Although they're one of the most vital resources of the background of the yankee Southwest, the lives of normal immigrants from Mexico have hardly been recorded. informed and hardworking, Luis G. Gómez got here to Texas from Mexico as a tender guy within the mid-1880s. He made his manner round a lot of South Texas, discovering paintings at the railroad and in different companies, gazing the folks and methods of the quarter and committing them to reminiscence for later transcription. From the instant he crossed the Rio Grande at Matamoros-Brownsville, Gómez sought his fortune in a chain of contracting operations that created the infrastructure to aid strengthen the Texas economy—clearing land, slicing wooden, construction roads, laying music, developing bridges, and quarrying rock. Gómez describes Mexican customs within the usa, akin to courtship and marriage, relatives with Anglo employers, non secular practices, and the easy domestic gatherings that sustained these Mexican Texans who settled in city components like Houston, remoted from predominantly Mexican South Texas. Few of the 150,000 immigrants within the final half the 19th century left written documents in their stories, yet Gómez wrote his memoir and had it privately released in Spanish in 1935. Crossing the Rio Grande provides an English variation of that memoir, translated by way of the author’s grandson, Guadalupe Valdez Jr., with the aid of Javier Villarreal, a professor of Spanish at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. An creation via Thomas H. Kreneck explainss the book’s price to scholarship and describes what has been realized of the booklet historical past of the unique Spanish-language quantity. Valdez’s reviews supply a lucid and fascinating photo of his grandfather’s later existence and his gentlemanly personality. This captivating little quantity presents a important account of a comparatively undocumented interval in Mexican Texans’ heritage. virtually unknown to these open air his relations, this narrative has now been “recovered,” edited by way of Valdez and Kreneck, and made to be had to a much broader, public.