Juan Cortina and the First Cortina War

On the morning of September twenty-eighth, eighteen fifty-nine, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina rode into Brownsville at the head of forty to eighty armed men and seized the town. He had been raised on the land north of Matamoros, on a grant his family held since the Spanish colonial era. When Texas became American territory, the courts and the lawyers came with it.

Cortina watched Anglo attorneys strip land from Mexican Texan families who could not navigate the English-language legal system, and he grew to hate a particular cluster of Brownsville judges and officials he held responsible. The immediate trigger was a July confrontation. Cortina saw the city marshal, Robert Shears, brutally arrest a Mexican laborer who had worked on Cortina's ranch.

Cortina intervened. Shears responded with a slur and refused to stop. Cortina shot him in the shoulder and rode out of town.

Two months later he came back with an army. Five men were killed in the raid, including the city jailer. Cortina then issued a proclamation from his family ranch asserting the rights of Mexican Texans and demanding justice for land taken illegally.

He spent the next months in a running conflict with Texas Rangers and a citizens' militia from Brownsville, defeating both before being driven south in late eighteen fifty-nine by federal troops. Cortina's movement was eventually suppressed, but his underlying argument was not answered. Courts continued to transfer South Texas land from Mexican to Anglo hands for decades after the Cortina War ended.

To Mexican Texans along the Rio Grande he remained, and for many still remains, a defender of rights the law refused to recognize.