As many as 9,500 men of Hispanic heritage fought in the United States' Civil War. In Texas, the bitter conflict deeply divided the Tejanos -- Texans of Mexican heritage. An estimated 2,500 fought in the ranks of the Confederacy while 950, including some Mexican nationals, fought for the Stars and Stripes. This is the story of these Tejanos who participated in the Civil War.

Mexican Texans, fighting for the Confederate cause, in their own words . . . The Civil War is often conceived in simplistic, black and white terms: whites from the North and South fighting over states’ rights, usually centered on the issue of black slavery. But, as Jerry Thompson shows in Tejanos in Gray, motivations for allegiance to the South were often more complex than traditional interpretations have indicated. Gathered for the first time in this book, the forty-one letters and letter fragments written by two Mexican Texans, Captains Manuel Yturri and Joseph Rafael de la Garza, reveal the intricate and intertwined relationships that characterized the lives of Texan citizens of Mexican descent in the years leading up to and including the Civil War. The experiences and impressions reflected in the letters of these two young members of the Tejano elite from San Antonio, related by marriage, provide fascinating glimpses of a Texas that had displaced many Mexican-descent families after the Revolution, yet could still inspire their loyalty to the Confederate flag. De la Garza, in fact, would go on to give his life for the Southern cause. The letters, translated by José Roberto Juárez and with meticulous annotation and commentary by Thompson, deepen and provide nuance to our understanding of the Civil War and its combatants, especially with regard to the Tejano experience. Historians, students, and general readers interested in the Civil War will appreciate Tejanos in Gray for its substantial contribution to borderlands studies, military history, and the often-overlooked interplay of region, ethnicity, and class in the Texas of the mid-nineteenth century.

Civil War and Revolution on the Rio Grande Frontier contains more than 125 of the best images taken by De Planque and other photographers, the vast majority having never been published. From numerous archives and private collections, these images include everything from the destruction following the killer hurricane of 1867 to gripping views of the heart-wrenching hanging of an American army deserter and three unfortunate followers of Cortina, who happened to get caught on the wrong side of the river.

Riding the rough and sometimes bloody peaks and canyons of border politics, Santos Benavides’s rise to prominence was largely the result of the careful mentoring of his well-known uncle, Basilio Benavides, who served several terms as alcalde of Laredo, Texas, and Chief Justice of Webb County. When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Basilio was one of only two Tejanos in the state legislature. During Santos’s lifetime, five flags flew over the small community he called home—that of the Republic of Mexico, the ill-fated Republic of the Rio Grande, the Republic of Texas, an expansionist United States, and in March 1861, the rebellious Confederate States of America. It was under the Confederacy in the disputed Texas-Mexico borderlands that Santos Benavides reached the pinnacle of his military career as the highest-ranking Tejano in the entire Confederate army. In the decades that followed the Civil War, he became an esteemed political leader, highly respected on both sides of the border. This is the first scholarly study of this important historical figure. At the pinnacle of his political career in 1879, Benavides held the distinction of being the only Tejano in the Texas legislature. Through strife, sweat, blood, and heroism in defense of the border, Benavides rose to economic and political heights few could dream of. As a friend and confidant of two Mexican presidents, he was one of the single most influential individuals in the nineteenth-century history of the border. His life was one of enduring perseverance as well as binational leadership and skilled diplomacy. He was without doubt the single most important individual in the long and often violent history of Laredo. The niche he carved in the tumultuous transnational history of the Texas-Mexico borderlands seems secure.

In 1863 the Union capture of Texas was viewed as crucial to the strategy to deny the Confederacy the territory west of the Mississippi and thus to break the back of Southern military force. Overland, Texas supplied Louisiana and points east with needed goods; by way of Mexico, Texas offered a detour around the blockade of Southern ports and thus an economic link to England and France. But Union forces had no good base from which to interdict either part of the Texas trade. Their efforts were characterized by short, unsuccessful forays, primarily in East and South Texas. One of these, which left New Orleans on October 26, 1863, and was known as the Rio Grande Expedition, forms the centerpiece of this book. Stephen A. Townsend carefully traces the actions—and inaction—of the Union forces from the capture of Brownsville by troops under Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks, through the advance up the coast with the help of Union Loyalists, until General Ulysses S. Grant ordered the abandonment of all of Texas except Brownsville in March 1864. Townsend analyzes the effects of the campaign on the local populace, the morale and good order of the two armies involved, U.S. diplomatic relations with France, the Texas cotton trade, and postwar politics in the state. He thoughtfully assesses the benefits and losses to the Northern war effort of this only sustained occupation of Texas. No understanding of the Civil War west of the Mississippi—or its place in the Union strategy for the Deep South—will be complete without this informative study.

In Why Texans Fought in the Civil War, Charles David Grear provides insights into what motivated Texans to fight for the Confederacy. Mining important primary sources-including thousands of letters and unpublished journals-he affords readers the opportunity to hear, often in the combatants' own words, why it was so important to them to engage in tumultuous struggles occurring so far from home. As Grear notes, in the decade prior to the Civil War the population of Texas had tripled. The state was increasingly populated by immigrants from all parts of the South and foreign countries. When the war began, it was not just Texas that many of these soldiers enlisted to protect, but also their native states, where they had family ties. CHARLES DAVID GREAR, who received his PhD in history from Texas Christian University, is an assistant professor of history at Prairie View A&M University. He holds a PhD from Texas Christian University.

In River of Hope, Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez examines state formation, cultural change, and the construction of identity in the lower Rio Grande region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He chronicles a history of violence resulting from multiple conquests, of resistance and accommodation to state power, and of changing ethnic and political identities. The redrawing of borders neither began nor ended the region's long history of unequal power relations. Nor did it lead residents to adopt singular colonial or national identities. Instead, their regionalism, transnational cultural practices, and kinship ties subverted state attempts to control and divide the population. Diverse influences transformed the borderlands as Spain, Mexico, and the United States competed for control of the region. Indian slaves joined Spanish society; Mexicans allied with Indians to defend river communities; Anglo Americans and Mexicans intermarried and collaborated; and women sued to confront spousal abuse and to secure divorces. Drawn into multiple conflicts along the border, Mexican nationals and Mexican Texans (tejanos) took advantage of their transnational social relations and ambiguous citizenship to escape criminal prosecution, secure political refuge, and obtain economic opportunities. To confront the racialization of their cultural practices and their increasing criminalization, tejanos claimed citizenship rights within the United States and, in the process, created a new identity. Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.