Goodbye, Randy Pausch

It's a rare thing for so many regular people to become aware of the death of another regular person.

Like millions of others, I was touched by Dr. Randy Pausch's Last Lecture, given after his terminal diagnosis, and shared globally via the internet.

Read this for more from someone who knows ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120951287174854465.html?mod=null_topbox

I don't want to take anything away from this man's life, and there's little chance my comments will, since no one who knows me knows him or his family.

But there's a thought that came up over and over again, toward the end of the Last Lecture, and repeatedly during his Time Management lecture (which I watched, since he said he thought it was more important, and I was curious -- and yes, a bit of a procrastinator).

I felt the time pressure in his life, which was there before the terminal diagnosis. Some white anti-racist activists who have become aware of the way some of us put the to-do list before human relationships have experienced it as time oppression.

I think after the diagnosis the only time pressure he felt was to spend time with his family, and leave clear evidence behind for his children that he loved them.

White privilege helped him do that, as did the love and concern and resources he had earned. I can't ignore that. There's whiteness in our living, and in our dying.

How many men and women are dying and leaving partners and children behind and do not have the resources to leave anything but the shell of the body and the memories a mind and heart can hold?

I do not begrudge his widow and children a bit of what he was able to leave.

I just don't want us to forget the inequality that prevents everyone from having such a good death.

To Be an Ally

The Angry Black Woman called a carnival of bloggers to address being an ally against a form of oppression – racism as well as other –isms.

http://theangryblackwoman.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/allies-talking/

That’s reason enough to engage the question of what it means to be an ally, but the topic happens to run along with the last couple of posts, so there’s reason number two. But it’s reason number three that gets me off my duff and onto the keyboard: I want to sit back and read the responses. I don’t want to write, because I don’t want to expose my limited understanding; I don’t want to be imperfect. Perfectionism, of course, being one of the better ways whiteness has of paralyzing white people and keeping them out of the fray. (“If I talk about racism, my racism will show.” Does that fear ever go away?)

Back to ABW: she asks some good questions and wonders some good wonders. For instance, do white people listen less defensively to other white people talking about racism, compared to the defensiveness that crops up with people of color?

In my experience, the answer is there may be less defensiveness, but not much less. And there is often less listening. It’s almost like some white folks don’t want to listen to other white folks talk about racism, as if we can’t know what we’re talking about. The white person wants to hear about it from a person of color. Maybe sometimes there is more defensiveness, because the white person who wants information resents that there are white people who “get it.” And I’m well aware that my own response to another white person can shape the interchange; if I come across as “more anti-racist than thou,” I am not doing anyone any good.

Then ABW wondered, “Is it easier to understand oppression, to move past guilt and on to useful dialogue, etc., if the person explaining these things to you in-depth is a person like yourself? White or male or straight or Christian or whatever?”

I think the shapers of the quality of dialogue on such issues has more to do with the incoming attitude of those in dialogue, rather than the similarity of the persons in dialogue. If the person seeking information has an honest and humble seeking, and the person sharing information has an honest and humble sharing, with everyone understanding that the goal is the process of learning and growth. Otto Maduro describes knowledge as a "fragmentary, partisan, conjectural, and provisional reconstruction of reality." Our processes of learning are going to be equally fragmentary, partisan, conjectural, and provisional. We may as well accept that reality and stop trying to be whole-unto-ourselves, objective, certain for all time.

On the topic of guilt, I actually find guilt – like anger – useful, once you decide to engage its utility. Anger is a compass; it tells me when something is wrong. When I am mindful, it can point the way to what needs to be attended to. Guilt functions the same way. The feeling of guilt arises when I have done something that transgresses my value system. It tells me I have done something wrong. And, as with anger, when I am mindful, it can point the way to what needs to be attended to. The problem is we (white folks) often become paralyzed when we feel guilt; it is like we have stumbled into an emotional minefield. We are afraid to move, because we are afraid of doing something else wrong; every direction looks threatening. It is not uncommon for white people to live in relative isolation, without a community to help engage and examine the guilt; when this is the case, we have no one to learn with, and we do not learn, and we do not grow.

Another issue with guilt is that we white people can be afraid that if we admit to doing something wrong, we will have to change, either because we feel we must, or because whoever has perceived our guiltiness will tell us we have to. And our fear of the need to change means that, once again, our ability to learn and grow is stymied.

ABW asks us to engage “why this or that oppression and prejudice is wrong. Why they are allies. Why the usual excuses are not good enough. I figure allies probably know full well all the many and various arguments people throw up to make prejudice and oppression okay. Things that someone on the other side of the fence may not hear. Address those things and more besides.”

The primary “wrong” for me is racism, in part because I am white, I live in a racist society, and I don’t want to be racist; and in part because racism broke my heart when I was a child growing up in South Texas. Accordingly, I understand myself to be a white ally against racism, and for me this stance of being a white anti-racist is commingled with my identity as a Christian. Racism warps the identities of white people and people of color, and – as do other forms of oppression – defaces the image of God we are each created to embody. I believe God’s intent for humanity is that we are each to be able to live into fullness of life; racism mars our ability to live into that fullness of life. It privileges white people, some more than others, and oppresses people of color. In Christian terms, this dehumanization is sin: to be unearthed, eradicated, resisted, and ended.

There are personal considerations, too: the people of color I know and love, who can perhaps feel my love as more than just talk, because I try to walk the walk, and because I listen when they call me on my stuff … the deep appreciation I have for what I learn from people of color, in real life and in the academy, and the way it feels to struggle to do justice to/with what I learn, as opposed to appropriating outside of ethical relationship … the way my life is grounded by knowing the history of my family and of white people in South Texas, and the specifics of the legacy I am trying to undo. There’s more to this, but it's enough for now to say it boils down to love, honesty, respect, for what is real.

ABW clarifies that when she says allies, she’s “talking about any and every type. PoC can be (and should be) allies to other PoC, or to LGBTQ people if they are straight, or any number of other combinations.”

This relates to an interesting point for me: some people have asked me why my primary focus is not feminism or homophobia, given that I’m a lesbian. For some reason, the calling on my heart is much more about understanding how I am complicit in the oppression of others, and my whiteness (along with my US location and citizenship) is the primary means by which I am continually tempted into or labeled as being the oppressor. So, my focus is on moving from racist to anti-racist, and trying to understand this notion of being liberated from oppressing.

I don’t want to be an oppressor, in reality or by association; some of the ways I've learned to get closer to being liberated from being an oppressor is to (1) claim a just stance – in this case, being anti-racist, (2) and understand how oppression is constructed – through history, economics, culture – so that I can (3) do my part to deconstruct and end it.

I figure whatever I learn about stopping oppression is going to stand me in good stand if some man or straight person says to me, “I want to be an ally to the process of your liberation, because my liberation is tied up with yours.” (With thanks to my friend and fellow white ally, Sue Eagle, who ends her emails with this signature: “If you have come here to help us, you are wasting your time ... But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” -- Lilla Watson, Indigenous Australian activist)

There’s more to say; but that’s enough for an imperfect, fragmented, partisan, conjectural, and provisional construction of thought about being an ally. ;)

Liberation ... from Oppressing?

In the last couple of weeks I've gotten feedback from my committee on the first couple of chapters. They've pointed out that the history chapter goes on too long (which I knew) and that there's not enough on the construction of whiteness and how power and privilege gets attached to it (I sort of knew that, too).

But probably the most critical piece of feedback came -- not too surprisingly -- from my "external reader," i.e., the person on my committee who is not on the faculty of my program at SMU. I am honored to have Ada María Isasi-Díaz on my committee; I say "honored" because she is a very well-known Latina scholar, and also because my work is founded in significant part on a seminal essay she wrote on solidarity, which is now almost 25 years old.

In scholarly terms, that can be considered ancient history; and I'd probably get more traction in the academy with something more recent and cutting edge, but the simple fact of the matter is this essay is still relevant, for two reasons: it is one of the few pieces of liberation theology where someone who knows herself to be part of an oppressor class can find guidance, and 25 years after it was written, it still has not been taken seriously enough to have been responded to effectively, in the academy or in Christian churches.

More than ten years ago, now, when I was just beginning to find language and opportunity for an anti-racist commitment, identity and practice, I read this essay and it went straight into my heart. In it, Isasi-Díaz describes solidarity as a practice of mutuality based on common commitments, rather than commonalities. She speaks of the solidarity that forms among people experiencing oppression, and also of the solidarity that can form between the people experiencing oppression and those who participate in the oppressing, but who want to move out of that complicity. (The interested reader can find this essay in Isasi-Díaz's Mujerista Theology.)

Over the last ten years, as I learned about dismantling racism from the Damascus Road program's trainings, and from work in local churches and organizations, I found more and more connections between these bodies of knowledge and Isasi-Díaz's work on solidarity. I also found key learnings in Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he speaks of appropriate ways for people considered to be part of "oppressor classes" to work alongside those experiencing oppression.

Isasi-Díaz spoke of liberation as a process that begins with the cry of the oppressed. Freire spoke of trusting the agency of those experiencing oppression, trusting them to know what their liberation required. Damascus Road spoke of following the lead of people of color (which seemed to me a key expression of the trust Freire was talking about), and of always asking the question "who benefits?" and realizing that when there was not a clear benefit for people of color, then the status quo of benefit for white people was being maintained.

These tenets have shaped the structure of my dissertation, which begins with an orientation to the history of South Texas, and how white privilege was constructed alongside the disempowerment and disenfranchisement of Latina/o peoples. Next (in the chapter I am working on now), I follow Isasi-Díaz's dictum to begin with the cry of the oppressed, and I "hear" Latina/o voices expressing their reality today, which unfortunately is still clearly shaped by that history of oppression. My intent is to construct a theology that provides the rationale for and means of working with people of color -- particularly Latino/a people groups, in my project, based on my own experience and setting -- with the clear intent that that work benefit people of color.

And then in the feedback from Isasi-Díaz came a criticism of this basic orientation. In the email dialogue that followed, she wrote "I think it is not theoretically valid from the perspective of liberation theology/philosophy to construct your argument mainly around what you can do for the oppressed. The moral agency of the oppressed in the process of our liberation is very key. For me, if you work at dismantling white racism because it is important for your own liberation ... wow! That would be an enormous contribution ... we are always struggling to find ways of convincing those in power to understand that oppressing others is not in their (the oppressors') best interest ..."

As I reflect on these comments, I know she is right, and yet, following this lead is tricky, and white women's history in this regard is particularly troubling. To give history very short shrift, white women's energy for the abolitionist movement shifted to the suffragist movement when white women shifted their focus from justice for enslaved/formerly enslaved African Americans to justice for (white) women. Similarly, white women took their learnings from and energy for civil rights activism into a women's liberation movement, limited by the a false assumption that women had universal needs focused on gender oppression, to the exclusion of oppressions based on race, class or sexual orientation. In both cases, when white women got in touch with their own experiences of oppression, they moved into ways of thinking and acting that left the concerns of people of color out.

As a white woman, I'm nervous about a commitment to white liberation, even liberation from oppressing. I have been helped by and shaped by and -- I humbly believe -- transformed by a commitment to seeking that my actions materially benefit people of color, even as I am aware of my many failures in that regard. I believe that deliberately shifting one's allegiance to work that benefits people of color is a key means for undoing unconscious white superiority, and dismantling racist structures.

And yet, I know there is a truth, too, in what Isasi-Díaz is telling me. Truths don't always play nicely together; sometimes paradox is created because of the seeming conflict between truths.

True: White people can't liberate people of color; that is their work.

True: Racism is white people's problem, which has a negative impact on both people of color and white people. Because it is white people's problem, we have a responsibility for ending it. And yet, because we benefit from it, our thinking is often faulty, and we need the leadership and insight of people of color, and to be accountable to them for our work.

True: White people's work includes liberating ourselves from oppressing, and from believing in the inherent superiority of white people.

True: Seeking the benefit of people of color helps white people who want to work with people of color at dismantling institutional and systemic racism.

Somewhere among these truths lies a path. I am tempted to say "the path," but my instinct says I will simply find one among many. This is a good time to ask other white people what they know about these paths. And a good time to pray for insight and clarity.

Spirit, illumine this path.

White Privilege, My Privilege

Like prejudices, privilege comes in a lot of different flavors. Take a look at the lists of privilege gathered on Barry Deutsch’s (aka Ampersand) blog:

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2006/09/26/a-list-of-privilege-lists/

If nothing else, the hard and creative work done by these authors frees me to focus on a particular form of privilege, and here I want to focus on the constructed nature of white-skin privilege, as well as its profitability to whites.

White privilege is created and maintained in a society that disparages people who don’t have white skin and privileges those who do. It is a correlate of racial prejudice; almost its flip-side. Part of the reason racism is so hard to eradicate is because ultimately white people benefit in concrete and material ways from being white in a white-privileging/ person-of-color-oppressing society. We can bemoan racism and outlaw racist behaviors and practices, and white privileging behaviors can and do persist. Usually invisibly. That’s a key white privilege: not knowing white privilege exists. The “best” thing about not knowing white privilege exists is then you don’t have to do anything about it.

But, it is real, and it does exist, in both individual and institutional terms. Peggy McIntosh’s essay on the invisible knapsack of privilege describes the individual white privileges very well. If you didn’t click to it on the link above, you can read it here.

http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html

It’s crucial to know white privilege is profitable to white people (because that’s what keeps these privileges, and racism, in place), and that these privileges were constructed (because that means they can be deconstructed).

George Lipsitz speaks of the profitability of white privilege when he says “Whiteness has a cash value: it accounts for advantages that come to individuals through profits made from housing secured in discriminatory markets, through the unequal educations allocated to children of different races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities to the relatives and friends of those who have profited most from present and past racial discrimination, and especially through intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations. I argue that white Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power and opportunity. This whiteness is, of course, a delusion, a scientific and cultural fiction that like all racial identities has no valid foundation in biology or anthropology. Whiteness is, however, a social fact, an identity created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige and opportunity.” (Lipsitz 1988, viii)

Lipsitz mounts a compelling argument over the course of his book, demonstrating how notions of race have been constructed by the functioning of legal, financial, educational and religious institutions, constructed in ways that financially and materially benefit white people, at the expense of people of color.

Accordingly, any attempt to achieve racial justice is going to take not only the transformation of practices that oppress people of color, but equal and perhaps greater efforts to transform attitudes and practices that primarily benefit white people. Being white is a very profitable business, an insight I have come to hold even more strongly after a month’s work on the “history ‘n’ sin” chapter, researching how racial privilege has been constructed through the history of Texas, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley.

Centuries before “modern” race theory developed in the nineteenth century, Spaniards used racial disparagement to justify the exploitation or execution of indigenous peoples, to an extent that over 95 percent of the original population of the Americas was wiped out in the process of a huge transfer of American mineral wealth to Spain. Spanish conquistadors also had children with indigenous women, by means of relations that varied from rape to marriage, under the auspices of priests who advised peninsulares (Spanish colonizers) that it was better to marry an Indian woman than to burn (although the same priests and conquistadors were not above burning Indian men, women and children). Their children became the mestizo or mixed-race peoples, who later declared their people-hood and independence from Spain, as happened in Mexico.

This quality of mestizaje became a source of pride for Mexicans, but a rationale for disparagement by Anglo settlers in Texas, who described Mexicans as “mixed-breeds” with Spanish, African and Indian blood, and asserted Anglo Texans could never be governed by such a mongrelized race, thereby justifying the formation of the Republic of Texas and its later annexation by the United States. Once again, racial prejudices backed by social power – in the form of armies, banks, schools, legal declarations – determined who could be exploited or expelled or exterminated.

We can read these histories today and tsk-tsk over the language used, the unjust decisions, the murderous behaviors of the past. But the land that was taken and the profits gathered through low-wage peonage and sharecropping and tenancy farming went into what Lipsitz termed intergenerational wealth transfers. That profitability, once captured from the sweat of Indian and Mexican and African American brows, was held and passed down through white families and institutions. Where it remains today, the foundation for further wealth creation.

My father worked hard all his life to create an inheritance, to fund my parents’ retirement, with any remnant to pass down to my brother and me. But it wasn’t just my dad. His farm employees were all Mexican and Mexican American men, because of course they would work for less than white men would, and my father’s profits would thereby be greater. The sweat of these men contributed to my father’s accumulation of wealth; so did the difference in wage scale between what he paid them versus what he would have had to pay white employees.

I have wondered what I would do if I inherited this land, this wealth. I don’t have to wonder any more; this inheritance is helping to fund my studies, including the part of this year I am devoting to writing this dissertation.

I am complicit. That’s hardly a dismantling of white privilege. But, awareness is the first step. By the grace of God, there will be more.

Writer's Flood ... and Prayer

Some friends have asked me if I ever have writer's block. To say "No" in my out-loud voice feels like asking for trouble ... but, "No."

And on this project, there is definitely no writer's block: it's more like "writer's flood." So much to say, that I've waited so long to try to say, so many places to begin, each of them depending on the other ... writer's flood means writer's confusion, as in "where do I start?" (when there's so many places to start?) and "how do I say this?" (and be true to what I know without pissing people off before they get a chance to hear what I'm saying?)

I like the story Anne Lamott tells, about her brother's struggles with a writing project on birds when he was a kid. Her brother was overwhelmed with the magnitude of the task, and her dad said "Just take it bird by bird." (Good enough advice to become the title of her book on writing, Bird by Bird.)

But the help I like best with writer's flood is prayer. I have been a praying writer for a while now. I pastored part-time from 2001 to 2004, and one of my favorite parts of that gig was developing the sermons: researching the text, looking at the words used, checking out the Greek and Hebrew roots, thinking through the implications of the text for the community I was preaching for/to/with, writing the sermon.

As do lots of preachers, I'd look ahead at the texts coming up; each one got a back burner on my mind's stove, and as I went through the days I'd see or hear or read things that went into the pot. Lots of times I'd come across something accidentally, or wake up with an idea or a problem solved. I learned that my mind kept working -- and often did its best work -- when I wasn't looking. I figure my sub-conscious was sneaking off to talk to God without me in the way.

When I began to write the sermon I'd sit and pray and ask God to be in the middle of it, that what I would write would get as close as I could to what God wanted. If I wasn't sure how to start, or if I felt human fear about what I felt I needed to say, those prayers could get really specific.

Sometimes, when I just couldn't figure things out, I'd stop. Sit. Pray in that wordless way that acknowledges need, willingness, openness.

And usually something would start writing itself in my head, and I'd scramble back to the keyboard.

I do know this smacks of delusions of grandeur, or lunacy, depending on how you look at it ("Reeeaalllly? God tells you what to write?"), so I'll leave it at that. But, no question, I do believe in the Spirit that resides at the heart of the word "inspiration."

These prayers make the work feel more coherent, even if the writing is not. I am reminded that I can pick a place to start and get going and fix it later if it wasn't the right place to start. I am reminded that there are lots of editors in the world, but no one else can write this first draft. I am reminded that anything worth doing is worth doing wrong or badly to begin with. I am reminded that I am loved, whether or not I write a word.

Choreographer Twyla Tharp, in her book The Creative Habit, talks about having a ritual that carries you into the work of the creative process every working day. Sitting with God is part of mine. I wake, write morning pages,* get breakfast for the kids and get them off to school, read through where I was yesterday (I try to quit in the middle of something good so I have some momentum the next day), edit and tweak a little, and then get away from the computer and sit.

*(yes, another good friend of a book, Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way)

I imagine God sitting in front of me; God is bigger than I am, sitting in a huge rocking chair ... all I can see is legs and a lap. I put whatever I am praying about in the lap. And just sit.

At some point in these writer's prayers, little tendrils of words start weaving themselves in my head, and I take the hint and get to work. I try to get five pages done before I quit for the day. When I hit a stumbling point, I stop, close my eyes, empty my mind, wait. The word comes ... a way through ... I keep going.

When my mental endurance is flagging, I'll play guitar (six-string prayer) for a while or go for a walk (moving meditation). Often an idea or a turn of phrase or at least some more energy will come.

An atheist could probably use the same practices without calling it prayer, without God in the middle of it all ... but you know, dissertating is a lonely business. I'm glad for the company.

Basal Cell Carcinoma

The third time was not the charm.

I have had two basal cell carcinomas removed in the last few years, both of them resulting in minor, temporary divots in unobtrusive places. This third one was different: right in the middle of my left cheek, and requiring actual surgery to remove, and stitches after the fact. I will be FrankenMommy for a week or so, and then I will have a little extra "character" running down my face.

I am thankful. That cancer is gone.

The basic mechanism here is worth looking at ... skin gets produced from the inside out; new skin cells push the older cells up toward the surface, where they eventually rub off. DNA runs the production, as with so many other body processes. But sometimes DNA gets damaged -- for instance by the ultraviolet rays in sunlight -- and it gives confused directions to the skin factory, which sometimes then goes into overproduction. That kind of overgrowth is often the key characteristic of a cancer.

Here's what I notice: Sunlight is a good thing; it gives us Vitamin D, and affects our moods and energy levels. But too much can do damage. Growth is a good thing, too. We need new skin cells to replace the ones that wear away. But overgrowth of cells in the wrong place can make a body sick or even kill a person.

It's like being white. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with being white. White-skinned people are as much a part of God's good creation as anyone else. The problem comes when there's too much of a good thing: as when a healthy self-respect gets twisted into thinking white people are just intrinsically better (and therefore people who are not white are intrinsically not as good). Internalizing these notions of false superiority and inferiority are just two of the ways we are damaged by living in a racially polarized culture.

Another set of problems arise from what could be considered personal or social overgrowth: for instance, when a healthy work ethic becomes perfectionism ... when a cultural value becomes the grounds for judging others, or even being prejudicial toward whole people groups ... when the desire to achieve financial security turns to greed ... when the need to manage resources, risks or anxiety turns to control and power-hoarding.

Too much of a good thing can produce an evil that can sicken or kill. We can understand this in our bodies. What can our bodies teach us about the rest of our lives?

For one thing, our bodies can teach us not only about too much of a good thing, but also about the need to be observant. I've learned to spot a skin cancer. That doesn't mean I'll spot them all, or that I can get rid of them on my own; but I know the signs, and I watch for them.

We can learn about healthy ways of being white, too, as well as ways that produce evil, so that we can grow into behaviors and results that match our intentions.

And then we can be observant, with eyes of love, seeking healthy growth, and rooting out what causes sickness and death, in body and soul. Racism can be considered a cancer of the skin -- white skin that has grown into something it was never meant to be.

Love is the cure: love for others that produces a more just community, love for self that produces ethical change where needed, love of the God who gives us the hope and grace we need to live into our highest, best selves.

Land genealogies

Thanks in no small part to the assistance of my cousin Richard Brotzman, my trip to South Texas for land research purposes was very productive. We were able to trace the deed records from my uncle Homer Brotzman's purchase of two 40-acre blocks of land in 1916 all the way back to the original grantee, Don Jose Salvador de la Garza, who received his land grant of 284,415.8 acres from Spain in 1781. This was known as the Espiritu Santo grant.

And here's one of the biggest grins of the day: a lawyer friend of Richard's just happened to be there that day, also doing land research. And Richard just happened to have recently found out this lawyer, Buddy Dossett, was a bit of an expert on the history of land transactions in South Texas, because of his work with irrigation companies in the region. Mr. Dossett was very generous in sharing not only his expertise in the use of the resources of the deed vault, but also in providing copies of his own research on land grants and subsequent ownership tracks, which helped to clarify some of what the deeds indicated.

How's that saying go? Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous. Gotta love it.

To abbreviate the history, most of the land grant stayed in family hands for the next hundred years, though -- according to Spanish custom -- split among surviving descendants. Land ownership continued to splinter through the inheritance process, until James G. Browne purchased several of the partitions, beginning in 1879, eventually accumulating 22,350 acres by purchasing land blocks from various heirs.

Browne's heirs sold about 20,000 acres in 1911 to Samuel Spears; Spears was apparently acting on behalf of the San Benito Irrigation Co. which had yet to be formed. When the SBIC was incorporated in 1912, with Spears as secretary of the company, he then conveyed the 20,000+ acres to the SBIC.

Because of various business failures, the SBIC went into foreclosure in 1916; the deeds then seem to indicate that some of that property was marketed by the O.L. Wilkins Development Co., with A. Wayne Wood acting as trustee. In 1916, Homer Brotzman bought two 40 acre blocks of land, sight unseen; one 40-acre block came from the O.L. Wilkins Development Co., and the other directly from the SBIC.

At this point, the tracks of the transactions are pretty clear, but I am still curious about some of the players, especially James G. Browne. I want to find out more about him and about the transactions whereby the lands of the original grant left the hands of the family owning it. I already know something about that timeframe; as Armando Alonzo describes in Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, between 1885 and 1900, South Texas land ownership by Tejanos went from 50 percent of the available land to 29 percent of the land in the region. (p. 180) Alonzo does a good job of explaining the reasons for this shift in ownership, some reasonable and some frankly nefarious. It's also important to place that critical 15-year period in context; 100 percent of the land in what is now the Rio Grande Valley had been under legal title by Spanish colonists as of the 1780s.

Why did the heirs of Jose de la Garza sell to Browne? What was the nature of those transactions? Stay tuned.