The story of South Texas is one that has been included in common Texas history for years, the same sorts of things are said for the Rio Grande Valley as the rest of the state in a generalized context. All of the experiences that Rio Grande Valley residents are supposed to have had are supposedly summed up in the same kind of mythological re-telling of the Alamo and the Mexican-Revolution, and this is the extent of it. What many people do not realize is that the range of experience for people who live in Texas is as wide as that of those who live throughout the nation as a whole, because the kind of people who live here are just as varied and diverse.

I grew up with a reconstructionist sort of knowledge about the history of the area, before I ever knew what a reconstructionist history was! The tradition of the oral transfer of knowledge was one that was heavily practiced by my family, and so stories of how Texas used to be, even according to stories that had been passed down to them from their ancestors were vital in constructing my view of the Rio Grande Valley and the rest of Texas as well. One person in particular helped shaped my view as a young child, which followed me well into my teen years, and that was my maternal grandmother.

As a little girl my grandmother would sit with me for hours and tell me stories about how it was to live in the city of Sebastian, Texas from the nineteen-forties to the present, and I was stunned by the supposed differences she would conjure up about how beautiful and pristine the small town once was, and how change and progress had intruded on that picture.

One particular story that she did tell me about several times was one that her mother had told her from first hand experience, and it was also the most frightening of her stories about the past. When speaking with my grandmother about race issues in the Rio Grande Valley, this was the story that usually summed up the tensions between people who lived there, as complicated as they were, it showed the historical source of the kind of conflict that people lived with on a daily basis.

This story, she said, took place when her mother was a teenage girl, living on a ranch with her mother and father and several of her extended paternal family. The men of the family were vaqueros who owned the ranch and had done much to keep the family afloat in times of crisis. They had worked the land for years on their own, without interference from any exterior sources, and they had been successful in this. (source)