About the Wild Horse Desert

The Wild Horse Desert, also known as the Nueces Strip, is a 16,000-square-mile rural expanse at the southern tip of Texas that stretches between the Nueces River to the north, the Gulf Coast to the east, and the Rio Grande to the south and west. It was known in Spanish colonial times as Nuevo Santander, and later as the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The region was frequently buffeted by war and upheaval - between the Texas revolution in 1836 through the end of the Mexican-American war in 1848 the Nueces Strip was contested ground, traversed by armies and outlaws and beset by frequent Indian raids.

The Nueces Strip was settled by Mexican ranching families from five towns along the Rio Grande that had been recently founded as the northern frontier of the province of Nuevo Santander. Many of them came from nearby towns in Nuevo Leon and had been frontier residents for many generations. They moved in extended family groups and became even more closely interrelated as landowning families used marriage and godparenthood to consolidate and cooperatively run cattle on ever-smaller shares of Spanish and Mexican land grants.

Starting in the mid-18th century, ranchers built fortified homes of sillar (caliche or sandstone blocks) that had flat roofs and no openings except one door and loopholes for defense against Indian raids. Around 1850, after US Annexation, homes were built with pitched roofs and larger windows. Surrounding these structures were numerous jacales, wattle-and-daub huts. All were made of locally available materials before the railroad arrived in 1881.

About the Project

This database and mapping project documents the people, places, built environment, and stories of the Nueces Strip during the 17th – 19th centuries. The project uses maps and graphs to trace the connections between people and places over time, showing how they structured their social networks around land which was both home and livelihood. It tells the stories of the families of this little-understood cultural landscape in multimedia narratives, demonstrating the extent and depth of a society which had deep roots in the land and created a unique material culture. Stories highlight characters and events that illustrate the colorful history of this borderland region, offering a broad overview as well as deep dive into granular data, and providing layers of context that point to multiple modalities, perspectives, and ways of interpreting history.

The project argues that the cultural landscape of Mexican South Texas is underrepresented in American history, though it is attested in its built and social structures which have survived and adapted to centuries of change. It is a work in progress. Though new information will be added on an ongoing basis, the database is not comprehensive.

This is a project by Marie Saldaña, Assistant Professor, College of Information Science, University of Arizona.

Contact

Taming the Wild Horse Desert

People and Places of Mexican South Texas