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.