The Porciones: Land Shaped Like Fingers
Near Mcallen, Texas
Fly over the lower Rio Grande Valley and you will see something strange in the field patterns below. The land does not divide into the tidy square sections you find across most of the American West. Instead it breaks into long narrow strips, each one running perpendicular to the river, each one touching the water at one end and extending miles into the brushy interior. Some are barely a quarter mile wide. Some stretch for four miles or more. From the air they look like fingers pressed side by side along the bank.
These are the porciones. The Spanish word means portions. They were granted beginning in seventeen sixty-seven under the colonial administrator José de Escandón, who was tasked with populating the territory Spain called Nuevo Santander. Escandón's method was deliberate. Each grant ran from the river inland, so that every family had access to water for their cattle and their fields. No single grant could monopolize the river frontage. The system was efficient and, by the standards of the time, relatively fair.
Escandón founded more than twenty settlements along the Rio Grande during the seventeen forties and seventeen fifties, including Reynosa and Camargo on the south bank. Settlers eventually crossed northward. Around eighty porciones were eventually distributed across what is now Hidalgo County alone, granted by both Spanish and later Mexican authorities. Juan José Ynojosa de Ballí received his grant in seventeen ninety, and José Manuel Gómez obtained the Santa Anita grant around eighteen hundred, the land that would eventually become the McAllen Ranch, still in operation nearly two centuries later.
The porcion system outlasted Spain, outlasted Mexico, and survived the American annexation of eighteen forty-eight. Property lines in the Valley today still follow boundaries drawn by Spanish surveyors with chains and stakes. The strips of land that Escandón parceled out have shaped nearly every road, fence, and property deed in the lower Valley. You can see their outline in the county plat maps. You can still feel them in how the towns align with water.
