ABSTRACT
Because we were so different, I always asked my abuela (grandmother) where she was from. She would laugh heartily and tell me she was from the very spot on which she was standing. In the late 1960s, rural South Texas didn’t look too much different than it had to her grandfather or his grandfather. They farmed the same land, whether it belonged to the United States or Mexico, whether it was subsistence farming of corn, sharecropping of cotton, or finally, in the 70s and 80s, government-subsidized sorghum. My Mexican grandmother didn’t immigrate to the United States. She was always here.
