The Nueces Strip, the Border Nobody Owned

Between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande lies a strip of South Texas, roughly a hundred and fifty miles wide, that both countries once claimed and neither really controlled. After Texas declared independence in eighteen thirty-six, the Republic of Texas drew its border at the Rio Grande. Mexico refused to recognize Texas independence at all, but where it did engage with the question, it claimed the border was at the Nueces River, far to the north. For twelve years, that gap between the two rivers was a no-man's land in the most literal sense.

Comanche raiding parties ranged across much of it. Both the Texas Republic and Mexico sent forces through it periodically, but neither could hold it. The few ranching families who tried to live there did so at constant risk. Anglo settlers generally stayed away. Mexican Tejanos who had lived there before the dispute found themselves in a territory claimed by two governments, protected by neither.

When Texas was annexed to the United States in eighteen forty-five, the border dispute became an American problem. President Polk believed the Rio Grande was the rightful boundary. He sent General Zachary Taylor south from Corpus Christi with orders to stand on the north bank of the Rio Grande. Mexican cavalry crossed to the American side and attacked Taylor's patrol in late April eighteen forty-six. Polk told Congress that American blood had been shed on American soil. Congress declared war.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in eighteen forty-eight settled the question by making the Rio Grande the border, ceding the Nueces Strip to the United States. Mexico lost more than five hundred thousand square miles of territory in total. The Strip became South Texas. But the communities, land grants, and families already there carried the legal and cultural inheritance of both worlds, and the collision of those inheritances never fully resolved.