In "Mexican American Odyssey, " Thomas H. Kreneck not only traces the influential life of Houston entrepreneur and civic leader Felix Tijerina as an individual but illustrates how Tijerina reflected many trends in Mexican American development during the decades he lived, years that were crucial for the Hispanic community today. Kreneck outlines a pattern of identity and assimilation that has been traced in bold, broader terms by other scholars, who have called Tijerina's contemporaries the "Mexican American Generation."
Felix Tijerina was born in 1905 in Mexico, although he publicly...

In 1849, a young German bride and her husband stepped off a ship in Corpus Christi Bay to establish their home in the new frontier settlement. For the next three decades Maria von Blucher wrote letters home describing the hardships of droughts and Indian and bandit raids, the chaos of the American Civil War, the discomforts of pioneer living, the joys and heartbreaks of family life, and the development of a town that her descendants would help to build into a thriving city. Her letters record above all the woman's side of pioneer life. Although they offer insight into political events and...

In 1910 Francisco Madero, in exile in San Antonio, Texas, launched a revolution that changed the face of Mexico. The conflict also unleashed violence and instigated political actions that kept that nation unsettled for more than a decade. As in other major uprisings around the world, the revolution's effects were not contained within the borders of the embattled country. Indeed, the Mexican Revolution touched communities on the Texas side of the Rio Grande from Brownsville to El Paso. Fleeing refugees swelled the populations of South Texas towns and villages and introduced nationalist...

Though relatively small in number until the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Houston'sHispanic population possesses a rich and varied history that has previously not been readily associated in the popular imagination with Houston. However, in 1989, the first edition of Thomas H. Kreneck's "Del Pueblo" vividly captured the depth and breadth of Houston's Hispanic people, illustrating both the obstacles and the triumphs that characterized this vital community's rise to prominence during the twentieth century.This new, revised edition of "Del Pueblo: A History of Houston's Hispanic...

Although they are among the most important sources of the history of the American Southwest, the lives of ordinary immigrants from Mexico have rarely been recorded. Educated and hardworking, Luis G. Gomez came to Texas from Mexico as a young man in the mid-1880s. He made his way around much of South Texas, finding work on the railroad and in other businesses, observing the people and ways of the region and committing them to memory for later transcription. From the moment he crossed the Rio Grande at Matamoros-Brownsville, Gomez sought his fortune in a series of contracting operations that...