The Land That Will Sustain Uvalde

The reason I want to tell you a little about south Texas right now is because it bleeds.South Texas is not where I was raised, but it is where I am from. It is my roots. At least two of my ancestors received porciones under José de Escandón, and we have been there in the 300 years since. It is not an easy land. It is hot and hostile, but it is ours. We arrived at nearly the exact same moment in history as the Comanches — and we were exploring the land long before the Comanches possessed a meaningful existence — and so the claim and the antiquity are ours.We have gone from captains and explorers under the banner of His Catholic Majesty the King of Spain, to ranchers on the vast riverine lowlands, to peasants just getting by, to what we are today. We were subjects of Spain, then of the Mexican Empire, then of what passed for a Mexican republic, then of the Republic of Texas — though only claimed, as the Republic’s writ never ran on the Rio Grande — then of the Republic of the Rio Grande, then of the United States of America, then of the Confederate States of America, and then of the United States again. (One may be surprised to learn that the most local, Tejano, enthusiasm for all these political projects was arguably for the Confederacy.)From Ciudad Mier to Laredo to Roma, there is hardly a square mile that some ancestor did not own. Did the Spanish establish themselves on the north bank of the Rio Grande in the 1750s? José Vázquez Borrego did that, as a captain in the king’s service. Did the great frontera architect Heinrich Portscheller build an elegant brick home in the 1880s on the Roma plaza that still stands today? Lino Ramírez did that, when he was the biggest rancher in Starr County, Texas.I am the direct descendant of both men — and many more like them.None of this is unique to me. There are a lot of people like this in south Texas. It is like only a few places in the United States — and the others are mostly patrician, which south Texas is not — in its population’s attention to its lineage and inheritance. I had a business meeting once with a man in the Rio Grande Valley who felt it important to establish at the outset that he was a Vela.The Velas, you see, were also porciones recipients. It was an expression of pride but more importantly an assertion of status. He thought I was an outsider, and he meant to tell me: You are visiting, but I have roots — you are today, but I am forever. He did not know that I am also part of the south Texas epic. I did not tell him. I told him that I was from Corpus Christi.We are from Corpus Christi, but Corpus Christi is where the story culminated, not where it began. It began in Laredo, in Roma, in Hebbronville, in Dolores, in San Ygnacio, in Los Corralitos, in a hundred ranchos and ferry crossings and forlorn outposts dotting the arid plain for hundreds of sun-blasted miles. Some of their works still stand: in Los Corralitos you can still visit the fortress blockhouse built by Don José Fernando Vidaurri.The Rio Grande country was not safe in darkness for nearly a century after its settlement (and in some sense, it reverts to that primal condition now), and so rancheros built these blockhouses for defense, or simply to have a safe place to sleep. (There is another outstanding example of one, if you ever have the chance to visit, at the Treviño-Uribe fort in San Ygnacio.)The Vidaurri fortress, at San José de los Corralitos in Zapata County, Texas, has — let’s let the promotional literature tell it — “33-inch thick walls; one door on the east elevation; no windows; six gun ports; and a flat 11-foot tall ceiling. The gun ports facilitated the muzzle of a black-powder firearm, which extended through the opening to be visible from the outside.”This is south Texas, a place peopled by only men and women who were resolved to a whole lifetime of war on a merciless frontier. In all American history, the only real parallels are among the Massachusetts Englishmen of the 1670s, the Waxhaws frontiersmen of the 1700s, and the Anglo Texans of the mid-19th century. Don José Fernando Vidaurri is also a direct ancestor.You have to understand this about south Texas. It is poor — before Nafta created a middle class ex nihilo, after 1994, in the Rio Grande Valley and Laredo, the entire region was a byword for poverty on par with the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia — but it is deeply proud. It is proud because it has these roots. It has this history.Everything its detractors say about it is true: It can be parochial, provincial, deadening, the antithesis of cosmopolitan. It is an infinite expanse of small towns and isolated communities where everyone knows you even if you wish they did not. We do not mind the detractors so long as they are one of us. (Just last week, a woman from Corpus Christi said she was surprised I was from Corpus Christi, “because you don’t get quality people from Corpus Christi.” It made us both laugh.)The myriad vices of the place disclose its great virtues. It need not be cosmopolitan because it is a world unto itself. It is content being provincial because this province was carved out of the wilderness by captains of the king. Everyone knows you, for good and for ill, but perhaps that inspires you to the good. If it does not, then there is room in this wild country for immense evils, but expect hard justice in the fullness of time.There are people out there who have never lived the experience of a whole country peopled by unknown family. I am not one of them, because of south Texas. Some years back, I came through Hebbronville and called upon a cousin whom I had never met. Her father showed up to join us: the man who succeeded my own great-grandfather as sheriff there half a century before. It was as if we had known one another all this time.Some weeks back, I met a woman in Kerrville who turned out to be from San Diego, Texas — and had a best friend in Hebbronville as well. That best friend gave me a call. She knew my family too, and so she knew me. Some months back, I went through Laredo and was warned by a relative not to tell people I was related to another relative — a pachuco — who was up to no good many decades back.Memories are long. The community is small. Also in Laredo, I drove by the house built by my great-grandfather there. I remember it. It stands. He was the kind of man who built a house by hand for his wife and 13 children. That is the one-sentence synopsis for him, and it is enough for him to deserve this: My youngest son is named for him.South Texas is a place where an itinerant laborer, vegetable-cart vendor, and taxi driver deserves remembrance unto the generations because he was a good man and a good father, who built that house, and greatness is only a function of goodness.There are people out there who have never had their grandmother fix them flour tortillas on a hot cooktop, flipping them by hand until they have just the right proportion of burnt spots, and bringing them to you in a stack wrapped in a damp dishcloth in a straw basket.They haven’t smeared the hot tortillas with Falfurrias butter — a south Texas brand, you know — and enjoyed them by the dozen with a Coke and crushed ice in the pounding summer heat. They haven’t tried to make those same tortillas with their own sons.They haven’t had their great-grandmother make the best dish of cheese enchiladas and serve up more than a small child could ever eat. They haven’t been taken to a taco window on the downscale side of Corpus Christi and grabbed a few — 50 cents a taco, 40 years ago — before the beauty-college class where your grandmother taught opened up.They haven’t gotten hot Cheetos with Velveeta melted upon it at the gas station. They haven’t been to Delia’s Tamales. They haven’t considered Whataburger the most upscale place in town. They haven’t asked the kid down the block to play and discovered that he too is a Treviño. They haven’t stepped outside in the predawn darkness and felt the heaviness of the air upon them, thick and pregnant with the coming daylight heat, and wished to be nowhere else.I am not one of them, because of south Texas.I want to tell you a little about south Texas, because it bleeds. This is what I want you to understand: that it is impossibly rich, but you have to know it to see the glory and the dream beneath the nondescript towns and the barren landscape.God gave some countries beauty in their vistas: In south Texas, He put it all in the people’s hearts. I do not know Uvalde well — I have stopped through a few times, once to visit the gravesite of native son Cactus Jack Garner — but it is part of the epic, part of the land.Its people are, too. Our country has a bit of it torn out, its precious children stricken in a spasm of monstrous evil. It is not the first tragedy in 300 years, but it does not lessen the pain. The wounded heart does not heal with the medicine of inheritance.You are seeing a lot of them now, the mourning families of Uvalde, and the community that must now sustain them. I want you to know who they are. They are not impoverished victims in some dusty border town. They are the ancestral community, the sons of giants.They are some of the greatest Americans, some of the last keepers of the old ways. In their moments of glory, they cast off heroes — men with names like Freddy Gonzalez and Roy Benavidez. In their moments of sorrow — well, you see them now.See them now. We can do so little for them in their agony. We can do for them the respect of knowing who they are.

The Land That Will Sustain Uvalde

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