In this post, you can download a great eBook about the Spanish Colonial Ranching Communities of Mier, Revilla, and South Texas. It is a dissertation by Mary Jo Galindo titled "Con Un Pie En Cada Lado: Ethnicities and the Archaeology of Spanish Colonial Ranching Communities Along the Lower RÃo Grande Valley".
It is a 353 page eBook about South Texas and Northeastern Mexico Ranching and its early families.
Once you read this Dissertation your views about the settlement, people, and ranchos about this area will completely be transformed. She describes her Dissertation in her own words:
This dissertation involves archaeological excavations and historical analyses of ranches and towns associated with this border in order to understand the nature and articulation of the ranch and town settlements, the types of household production and livestock raising that sustained them, their trade relationships as reflected in their material culture, and the complex issues of ethnic identity construction along a contested border through time. Although my primary goal is to shed new light on a process of colonization and adaptation to a border context that went on a century before the more-studied Anglo-American colonization of the region, this is also a personal journey, because I am a descendant of these early pobladores and my family’s roots are in this border region.
Below is the cover of the dissertation and also the link to download it.
Cover of the eBook Spanish Ranching Communities
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Table of Contents
Here is the table of contents so that you can see what is included in the book.
Chapter 1: Historical and Archaeological Context of Borderlands Project Area Pg. 1
Chapter 2: The Indigenous Heritage of the RÃo Grande Communities of Nuevo Santander Pg. 26
Chapter 3: Mining Community Origins of Nuevo Santander Colonists Pg. 58
Chapter 4: Historical Archaeology and Ethnicities Among Nuevo Santander Rancho Communities in South Texas and Northeastern Mexico Pg. 77
Chapter 5: Household Archaeology and the Nuevo Santander Ranching Community Pg. 92
Chapter 6: The Ethnohistory and the Origins of El Rancho Saladito Pg. 109
Chapter 7: Results and Discussion of Investigations at El Rancho Saladito Pg. 164
Chapter 8: Summary Pg. 304
Chapter 8: Summary Pg. 322
Get Your Free Copy
This eBook is being hosted by the University of Texas at Austin and here is the link to it: https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/589
My finishing research project when taking my degree at Southwest Texas State University was titled, “The River Hamlet Country: To Gemeinshaft or to Geiselshaft,”. The study involved polling several hundred respondents about their attitudes, their understanding about their background, and their propensity to either stay or go. in the area between especially, and including, San Ygnacio and Roma, Texas.
My professor was an arch-liberal, and I the only conservative in the class of 9 for the required senior course if a person wanted a real sociology/anthropology milepost degree. I made a 99% for the course.
The professor, Dr. Rollo Newsome said that my paper and its historical aspects and the several representative genealogies opened his eyes to a Latin (Spanish / Mexican) reality he had never considered. Later he wrote me to note that my predictions had turned out to be accurate. That was shortly before the beginning of the general collapse of much of the cultural characteristics stemming from the drug traffickers and their violation of the social compact that had been in place since the time of Escandon.
Thanks for your time an interest. I am sure that Mary Jo’s dissertation takes all these things both deeper and much wider than my little treatise. Some of my guidance was from my brother’s work on his master’s thesis, (Texas A and I College) – “Certain Aspects of the Political History of Starr County” published in 1964, before he went on to take his Ph.D. in Cultural Geography at Louisiana State University
I look forward to reviewing Mary Jo’s work, for obvious reasons.
David Christian Newton (aka El Gringo Viejo)