Q&A with C.J. Alvarez on His History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide

From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet.

Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences

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and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building. He explains how initial groundbreaking in the nineteenth century transitioned to unbridled faith in the capacity to control the movement of people, goods, and water through the use of physical structures. By the 1960s, however, the built environment of the border began to display increasingly obvious systemic flaws. More often than not, Alvarez shows, federal agencies in both countries responded with more construction—“compensatory building” designed to mitigate unsustainable policies relating to immigration, black markets, and the natural world. Border Land, Border Water reframes our understanding of how the border has come to look and function as it does and is essential to current debates about the future of the US-Mexico divide.

Give us the elevator pitch for your research and the resulting book.

The US-Mexico border is at the center of an unprecedented national debate, yet very few people from either the United States or Mexico have ever been to the international divide. This book explains the complex history of construction projects on the border that have been underway for over 100 years.

How did you get interested in the subject of your book?

I thought this was an important subject to write about not because it has become especially controversial but because I grew up in the border region. To us border dwellers, the international divide and the various ecosystems through which it passes have always been relevant.

Why is it important to study the built environment on the US-Mexico border?

Government policies—whether we’re talking about the “drug wars” or immigration law—are often enacted through physical construction projects. Fences and walls are the most obvious examples of this, but it’s important to understand other, less-obvious kinds of building, such as border survey markers, roads and highways, surveillance infrastructure, bridges, and massive storage dams.

In what ways did engineering and police projects affect the geography, environment, and communities on both sides of the international divide?

One of the most surprising conclusions I came to through my archival research was that the Rio Grande border has undergone a far higher degree of environmental transformation than the land border. There is almost nothing “natural” about the Rio Grande watershed, and this has produced fascinatingly complex results in border communities. On one hand, some of these river modifications made it easier for immigration police to surveil the international divide, and on the other hand, an untold number of people have been saved from disastrous floods.

What context might be missing from contemporary debates about the ongoing “drug wars” of the border region and border enforcement policy?

Government and business interests in both the United States and Mexico have spent over a century painstakingly building connective tissue between our two countries. First it was the railroads of the 1880s, then, with the invention of automobiles and trucks in the early twentieth century, more complex road networks were introduced: after the 1950s, that meant the interstate highway system, and after the free trade agreements in the 1980s and 1990s, superhighways and port-of-entry expansions. These were all bilateral projects; you can’t build only half a port of entry. The US-Mexico border is designed to be open to commerce, which means you can’t cherry pick those who cross it, weeding out illicit business and the unauthorized movement of people, no matter how many fences you build.

C. J. Alvarez is an assistant professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

www.utexaspress.com

Meet Stephen Harrigan On Tour for ‘Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas'

The University of Texas Press is pleased to announce a fall book tour celebrating Stephen Harrigan's comprehensive, definitive history of Texas titled Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas. Join us in October and November in:

Alpine | Austin | Albuquerque | Boerne | Dallas | Houston | Kerrville | New York City | Oklahoma City | Phoenix | San Antonio | Tulsa | Washington, D.C.

Add to your iCal | Add to Google and Android

About the book

Big Wonderful Thing:
A History of Texas
Stephen Harrigan
$35.00 Hardcover

The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and of the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world.

Harrigan’s book brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea.

Confirmed Tour Dates

October 1 — Austin, TX

BULLOCK STATE HISTORY MUSEUM

Interview with Dan Rather

October 4-5 — Boerne, TX

BOERNE BOOK & ARTS FESTIVAL

October 8 — Dallas, TX

HIGHLAND PARK UMC

In Conversation with Skip Hollandsworth

October 15 — San Antonio, TX

THE ALAMO

In Conversation with Clay Smith

October 17 — Waco, TX

FABLED BOOKSHOP

October 26-27 — Austin, TX

TEXAS BOOK FESTIVAL

October 29 — Tempe, AZ

CHANGING HANDS BOOKSTORE

In Conversation with Mark Athitakis (tentative)

November 3 — Albuquerque, NM

BOOKWORKS

In Conversation with Paul Hutton (tentative)

November 5 — Tulsa, OK

MAGIC CITY BOOKS

November 6 — Oklahoma City, OK

FULL CIRCLE BOOKS

In Conversation with Lou Berney

November 8 — Dallas, TX

Texas Monthly Live! with

THE EDGE OF TEXAS FESTIVAL

November 13 — Houston, TX

ST. LUKE'S UMC

November 18 — New York City, NY

HILL COUNTRY BBQ
In Conversation with Elise Jordan

November 19 — Washington, D.C.

HILL COUNTRY BBQ

November 20 — Austin, TX

APL CENTRAL LIBRARY

In Conversation with Mimi Swartz

December 5 — Kerrville, TX

WOLFMUELLER BOOKS

December 6 — Alpine, TX

FRONT STREET BOOKS

December 14 — Dallas, TX

INTERRABANG BOOKS

Praise for Big Wonderful Thing

"Exhilarating . . . As good a state history as has ever been written and a must-read for Texas aficionados."

—Kirkus, Starred Review

“Harrigan uses his stupendous storytelling skills to great effect [in Big Wonderful Thing]. He covers the state's major historical events from inventive angles, introduces newly discovered archaeological and archival research, and excels at puffing up many of Texas's larger-than-life personalities.”

—Foreword Reviews

“Harrigan describes post-Columbian Texas in novelistic style in this eloquent homage to the Lone Star state...History lovers will enjoy this packed, fascinating account of a singular state.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Stephen Harrigan has given us a wonderful new history of Texas. It tells us all we need to know and little that we don't need to know. A splendid effort.”

—Larry McMurtry

“History at its best—comprehensive, deeply informed, pleasurable, and filled with surprise and delight. It is at once a gift to the people of Texas and an unflinching explanation to the world at large of America’s most controversial state.”

—Lawrence Wright, author of God Save Texas

“No one tells the story of Texas better than Stephen Harrigan. He brings to Big Wonderful Thing contemporary and thoughtful analysis along with the most graceful writing anywhere. Harrigan pulls no punches but uses humor and pathos to examine the complexities and contradictions that have made us who we are. Finally, Texas has the rich and honest history it deserves.”

—Mimi Swartz

“Harrigan tacks brilliantly through the shifting winds of Texas history by telling a series of rip-snorting good tales.”

—S.C. Gwynne

www.utexaspress.com

Mexicans Made America—in So Many Ways. Why Do We Treat Them as Alien Invaders?

By John Tutino 

John Tutino is a professor of history and international affairs in the School of Foreign Service and director of the Americas Initiative at Georgetown University.

Mexicans have contributed to making the United States in pivotal and enduring ways. In 1776, more of the territory of the current United States was under Spanish sovereignty than in the thirteen colonies that rejected British rule. Florida, the Gulf Coast to New Orleans, the Mississippi to St. Louis, and the lands from Texas through New Mexico and California all lived under Spanish rule, creating Hispanic-Mexican legacies. Millions of pesos minted in Mexico City, the American center of global finance, funded the war for U.S. independence,

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leading the new nation to adopt the peso (renamed the dollar) as its currency.

The U.S. repaid the debt by claiming Spanish/Mexican lands: buying vast Louisiana territories (via France) in 1803; gaining Florida by treaty in 1819; sending settlers (many undocumented) into Texas to expand cotton and slavery in the 1820s; enabling Texas secession in 1836; and provoking war in 1846 to incorporate Texas’s cotton and slave economy—and acquiring California’s gold fields, too. The U.S. took in land and peoples long Spanish and recently Mexican, often mixing European, indigenous, and African ancestries. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo recognized those who remained in the U.S. as citizens. And the U.S. incorporated the dynamic mining/grazing/irrigation economy that had marked Spanish North America for centuries and would long define the U.S. west.

Debates over slavery and freedom in lands taken from Mexico led to the U.S. Civil War, while Mexicans locked in shrunken territories fought over liberal reforms and then faced a French occupation—all in the 1860s. With Union victory, the U.S. continued its drive for continental hegemony. Simultaneously, Mexican liberals led by Benito Juárez consolidated power and welcomed U.S. capital. U.S. investors built Mexican railroads, developed mines, and promoted export industries, including petroleum. The U.S. and Mexican economies merged; U.S. capital and technology shaped Mexico while Mexican workers built the U.S. west. The economies were so integrated that a U.S. downturn, the panic of 1907, was pivotal in setting off Mexico’s 1910 revolution, a sociopolitical conflagration that focused Mexicans while the U.S. joined World War I.

Afterwards, the U.S. roared in the 1920s while Mexicans faced reconstruction. Though the U.S. blocked immigration from Europe, the nation still welcomed Mexicans across a little-patrolled border to build dams and irrigation systems, cities and farms across the west. When the Great Depression hit in 1929 (begun in New York, spread across the U.S., and exported to Mexico), Mexicans became expendable. Denied relief, they got one-way tickets to the border, forcing thousands south—including children born as U.S. citizens.

Mexico absorbed the refugees thanks to new industries and land distributions—reforms culminating in a 1938 oil nationalization. U.S. corporations screamed foul, and FDR enabled a settlement; access to Mexican oil mattered as World War II loomed. When war came, the U.S. needed more than oil. It needed cloth and copper, livestock and leather—and workers, too. Remembering the expulsions of the early 1930s, many resisted going north. So the governments negotiated a labor program, recruiting braceros in Mexico: paying for their travel, and promising decent wages and treatment. Five hundred thousand Mexican citizens fought in the U.S. military; sent to deadly fronts, they suffered high casualty rates.

To support the war, Mexican exporters accepted promises of postwar payment. With peace, accumulated credits allowed Mexico to import machinery for national development. But when credits ran out, the U.S. was subsidizing the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, and Mexico was left to compete for scarce and expensive bank credit. Life came in cycles of boom and bust, debt crises and devaluations. Meanwhile, U.S. pharmaceutical sellers delivered the antibiotics that had saved soldiers in World War II to families across Mexico. Children lived—and Mexico’s population soared: from 20 million in 1940, to 50 million by 1970, to 100 million in 2000. To feed these growing numbers, Mexico turned to U.S. funding and scientists to pioneer a “green revolution.” Harvests of wheat and maize rose to feed growing cities. Reliance on machinery and chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, however, cut rural employment. National industries also adopted labor-saving ways, making employment scarce everywhere. So people trekked north, some to labor seasonally in the bracero program, which lasted until 1964, and others to settle families in once-Mexican regions like Texas and California and in places north and east.

Documentation and legality were uncertain; U.S. employers’ readiness to hire Mexicans for low wages was not. People kept coming. U.S. financing, corporations, and models of production shaped lives across the border; Mexican workers labored everywhere. With integrated economies, the nations faced linked challenges. In the 1980s, the U.S. lived through “stagflation,” while Mexico faced a collapse called the “lost decade.” In 1986, Republican president Ronald Reagan authorized a path to legality for thousands of Mexicans in the U.S., tied to sanctions on employers that aimed to end new arrivals. Legal status kept workers here; failed sanctions enabled employers to keep hiring Mexicans—who kept coming. They were cheap and insecure workers for U.S. producers, subsidizing profits in challenging times.

The 1980s also saw the demise of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the presumed triumph of capitalism. What would that mean for people in Mexico and the U.S.? Reagan corroded union rights, leading to declining incomes, disappearing pensions, and enduring insecurities among U.S. workers. President Carlos Salinas, a member of Mexico’s dominant PRI Party, attacked union power—and in 1992 ended rural Mexicans’ right to land. A transnational political consensus saw the erosion of popular rights as key to post–Cold War times.

Salinas proposed NAFTA to Reagan’s Republican successor, George H. W. Bush. The goal was to liberate capital and allow goods to move freely across borders, while holding people within nations. U.S. businesses would profit; Mexicans would continue to provide a reservoir of low-wage workers—at home. The treaty was ratified in Mexico by Salinas and the PRI, and in the U.S. by Democratic president Bill Clinton and an allied Congress.

As NAFTA took effect in 1994, Mexico faced the Zapatista uprising in the south and then a financial collapse before NAFTA could bring investment and jobs. On top of this, the Clinton-era high-tech boom caused production to flow to China. Mexico gained where transport costs mattered—as with auto assembly. But old textiles and new electronics went to Asia. Mexico returned to growth in the late 1990s, though jobs were still scarce for a population nearing 100 million. Meanwhile, Mexican production of corn for home markets collapsed. NAFTA ended tariffs on goods crossing borders while the U.S. continued to subsidize corporate farmers, enabling agribusiness to export below cost. Mexican growers could not compete, and migration to the U.S. accelerated.

NAFTA created new concentrations of wealth and power across North America. In Mexico, cities grew as a powerful few and the favored middle sectors prospered; millions more struggled with marginality. The vacuum created by agricultural collapse and urban marginality made space for a dynamic, violent drug economy. Historically, cocaine was an Andean specialty, heroin an Asian product. But as the U.S. leaned on drug economies elsewhere, Mexicans—some enticed by big profits, but many just searching for sustenance—turned to supplying U.S. consumers.

U.S. politicians and ideologues blame Mexico for the “drug problem”—a noisy “supply side” argument that is historically untenable. U.S. demand drives the drug economy. The U.S. has done nothing effective to curtail consumption or to limit the flow of weapons to drug cartels in Mexico. Laying blame helps block any national discussion of the underlying social insecurities brought by globalization—deindustrialization, scarce employment, low wages, lowered benefits, vanishing pensions—that close observers know fuel drug dependency. Drug consumption in the U.S. has expanded as migration from Mexico has slowed (mostly due to slowing population growth)—a conversation steadfastly avoided.

People across North America struggle with shared challenges: common insecurities spread by globalizing capitalism. Too many U.S. politicians see benefit in polarization, blaming Mexicans for all that ails life north of the border. Better that we work to understand our inseparable histories. Then we might move toward a prosperity shared by diverse peoples in an integrated North America.

John Tutino
Georgetown University

John Tutino is the author of Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Duke University Press, 2011) and The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–2000 (Princeton University Press, 2018). He is the editor of and a contributor to Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States (University of Texas Press, 2012).

Further Reading - Border Essentials

REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era

By Amy Sara Carroll

Featuring dozens of compelling images, this transformative reading of borderland and Mexican cultural production—from body art to theater, photography, and architecture—draws on extensive primary research to trace more than two decades of social and political response in the aftermath of NAFTA.

Border Odyssey: Travels along the U.S./Mexico Divide

By Charles D. Thompson, Jr.

This compelling chronicle of a journey along the entire U.S.-Mexico border shifts the conversation away from danger and fear to the shared histories and aspirations that bind Mexicans and Americans despite the border walls.

Visit the companion website www.borderodyssey.com to access maps, photographs, a film, audio, and more.

Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados: Class and Culture on the South Texas Border, Revised Edition

By Chad Richardson and Michael J. Pisani

Now thoroughly revised and updated, this classic account of life on the Texas-Mexico border reveals how the borderlands have been transformed by NAFTA, population growth and immigration crises, and increased drug violence.

Mexican Migration to the United States: Perspectives from Both Sides of the Border

Edited by Harriett D. Romo and Olivia Mogollon-Lopez

Bringing together leading scholars from Mexico and the United States in fields ranging from economics to anthropology, this timely anthology presents empirical research on key immigration policy issues and analyzes the many push-pull facets of Mexico-US migration.

Captivity Beyond Prisons: Criminalization Experiences of Latina (Im)migrants

By Martha D. Escobar

Escobar examines the criminalization of Latina (im)migrants, delving into questions of reproduction, technologies of power, and social justice in a prison system that consistently devalues the lives of Latinas

The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town

By Jennifer R. Nájera

Using oral histories and local archives, this historical ethnography analyzes how and why Mexican American individuals unevenly experienced racial dominance and segregation in South Texas.

Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border

By Edward S. Casey and Mary Watkins

Using the U.S. wall at the border with Mexico as a focal point, two experts examine the global surge of economic and environmental refugees, presenting a new vision of the relationships between citizen and migrant in an era of “Juan Crow,” which systematically creates a perpetual undercaste.

Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants: A Texas History

By Martha Menchaca

A timely exploration of the political and cultural impact of U.S. naturalization laws on Mexicans in Texas, from early statehood years to contemporary controversies.

www.utexaspress.com

J.P. Morgan, The Pujo Committee, and the “Money Trust”

Like it or not, the broad influence of our best-known capitalists makes America unique (Donald Trump might say great). With the very real possibility of a billion dollar businessman landing in the Oval Office next year, we asked Professor Emeritus and biographer Charles Molesworth to reflect on a very different kind of powerful capitalist in

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American history, one who avoided public statements and hated publicity.

Sure, J.P. Morgan exploited a pre-regulation American economy, but he was also an avid art collector and played a major role in establishing the preeminence of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Charles Molesworth's new book The Capitalist and the Critic offers the first in-depth look at how Morgan and the headstrong English art history expert Roger Fry helped to mold the cultural legacy of the “encyclopedic” museum. In this blog post, Molesworth expands on his examination of J.P. Morgan, reflecting on issues that reverberate today: buying influence in a presidential race, breaking up too-powerful bank trusts, pushing Progressive Era initiatives to eliminate obscure and unfair trading practices, and the problem of "large sums of money resting in the hands of a few men."

Look for Charles Molesworth's piece in the New York Post this weekend.

J.P. Morgan, The Pujo Committee, and the “Money Trust”
By Charles Molesworth

In the last three decades of his life, J. Pierpont Morgan enjoyed unique pre-eminence as the nation’s most famous banker and its most demanding art collector. The latter distinction was burnished by his position as president of the Board of Trustees at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The influence he exercised over the growth of the museum outstripped that of any other individual. Yet many of his artistic treasures resided elsewhere than the Met. His personal collections were housed in London and his other homes in England, and most impressively in his imposing self-named Library on Madison Avenue in New York, which was completed in 1906. The building served as the final testament to the fortune he had spent on paintings, sculpture, decorative objects-d’art, and rare books. His life as a banker, however, was not adorned with such a monument. His fame as a finance capitalist of international power and renown was instead to be spotlighted by a Congressional Committee which brought his banking style and practices briefly into the open.

Morgan was possibly the least well-known of America’s most famous men. Amassing an untold fortune – he was routinely referred to as the country’s wealthiest man – and redrawing the foundations of America’s industrial and financial workings somehow did not interfere with his inordinate desire for complete privacy. This desire was implemented not only by the power of his wealth, but because he wrote very little, and seldom made public statements. No one doubted the sway he exercised with stern willfulness, but many disputed whether or not he was a force for good. But on one dramatic and well-reported occasion, the public, and the prying eyes of reporters, caught more than a glimpse of what Morgan had adamantly tried to conceal. It would show what he thought of himself and his role in the system he built.

“The Pied Piper” cartoon expressed what Morgan’s detractors felt about his unchecked influence in the industrial and financial markets. Those “magnetized” by Morgan’s influence also included people from all sectors of society.

As he reached his seventieth birthday, Morgan had begun to spend more of his furious energy on the Metropolitan Museum, in part because his life as a financier was drawing to a close. Still, the final chapter was not to be finished until the pivotal event known as the Panic of 1907, when with immense leverage he called together the various bankers whose credit crisis was threatening everyone’s fortune. The rather lurid story of Morgan locking them all in his study (while he went off to play one of his countless games of solitaire) until they could agree on the necessary fiscal and monetary arrangements contained enough truth to be widely accepted. In fact it only added to his near-mythic identity. For some time Morgan himself had been acting like a Federal Reserve Bank, controlling the loans and liens that occurred between banks as part of the country’s economic system.

8 Ways Moving to 1830s Texas was . . . Different

In 1834, a German immigrant to Texas named Detlef Thomas Friedrich Jordt, aka Detlef Dunt, published Reise nach Texas, an informative and entertaining little book that praised Texas as a land of opportunity for European immigrants. The first English translation, Journey to Texas, 1833, provides a vivid glimpse into pre-Revolutionary Texas life and when read in light of our experiences as contemporary Texans, is as illuminating as it is amusing.

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We've compiled a list of eight notable ways life in Texas has changed since 1833, or hasn't. You can read an excerpt from Journey to Texas in the May issue of Texas Co-op Power Magazine and on our website.

8 Ways 1830s Texas was . . . Different

1

There were no vegan dining options.

Detlef Dunt writes, "Meat, which, from every kind of animal, is much tastier than in Germany, is eaten fried in the morning at breakfast, as well as at noon and in the evening."

There's no telling what animals were fried up besides cattle and hogs, and Dunt doesn't elaborate, but we can be sure there were no processed foods!

2

International travel to the Austin area was a little less convenient.

Compare Detlef's advice for the best fare from Germany to America to modern transatlantic airline fares:

"Passage from Germany to New Orleans should not exceed forty-five dollars per person . . . personal belongings free." However, the journey to cross the Atlantic took seven weeks and he advises Europeans NOT to arrive between July and October because, you know, yellow fever.

Detlef also includes some very explicit advice about how to get your sea legs which we will not quote here out of consideration for sensitive stomachs.

3

Your fellow passengers did more than just hog the armrest.

". . . they find merit in out-doing the initial perpetrators when it comes to bad manners and vulgar conduct. When on top of this there is also gossip, tippling, and immoderate indulgence, then steerage assumes a veritable village mentality, and a wolf's lair is an Eden by comparison."

An etching illustrating steerage passengers

Five Myths about Corpus Christi

What U.S. state has the most tall tales and great American legends? Of course Texans would say Texas, with our colorful history full of personalities like Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie at the Alamo, but often myths and legends need the tempering of history to get to the truth. We asked Professor Alan Lessoff to draw from his new book Where Texas Meets the Sea: Corpus Christi and Its History to dispel some of the myths about Corpus Christi.

Five Myths about Corpus Christi
by Alan Lessoff, author of Where Texas Meets the Sea: Corpus Christi and Its History

I subtitled my book Corpus Christi and Its History because I was less interested in recounting the city in a narrative and detached way than I was in understanding the many

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ways that Corpus Christians write, talk, and argue about their history and how those varied perspectives shape the city now. Sophisticated historians know that their job is not merely to use facts to disprove myths, though one has to do that sometimes. Myths are themselves historical forces that require study, since they serve as vehicles through which people express their identity, values, and goals. Anyone who has taken a halfway decent sophomore humanities class knows that true stories take on mythic qualities when people wrap them in epic grandeur. Much of Corpus Christi’s significance to Texas history starts from its having been a place where Texas’s two largest true myths came against one another: the south-to-north Hispanic Texan epic of explorers and empresarios and the east-to-west Anglo Texan lore of the frontier, ranchers, rangers, and town boosters. Within the context of those two epics, numerous other stories have appeared, some of which veered into myths in the sense of misconceptions that need clearing up. Where Texas Meets the Sea treats each of these misconceptions respectfully, because they meant a lot to the people who adhered to them and revealed much about them and their city:

1

Explorer Alonso Álvarez de Pineda named Corpus Christi Bay on Corpus Christi Day in 1519. This story, which one still sometimes finds in tourist publications, is believable only if one discards all normal rules of historical evidence. No written record of the Álvarez de Pineda expedition has survived. The first Spanish document that refers to the bay by name dates from the 1740s, and that document assigns it another name. The earliest documented use of “Corpus Christi Bay” dates from 1766, in connection to the colonizing expedition that finally set up a continuous Spanish presence in the vicinity. In a 2011 article, the Corpus Christi librarian and historian Herb Canales summarized the evidence pointing to the reasonable conclusion that someone in that 1760s expedition named the bay. On top of all that, before the 1920s, local accounts sometimes claimed that members of France’s ill-fated LaSalle expedition named the bay on Corpus Christi Day in 1685, a provenance only slightly more plausible than Álvarez de Pineda. As my book recounts, Anglo promoters, in keeping with the early twentieth-century fashion for Spanish colonial romance, spread the Álvarez de Pineda story in the 1920s and 1930s. Decades later, Hispanic heritage activists became the story’s guardians, in part as a vehicle for expressing ethnic pride and dramatizing Hispanics’ prior claim upon the region. In print—and on the Pineda monument in Westside Corpus Christi—supporters have usually been careful to label the story a “legend,” but through the 1990s, people would tell one in conversation that they believed it.

The Book that Outraged a Nation

There's a new book blog that we're thrilled to have our authors contributing to: Books Combined. Started by Combined Academic Publishers, the goal of the blog is to facilitate a conversation among scholars about the importance of books. From bookscombined.com:

This blog isn’t about selling books – it’s about understanding the power of books. 

Better than anyone, we think scholars understand books’ potential, and how books, as repositories for ideas, can change us, and our perspective on the world. In bookscombined.com we’re asking scholars to write about the books that have had a significant impact on their lives – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

In their latest post, our author Lance deHaven Smith (Conspiracy Theory in America, 2013) has written about the biggest influences of his career: a shocking story his grandfather told him as a child, and a pioneering American conspiracy scholar, Charles Beard, who confirmed the controversial conspiracy theory behind America's entry into World War II.

Bullet holes remaining from the 1941 attack at Pearl Harbor.
Photo taken by Howard Gribble. 

The Book that Outraged a Nation
By Lance deHaven-Smith
Originally posted on bookscombined.com

I began to study conspiracy theories after learning that many of them have turned out to be true. One of the most shocking is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew when and where Japan was going to strike in the Pacific but intentionally failed to warn U.S. military commanders at Pearl Harbor.

In letting Japan surprise U.S. forces, Roosevelt’s motive was to bring the United States into World War II and foment social panic and outrage to fuel support for the war effort.

My grandfather told me about this when I was five years old. He had been wounded in World War II at Anzio during the U.S. invasion of Italy. He thought America’s top leaders cared little about the nation’s ordinary soldiers. In high school, I learned by happenstance that my grandfather’s story was not mere speculation. I came across a book by Charles Beard that explained and documented Roosevelt’s intrigue and deceit.

New York Times :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

By Josh Ozersky
Buy It Now

Unlike Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben, Colonel Sanders was a real person, although never a real colonel. It was some honorary title bestowed on notable Kentuckians by the governor. Yet Sanders introduced himself to his associates by it. It’s one of many entertaining affectations — including bleaching his beard — that Josh Ozersky uncovers in “Colonel Sanders and the American Dream” (University of Texas Press, $20).

Read the full article at nytimes.com »

Writer's League of Texas Book Award :: Before Brown

Before Brown
by Gary Lavergne
Buy It Now

Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice by Gary M. Lavergne was awarded the award for best work of non-fiction by the Writers' League of Texas. The Writers' League of Texas Book Awards recognize outstanding published books each year in five categories, Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry & Literary Prose, Children's books (long works) and Children's books (short works).

Find out more at writersleague.org »

Huffington Post :: Deception and Abuse at the Fed [ comment ]

Deception and Abuse
at the Fed
by Robert Auerbach
Buy It Now

Chairman Bernanke's "Urban Legend" About Deception and Corruption at the Fed

By Robert Auerbach,
Professor of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin

On the same day, October 4, 2011, I testified on Capitol Hill about the terrible record for transparency and corrupt records at the Federal Reserve, its chairman, Ben Bernanke, gave a strong opposing view before the Joint Economic Committee. When Senator Michael Lee (R, Utah) said he was concerned about the "general veil of secrecy under which the Federal Reserve typically operates," Bernanke replied: "That's an urban legend." (Defined as "a bizarre untrue story that circulates in society...")

Bernanke's reply incorporated the Fed's urban legend: "We are thoroughly audited at this point." and "Nobody has found an impropriety." While Bernanke may confine this reply to the partial audit in the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, which the Fed vigorously opposed, the Fed's long history of deception and corruption should not be bypassed.

My testimony on the same day before the Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Technology of the House Financial Services Committee, chaired by Congressman Ron Paul, reveals a different record from Congressional investigations in which I participated:

Blocking large parts of the Federal Reserve from GAO audits

House Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Chairman Henry Reuss (D, Wisconsin) proposed a GAO audit of the Fed in 1976. The Fed orchestrated a massive campaign using the officials of the private banks it regulates to lobby to kill the audit bill. The Fed won. The bill could not garner enough support to pass out of the Committee. It passed the Government Operations Committee two years later, only after glaring no-audit barriers for Fed monetary policy and international operations were added.

Billions of dollars can be made from inside information leaks from the Fed's monetary policy operations. One necessary step to stop leaks is to severely limit inside information on future Fed policy to a few Fed employees.

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UNRV.com :: Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul

Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul

By Ian Hughes

Buy It Now

Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul by Ralph W Mathisen
Book Review by Ian Hughes

In 1993, R W Mathisen, currently Professor of History at the University of Illinois, wrote ‘Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition’. At the time of its publication the book was acclaimed as an excellent, scholarly examination of the impact of the barbarian invasions on the ‘Roman’ aristocrats of Gaul. Unfortunately, in the intervening years anyone wishing to buy the book has had to pay ever-more inflated prices, until at the time of writing (June,2011) copies of the original hardback are being offered for sale in excess of £100/$150. Now, 18 years later, the University of Texas Press have released a paperback edition, selling for less than £20/$25. To those of us with an interest in Late Antiquity, this is a great relief and will hopefully act as an example for other publishing houses to reprint and so help lower the extremely high prices being asked for vital textbooks.

The aim of the book was to analyse the then-accepted hypothesis that the barbarian take-over of Gaul was relatively peaceful and had little impact on the lives of the Gallic aristocracy (p IX-X). Mathisen’s approach was to scrutinize the mass of primary sources written by the Gallic aristocrats during the fourth and fifth centuries in an attempt to discover what changes were seen by contemporaries as taking place and how they reacted to these changes.

Part One of the book contains a brief study of the barbarians, of the origins of the Gallic aristocrats, and of the political changes taking place with regard to Gaul and Italy, highlighting the withdrawal of the Empire from the north and the beginnings of the ‘isolation’ of Gaul. The section ends with an analysis of the contemporary sources which portray the fifth century as one of ‘harassment, interference and oppression’. Although brief, these chapters read well and provide the context vital to the analysis of the changes taking place in Gaul. The final chapter also helps to explain why the barbarian invasions of Gaul were traditionally seen as scenes of violence and bloodshed.

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