WE WERE ILLEGAL

An invigorating history that will displease legislators and would-be despots throughout the Lone Star State.

In 2019, Stephen Harrigan’s Big Wonderful Thing asked difficult questions about Texas from a macro level. Goudeau, a San Antonio native with a bloodline in the state stretching over two centuries, examines some of the same issues through the lens of her family history. Though she “loved Texas my whole life,” what she uncovered is not pretty. For example, an ancestor executed by Santa Anna’s forces at Goliad was one of a generation of newcomers who was part of “an ad hoc system that grew from the machinations of desperate men trying to make a buck and get ahead.” That system, if it were to be successful, relied on the labor of enslaved people, and one reason to revolt against Mexico was that Mexico planned to abolish slavery. The political fortunes of many Anglos hinged on keeping the Latinx population terrified. One Texas Ranger relative, Goudeau writes, very likely “lied under oath to free a serial killer” in that interest. The author is consistently thoughtful and unsparing, and although she hits on just the right formula to explain the Texas attitude of conquest and control (“our right to flourish was God-given, and higher than anyone else’s rights”), she catalogs as many failures as successes among forebears who wound up full of lead and forced from land and power. Throughout, she skillfully connects past to present. The redlining that marginalized communities in big chunks of Texas cities, for instance, is part and parcel of the habit of right-wing Texas politicos to consider everyone with a Spanish surname to be in Texas illegally.

Expect to see bans of this powerful book, one that every Texan should read.