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.
The statue of Padre Jose Nicolas Ballí, the island's original owner and namesake.
Photograph by James McGoon
As sixteen-year-old of skinny arms and knobby knees, I stood at the front of a U. S. history class with a big red poster board and a bit of self-righteousness. Our teacher had assigned a research project, and as I roamed the Brownsville library's bookshelves without direction, I had found a tiny treasure: a book about a Mexican man from my own hometown. It was thin and floppy, written by a graduate student in history at the University of Chicago. The subject was Juan Cortina, the man who had rounded up an army and shot several men as he declared war against the violent change of power South Texas experienced when it became part of the United States. In an 1859 proclamation, Cortina decried the arriving Anglos for forming, "with a multitude of lawyers, a secret conclave, with all its ramifications, for the sole purpose of despoiling the Mexicans of their lands and usurping them afterwards." In traditional historical accounts Cortina went down as a border bandit, a "plunderer and murderer." But in 1949, Charles W. Goldfinch offered a different image, one that had lived on in Mexican border ballads, that rendered Cortina a man outraged by the plight of his people. And so, on a cheap slice of cardboard, I drew a balance with all the ugly descriptions on one side and all the pretty ones on the other. The moral of the story was simply that history had more than one telling. To me, this most basic idea was the most profound revelation. I did not fully realize it at the time, but Juan Cortina's story was, in a way, my story too. For my family had been in South Texas at the time of the Cortina uprising and for more than a hundred years before, and in time they also would fight for the land they had lost, though with law books and lawyers instead of guns.
Anyone who remembers seventh-grade Texas history class knows that in textbooks the story of our state begins just far back enough to show how brave men with Anglo surnames had conquered a cruel, empty brushland. They briefly recount that this land had been a Spanish province, then Mexican territory. But there is no mention, for instance, of the great Mexican ranches that already dotted the area when the Anglos arrived or of the ranchers' winter trips to the area's cities, where there were social clubs, colorful silk dresses, romantic violin serenades. An entire way of life, governed by a sophisticated system that rewarded and discriminated based on birth, class, and skin color, slipped into the whiteness of pages, erased and selectively forgotten.
It was into that social system that José Nicolás Ballí was born—on the privileged side, to be sure. In 1749, 72 years before Stephen F. Austin would set foot in Texas, the first Ballís had arrived from northern Mexico to the province of Nuevo Santander, what is now the Lower Rio Grande Valley. There they would become a powerful landed dynasty. Ten years later, King Carlos III granted the offshore island, then called Isla de Santiago, to Nicolás Ballí, the grandfather of José Nicolás. But it was the grandson, by then a Roman Catholic priest, who surveyed the property, claimed it as his own in 1800, and put up a ranch there. With the help of a nephew, Juan José Ballí, he raised cattle, horses, and mules and worked to Christianize the area's Karankawa Indians. Eight months after the priest died, in 1829, the newly independent Mexican government finally confirmed title to him and his nephew. By that time Isla de Santiago was already acquiring the name by which it is known today: Padre Island.
To Texans and Mexicans alike, Padre Island is a nice getaway for the limited budget, a beach resort close enough for three-day weekends. Here, Winter Texans dine on fresh fish while their relatives up north shiver through December. Here, college students drink a week of their lives away and dance with barely dressed strangers in sticky outdoor clubs. Rich Mexicans pick up tans during Holy Week and cruise late at night in their shiny Jettas. Skinny beauty pageant contestants strut around in high heels and wide smiles in hopes of a crown. But to the Ballís, the island whispers of a proud but sad past. The last family members to claim a piece of it sold out at the close of the Great Depression, expecting to receive royalties from its underground riches. They never saw a cent. The island's very presence was a continuing reminder of their fall from preeminence—until last summer, when a Brownsville jury heard their arguments and vindicated their claims.
News of the verdict appeared in dozens of papers nationwide, spread across the pages of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today, and as far away as Argentina. "Six decades after a New York lawyer bought Padre Island from a Mexican American border family, a jury determined Wednesday that he had swindled the family's impoverished descendants out of $1. 1 million in oil and gas royalties," the Associated Press reported. Historians called it "revolutionary," an overdue acknowledgment of a shady time in Texas history during which hardworking people were stripped of their land. My branch of the family was not involved in the Padre Island lawsuit, but distant relatives were, and we celebrated together. "The victory of the Ballí heirs," wrote Gilberto Hinojosa, a dean at the University of the Incarnate Word and a South Texas historian, "confirms a heartfelt sentiment among Mexican Americans that this is their land and they belong here." Once a family whose last name few outside the Valley could pronounce (By-yee), the Ballís became, almost overnight, world-famous.
Yet the victory took centuries of work and lifetimes of hope. It took generations of white-haired matriarchs and patriarchs passing on the story to their grandchildren, decades of searching for old documents that would speak the truth. It took marches and massive family meetings and some miracles too. The Ballí family is a family of self-made genealogists, historians, lawyers. When nobody would acknowledge their roots, the Ballís unearthed them. When nobody would tell their side of the story, they wrote and proclaimed it themselves. When nobody would represent them, they asked to approach the bench, Your Honor, and they said what they had to say. You see, the Ballís weren't just born Ballí, they became it. And once they began to change, there was no turning back.
"I've been telling people I'm gonna move on with my life after this," Pearl Ballí Mancillas mumbled as we waited in the Brownsville federal courthouse for the jury's verdict. She sighed. "But then I ask, 'What is my life? This is all I've ever known.'"
The history of the Ballí lawsuit really begins in the blurry years after Padre Ballí's death. Just months afterward, his nephew, Juan José, sold the island, but the story goes, Santiago Morales, the Mexican man who bought it, may have suffered buyer's remorse. Exactly what was happening on Padre Island at that time is impossible to know. The Ballís had divided the island among themselves into two large tracts, north and south. At the same time, Anglos who arrived from throughout the United States and Europe set foot on other parts of the island and called it theirs. Among these was John Singer, the brother of the man who invented the modern sewing machine. And there was Pat Dunn, the famed Duke of Padre Island, who, the Ballís' lawyers say, erected guard posts to keep others out, and in 1928, claimed title to almost the whole island through squatter's rights. The whole time, various Ballís with island roots and from other landed branches had been trying to determine what they owned. One of them was Ignacio Ballí Tijerina, whose ancestors had possessed an even larger tract on the mainland known as La Barreta, where cattle baron Miflin Kenedy later built his ranching empire. "Before the law, we are all equal men," Tijerina wrote in the articulate, typed notes he left behind. "Before society, we are not." Over lunch at one of the five tables in the Brownsville Cafe, in a white T-shirt with an imprint of the Ballí coat of arms, his daughter Herminia Ballí Chavana tells me the story. Her father and his brothers, she says, were approached in 1910 by a Mexican American man who had been sent by an Anglo lawyer to offer them 25 pesos each for their signatures. His brothers refused the offer and instead sent Tijerina to the Mexican archives in Reynosa to find out what their ancestors had owned.
But he was not let in, he wrote in his notes, so he sought special permission from a Matamoros judge some sixty miles away, then made his way back to Reynosa. The archives were in disarray. "Los americanos," as he called the Anglos, had already been there—without the extra trip to Matamoros. They pieced together land ownership through wills and birth and marriage certificates, bribing the archives' keeper for some of the originals or simply taking what wasn't theirs. Herminia's voice grows furious as she paraphrases her father's memoir. "The Anglos would steal the deeds," Herminia says angrily, her hand shaking violently as she grabs a white paper napkin from the table and stuffs it under an imaginary jacket. Later they would hire locals to pay landowners to sign documents that some of them could not even read, sealing the transfer of their land.
As the research of land ownership progressed, speculation abounded and theories surfaced. Some of them seeped into the newspapers, and one of these articles, a 1937 story that appeared in the Brownsville paper, was mailed to a prominent New York lawyer named Frederic Gilbert by a business associate in South Texas. The article reported that a document had been found showing Juan José Ballí's sale of the island in 1830 to Santiago Morales had been rescinded. This suggested that a group of Ballís might still hold title to more than half of the island. In New York, Frederic Gilbert summoned his 24-year-old nephew, Gilbert Kerlin, a sharp young graduate of Harvard Law School, and gave him his first assignment: Go down to Padre Island and buy the Ballís' titles.
