It’s clear from the book that you’re fascinated by Texas, but you also have a sharp-eyed view of its complications and imperfections. What do you think is most inaccurate about the conventional Texas mythology?I suppose the biggest misconception is that Texans are all appalling Know-Nothings like Rick Perry and George W. Bush. Back home, those yahoos are what my grandmother used to call “all hat and no cattle.” Texas is a vibrant multi-cultural society, but you’d hardly know it from most of what you read and see in the media. How Texas came to be dominated by its most retrograde and backward elements is a fascinating story. The yahoos eventually triumphed in Texas, but the story didn’t have to end up that way.
The one thing everyone knows about Texas is the Battle of the Alamo, but most of Texas history occurred before the Alamo, before the Anglo colonists arrived; it was the history of the native peoples who lived there over the course of 14,000 years, some of whom left huge, magnificent cosmological murals in rock shelters along the Pecos River before they moved on as the climate changed and water disappeared. When the Spanish arrived, they found hundreds of different native groups, speaking a dizzying array of languages. Even during the historical period, all the way up to the American Civil War, the dominant power in Texas was not the Spanish or the Mexicans or the Anglo Texans; it was the Comanches. Update
Fireboy and Watergirl fullseries.
You note that this book started years ago as a magazine essay. How did it evolve into a full book? How long did it take and what kind of research did you do?The idea for this book grew inside me over the course of many years. I had long been fascinated by the history of the borderlands, by the stories of smugglers and outlaws and Indian fighting that I had heard growing up. I was curious about my family’s place in that history, but I was never able to find out much about the generations that came before my grandparents. I read all the big Texas histories but found them too broad and unsatisfying. So I always had a vague plan to write a long essay that would scratch that itch. In 2006 I wrote an essay for
Harper’s Magazine on Cormac McCarthy’s
No Country for Old Men that in some ways became the germ of
Texas Blood. But at that point, the post-9/11 militarization of the border was just getting started. The Secure Fence Act was passed that year, and it was only later, after I had left
Harper’s, that I began my reporting on border surveillance.
The book combines historical narrative with family memoir and reportage, so I had a number of different research strategies. First there was the border reporting, which mostly played out in many long road trips, crisscrossing the state, talking to people, going on ride-alongs with the Border Patrol, chatting up military contractors at security conferences, camping out with archaeologists studying rock art, and so on. I have stacks of notebooks, gigabytes of audio and thousands of photographs from that reporting.
At the same time, I was doing the library research. I spent untold hours reading primary sources and testimonies. Gradually it dawned on me that everything I was reading was an account of a journey through Texas: Cabeza de Vaca inaugurated the genre in the 1530s with his narrative of walking barefoot and naked across Texas and northern Mexico. Then came the expedition reports of entradas by Spanish soldiers, seeking to establish a colony in the north; the accounts of early Texans, the mountain men, trappers and scalpers; the prairie tourists and journalists; and the overland diaries of cattlemen and emigrant families and forty-niners on the road to the goldfields of California.
