'We Were Illegal' uses family stories to challenge the myths of Texas
Author Jessica Goudeau has deep roots in Texas. But while looking at her family’s history she discovered how it intersected and reflected the state’s brutal and often racist past. Goudeau tells six of her ancestors’ stories in “We Were Illegal: Uncovering a Texas Family’s Mythmaking and Migration” and joins host Deepa Fernandes to talk about the book.
Book excerpt: ‘We Were Illegal: Uncovering a Texas Family’s Mythmaking and Migration’
By Jessica Goudeau
I have loved Texas my whole life. Even when we moved away, my family has a long history of boomeranging back to this state, over many generations and for my entire childhood. Some of my earliest baby pictures are orange-tinted snapshots of me on a blanket on dry buffalo grass in West Texas, near where my father grew up. When I was a toddler, we moved to Iowa, where I jumped in leaf piles and trekked through snowdrifts. I left Texas before grandmother did; the first time my mother’s mother, my Nanny, traveled out of the state in her entire life was to come to Iowa my sister was a baby. It wasn’t long before we moved back to Texas, time down south, near where my mother grew up. My parents bought a house based mostly on the trees for our growing family— my brother was born a Texan. I spent the majority of my early elementary years in one of the huge live oak trees in our yard, usually with an apple, always with a book.
Like most San Antonio schoolkids, I went on multiple field trips to the Alamo, the mission turned historical landmark in the center of our city. We shuffled through in long lines, listening to guides shouting over the din of dozens of rowdy kids in a small close space. I remember very little from those tours of the Alamo: mostly that James Bowie, William B. Travis, Davy Crockett, and other brave heroes of Texas died fighting for their freedom against the evil general, Santa Anna; that their sacrifices spurred Texans on to win the war for independence from Mexico; and that’s how Texas became its own country.
I remember that when I got home, my father sang “Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier” for the rest of the day, and now I can’t even type his name without that song running through my head. I remember nothing about the border tensions rollicking the region during my childhood in the 1980s. For me, the border was something we crossed for a day trip, to buy crepe flowers and twirly dresses and elotes so hot, the butter dripped down our fingers while we walked. One of my best friends today grew up only a few miles from me; her family were some of the estimated three million people to receive a path to citizenship when one of the most conservative presidents in modern history put an amnesty program in place that seems impossible now at a time when we struggle to talk reasonably about immigration. That act changed my friend’s life; I only learned about it years later.
Growing up in Texas means growing up in the tensions of who controls the border, who has the right to be here and who does not. Those frictions are one of the few constants in the history of this state. I grew up thinking those conversations about the border were “issues” to be learned about from school and books, and that they had nothing to do with me.
When I was nine, we left San Antonio for my dad’s job, and I spent a miserable school year in Tennessee. On the first day at my new school, my classmates cornered me, asking where my boots were (I didn’t have any), where I left my horse (I’d ridden twice in my life, both times in a circle at the rodeo), and if I knew any Texas Rangers (it turns out, I did). We didn’t stay gone long. Less than a year later, we were back in West Texas, with twisted mesquites and tumbleweed instead of the live oaks and wildflowers I missed so fiercely. An awkward, bookish kid in a town where it seemed like every other girl was a basketball player or cheerleader, I had a hard time fitting in for years; that’s probably why it took me some time, but eventually I fell in love with that part of Texas too.
I stayed here for college. In my literature classes, I learned more about the state and my place in it than I had ever known. A handful of lines I read in Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa burst open a truth about Texas I’d been stumbling toward but hadn’t yet been able to put into words. Her memoir sections were about growing up in South Texas not far from my mom’s hometown of Pleasanton. The first time I read Anzaldúa, I wanted to position myself as I always had in books: alongside the plucky young protagonist, as an underdog setting out against the odds. Anzaldúa, through her writing, firmly and clearly picked me up and placed me on the other side of the line—we “the Gringo” were “locked into the fiction of white superiority.”
Perhaps embarrassingly, that book was the first time I read a history of Texas that did not center people who looked like me: “In the 1800s,” Anzaldúa wrote, “Anglos migrated illegally into Texas, which was then part of Mexico, in greater and greater numbers and gradually drove the tejanos (native Texans of Mexican descent) from their lands, committing all manner of atrocities against them.” Reading those lines made me uncomfortable. It made me want to put the book down, to justify myself, to explain that I wasn’t like those Anglos, but I kept reading; by the end of the book, I felt a new understanding opening up in my mind. For the first time, I heard voices from the same land in Texas I had always loved but who had very different experiences from my own. It was only a start, the smallest of steps, but when I moved away from Texas as a young adult, I was beginning to view the layered stories of my home in a new way. Leaving gave me valuable clarity.
At the time, I thought—like so many of my family members before me—that I was never coming back to Texas. I taught English in Southeast Asia and South America, learning to sleep in rickety hostel beds and gaining a forever craving for spicy street food. I married a man who also loves to travel; Jonathan and I spent most of our twenties adventuring. We fished for piranhas in the Brazilian Pantanal while jabiru storks flapped giant wings over the water. We bunked on overnight Soviet-era trains from Slovenia into Italy to avoid paying for hotel rooms. We woke to the lazy roar of lions at the zoo next door in Guadalajara, Mexico. We felt the thrum of the discotheques beneath us through the floor of our cheap apartment in Santiago, Chile. In those years, I consciously dropped my Texas accent, tried to stop saying “y’all,” and got by with faltering but improving Portuguese and Spanish.
I had almost convinced myself by my late twenties that I had no desire to move back to Texas. Which is why I was unprepared for the surge of pure longing I felt when I walked on the campus at the University of Texas, where I was interviewing for the English graduate program while visiting our families for the holidays. A future unfurled before me in an instant: me on the quad outside of the English department, reading a book between classes beneath enormous, sprawling live oak trees like the ones I climbed as a kid. Photo sessions with yet-to-be-born small children in fields of bluebonnets to match the ones my mom had in photo albums of my sister, my brother, and soundtrack of cicadas lulling us to sleep. The smell of sunscreen chlorine lingering on our damp skin. Watching the sun set on flat Texas horizon where I could see every gradation of crepuscular color.
The day the acceptance letter came, ecstatic. There was a catch in my voice when I called our families said, “We’re coming home.” As we drove into Austin with scant worldly belongings in the back of a dented U-Haul, I said Jonathan, “I love the geography of other places more. I’d rather mountains and lakes and leaves that change in the autumn. But breathe in Texas like I can’t anywhere else.”
I still feel that way.
Immediately after we moved home, the childhood love I had felt for Texas deepened into a chosen love for a state that surprised me with the depths of its hospitality. I started class at the University of Texas the third week of August 2005. On August 23, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.
My memories from that month are hazy snapshots. Standing beside a childhood friend, outside of the Austin Convention Center, wearing Red Cross vests. She was the brand-new volunteer coordinator suddenly in charge of thousands of volunteers in a massive displacement event; I was one of the friends who came when she called.
Setting up a call center with business leaders in suits in a strip mall to help facilitate the enormous community response.
Picking up books at the university co-op: Aimé Césaire, James Joyce, C. L. R. James, Nella Larsen, Salman Rushdie, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Gilroy, Gabriel García Marquez.
Threading my way through rows of sleeping people in orderly cots, leading recently arrived chaplains of all different faiths to find coffee before their long days began.
Sitting in hard brown chairs in a 1980s-era mint-green classroom while students elaborated at length on theoretical ideas I barely understood.
Holding the hand of a woman in her eighties as she named all the children and grandchildren who had been evacuated, none of whom she could find, while I sat beside a computer bank set up to connect separated families. Her tears splotched our joined hands.
It was a chaotic way to return home. I fell in love completely. Over the next few years, I sought out that hospitable side of Texas with more and more frequency, pairing my academic education with community involvement. I taught a rhetoric class filled with DREAMers—young adults who came to the US as undocumented minors—and read with them The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea. Prompted by discussions in that class, Jonathan and I went to pass out health-care pamphlets in Spanish at a community event in North Austin with our baby. I assumed we would meet asylum-seekers and people without documents. Instead, I got to know a group of former refugees from Myanmar.
That day changed my life completely. Those friendships grew into English classes for women trying to make ends meet in a bewildering new country, and then a nonprofit helping weavers and sewers and jewelry makers turn their skills into sustainable incomes they could use to support their families. For years, I saw Texas hospitality at its best at Catholic sanctuaries, Jewish community centers, Baptist gyms, and Muslim cultural centers, through English teachers and community partners, jewelry designers and graphic designers, seamstresses and tutors, medical appointment drivers, lawyers, surrogate grandmothers, interpreters—all of us bridging thousands of gaps in our lovely, unlikely community.
My education about borders and Texas and my place in this state— that began with those pages by Anzaldúa in college—expanded in those years, both outside of the classroom and through my studies. I had applied to UT to study US and Brazilian poetry because it has one of the best libraries of Latin American literature in the world. I immersed myself in 1950s newspaper archives from Rio de Janeiro; studied translations of poetry from all over the Americas; learned about immigration policies; took classes on surrealism in Central and South American novels. Conversations about borders were all around me in those years.
Jonathan and I decided to stay in Texas. We three children through birth and adoption. Most of our family here too, and we made friends that felt like family. We bought house with magnificent live oaks like the ones I climbed as a girl mother climbed before me. The largest one in our backyard probably two hundred years old. Beneath it, we held family gatherings birthday parties, the evening sky lit by twinkle lights. We say unapologetically, welcoming everyone with one short word. raising our kids in the kind of place we always wanted: a diverse community that gives them an expansive sense of the world while still being rooted in our past.
That is the love now, as I have loved it for more than four decades, as I will love it for the rest of my life. I believe in the strength of this Texas, with wide-open skies and room enough for all kinds of people.
I describe this Texas so that you can understand what is at stake and why it has felt necessary to write a book that has personally been so difficult for me. As we have been many times in our past, we are at a precarious moment in our state. I believe firmly in our ability to find a way forward.
But we have to face some hard truths together first.
From “We Were Illegal” by Jessica Goudeau, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Jessica Goudeau.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
