...Chapter One concerns the family background of Fr. Olivares.Both of his parents’ families were exiles from the Mexican Revolution of 1910.They crossed the border and settled in San Antonio where Luis Olivares was born in 1934.He grew up in a very devout and religious family that laid the groundwork...

... —agricultural —militancy of Nueces County Tex Pecan industry San Antonio Tex Deportation Growers Migrants migration New Deal Sharecropping South Texas Texas American Public Welfare Association Brownsville Tex Mexican Americans Mexicans New York N Y Paris France Wells James Farm Security...

...This chapter discusses how Spanish authorities' neglect and mismanagement of Texas and the forces unleashed by cotton combined to overwhelm Spain's presence in the Texas borderlands. In 1819, floods devastated the town of San Antonio, destroying homes and killing indiscriminately. The town's...

...Born in 1926 outside of San Antonio, Texas, to a migrant farmworker family, Reies López Tijerina’s earliest years were defined by severe poverty and intense religiosity. Nevertheless, starting as a boy, Tijerina saw himself as destined by God for greatness. After attending a Pentecostal Bible...

...This chapter describes efforts to organize a union of pecan-shelling workers in San Antonio in the late 1930s. After the success of that effort, a maverick New Dealer rode the wave of the insurgency to the mayor’s office, bringing the Mexican American pecan-shellers into common cause with white...

...This chapter describes the formation of a coalition between African Americans and Mexican Americans in San Antonio. The experiments in San Antonio in the fifteen years after World War II laid the foundation for future collaboration across the color line. African Americans Civil rights movement...

...Chapter Seven illustrates the culmination of the tendencies toward combining demands for recognition of class and race based discrimination in the early 1970s. Among a series of other similar cases, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez is a pivotal "taxpayer" case...