Texas: The Great Theft by Carmen Boullosa

It's high noon in Bruneville. Not a cloud in the sky. The sun beats down, piercing the veil of shimmering dust. Eyes droop from the heat. In the Market Square, in front of Cafe Ronsard, Sheriff Shears spits five words at Don Nepomuceno:

"Shut up, you dirty greaser."

He says the words in English.

Last week I spent a few days in Brownsville, a city on the Rio Grande where Texas borders Mexico. Brownsville is one of the most heavily Latino cities in the United States, and it still has a distinctly Mexican feel to it. Across the border lies the city of Matamoros, Brownsville's Mexican "twin." Though we never saw it, we did overlook the border many times, looking for birds. It's hard to stand there and not feel underwhelmed; is this narrow, sluggish, brown river really such a meaningful boundary that it preoccupies our national imagination? A kindly local suggested we try birding at a former golf course on the river "where the illegals cross," though he hastened to add that nothing bad would happen there. Nearby, on an anonymous and scrubby patch of grassland, is where the opening shots of the Mexican-American war rang out. You feel the history, perhaps, but the feeling of the border, the boundary, is elusive.

Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa's book Texas: The Great Theft begins on the American side of the river, in Bruneville, a fictionalized version of Brownsville, in the 1850s. A white sheriff is picking on a Mexican drunk in the town square. When Don Nepomuceno, a wealthy Tejano rancher, objects, the sheriff insults him, calling him a "greaser," a word which will reverberate for miles and miles on both sides of the Rio Grande, and which will ultimately lead to a war between Nepomuceno's forces and the white settlers who resent the claims that the Mexicans, Tejanos, and Indians have on the land. The first quarter or so of the novel follows the news of the sheriff's insult as it passes from mouth to mouth, a process by which it takes in all of the novel's frankly enormous cast of characters: ranchers, vaqueros, gamblers, the bargeman, the innkeeper, the doctor, the mayors of Bruneville and its twin Matasanchez, journalists, spies, bandits, enslaved men, freedmen, Seminoles, Comanches, Germans, children, the keeper of the messenger pigeons, fishermen, and more. Texas has maybe the largest cast of characters per page of any book I've ever read; Boullosa pointedly gives us as wide a view as possible. The sheriff's insult, then, ripples like a stone dropped in the river.

Texas is a highly fictionalized version of a true story; Nepomuceno is a version of the Tejano rancher Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, who lead bands of raiders against the white ranchers in south Texas. I recognized many of the ranchers' names, like Kenedy and Kleberg, who gave their names to south Texas counties, and King, whose namesake ranch is still the largest in the United States, and who inspired the cattle barons of Edna Ferber's novel Giant. Like the Rio Grande, the border between fiction and history is permeable, and who belongs to which is not always discernable. The sheer number of characters gives the novel a kind of breakneck pace, and steers it away from modes that emphasize the interiority or psychology of historical figures. Instead, it gives the history a kind of fable-like quality, a colorful flatness that emphasizes breadth over depth.

It's a story not just about Nepomuceno but all of south Texas, and it's a story about racial violence that comes down squarely on the side of the Mexicans and Tejanos. For them, the border is a boundary placed down to delineate and permit violence and deprivation. The sheriff's insult sets off the war, but the larger context is the white ranchers who have eaten away by subterfuge the lands belonging to Nepumoceno's mother Dona Estefania, and who exert control over Mexicans (and Black people and Indians) by a regime of dispossession and disrespect. Boullosa captures the way that Brownsville/Bruneville, having been founded to mark and watch over the border, represents a kind of diminished and degraded mirror image of its sister city across the border. And I thought it was interesting how Nepomuceno, having been roped into the United States by the machinations of the Anglo ranchers, cannily insists on his claim to American citizenship--though the two cities are emblems of opposition, they exist in a kind of symbiosis that cannot be fully pulled apart or cleanly separated.