Though rarely recorded, the lives of ordinary immigrants from Mexico 
are an important piece of the history of the American Southwest. 
Educated and hardworking, Luis G. Gómez came to Texas from 
Mexico as a young man in the mid-1880s and would later publish his 
recollections.

    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. Gómez describes Mexican customs in the United States, 
such as courtship and marriage, relations with Anglo employers, 
religious practices, and simple home gatherings.

    Crossing the Rio Grande presents an English edition of Gómez's 
memoir, which was privately published in Spanish in 1935. It is 
translated by 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 explains the book's 
value to scholarship and describes what has been learned of the 
publication history of the original Spanish-language book.

    This volume provides a valuable account of a relatively 
undocumented period in Mexican Texans' history.

_________________________________________________________

GUADALUPE VALDEZ, JR., is the grandson of Luis Gómez. 
THOMAS H. KRENECK is the associate director for Special 
Collections and Archives and graduate lecturer in public history at 
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.


Number Nine: Gulf Coast Studies, sponsored by Texas A&M 
University–Corpus Christi


What people are saying about this book

" . . . 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, November 2007

". . . 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

"These stories contain strains of melancholy when talk turns to family 
ties south of the border and to Mexican history and the land lost to 
the United States. They also speak of Mexican workers deceived by 
company con men and the unpredictable nature of their legal rights, 
along with brushes with violence that reveal the racism endemic to the 
time and place . . . But the pages also sparkle with references to the 
enjoyment of food and drink, the warmth of companionship and the 
generosity of both Anglos and Hispanics, all of whom are trying to 
move themselves and the state forward. Crossing the Rio Grande 
provides a valuable and accessible resource to a reader familiar with 
the fundamentals of Texas's immigration history . . . The exchange of 
population and culture between the United States and Mexico has 
gone on for more than 150 years. This book demonstrates that those 
involved in the process are people, not fragments of data for politicians 
to spin."—SWHQ, Fall 2007

"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, Angelo State University