A revisionist account of the Tejano experience in south Texas from its Spanish colonial roots to 1900.

In Fevered Measures, John Mckiernan-González examines public health campaigns along the Texas-Mexico border between 1848 and 1942 and reveals the changing medical and political frameworks U.S. health authorities used when facing the threat of epidemic disease. The medical borders created by these officials changed with each contagion and sometimes varied from the existing national borders. Federal officers sought to distinguish Mexican citizens from U.S. citizens, a process troubled by the deeply interconnected nature of border communities. Mckiernan-González uncovers forgotten or ignored cases in which Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and other groups were subject to—and sometimes agents of—quarantines, inspections, detentions, and forced-treatment regimens. These cases illustrate the ways that medical encounters shaped border identities before and after the Mexican Revolution. Mckiernan-González also maintains that the threat of disease provided a venue to destabilize identity at the border, enacted processes of racialization, and re-legitimized the power of U.S. policymakers. He demonstrates how this complex history continues to shape and frame contemporary perceptions of the Latino body today.

Signed in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war between the United States and Mexico and gave a large portion of Mexico’s northern territories to the United States. The language of the treaty was designed to deal fairly with the people who became residents of the United States by default. However, as Richard Griswold del Castillo points out, articles calling for equality and protection of civil and property rights were either ignored or interpreted to favor those involved in the westward expansion of the United States rather than the Mexicans and Indians living in the conquered territories.

Two forgotten weeks in 1836 and one of the most consequential events of the entire Texas Revolution have been missing from the historical record - the tale of the Mexican army's misfortunes in the aptly named Sea of Mud, where more than 2,500 Mexican soldiers and 1,500 female camp followers foundered in the muddy fields of what is now Wharton County, Texas. In 1996 a pediatrician and avocational archeologist living in Wharton, Texas, decided to try to find evidence in Wharton County of the Mexican army of 1836. Following some preliminary research at the Wharton County Junior College Library, he focused his search on the area between the San Bernard and West Bernard rivers.Within two weeks after beginning the search for artifacts, a Mexican army site was discovered, and, with the help of the Houston Archeological Society, excavated.

Winner of the Caughey Western History Prize Winner of the Robert G. Athearn Award Winner of the Lawrence W. Levine Award Winner of the TCU Texas Book Award Winner of the NACCS Tejas Foco Nonfiction Book Award Winner of the María Elena Martínez Prize Frederick Jackson Turner Award Finalist “A page-turner...Haunting...Bravely and convincingly urges us to think differently about Texas’s past.” —Texas Monthly Between 1910 and 1920, self-appointed protectors of the Texas–Mexico border—including members of the famed Texas Rangers—murdered hundreds of ethnic Mexicans living in Texas, many of whom were American citizens. Operating in remote rural areas, officers and vigilantes knew they could hang, shoot, burn, and beat victims to death without scrutiny. A culture of impunity prevailed. The abuses were so pervasive that in 1919 the Texas legislature investigated the charges and uncovered a clear pattern of state crime. Records of the proceedings were soon filed away as the Ranger myth flourished. A groundbreaking work of historical reconstruction, The Injustice Never Leaves You has upended Texas’s sense of its own history. A timely reminder of the dark side of American justice, it is a riveting story of race, power, and prejudice on the border. “It’s an apt moment for this book’s hard lessons...to go mainstream.” —Texas Observer “A reminder that government brutality on the border is nothing new.” —Los Angeles Review of Books