Blood oranges: Citriculture, colonialism, and the making of Anglo-American identity in the Lower Rio Grande Valley borderlands during the twentieth century

This dissertation argues that Texas' Lower Rio Grande Valley borderlands were an internal colony of the Anglo-American dominated United States throughout the twentieth century. The relationships between Anglo Americans and ethnic Mexicans in the Valley during the twentieth century closely resemble the relationships between colonizers and colonized people throughout world history. I utilize the history of the Valley's citrus industry, which rose to prominence in the 1920s and attracted many newcomer growers and ethnic-Mexican laborers to the region, as an organizing tool to explain the Valley's colonization in a concise, digestible manner. Understanding Anglo-Mexican relations in the Valley through the lens of colonialism is important, I argue, because it explains the crippling poverty and rampant racial oppression under which countless thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans struggled in the Valley throughout the twentieth century. I will also display the essential component that the nearby modern borderline played in creating the Lower Rio Grande Valley's internal colony. Ethnic Mexicans in the Valley ranked among the poorest, unhealthiest and least educated group of people through the latter part of the twentieth century. This dissertation will explain how Anglo Americans conquered and colonized the Valley, which, despite being in Texas, was previously a non-Euroamerican space. The Valley should be considered, I suggest, a Mexican homeland.;I begin by examining the history of the Lower Rio Grande Valley as a long-contested borderlands space caught between imperial powers and modern nation states. I next turn the to rapid colonization of the region by Anglo Americans from the U.S. Midwest, who converted the Valley from a place dominated by ranchland to a commercial-farming empire on the border. Then, I examine how land salesmen helped potential land purchasers develop new identities as modern-day pioneers on a frontier landscape. As the local citrus industry rose to prominence in the post-World War One era, new growers came to the Valley by the thousands, and successfully pushed ethnic Mexicans to the margins of local society. The Great Depression saw the colonial vision of many of the Valley's small citrus growers shattered. Beginning in the mid-1930s, large corporate agribusinesses swooped into the region and successfully adopted the small growers' colonial practices, which included race-based oppression and the marginalization of ethnic Mexicans as harvest laborers. But growers would see themselves challenged from many quarters after World War Two and into the late-1960s, when Mexican Americans began attacking the Lower Rio Grande Valley borderlands' colonial status quo. Nevertheless, colonialism---namely, racialized labor---still persisted in the Valley toward the end of the twentieth century, and continued to effect the lives of many.