In the late nineteenth century, the Mexican government, seeking to fortify its northern borders and curb migration to the United States, set out to relocate "Mexico-Texano" families, or Tejanos, on Mexican land. In Colonizing Ourselves, Jose? Angel Herna?ndez explores these movements back to Mexico, also known as autocolonization, as distinct in the history of settler colonization. Unlike other settler colonial states that relied heavily on overseas settlers, especially from Europe and Asia, Mexico received less than 1 percent of these nineteenth-century immigrants. This reality, coupled with the growing migration of farmers and laborers northward toward the United States, led ultimately to passage of the 1883 Land and Colonization Law. This legislation offered incentives to any Mexican in the United States willing to resettle in the republic: Tejanos, as well as other Mexican expatriates abroad, were to be granted twice the amount of land for settlement that other immigrants received. The campaign worked: ethnic Mexicans from Texas and the Mexican interior, as well as Indigenous peoples from Mexico, established numerous colonies on the northern frontier. Leading one of the most notable back-to-Mexico movements was Luis Siliceo, a Texan who, with a subsidized newspaper, El Colono, and the backing of Porfirio Di?az's administration, secured a contract to resettle Tejano families across several Mexican states. The story of this partnership, which Herna?ndez traces from the 1890s through the turn of the century, provides insight into debates about settler colonization in Mexico. Viewed from various global, national, and regional perspectives, it helps to make sense of Mexico's autocolonization policy and its redefinition of Indigenous and settler populations during the nineteenth century.
Jose? Angel Herna?ndez is Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston and the author of Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century: A History of the US-Mexico Borderlands.
"In this work of meticulous research and remarkable scholarship focused on Mexican colonization, historian JosE Angel HernAndez addresses one of the most vexing issues facing the modern world: the mass migration of people across national borders. His book encapsulates and gives voice to the experiences of people striving to build a better life."-Miguel Angel GonzAlez-Quiroga, author of War and Peace on the Rio Grande Frontier, 1830-1880 "'Autocolonization' describes the way nation-states-Mexico in this case-used their own indigenous, mestizo, and transnational populations to settle their 'empty lands' in a pattern quite distinct from Anglo-American settler colonialism.In this innovative work, historian JosE Angel HernAndez adds a significant, new theoretical model to the colonial paradigm, one applicable to the Mexican-American borderlands and elsewhere in Latin America."-John R. ChAvez, author of Beyond Nations: Evolving Homelands in the North Atlantic World
