Copyright by Jennifer Rose Nájera 2005

Copyright by Jennifer Rose Nájera 2005 The Dissertation Committee for Jennifer Rose Nájera Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Troublemakers, Religiosos, or Radicals? Everyday Acts of Racial Integration in a South Texas Community Committee: Martha Menchaca, Supervisor Richard Flores José Limón Angela Valenzuela Emilio Zamora Troublemakers, Religiosos, or Radicals? Everyday Acts of Racial Integration in a South Texas Community by Jennifer Rose Nájera, A.B.; A.M.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2005 Dedication To my parents, Joe and Rose Najera, and to the Mexican origin people of La Feria whose stories had not been told. Acknowledgements The process of conceptualizing, researching, and writing this dissertation has challenged me both professionally and personally in that this project has been almost as much auto/ethnography as it has been historical ethnography. While it is has always been my intention to produce a written work that I could share with the community of La Feria, I have also written this dissertation for myself. It is a history of the town where my mother was born and lived the earliest years of her life after our family emigrated from Mexico. While it has, at times, felt like opening old wounds to write about practices of segregation, it is my hope that also writing about integration may help to heal those wounds. I would first and foremost like to thank the people of La Feria, who so generously welcomed me into their community as a prodigal daughter, scholar, fellow traveler, and friend. I appreciate the openness with which they allowed me into their lives and shared with me their stories. I am especially grateful to the parish community of St. Francis Xavier and to the members of the La Feria Community of Shalom for their support. I am grateful to the Social Science Research Council for an International Migration Fellowship that allowed my thirteen-month stay in La Feria to conduct fieldwork. I also extend my appreciation to the Department of Chicano/a Studies at the v University of California, Santa Barbara for a dissertation writing fellowship. The Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin has also provided me financial support through the latter part of my dissertation writing process. As a student in the Anthropology Department at the University of Texas at Austin, I have been in a unique position to examine Borderlands Anthropology, under the tutelage of three Chicano/a anthropologists. I am grateful to Martha Menchaca, my dissertation chair, who offered her expertise and meticulous attention that helped to shape and, ultimately, focus this project. I am also grateful to Richard Flores and José Limón for their encouragement and theoretical prodding. Emilio Zamora and Angela Valenzuela, Chicano/a scholars in the departments of History and Education, respectively, have similarly offered their encouragement and expertise at various moments during the dissertation journey. I must also acknowledge my peers at the University of Texas who have provided this project critical insight and its writer needed encouragement and support. To Olga Lydia Herrera, Verónica Yvette Martínez, Laura Padilla, Virginia Raymond, and Cristina Salinas—las girlfriends—I offer my heartfelt thanks and appreciation. I would also like to thank Gilberto Rosas and Faedah Totah for their keen anthropological perspectives and help in shaping this project. This dissertation would not exist if not for all of you. Finally, I want to thank my family—Joe, Rose, Sandra, and Paul Najera—for helping me to keep my “chin up” through the most difficult moments of my academic journey. For their unconditional love and support, and for always believing in me. vi Preface: Fotografía La Feria It is a bright and heavy afternoon in late August. The South Texas sun streams brutally through the car windows, defying the air conditioner on its full setting. I am driving with my mother and my Aunt Lupita along an isolated country road north of La Feria. We are looking for the house where they spent most of their childhood years, where my grandpa earned two dollars a day working sun up to sun down for a local German farmer. They lived in a small house on his property, a house neither of them has seen for decades. "It's down that road," my mom tells us, "pero se me hace que allí es private property." "No, it’s not private property," I tell her. I’ve lived in La Feria now for a year and have done some investigating into the matter. "It just looks that way because it's a dirt road." I make a difficult U-turn on the caliche road and will my car down the path that will take us to their house. We drive slowly down the road, partly because we are not sure where we are going and partly because small, sharp rocks impede our smooth passage. We creep by the main house on our left, which they tell me used to look much vii nicer thirty years ago. On our right a cluster of dilapidated wood frame houses looks abandoned. I notice, then, that there are clothes hanging out to dry in some of their yards. "I think that's it." "Is that it?" They remember that the house was white, but it seems that layers of paint from the houses in that cluster have chipped and faded away, probably several times throughout the years. "Yes, that's it. Look there's the diche. And the porch where we used to sit." I make another difficult U-turn on the narrow road, and we pass the houses again. The second time we drive by, my aunt notices the old barn. It is still a tall, imposing building, but the wood is now a gray color and the structure looks as if the next hard rain would take it down. "That's where my dad would go to milk the cows and feed the pigs after he would work all day in the sun," my aunt tells me as she fumbles in her bag for her camera. "Slow down. I'm going to take a picture." "Why do you want to take a picture?" my mom asks, not even trying to conceal the exasperation in her voice. "Because," my aunt insists, "I want to take a picture.” “I don’t know why you want to remember this place. These are just like oppressing memories.” “I want to take a picture. I dream about this house. I have to take a picture so that I won't dream it any more." viii *** Although she has lived in California for the past forty years, having married and raised three children there, my mother is originally from the Rio Grande Valley. She was the first of her siblings to be born in the United States, the four elder daughters all born in Mexico. Poverty and hunger were the push factors that propelled my family’s migration from a ranch in Guanajuato to the rancho outside of La Feria, Texas during the mid- 1940s. They lived and worked as a generally poor, farmworking family in South Texas for twenty years. My mother’s family left to pick cotton and grapes in California the day after she and her sister graduated from La Feria High School. It was the same every summer. They packed only what they needed for the next few months, piled clothes and kitchen utensils and children into their Ford and headed west. The summer of 1965, however, was different from other summers. Five of my aunts, including my mother and my Aunt Lupita, joined my grandfather working in the fields that year and, with the money they earned, the family was able to buy a house in California. They never returned to live in La Feria. Thirty-five years later, my mother and I drive to the Valley. She had been back once before in 1985 for her twenty-year high school reunion, but this would be my first time. The first time that I would see where she was born, where she had gone to school, church, dances. After a year of graduate study in Austin, I had yet to make the connection between the stories that she told me about growing up on the Texas border and the capital city where I lived. As we traversed the long miles from Austin five and a ix half hours to the border region in South Texas, it occurred to me that I had yet to experience her Texas. The sun sets wide and warm, coating the highway with an orange glow as we drive through Harlingen. Ten minutes later, as the light of day begins to dim, we exit the expressway and head along Main Street into town. To our left is a Chevron/McDonald's complex and a Dairy Queen—all new additions to the town, according to my mom. Farther along the road, we notice a fairly large local grocery store, El Centro, as well as a Church's Chicken, a couple of taco stands, a beauty shop, and a small auto shop. We turn right and enter a residential area. My mother drives me by Sam Houston School, where she attended elementary school. "Esta era la escuela mexicana," she tells me. "And here, this is where Emilio's store used to be. Todo esto era el pueblo mexicano." The houses in the area are modest but generally well maintained, some with manicured lawns and bright flowers.

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