TIMOTHY BOWMAN

“Blood Oranges: Citriculture and the Making of Anglo-American Identity
 in the Lower Rio Grande Valley Borderlands, 1904-1975”

Bowman’s dissertation examines how a generation of farmers from the U.S. Midwest became self-professed colonizers in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Early twentieth-century land developers, noting the region’s suitability for agriculture, began parceling off ranchlands in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and marketing them to Anglo Americans from more northern climes. In order to attract the newcomers, boosters published pamphlets with a veritable cornucopia of images; if they came to the Valley, Midwestern farmers read, they could become financially secure or possibly wealthy citrus-growers in a modern, racially stratified society. They would also become modern-day pioneers—colonizers following in the wake of the allegedly path-blazing activities of the first Anglo-Americans who pushed into the Texas-Mexican frontier during the nineteenth century. Bowman examines the many challenges and compromises that these twentieth-century colonizers faced in attempting to realize their colonial vision for the region, as well as how the process of the Valley’s internal colonization inside of the larger United States pitted small growers against Mexican and Mexican-American laborers in a contest under which each demographic would struggle, but in markedly different ways. The legacy of the Anglo colonial establishment marred the history of the Valley throughout the rest of the twentieth century—rampant poverty, public health concerns and poor education remain serious problems in the Valley to the present day. Bowman’s dissertation is the first major study in borderlands historiography to examine the formation of Anglo-American identity in a primarily Hispanic borderlands space.

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