Crossing the Rio Grande: An Immigrant's Life in the 1880s
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.37 (582 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1585445142 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 106 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 0000-00-00 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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." -- PleiadesCrossing the Rio Grande provides a valuable and accessible resource to a reader familiar with the fundamentals of Texas's immigration history. "The memoirs are outstanding for their literary, ethnographic, sociological, and historical quality." -- Arnoldo De León, Angelo State University" a vital contribution to the growing li
Mark Valderama said Great history. Wonderful book!
Guadalupe Valdez Jr., who translated the Spanish original, 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.
Gómez came to Texas from Mexico as a young man in the mid-1880s. Kreneck explainss the book’s value to scholarship and describes what has been learned of the publication history of the original Spanish-language volume. An introduction by Thomas H. Valdez’s comments provide a lucid and engaging picture of his grandfather’s later life and his gentlemanly character. 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. 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. 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 UniversityCorpus Christi. 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.. 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