The 1929 master's thesis of folklorist Jovita González has served as 
source material on the Texas-Mexican borderlands for more than 
seventy-five years but has never before been published.

    When González decided to pursue a master's degree in history 
from the University of Texas, she was already the vice-president and 
president-elect of the Texas Folklore Society. Despite this, she wrote 
a defiant master's thesis that offered a competing vision of Texas 
history and culture to that promoted by the "founding fathers" of 
Texas folklore. 

    Her complex analysis de-emphasizes the role of the Texas 
Revolution in Texas history and explores the ways in which Anglos 
and Mexicans developed tense ties following the U.S.-Mexico War. 
Her approach to Texas history elegantly counters the "rhetoric of 
dominance" of the established historians of the American West of her 
time.

    González's thesis is now available for the first time to a wider 
reading public, especially those who value a Tejana legacy that 
presents the borderlands as a crucible in which a new kind of identity 
is being formed.

_________________________________________________________

JOVITA GONZÁLEZ, who died in 1983, is the author of Caballero, 
a historical novel published by Texas A&M University Press, and 
Dew on the Thorn. MARÍA EUGENIA COTERA, who earned her Ph.D. 
from Stanford and now teaches at the University of Michigan, became 
interested in Jovita González as a master's student at the University 
of Texas.


Number Twenty-six: Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West 
and Southwest