Download or read book From South Texas to the Nation written by John Weber and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early years of the twentieth century, newcomer farmers and migrant Mexicans forged a new world in South Texas. In just a decade, this vast region, previously considered too isolated and desolate for large-scale agriculture, became one of the United States' most lucrative farming regions and one of its worst places to work. By encouraging mass migration from Mexico, paying low wages, selectively enforcing immigration restrictions, toppling older political arrangements, and periodically immobilizing the workforce, growers created a system of labor controls unique in its levels of exploitation. Ethnic Mexican residents of South Texas fought back by organizing and by leaving, migrating to destinations around the United States where employers eagerly hired them--and continued to exploit them. In From South Texas to the Nation, John Weber reinterprets the United States' record on human and labor rights. This important book illuminates the way in which South Texas pioneered the low-wage, insecure, migration-dependent labor system on which so many industries continue to depend.
Download or read book Border Boss written by J. Gilberto Quezada and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2001-05 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On January 1, 1937, Manuel B. Bravo was sworn in as county judge of Zapata County, a post he would hold for twenty years. In Border Boss: Manuel B. Bravo and Zapata County, J. Gilberto Quezada delineates Bravo’s political career in the Democratic Party and examines his role in some of the important issues of his day, especially Falcon Dam. During Bravo’s years in office, he worked and corresponded with many Texas and national politicians, including James Allred, Lloyd Bentsen, Kika de la Garza, Ralph Yarborough, and, most prominently, Lyndon Johnson. The association between Bravo and Johnson began with the special Senate election of 1941 and is reflected in the more than fifty letters between the two in Bravo's personal papers. In Johnson's 1948 Senate runoff against Coke Stevenson, voting irregularities were alleged in Zapata County when the election returns from Precinct No. 3 were reported missing. Quezada analyzes the Bravo papers for any evidence that Bravo and Johnson had arranged the disappearance and offers possible alternative explanations. From the 1930s to the 1950s Zapata County was one of six South Texas counties where the Tejano majority dominated local politics and held most public offices. Bravo became known as one of the "Mexican bosses" of South Texas, but Quezada draws a more nuanced picture of bossism than has been presented previously, analyzing the role of influential leading families but looking as well at the degree of economic integration into the state and nation as factors in how bossism developed. Those interested in Mexican-American studies and politics and bossism in South Texas will appreciate the window onto South Texas politics and Tejano culture this biography gives.
Download or read book The Tejano Diaspora written by Marc S. Rodriguez and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each spring during the 1960s and 1970s, a quarter million farm workers left Texas to travel across the nation, from the Midwest to California, to harvest America's agricultural products. During this migration of people, labor, and ideas, Tejanos establish
Download or read book Not Bad for a South Texas Boy written by Federico Peña and published by Federico Pena. This book was released on 2021-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autobiography of Federico Peña including some family history plus additional insights.
Download or read book Seeds of Empire written by Andrew J. Torget and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-08-06 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the late 1810s, a global revolution in cotton had remade the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing wealth and waves of Americans to the Gulf Coast while also devastating the lives and villages of Mexicans in Texas. In response, Mexico threw open its northern territories to American farmers in hopes that cotton could bring prosperity to the region. Thousands of Anglo-Americans poured into Texas, but their insistence that slavery accompany them sparked pitched battles across Mexico. An extraordinary alliance of Anglos and Mexicans in Texas came together to defend slavery against abolitionists in the Mexican government, beginning a series of fights that culminated in the Texas Revolution. In the aftermath, Anglo-Americans rebuilt the Texas borderlands into the most unlikely creation: the first fully committed slaveholders' republic in North America. Seeds of Empire tells the remarkable story of how the cotton revolution of the early nineteenth century transformed northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the United States, and how the rise and spectacular collapse of the Republic of Texas as a nation built on cotton and slavery proved to be a blueprint for the Confederacy of the 1860s.
Download or read book Lone Star Nation written by Richard Parker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To most Americans, Texas has been that love-it-or-hate it slice of the country that has sparked controversy, bred presidents, and fomented turmoil from the American Civil War to George W. Bush. But that Texas is changing—and it will change America itself.Richard Parker takes the reader on a tour across today's booming Texas, an evolving landscape that is densely urban, overwhelmingly Hispanic, exceedingly powerful in the global economy, and increasingly liberal. This Texas will have to ensure upward mobility, reinvigorate democratic rights, and confront climate change—just to continue its historic economic boom. This is not the Texas of George W. Bush or Rick Perry.Instead, this is a Texas that will remake the American experience in the twenty-first century—as California did in the twentieth—with surprising economic, political, and social consequences. Along the way, Parker analyzes the powerful, interviews the insightful, and tells the story of everyday people because, after all, one in ten Americans in this century will call Texas something else: Home.
Download or read book Boy Kings of Texas written by Domingo Martinez and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A lyrical and authentic book that recounts the story of a border-town family in Brownsville, Texas in the 1980's, as each member of the family desperately tries to assimilate and escape life on the border to become "real" Americans, even at the expense of their shared family history. This is really un-mined territory in the memoir genre that gives in-depth insight into a previously unexplored corner of America.
Download or read book Adios to the Brushlands written by Arturo Longoria and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once a celebration of a region's nature and a call to preserve the little bit of it still left today, Adios to the Brushlands is to South Texas what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was to the nation's wetlands or John Graves's Goodbye to a River was to the Brazos River. A unique descriptive documentary of a disappearing natural treasure, it is a slice of the new natural history that weds the details of the physical world with their significance to the human heart.
Download or read book The Injustice Never Leaves You written by Monica Muñoz Martinez and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Caughey Western History Prize Winner of the Robert G. Athearn Award Winner of the Lawrence W. Levine Award Winner of the TCU Texas Book Award Winner of the NACCS Tejas Foco Nonfiction Book Award Winner of the María Elena Martínez Prize Frederick Jackson Turner Award Finalist “A page-turner...Haunting...Bravely and convincingly urges us to think differently about Texas’s past.” —Texas Monthly Between 1910 and 1920, self-appointed protectors of the Texas–Mexico border—including members of the famed Texas Rangers—murdered hundreds of ethnic Mexicans living in Texas, many of whom were American citizens. Operating in remote rural areas, officers and vigilantes knew they could hang, shoot, burn, and beat victims to death without scrutiny. A culture of impunity prevailed. The abuses were so pervasive that in 1919 the Texas legislature investigated the charges and uncovered a clear pattern of state crime. Records of the proceedings were soon filed away as the Ranger myth flourished. A groundbreaking work of historical reconstruction, The Injustice Never Leaves You has upended Texas’s sense of its own history. A timely reminder of the dark side of American justice, it is a riveting story of race, power, and prejudice on the border. “It’s an apt moment for this book’s hard lessons...to go mainstream.” —Texas Observer “A reminder that government brutality on the border is nothing new.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
Download or read book Lone Star Nation written by H. W. Brands and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2005-02-08 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War emythologizes Texas’s journey to statehood and restores the genuinely heroic spirit to a pivotal chapter in American history. • “A balanced, unromanticized account [of] America’s great epic.” —The New York Times Book Review From Stephen Austin, Texas’s reluctant founder, to the alcoholic Sam Houston, who came to lead the Texas army in its hour of crisis and glory, to President Andrew Jackson, whose expansionist aspirations loomed large in the background, here is the story of Texas and the outsize figures who shaped its turbulent history. Beginning with its early colonization in the 1820s and taking in the shocking massacres of Texas loyalists at the Alamo and Goliad, its rough-and-tumble years as a land overrun by the Comanches, and its day of liberation as an upstart republic, Brands’ lively history draws on contemporary accounts, diaries, and letters to animate a diverse cast of characters whose adventures, exploits, and ambitions live on in the very fabric of our nation.
Download or read book God Save Texas written by Lawrence Wright and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—and a Texas native—takes us on a journey through the most controversial state in America. • “Beautifully written…. Essential reading [for] anyone who wants to understand how one state changed the trajectory of the country.” —NPR Texas is a red state, but the cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king, but Texas now leads California in technology exports. Low taxes and minimal regulation have produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Texas native Lawrence Wright gives us a colorful, wide-ranging portrait of a state that not only reflects our country as it is, but as it may become—and shows how the battle for Texas’s soul encompasses us all.
Download or read book Can cula written by Norma E. Cantú and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fictionalized memoir of Laredo, Texas, canícula represents a time between childhood and a yet unknown adulthood.
Download or read book Rainy Days and Starry Nights written by Lois Zook Wauson and published by Maverick Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Depression and the worst drought in Texas history did not make it easy for a large family on a small South Texas farm in the mid-twentieth century. Lawrence Zook tried cotton, corn, peanuts, even black-eyed peas on his 100 sandy acres 30 miles southeast of San Antonio near Floresville, now known as the Peanut Capital of Texas. His family survived, though he tended to be disagreeable when it didn't rain which seemed to be most of the time. Brush Country natives will quickly relate to the moving descriptions of sweeping the family's sunbaked, grassless lawn, of six-man football on Friday nights, of dance hall rituals on Saturday nights. Those who grew up elsewhere will enjoy being introduced to the lifestyle of a Texas region that is too often overlooked.
Download or read book Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas 1836 1986 written by David Montejano and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A benchmark publication . . . A meticulously documented work that provides an alternative interpretation and revisionist view of Mexican-Anglo relations.” –IMR (International Migration Review) Winner, Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians American Historical Association, Pacific Branch Book Award Texas Institute of Letters Friends of The Dallas Public Library Award Texas Historical Commission T. R. Fehrenbach Award, Best Ethnic, Minority, and Women’s History Publication Here is a different kind of history, an interpretive history that outlines the connections between the past and the present while maintaining a focus on Mexican-Anglo relations. This book reconstructs a history of Mexican-Anglo relations in Texas “since the Alamo,” while asking this history some sociology questions about ethnicity, social change, and society itself. In one sense, it can be described as a southwestern history about nation building, economic development, and ethnic relations. In a more comparative manner, the history points to the familiar experience of conflict and accommodation between distinct societies and peoples throughout the world. Organized to describe the sequence of class orders and the corresponding change in Mexican-Anglo relations, it is divided into four periods, which are referred to as incorporation, reconstruction, segregation, and integration. “The success of this award-winning book is in its honesty, scholarly objectivity, and daring, in the sense that it debunks the old Texas nationalism that sought to create anti-Mexican attitudes both in Texas and the Greater Southwest.” —Colonial Latin American Historical Review “An outstanding contribution to U.S. Southwest studies, Chicano history, and race relations . . . A seminal book.” –Hispanic American Historical Review
Download or read book A Nation Within a Nation written by Mark E. Nackman and published by Port Washington, N.Y. : Kennikat Press. This book was released on 1975 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Passionate Nation written by James L. Haley and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2022-05-15 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utilizing many sources new to publication, James L. Haley delivers a most readable and enjoyable narrative history of Texas, told through stories—the words and recollections of Texans who actually lived the state’s spectacular history. From Jim Bowie’s and Davy Crockett’s myth-enshrouded stand at the Alamo, to the Mexican-American War, and to Sam Houston’s heroic failed effort to keep Texas in the Union during the Civil War, the transitions in Texas history have often been as painful and tense as the “normal” periods in between. Here, in all of its epic grandeur, is the story of Texas as its own passionate nation. “Texas native Haley does an outstanding job of narrating the outsized and dramatic history of the Lone Star State. John Steinbeck observed, ‘Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own private history based on, but not limited by, facts.’ Cognizant of this, Haley takes pains to separate folklore from fact. He's a good storyteller, but then it's hard to go wrong with the colorful characters he has to work with: pioneer nationalists Sam Houston and Davy Crockett, Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, a wagonload of liquored-up turn-of-the-century oilmen and such latter-day heroes as Lyndon Johnson, John Connally and Janis Joplin.”—Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Download or read book South Texas Tales written by Patricia Cisneros Young and published by Tate Publishing. This book was released on 2007-11 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ' These] vignettes of Brownsville people, part real and part fiction, capture the character of our border community. The reader becomes involved with the characters and the stories. It's as though the essence of our society and culture had been opened to view through a historical prism. And the stories are just plain pleasurable to read.' -Dr. Anthony Knopp, Ph.D, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Brownsville, Texas
