Memories of stolen lands in S. Texas ring true
For 50 years now, Conrad and Frances Gonzales have been telling the story of her family’s ancestral ranch in South Texas, a place taken from them because it was vast and rich in resources.
For more than a century, similar stories have been passed down from one generation to the next in South Texas. They’ve largely been dismissed as fanciful, more lore than fact.
But they’ve rung true to those families who can trace their roots to land grant recipients living in the Texas borderlands that were once Mexico and New Spain.
Only a handful have been documented in books and film. Others have been collected in family archives and oral testimonies about an erased history. They’re being used, not in court cases that seek relief, but to tell a broader story of Texas, the Southwest and the United States.
This story may be one of the latter.
Frances Gonzales, 82, heard the story from her mother, Gregoria Ramirez Mesquití. She said her family held a land grant originally given to her ancestors, José Domingo de la Garza and his wife María Bernarda Ramírez.
Her mother maintained she and other descendants were driven off the land in the early 1900s after her father’s death, and that the Texas Rangers were involved.
Mesquití’s stories, recorded in Spanish and transcribed into English, remain, as does a photo of her in a fur coat holding onto the reins of a horse. It was taken after several male relatives were killed and others were “run off La Parra Ranch.”
La Parra, or Las Parras in some historical documents, was a more than 66,000-acre ranch. The Gonzaleses aren’t the only ones who have claimed it.
A 2004 Texas Monthly story titled “Sarita’s secret” — referring to Sarita, Texas, named for heiress Sarita Kenedy East — featured a Mexican American man who believed he was the descendant of a maid on the Kenedy Ranch who had a relationship with rancher Mifflin Kenedy.
He was “one of the three great ranchers of far South Texas,” the Texas Monthly story said. Richard King, of King Ranch fame, was another.
A Kenedy Memorial Foundation website says Mifflin Kenedy bought the La Parra land grant, and it became part of his 400,000-acre ranch, which sits adjacent to the King Ranch.
The Kenedy Ranch’s headquarters is now a Catholic retreat center, the Lebh Shomea House of Prayer, owned by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a religious order with a long Texas history, too.
Like other South Texas families that have filed lawsuits for mineral rights, the Gonzales family hopes someday to get legal representation. They don’t aspire to the land itself.
But they talk of another kind of justice: a historical one.
Conrad Gonzales, 87, says he has written a book and screenplay. Frances Gonzales talks of her mother’s struggles, ending up as a migrant farm worker, then running a café in San Antonio.
The Gonzaleses have collected lots of documents over five decades of research, including letters asking elected officials for help.
A letter from Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez in 1976 responds to questions Conrad Gonzales had about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the commissions established to protect land rights. The lawmaker told him they’d been disbanded.
In other letters to the family, Henry B. talks about mineral rights on Texas public lands and his hope to establish a panel to take up such matters. It was not to be.
Frances Gonzales likes to tell a tidbit about the family’s wealth: her mother recalled uncles who used dollar bills to light their cigarettes. But it’s the transcription of an interview with Mesquití in 1980 that may be the most vivid.
She said her uncles were killed by Anglos to get their land. Their bodies were put in an alligator pit, she said.
“My relatives, my mother did not lose that land,” she said. “Se las quitaron a fuerza los anglosajones,” they were taken by force by Anglo-Saxons.
The transcript states a lawyer in Brownsville told them their safest option was to leave.
In the late 1980s, the couple said they spoke with lawyers for the Kenedy Foundation to no avail.
“They said, ‘OK, we’ll let you know.’ We never heard from them,” Conrad Gonzales said.
They’re running out of time. Their son Conrad Gonzales Jr., a retired firefighter and paramedic, will take over the documents. A new generation will tell the family’s stories.
His father has been in hospice care. Last year, he was given two weeks to live. He’s a scrappy guy.
“Our people need to know where they came from,” the senior Gonzales said. “If not, it’s like letting a library burn down.”