Colonizing Ourselves, Tejano-Back-to Mexico Movements and the Making of a Settler Colonial Nation

José Angel Hernández

ISBN 10: 0806194596 / ISBN 13: 9780806194592

Published by The University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 2024

About this Item

Size:6 x 9. Volume 5 in the New Directions in Tejano History Series.

Seller Inventory # 001439

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Colonizing Ourselves, Tejano-Back-to Mexico Movements and the Making of a Settler Colonial Nation
• Publisher: The University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0806194596
• ISBN 13: 9780806194592
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

In the late nineteenth century, the Mexican government, seeking to fortify its northern borders and curb migration to the United States, set out to relocate “Mexico-Texano” families, or Tejanos, on Mexican land. In Colonizing Ourselves, José Angel Hernández explores these movements back to Mexico, also known as autocolonization, as distinct in the history of settler colonization.

Unlike other settler colonial states that relied heavily on overseas settlers, especially from Europe and Asia, Mexico received less than 1 percent of these nineteenth-century immigrants. This reality, coupled with the growing migration of farmers and laborers northward toward the United States, led ultimately to passage of the 1883 Land and Colonization Law. This legislation offered incentives to any Mexican in the United States willing to resettle in the republic: Tejanos, as well as other Mexican expatriates abroad, were to be granted twice the amount of land for settlement that other immigrants received. The campaign worked: ethnic Mexicans from Texas and the Mexican interior, as well as Indigenous peoples from Mexico, established numerous colonies on the northern frontier.

Leading one of the most notable back-to-Mexico movements was Luis Siliceo, a Texan who, with a subsidized newspaper, El Colono, and the backing of Porfirio Díaz’s administration, secured a contract to resettle Tejano families across several Mexican states. The story of this partnership, which Hernández traces from the 1890s through the turn of the century, provides insight into debates about settler colonization in Mexico. Viewed from various global, national, and regional perspectives, it helps to make sense of Mexico’s autocolonization policy and its redefinition of Indigenous and settler populations during the nineteenth century.
 

About the Author

José Angel Hernández is Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston and the author of Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century: A History of the US-Mexico Borderlands.