"Come to Texas" urged countless advertisements, newspaper articles, and private letters in the late nineteenth century. Expansive acres lay fallow, ready to be turned to agricultural uses. Entrepreneurial Texans knew that drawing immigrants to those lands meant greater prosperity for the state as a whole and for each little community in it. They turned their hands to directing the stream of spatial mobility in American society to Texas. They told the "Texas story" to whoever would read it. In this book, Barbara Rozek documents their efforts, shedding light on the importance of their words in peopling the Lone Star State and on the optimism and hopes of the people who sought to draw others.Rozek traces the efforts first of the state government (until 1876) and then of private organizations, agencies, businesses, and individuals to entice people to Texas. The appeals, in whatever form, were to hope?hope for lower infant mortality rates, business and farming opportunities, education, marriage?and they reflected the hopes of those writing. Rozek states clearly that the number of words cannot be proven to be linked directly to the number of immigrants (Texas experienced a population increase of 672 percent between 1860 and 1920), but she demonstrates that understanding the effort is itself important.Using printed materials and private communications held in numerous archives as well as pictures of promotional materials, she shows the energy and enthusiasm with which Texans promoted their native or adopted home as the perfect home for others.Texas is indeed an immigrant state?perhaps by destiny; certainly, Rozek demonstrates, by design.

In addition to Mary's published Memoirs, the Mavericks left a rich store of family papers, including letters, journals, and business materials. The author uses these to vividly portray the dramatic story of these two important Texas pioneers.

Those individuals remembered as the "founders" of cities were men, but as Elizabeth York Enstam shows, it was women who played a major role in creating the definitive forms of urban life we know today.

Fair Park Deco is a fascinating tour of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition. Like every American exposition in the 1930s, it began in economic depression. Although its economy had been buoyed by major oil discoveries in the early '30s, Texas agriculture was hard hit by the Great Depression. By the middle of the decade, state officials had set their sights on a great centennial celebration to help stimulate the economy and attract tourist dollars. "If during the next six months the people of the state could become filled with the idea of holding a big celebration on the one hundredth anniversary of the establishment of Texas independence," the state's centennial commission speculated in July, 1934, "it would have the effect of creating a general forward-looking spirit through the state. It would be more stimulating than anything we can think of, and this effect would be immediate." This book focuses specifically on the Art Deco art and architecture of Fair Park--the public spaces, buildings, sculptures and murals that were designed for the 1936 exposition. Most of the chapters in the book represent different areas of Fair Park, with buildings and artwork effectively arranged in the same order that a visitor to the Texas Centennial Exposition might have seen them. The art and architecture are featured in original photography by Jim Parsons and David Bush as well as in historic photographs. Fair Park is one of the finest collections of Deco architecture in the country, but it is so much more: the embodiment of Texan swagger, it is a testament to the Texanic task of creating a dazzling spectacle in the darkest days of the Depression.

The Texas Centennial of 1936, commemorated by statewide celebrations of independence from Mexico, proved to be a powerful catalyst for the formation of a distinctly Mexican American identity. Confronted by a media frenzy that vilified "Meskins" as the antithesis of Texan liberty, Mexican Americans created literary responses that critiqued these racialized representations while forging a new bilingual, bicultural community within the United States. The development of a modern Tejana identity, controversies surrounding bicultural nationalism, and other conflictual aspects of the transformation from mexicano to Mexican American are explored in this study. Capturing this fascinating aesthetic and political rebirth, Border Renaissance presents innovative readings of important novels by María Elena Zamora O'Shea, Américo Paredes, and Jovita González. In addition, the previously overlooked literary texts by members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) are given their first detailed consideration in this compelling work of intellectual and literary history. Drawing on extensive archival research in the English and Spanish languages, John Morán González revisits the 1930s as a crucial decade for the vibrant Mexican American reclamation of Texas history. Border Renaissance pays tribute to this vital turning point in the Mexican American struggle for civil rights.

To be sure, the dramatic shift in land and resources greatly affected the Mexican, but it had its effect on the Anglo American as well. After the 1820s, many of the Anglo-American pioneers changed from buckskin-clad farmers to cattle ranchers who wore boots and "cowboy" hats. They learned to ride heavy Mexican saddles mounted on horses taken from the wild mustang herds of Texas. They drove great herds of longhorns north and westward, spreading the Mexican life-style and ranch economy as they went. With the cattle ranch went many words, practices, and legal principles that had been developed long before by the native Mexicans of Texas - the Tejanos.