Justino

My grandfather Justino was the Benjamin of a long list of siblings.  The older ones were more surrogate parents than brothers and sisters. The records show that he was born in Cameron County, Texas, in 1897,  however the family folklore says he falsified the records to enlist for  World War I when he was a minor. Justino grew up in San Benito, a  typical Texas town of the beginning of the twentieth century, where the  railroad tracks marked the segregation boundary, on one side was San  Benito, for Texans and Mexicans, and on the other, was Harlingen, for  the new conquerors.

Grandpa’s family had been in Texas for over two hundred years and  they were Mexican in the sense that Texas was once part of Mexico. My  grandfather would refer to himself as Texan, without qualifications, to Mexican migrants as “pelones” and to the invaders as “gabachos.”