Globalizing the Lower Rio Grande: European Entrepreneurs in the Borderlands, 1749–1881

Often obscured in the history of the nineteenth-century US-Mexico borderlands, European-born entrepreneurs played a definitive role in pushing the Lower Rio Grande borderlands into Atlantic markets. Though they were often stymied by mismanagement, notions of ethnic and cultural superiority, and eruptions of violence, these entrepreneurs persistently attempted to remake the region into a modern commercial utopia. Their actions challenged United States imperial expansion as they tried to populate the region with Europeans and dominate trade. Globalizing the Lower Rio Grande highlights the actions of folks like English-born John C. Beales, who convinced a party of Europeans to trek overseas and overland to the isolated Las Moras Creek to build a colony from scratch; Alexander Bourgeois d'Orvanne, who manipulated powerful French and German leaders to support a settlement scheme on the Rio Grande; Spanish-born José San Román and the way he constructed massive transatlantic networks of credit and exchange; and Joseph Kleiber from Strasbourg, who facilitated the construction of a European-owned railroad line along the Rio Grande