Globalizing the Lower Rio Grande

Often obscured in the history of the nineteenth-century US-Mexico borderlands, European-born entrepreneurs played a definitive role in pushing the Rio Grande borderlands into Atlantic markets. These borderlands entrepreneurs tried to transform the Lower Rio Grande and its surroundings from a regional crossroads of trade to a hub of the Atlantic economy. Though they were often stymied by mismanagement, notions of ethnic and cultural superiority, and eruptions of violence, these entrepreneurs pers