Return to Padre
Last summer my relatives won a lawsuit that gave them a share of the island that once had belonged to their forebears. But before they could prevail, the Ballis had to rediscover their own history—and the history of South Texas.
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And so Gilbert Kerlin, who today is 91 years old, stepped into what had become common South Texas practice: Figure out who owns land, round them up, and offer to buy. He was a "baby lawyer" then, as attorneys in the island case described him in court last summer, and he spoke no Spanish. But he was resourceful, so he got help—the best help, in fact, he could find. To track down the Ballís who might still have claims to the island, he hired one of their own, a man named Primitivo Ballí, who was paid $750. Primitivo's daughter Librada, who testified at the trial, would be Kerlin's secretary. And for legal advice, Kerlin knocked on the door of Francis William Seabury, a powerful lawyer well known for his extensive research of South Texas land grants. Originally from Virginia, Seabury had become a prominent Valley politician and served four terms in the Texas Legislature, including one as Speaker. Some spoke English; some did not. Most weren't very educated. But the Ballís who descended from the priest's nephew held claims to the beach that Kerlin's uncle thought might be worth something. At the time, the island was but an empty swath of sand, with only a Coast Guard station and an abandoned fishing shack. Yet underneath lay the slick stuff of Texas riches. Seabury tried to warn Kerlin off. "Developments since you left confirm my original opinion that you would have no reasonable chance of making good title to any part of Padre Island acquired by deed from the supposed heirs of Juan José Ballí," Seabury wrote Kerlin's uncle in a letter dated August 11, 1938. Had the 1830 rescission really occurred? It wasn't entirely clear, Seabury argued. Almost prophetically, he closed with a warning: "Please do not go too fast in this matter. There is a fine chance for you and your associates to get badly stung if you rely on any fact that is not proven by almost conclusive evidence." Undeterred, Gilbert instructed his nephew to press forward.
Eventually, 54 Ballís signed eleven deeds. There is disagreement over how much each was paid—suggestions range from nothing to $300—but one thing was clear: It was agreed, by deed, that they would retain a small portion of mineral rights, which was more than the cash-poor family was getting from the empty land anyway. Deeds acquired, Kerlin moved on, cutting deals with other island claimants and battling in the courts to secure as much of the beach as possible. In 1940 he faced off with the State of Texas, which had sued the Ballís and other island claimants in an attempt to take the acreage by which the property exceeded the 1829 survey dimensions, amounting to roughly two thirds of the island. The state eventually lost its case and was refused a hearing by the U. S. Supreme Court. In 1941 Kerlin sued the powerful King Ranch, which claimed to own a six-thousand-acre strip of the island. Lawyers for the ranch settled that case out of court, granting Kerlin half of the mineral rights to the disputed land.
Kerlin's next challenge was daunting—to bring down Pat Dunn. Forming an unusual coalition through his lawyer Seabury, he banded with other Anglos who were claiming ownership of parts of the island. In 1942, while Kerlin was serving in World War II, they sealed that ownership when Havre v. Dunn was settled, then sat down to exchange 135,000 acres of land among themselves. Kerlin walked away with 20,000 acres, plus an additional 1,000 acres of mineral rights. That victory was temporarily jeopardized when, during World War II, the federal government announced that it intended to take the southern quarter of the island to use as a bombing range. The war ended before the government's plan could be put into effect, allowing Kerlin to retain the land. He would strike one last time—in 1978, when he sued the state, which claimed to own 30,000 acres of mudflats in the Laguna Madre that he argued were part of the island. Like his other deals, the resolution of that case exemplified Kerlin's knack for winning. When it was settled, in 1980, the state had lost 27,000 acres to the shrewd New Yorker.
The Ballís never heard from Kerlin again, never learned that such monumental lawsuits had been settled. And they never received the small royalty checks that would have justified the sale of their lands. In the early fifties Primitivo Ballí mailed several letters to New York; Kerlin responded to one of them by saying the family's deeds had been worthless. So in 1953, the Ballí who would forever be shunned by his relatives for enabling their loss sent Kerlin a final, respectful request: Could the Ballís have their birth certificates back?
The streets of Brownsville are awfully quiet without Johnny. These aren't his times anyway. In 2001 we don't walk into government buildings and make demands; we don't block streets until people listen to what we have to say, as Johnny liked to do. I wonder, in fact, what it would have been like for Johnny to sit still in the courtroom, as his sisters did, and listen to hours of testimony knowing that anyone who made a racket would be thrown out. No, that wasn't his style. Johnny liked to be heard. I met Johnny Ballí when I was eighteen, and I haven't seen him again. I was writing for the Brownsville Herald that summer, and he had caught my name in the paper; so one day he walked into the newsroom and, in that imposing way of his, asked everyone at once, "Who is Cecilia Ballí?" They pointed him to my desk, and he walked up in his boots and shook my hand hard. Who was my father, he wanted to know, and did I know the Ballís once owned Padre Island? Ask the residents of Brownsville and they will say they remember Johnny too, the liquor-tax collector at the Gateway International Bridge whose life mission was to let the town know where the Ballís came from. You see, in my times, after Johnny had persuaded the Cameron County Commissioners Court and the Texas Historical Commission to put a statue of the priest on the island, being Ballí was an honor, a title that made people look at us with a little more respect, even if we had nothing to show for it. But in Johnny's time, if he said the Ballís had owned the island, people, including family friends, laughed.
Decades had passed since Primitivo Ballí had heard from Gilbert Kerlin, but the Ballís' memory of the New York lawyer, instead of withering, grew thick layers as time passed, like the bark of a tree rooted stubbornly in their back yards. Those who had signed over their deeds remained mum for a generation, shamed about what had happened to them. But as the elders began to grow old, they started telling the story to grandchildren. For a family that had descended from landed gentry to working class, the tale became its members' only heirloom. It lost details as it transcended generations but picked up meaning as other branches of the Ballís claimed it as their own, a moral to be learned about trust and the lot of little people.
Johnny was born into this culture, the grandson of one of the 54 Ballís who had signed over their deeds to Kerlin. In the late sixties he began agitating. A charismatic man recognized instantly for his cowboy hat and his commanding presence, he became the family spokesman, setting out to shake the city's conscience. Once, he stomped into a county commissioners' meeting and declared, "As a member of the Ballí family, I am officially claiming possession of Padre Island." "He was quickly arrested," wrote his sister Pearl in a 126-page book, where she pressed her family's plight between two hard, brown covers. The politicians weren't interested at first, but Johnny was able to persuade local businesses like Cowen's Used Cars and the Flamingo Motel to dot the town with "Erect Statue of Padre Ballí on Padre Island!" portable signs. He led family members and supporters on three marches to the beach, in one case blocking the causeway to the island with their cars as they waved the U. S. flag next to the Ballí coat of arms. Finally, in 1983, the bronze arrived at its site at the entrance to the beach and was hoisted out of its wooden crate, with Johnny watching emotionally. Like the good Catholic he was, he repaid the Virgin Mary for the blessing by making a sixty-mile pilgrimage by foot to the Virgin of San Juan del Valle shrine, television cameras trailing. The story is that when he arrived, in the middle of mass, the congregation clapped and wept.
Today Johnny sits at home with brain tumors, only sporadically comprehending what goes on around him. But although Johnny's times have passed, the Ballí family as it is today is his legacy. For when others began to believe their story, the Ballís learned that there was power in numbers, in doing things systematically. They began to hold large family reunions. They sold self-published books. They went to the media. They formed organizations and held thoughtfully planned meetings. Those with computers constructed Ballí Web sites, family chat rooms where distant cousins could reconstruct their ancestries, announce family gatherings, and discuss strategy. Ballís began to check in from the various states where many of their parents or grandparents had relocated to do farmwork and realized they were part of a huge family. Estella Ballí Trimble didn't know she had any cousins until her mother, nearing death, told her. So Estella set off to find them. "Can you imagine living in this world and not knowing you have three thousand relatives?" she asked me once over the phone. "It's like counting the stars."
But the Ballís knew it wasn't enough to say they had lost their land. In the end, legal justice would require evidence, and only a few lines of the family might have the documents needed to prove that they had been wronged. While Johnny was organizing in Brownsville, another island heir, a onetime paralegal named Connie Gonzales who lived in Houston, had begun to do research. It pained her to think that her grandmother had migrated back and forth to Wisconsin to work in a cannery while Padre's new owners had gotten rich. So for years she spent days in the archives of county records throughout South Texas, her husband and children touring the cities they visited while she searched in stuffy rooms for any documents that mentioned the Ballís.
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