| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas. By Jerry Thompson. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. xii, 332 pp. $32.50, ISBN 978-1-58544-592-9.)
Juan Nepomuceno Cortina influenced the Mexican-Texan borderlands from 1840 to 1890 and violently opposed the intrusion of the Norte Americanos, as he called them, into the lands gained by the United States under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo along the Rio Grande River. Many works describe Cortina as a bandit inciting a race war, while others have called him a social bandit, fighting for the rights of Mexicans on the frontier. In this balanced and detailed work, Jerry Thompson places Cortina into the complex histories of both the United States and Mexico during the latter half of the nineteenth century.	1
In his first chapter, Thompson briefly reviews the history of the problems in the Rio Grande Valley. Those problem erupted on July 13, 1859, when Cortina, "the champion of the people who had no champion" shot the sheriff of Brownsville for pistol-whipping a Mexican ranch hand (p. 38). In the escalating violence, Cortina struck back at the Texas Rangers, who increased the hostility by hanging many innocent Mexican Texans, resulting in a "vicious, no-holds-barred bitter guerilla war" that lasted for thirty years (p. 64).	. . .

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