We Were Illegal

April 1, 2024
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.

April 15, 2024
Texas occupies a complex space in the American landscape. Goudeau argues that the state's history is essential to understanding some of American society's most important contradictions around liberty, faith, and personhood. And more than that, it is Goudeau's true home, the site of family histories that sprawl across nearly 500 years. She grew up with oft-sensationalized tales of her family's heroism and faith; now, she seeks to unravel the truth. Tracing the lives of six key relatives, she illustrates the society that shaped them and the world they left behind. Crucial to this project is the idea of agency. Her relatives' decisions, large and small, echoed for generations; many of their lives directly intersect with the political divisions we face today. Some of the most moving parts of the book come from Goudeau finding the people helped--and harmed--by her ancestors' choices. This is is an empathic and thoughtfully told work, sure to encourage reflection on the legacies we choose to inherit.

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Starred review from June 1, 2024
An invigorating history that will displease legislators and would-be despots throughout the Lone Star State. In 2019, Stephen Harrigan's Big Wonderful Thing asked difficult questions about Texas from a macro level. Goudeau, a San Antonio native with a bloodline in the state stretching over two centuries, examines some of the same issues through the lens of her family history. Though she "loved Texas my whole life," what she uncovered is not pretty. For example, an ancestor executed by Santa Anna's forces at Goliad was one of a generation of newcomers who was part of "an ad hoc system that grew from the machinations of desperate men trying to make a buck and get ahead." That system, if it were to be successful, relied on the labor of enslaved people, and one reason to revolt against Mexico was that Mexico planned to abolish slavery. The political fortunes of many Anglos hinged on keeping the Latinx population terrified. One Texas Ranger relative, Goudeau writes, very likely "lied under oath to free a serial killer" in that interest. The author is consistently thoughtful and unsparing, and although she hits on just the right formula to explain the Texas attitude of conquest and control ("our right to flourish was God-given, and higher than anyone else's rights"), she catalogs as many failures as successes among forebears who wound up full of lead and forced from land and power. Throughout, she skillfully connects past to present. The redlining that marginalized communities in big chunks of Texas cities, for instance, is part and parcel of the habit of right-wing Texas politicos to consider everyone with a Spanish surname to be in Texas illegally. Expect to see bans of this powerful book, one that every Texan should read.

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