IN 2021, Texas lawmakers, feeling themselves under attack, launched a counteroffensive. The 1619 Project, a series of magazine articles that became a phenomenon (and an educational curriculum), presented slavery and racism as central to American history—and Texas, whose 1836 independence from Mexico was partly driven by the desire to allow slavery, was very much implicated. The Republican-dominated state legislature made it illegal for teachers to “require an understanding” of the 1619 Project. Lawmakers also mandated the creation of the 1836 Project, an advisory committee that would, according to Governor Greg Abbott, “promote patriotic education and increase awareness of Texas values.” Thanks to the 1836 Project, everyone receiving a new driver’s license in the state also receives a fifteen-page pamphlet, “Telling the Texas Story.” The publication doubles down on Texas’s “larger-than-life legends and lore,” reaffirming the origin story that many powerful Texans have preferred to tell: a seemingly “inhospitable” territory is transformed into “a land of promise” by people with “fortitude and nerve.”
It’s true that for the past couple of centuries, Texas has held a special attraction for seekers, visionaries, and enterprising forward-thinkers—or, perhaps more accurately, hustlers, grifters, and profiteers. In the 1830s, it was widely understood that if you were a white man who found yourself unwelcome elsewhere in the United States—say, through a reputation for violence, or by racking up debts you weren’t inclined to pay—there was a place you could find refuge and opportunities for reinvention. “All across the United States, scrawled on the doors of abandoned cabins, written in the dockets of debtors’ trials in which the accused failed to appear in court, were the words ‘Gone to Texas’ or simply the instantly recognized initials ‘GTT,’” Stephen Harrigan wrote in 2019’s Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas.
The vast and varied region north of the Rio Grande has been home to Caddo territory, Spanish settler colonies, a distant northern outpost of newly independent Mexico, and part of greater Comancheria. After winning independence from Mexico in 1836, Texas spent a hectic handful of years as an independent republic before joining the US as the twenty-eighth state. Newcomers understood Texas as a place in flux, where it was possible to find an edge. It drew land speculators compelled by rumors of abandoned silver mines, aspiring ranchers seeking to obtain title to vast tracts of grazing lands, and steamboat operators aiming to monopolize trade and transit routes. Some of these people became the “larger-than-life” figures celebrated in hagiographic histories like “Telling the Texas Story,” although a full accounting of their exploits reveals them to be less than heroic. Take Jim Bowie, one of the heroes of the Alamo, who may sound familiar thanks to his namesake knife, or from the kitschy 1950s Western kids’ television program that bore his name. In the show, a cleft-chinned and cowboy-hatted Bowie comes to the aid of people who’ve been swindled. In reality, he was much more likely to have been the source of the swindling: Bowie was a slave trader and scammer who did hefty business in forged Spanish land-grant titles.
This world of advantage-seeking and gleeful exploitation is the backdrop for Carmen Boullosa’s rollicking, righteous epic Texas: The Great Theft, which takes place over a few months in 1858. Boullosa’s novel—recently given a tenth-anniversary reissue in the US by Deep Vellum, with a jaunty translation by Samantha Schnee and a new introduction by Merve Emre—is a cacophonous book that sometimes feels as though it is trying to contain the whole world: a list of characters at the back of the book runs to more than two hundred entries, not all of them human. The Texas-Mexico borderlands of Boullosa’s book, while not exactly cosmopolitan, are a bustling place of cultural and economic exchange. The characters include people described as Galician, Lipan, Karankawa, Mascogo, Viking, Russian, Cuban, German, Tonkawa, Yamparika, Mexican, Hasinai, Negro, Austrian, and English. We meet a bootblack, a barber, a barge captain, a buffalo hunter, a photographer, a plantation owner, a priest, a cabal of shady lawyers, intrepid messenger pigeons, and the godson of the Prince of Nassau, among many others. Yet the events the novel centers on are confined to a narrow geographic scope laid out in the opening pages: “the northern and southern banks of the Río Bravo, known to some as the Rio Grande, in the cities of Bruneville and Matasánchez.” (The towns are stand-ins for the real-life Rio Grande Valley border towns of Brownsville and Matamoros.)
The Rio Grande Valley had been, until very recently, part of Mexico, and at the time the story begins, many of the region’s wealthy landowners are Americans of Mexican descent. Boullosa’s representative of the Tejano elite is Doña Estefanía, the inheritor of an enormous cattle ranch, originally deeded to the family by the Spanish crown. The property spans the Nueces Strip, a fertile, grassy zone between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. We’re told about Doña Estefanía’s jewels and carriages, how the chapels on her land look more like churches, how it would take four days to traverse her property on horseback. But with the entry into the US has come an influx of Anglo settlers with insatiable appetites for land and the willingness to exploit American property laws to their own advantage. One has already persuaded Doña Estefanía to carve off a portion of her land, and has used to establish the city of Bruneville. Now they’re seeking more. Their main obstacle is Doña Estefanía’s dashing, impetuous son, Nepomuceno, Boullosa’s version of Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, the folk hero known as the “Robin Hood of the Rio Grande.”
For all the novel’s fantastical flourishes, it hews relatively close to history, roughly tracing the events of the First Cortina War. Like that series of skirmishes, the book’s events begin with a sheriff named Shears beating an old vaquero in the Brownsville/Bruneville town square, and Cortina/Nepomuceno coming to the old man’s aid. In short order, our redheaded hero shoots the sheriff. Although the shooting isn’t fatal, Nepomuceno understands that it will likely spark the race war the Anglo settlers have been itching to incite. Nepomuceno flees across the river into Mexico. He aims to return after he’s organized a militia to rise up against what Cortina (who, although reportedly illiterate, had a way with words) called “a perfidious inquisitorial lodge” of lawyers bent on expropriating Tejanos’ land.
But a recap of the historical context hardly captures what it feels like to read this book. Readers will encounter sneak-attacks and shootings and a pivotal lynching. But, amid the action set pieces, Boullosa’s narrator—a chatty, omniscient, hovering presence—keeps getting distracted. The experience of reading Texas: The Great Theft is one of a largely pleasurable bombardment of names, backstory, entanglements. Characters parade across the page, engaged in their own private (or public) dramas. Some of these figures will prove instrumental; some will reappear only briefly, or not at all. The narrative voice floats over the border towns, as if reporting on footage shot by a drone; then it follows the path of a bullet as it tunnels into a brain, recording a character’s final, fleeting thoughts. On a steamboat heading to Matasánchez, the action pauses so we can hear about one minor character, a German immigrant who initially came to Texas as part of a failed agrarian utopia:
Each of the Forty wore beards. The youngest was seventeen and the two eldest were twenty-four, free thinkers one and all. No one knows why they lasted only one year. There are lots of stories: some say that they harvested only six ears of corn because no one wanted to do any work (it’s true they spent most afternoons guzzling whiskey from barrels they had brought from Hamburg), while others say it was because of a woman, which makes no sense, because there weren’t any women in the colony.
On the morning of Nepomuceno’s return to Bruneville, as his ragtag militia prepares to attack, the narrator spends half a page exploring the mind of a cow’s rotting carcass as it floats down the river:
I, the rotting cow, endowed with the life of these worms, dream that I am about to eat a mouthful of fresh grass. In the grass, a caterpillar watches me. It’s not like any of the worms in my belly. In the caterpillar’s eye, I see the moon shining at noon. In this day that I share with the moon, reflected in the caterpillar’s eye, I see myself, a cow that’s very much a cow: a ruminating, sweet, edible cow that gives the milk that makes sweets and cakes.
Doesn’t feel good to be breeding worms. . . . Perhaps I should calm myself: I’m the cow who used to moo. The cow who dreams, inspired by my worms’ souls.
I forget about the earthworm and her eye; I take a bite of the (delicious) fresh grass which might not be real, but no matter.
We never hear from the cow again.
Characters get distracted, too—by oranges fallen in the street, or new wares at a shop, or a piece of juicy gossip. The shooting and its aftermath are experienced as a rupture, forcing people who were previously intent on their own trajectories—speaking to their crush, selling animal skins, training a frog to jump extraordinarily far—into the narrower path of history. Along the way, some of them will wind up dead or imprisoned.
Amid all the antics and bustle, though, Boullosa is making a moral argument. Characters that the reader may meet only briefly are shown to have a lively interiority, a choice that is both stylistic and thematic. Bolluso gives the opposing attitude—a cramped, racist view of subjectivity—to attendees at a dinner party hosted by Mrs. Stealman, where a number of the novel’s villains discuss Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “Negroes can’t be characters in novels. That would be like having a dog as protagonist!” one scandalized guest says. Which is to say, the book is not always subtle about its villains, who include a minister named Fear and an attorney named Stealman. (The latter is Boullosa’s take on Charles Stillman, the founder of Brownsville and great-great grandfather of director Whit Stillman.)
At the start of the novel, before Shears is shot, there’s a sense that justice is up for grabs in a state that’s just finding its footing. The sheriff is better known for being a terrible carpenter, and the man everyone calls “Judge Gold” isn’t really a judge—that’s just his nickname. (The actual judge, Judge White, is better known as “old Whatshisname.”) Brunevilleis brimming with thieves, from title fraudsters and cattle rustlers to your standard Old West gangs of carriage robbers. By the closing pages, it’s become clear that some of these thefts will be recast as entrepreneurial gumption.
It is difficult, of course, to have much respect for the law in a place where certain human beings can legally be considered private property. Several of the novel’s characters make their money by exploiting the difference in laws between Mexico, where slavery is illegal, and Texas, where it is not. Traders prowl the territory, looking for escapees to sell back into slavery. Others promise to help fugitive slaves cross the river into Mexico, while not mentioning that they’re delivering them into indentured servitude and starvation. The idea of theft, and of the sanctity of private property, takes on a different cast in such a context. (One of Boullosa’s historical digressions involves a petition signed by prominent Texans that, in high-minded patriotic tones, celebrates the sovereign constitutional rights of property owners—“in other words,” as Boullosa writes, “the right to recover fugitive slaves.”) And while the “great” theft of the novel’s title refers to Anglos who manipulate property law to take control of land owned by Mexicans, even Doña Estefanía’s claim to ownership has spurious origins: before the Spanish crown began awarding land grants, the area was populated by Caddo traders and farmers; by the time of Nepomuceno’s rebellion—and thanks to the depredation of the buffalo, government-sanctioned massacres, and a policy of forced removal—Indigenous power has been massively undercut.
The real crime, Boullosa seems to argue, is not the mere act of stealing, but how theft becomes enshrined into law and then retroactively justified. By the end of the book, only a few months have passed. Nepomuceno’s brief, thwarted rebellion has failed, and an Anglo power structure is solidifying. The novel’s Robin gang, a band of bandit brothers “skinnier than mine mules” who started out robbing mail coaches, gain cachet by aiding the fight against Nepomuceno’s militia. The Robins spend their ill-gotten gains on bribing judges to wrest land from Mexicans: “They dispute with the rightful owners, accusing them of theft, and by using judges, lawyers, and witnesses—they were well trained by King, who had taught them himself—they became wealthy without so much as dirtying their shoes.” In relatively short order, they’ve achieved respectability; they’re now better known as “the Robin family,” even though, as Boullosa reminds us, “the blood of thieves, not nobility, still runs in their veins.”
Texas: The Great Theft covers the period when a fluid, hybrid world begins to take the shape of the “Texas Story” as told by the 1836 Project. The crimes it took to get there have been papered over by a heavily mythologized history. Greed and exploitation are reframed as “fortitude and nerve,” and the result—Texas as it is today—is presented as if it is not only natural and inevitable, but also righteous. Texas: A Great Theft isn’t so much a rewriting of the Texas story, though, as a gossipy undermining of it, one that exposes the whole grand myth as silly and self-serving, nowhere near what was really going on.
The “King” who taught the Robins how to bend the justice system to their whims turns out to be a real historic figure, too. Richard King was the son of Irish immigrants who got his start working as a cabin boy on steamships. When Tejano landowners fled South Texas during the Mexican-American War (1846-48), King was one of the enterprising settlers who helped himself to their property under questionable pretenses. He parlayed his holdings into a massive cattle operation. Even today, the King Ranch, which comprises nearly one million acres, is the largest ranch in the United States. The King Ranch has become so iconic that Ford now uses its brand to distinguish an upgraded model for some of its trucks. The 2025 King Ranch F150, which has a suggested retail price of nearly $75,000, features a leather-wrapped steering wheel, wood accents, heated seats, and a twelve-inch infotainment system. It’s just the kind of car for a Texan to drive through the suburban streets, daydreaming about the good old days, when all this was a free, rugged place, just waiting to be made profitable and productive by heroic, self-made men.
Rachel Monroe is a contributing writer at the New Yorker and the author of Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession (Scribner, 2019).