We Were Illegal
Uncovering a Texas Family's Mythmaking and Migration
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jun 18, 2024
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- $13.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An award-winning author's deep exploration of pivotal moments in Texas history through multiple generations of her own family, and a ruthless reexamination of our national and personal myths
Seven generations of Jessica Goudeau’s family have lived in Texas, and her family’s legacy—a word she heard often growing up—was rooted in faith, right-living, and the hard work that built their great state. It wasn’t until her aunt mentioned a stowaway ancestor and she began to dig more deeply into the story of the land she lives on today in suburban Austin, that Goudeau discovered her family’s far more complicated role in Texas history: from a swindling land grant agent in the earliest days of Anglo settlement that brought slavery to Mexican land, up through her Texas Ranger great-uncle, who helped a sociopathic sheriff cover up mass murder.
Tracking her ancestors’ involvement in pivotal moments from before the Texas Revolution through today, We Were Illegal is at once an intimate and character-driven narrative and an insider’s look at a state that prides itself on its history. It is an act of reckoning and recovery on a personal scale, as well as a reflection of the work we all must do to dismantle the whitewashed narratives that are passed down through families, communities, and textbooks. And it is a story filled with hope—by facing these hypocrisies and long-buried histories, Goudeau explores with us how to move past this fractured time, take accountability for our legacy, and learn to be better, more honest ancestors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Disturbed by a rise of xenophobic extremism in her home state of Texas, journalist Goudeau (After the Last Border) sets out in this ruminative account to investigate whether her family has always been as welcoming toward strangers as they were during her childhood. She is shocked to discover that her ancestors tore a destructive path across America that included owning slaves and participating in lynchings and feuds. Tracing her family's migration from Virginia—where in the late 18th century her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Slowman Reese was a plantation overseer—to Tennessee and then Texas, Goudeau unspools a narrative in which the family's early entrenchment in slavery festered as white supremacist beliefs and a penchant for violence in Slowman's descendants—whom, in Goudeau's telling, went on to play surpisingly pivotal yet below-the-radar roles in Texas history. Among them are Robert Leftwich, a land grant agent involved in early 19th-century schemes to get Anglo Texans to rebel against Mexico; Sam Houston Reese, a sheriff who waged a deadly feud with his political rivals in the 1890s; and the author's great-uncle Frank Probst, a Texas Ranger implicated in the 1945 murder of a Latino migrant worker family. Introspective and detailed, Goudeau's questing narrative, which strikes out in many directions in search of answers, at times feels circuitous. Still, it's a valuable contribution to Texas history.