Reading Dobie as a Border Kid

I suppose my relationship with J. Frank Dobie is as complicated as my ethnic history, in which a pair of Anglo families immigrated to the Rio Grande Valley during the Great Depression and married into the Mexican American clan of my grandfather Manuel Garza.

My father, growing up in that complex border family in the transnational community of McAllen-Reynosa, learned to view Dobie as the second greatest authority on life, just below Father Joseph O’Brien at Sacred Heart Catholic Church and a little above the pulp fiction authors he loved so much.

When I inherited those volumes of South Texas lore — nearly as prized in our home as the family Bible — I felt joy as seeing my homeland and people depicted in the pages of a book. “Great literature transcends its native land, but none that I know of ignores its soil,” Dobie assured me, and the message came at a perfect time. In the McAllen schools I attended in the 1970s and 1980s, there was essentially no representation of the borderlands or Mexican American community. So the nice words Dobie had written and the respect he had shown us were a boon.

Yet I was also painfully aware that while his descriptions of Anglo life in South Texas rang true, he hadn’t been equipped to explore authentically the inner lives and concerns of Tejanos. In fact, none of the books I’d read in class or on my own…