Although they are among the most important sources of the history of the American Southwest, the lives of ordinary immigrants from Mexico have rarely been recorded. Educated and hardworking, Luis G. Gómez came to Texas from Mexico as a young man in the mid-1880s. He made his way around much of South Texas, finding work on the railroad and in other businesses, observing the people and ways of the region and committing them to memory for later transcription. From the moment he crossed the Rio Grande at Matamoros-Brownsville, Gómez sought his fortune in a series of contracting operations that created the infrastructure to help develop the Texas economy—clearing land, cutting wood, building roads, laying track, constructing bridges, and quarrying rock. Gómez describes Mexican customs in the United States, such as courtship and marriage, relations with Anglo employers, religious practices, and the simple home gatherings that sustained those Mexican Texans who settled in urban areas like Houston, isolated from predominantly Mexican South Texas. Few of the 150,000 immigrants in the last half of the nineteenth century left written records of their experiences, but Gómez wrote his memoir and had it privately published in Spanish in 1935. Crossing the Rio Grande presents an English edition of that memoir, translated by the author’s grandson, Guadalupe Valdez Jr., with assistance from Javier Villarreal, a professor of Spanish at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. An introduction by Thomas H. Kreneck explainss the book’s value to scholarship and describes what has been learned of the publication history of the original Spanish-language volume. Valdez’s comments provide a lucid and engaging picture of his grandfather’s later life and his gentlemanly character. This charming little volume provides a valuable account of a relatively undocumented period in Mexican Texans’ history. Almost unknown to those outside his family, this narrative has now been “recovered,” edited by Valdez and Kreneck, and made available to a wider, interested public.
What Readers Are Saying:
“Luis G. Gómez says explicitly in the prologue to his memoirs that the purpose of recording the events of his life is to entertain; however, his memoirs accomplish much more than this as they fill a void in the history of the American Southwest of the late nineteenth century. Mexican immigrants formed an important part of the Southwest at that time, although few recorded accounts of the lives of immigrants from this era remain.” --Journal of the American Studies Association fo Texas
“In 1884 a young man crossed from Matamoros to Brownsville fleeing conflict in Mexico and seeking his fortune in Texas. As a scenario this has no particularly unusual traits. In fact, it’s almost commonplace. What makes the tale engaging in this case is the voice telling it. A distinct personality resonates throughout this delightful book and pulls the read back in time to contemplate many of the same elements that make up the contemporary immigration debate.” --SWHQ
" . . . a vital contribution to the growing literature on Mexicans and Mexican Americans. . . . unique because few documents by Mexicans of this period have been found or published." --Journal of Southern History
“…brings an important historical perspective to the current debate swirling over immigration, and in it we hear a voice not often detected: that of an ordinary man, never well known outside his community, who accomplished something beyond the mean in his remarkable life.” --Pleiades
“…this book is a charming diary of a Mexican immigrant who migrated into the southeast Texas in 1884 at age nineteen and carved out careers in the vicinity of Houston and Galveston.” --New Mexico Historical Review
“The memoirs are outstanding for their literary, ethnographic, sociological, and historical quality. They reveal the thought processes and writing style of a person whose background and upbringing was lower class but whose education and occupation permitted him to observe things around him through a middle-class lens.” --Arnoldo De León, Professor