Growing up as the daughter of a funeral director in Fort Bend 
County, Texas, Marie Theresa Hernández was a frequent visitor to 
the San Isidro Cemetery, a burial place for Latino workers at the 
Imperial Sugar Company, based in nearby Sugar Land. During these 
years she acquired from her father and mother a sense of what it was 
like to live as an ethnic minority in Jim Crow Texas. Therefore, 
returning to the cemetery as an ethnographer offered Hernández a 
welcome opportunity to begin piecing together a narrative of the lives 
and struggles of the Mexican American community that formed her 
heritage.

    However, Hernández soon realized that San Isidro contained 
hidden depths. The cemetery was built on the former grounds of an 
old slave-owning plantation. Her story quickly burgeoned from one 
of immigrant laborers working the land of the giant sugar company to 
one of the slave laborers who had worked the sugar plantations 
decades before, but whose history had been largely wiped out of the 
narrative of the affluent, white-majority county. Much like an 
archeologist, Hernández began carefully brushing away layers of 
time to reveal the fragile, entombed remnants of a complex, unknown 
past.

    A professional photographer as well as a scholar, Hernández 
provides visual images to spur the reader's imagination and anchor 
the narrative in historical reality. She mines interviews, newspaper 
accounts, and other primary sources—interpreted through her own 
rich sense of place and time—to reconstruct the identity of a 
community where the Old South, the wealthy New South, and the 
culture from south of the border all comingle to form an almost 
iconic symbol for today's America.

    In this complex and nuanced, self-reflexive ethnography, 
Hernández interweaves personal memory and group history, ethnic 
experience and class . . . even death and life.

_________________________________________________________

MARIE THERESA HERNÁNDEZ is an associate professor in the 
Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of 
Houston. She is also the author of Delirio—the Fantastic, the 
Demonic, and the Réel: The Buried History of Nuevo León.


Number Five: University of Houston Series in Mexican American 
Studies