As those in the HPPR listener region know, the High Plains has always been a vast space with some common history, despite the demarcation of state borders. It's a region with centuries of migration, settlement, trade, agriculture, and turmoil. A new book, Los Llaneros: The Mexican Southern Plains, 1500-1900, explores how Spanish, Indigenous, Mexican, and Anglo-Texan people have shaped it into the place it is today.
Click the link at the top of this page to hear our full conversation with Alex & Greg.
To learn more about the book — or to make a purchase — click here.
Also, mark your calendars for April 8th, 2027; there will be a gathering to celebrate this book, and the scholars who made it happen will be in attendance!
ABOUT THE BOOK (from OU Press website)
For centuries Mexican people of the plains—or “los Llaneros”—have inhabited and embodied the borderland region known today as the Southern Great Plains. Yet their central presence in the area is often forgotten. This diverse collection of essays brings much-needed attention to the ethnic culture and history of the Llano, the vast grassland plains encompassing the Texas Panhandle, eastern New Mexico, and corners of Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
Los Llaneros covers a broad period, beginning with the Coronado entrada of 1540 and ending in the big ranch era around 1900. It is a unique colonial history, involving Nuevomexicanos, Comanches and other Indigenous peoples, the Spanish, and Anglo-Texans. The volume is interdisciplinary in its approach, embracing archeological, folkloric, literary, and cultural knowledge. Through these multiple perspectives, Los Llaneros achieves a singular goal: counteracting a long silence—and at times silencing—of Mexican people.
Collectively the contributors to this volume make a compelling argument that this region’s ethnic history must be recovered and reinterpreted to understand fully the cultural, environmental, and racial dynamics of the Southern Plains. A timely reconsideration of an important borderland region, Los Llaneros opens new pathways for future examination of the Llano and its diverse peoples.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
Joel Zapata is Assistant Professor at Oregon State University. He has previously been a Mellon Foundation Fellow in Latino Studies at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe.
Andrew Reynolds is Professor of Spanish at Texas Tech University. He is the author of The Spanish American Crónica Modernista, Temporality and Material Culture: The Unstoppable Presses of Modernismo.
Alex Hunt is the Vincent/Haley Endowed Professor of Western Studies at West Texas A&M University. He is coeditor of Los Llaneros: The Mexican Southern Plains, 1500-1900.
John Beusterien is Professor of Spanish at Texas Tech University. He is the author of Transoceanic Animals as Spectacle in Early Modern Spain.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
"With a scope as broad and sweeping as the Southern Plains itself, Los Llaneros charts the region's centuries-long, but mostly forgotten, ethnic Mexican and Native Plains past. Delightfully revelatory, these essays uncover a rich tapestry of Llano Estacado's peoples, inter-relationships, economies, politics, art, and literature. Forgotten no more, thanks to this deeply grounded volume, the Southern Plains' fascinating history now rests in your hands."—Sherry L. Smith editor of The Future of the Southern Plains
“What a group of truly superb scholars has fashioned with Los Llaneros is no less than a re-invention of the Southern High Plains sense of self. Long summed up as stories of Comanches, Palo Duro Canyon, Charles Goodnight, and Georgia O’Keeffe, Llano Estacado history has been overdue an epiphany. This book provides a stunner.” —Dan Flores, New York Times bestselling author of Coyote America and Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys into the Heart of the Southern Plains
“This edited collection undergirds the editors’ proposition that since the 16th century, the Southern Plains have persisted as a ‘historical and cultural homeland’ of ethnic Mexicans. Sound in analysis and firm in its contention, this groundbreaking study fortifies the long-existing scholarship in the fields of Borderlands and Chicano history.” —Arnoldo De León, author of Mexican Americans in West Texas: The Borderlands of the Edwards Plateau and the Trans-Pecos
“Los Llaneros is a provocative meditation on the vexed meanings of Mexican ethnicity and influence in the so-called American West. The volume, taken as a whole, invites readers to think hard about the nature of identity, especially the binaries between ‘Indigenous’ and ‘colonial.’ Los Llaneros is a must-read for students of the Southern Plains’ deeply complicated past.”—Paul Barba, author of Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands
"This groundbreaking volume bridges disciplinary boundaries, offering a llanero sensibility that highlights the complexity of borderlands subjects navigating contested cultural and spatial claims on the Southern Plains."—Aimee Villarreal, Texas State University
GREG ROHLOFF’S REVIEW OF THE BOOK:
Los Llaneros: The Mexican Southern Plains 1500-1900
Edited by Joel Zapata, Andrew Reynolds, Alex Hunt, and John Beusterien
Foreword by Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, Afterword by José Limón
Published 2026 by University of Oklahoma Press
The notion that the Texas Panhandle was a barren wasteland before the arrival of cattle ranches ignores a vast history. For before the cattle ranches, were hundreds of years of settlements by indigenous tribes, and the expeditions by Spanish explorers seeking gold brought a steady flow of Mexican hunters and traders and the establishment of Spanish settlements in New Mexico near the southern High Plains.
Los Llaneros, The Mexican Southern Plains 1500-1900 is a series of academic essays quoting original documents, academic studies, and historical literature that provide evidence that, while the populations were small by current standards, the southern plains was a vibrant center of trade, starting with indigenous tribes and the changes brought by Spanish expeditions searching for fabled riches in the new world.
The region includes the Texas Panhandle and neighboring stretches of eastern New Mexico, southwestern Oklahoma, southeastern Colorado and southwestern Kansas.
Los Llaneros describes how native tribes created trails across the Llano Estacado that took them to areas where they could hunt bison, and trade with other tribes from the Rio Grande Valley and northern regions. The mix of people grew with the arrival of Coronado’s expedition to find the Seven Cities of Gold.
Contributor and co-editor Alex Hunt states the impetus for the book grew from the development of the Center for the Study of the American West at West Texas A&M University.The history of the Texas Panhandle has been understudied, and the Hispanic/Mexican/Latino part of the history is “especially under-studied.”
“Personally, I wanted my Hispanic/Latino students to feel as if they have a place in this region’s history; and they do, if the history is told the right way.”
Coronado brought 300 conquistadors and hundreds of people from Mexico to care for the cattle, horses, and sheep in establishing his base camp in the Pecos River Valley of New Mexico. He used a trail most likely that led the group from New Mexico into Texas in an area that eventually became Route 66 and later Interstate 40. The Mexicans who settled in the Spanish encampments in New Mexico also used the trails, first to hunt bison on horseback as the Apache hunted. But in working with the Spanish, they acquired steel lances to hunt with rather than the bow and arrow. And as the numbers of bison diminished, other Mexicans herded sheep and cattle, following the trails that led to springs and rivers so that they could grow beans, corn and squash on a sustainable basis.
One such area was the Quitaque Plaza, home to several Mexican families who had dug an irrigation ditch for raising crops and herded sheep. They also established homes. After the U.S. Army had cleared Comanche and Kiowa tribes from the Panhandle in the Red River Wars, cattle ranchers were eager to fence in grazing lands instead of open range that allowed shepherds to freely move their sheep.
Hunt and Daniel Steven Kerr in their chapter “The Quitaque Massacre in Context,” describe how cattle ranchers brothers Jim and George Baker claimed the land of the Quitaque Plaza, and sent cowboys from their Lazy F brand claim. These gunmen killed several men and attacked their families. Their sheep were rounded up and led to a dry playa bed that was grown over with weeds and grass. There, the gunmen set the grass on fire and destroyed the sheep.
What common history forgets is that the traders – comancheros – served as guides and scouts for the cavalry troops. And a guide for shepherds led Charles Goodnight and his herd of cattle from the Canadian River area to Palo Duro Canyon where Goodnight established his JA Ranch.
“I hope that the book helps to fill a very real gap in the regional history,” Hunt commented in an interview. “In the Panhandle region, we need to do a better job acknowledging this history, and this book is design to help with that.
While popular history was written to credit Goodnight as the pioneer settler of the Panhandle, that claim ignores the hundreds of years of indigenous and Mexican settlements near the sources of water for their sheep and crops.
Perhaps the most influential of these Llaneros was Jose Casimero Romero, who was born in New Mexico when it was ruled by Mexico. Kerr writes that Romero left with his extended family and other Mexicans in 1876 from Mora County in New Mexico where he had a large farm and a flock of twenty-eight hundred sheep and fifty-four beef cattle. He took them to grasslands in the Texas Panhandle where his shepherds could graze the sheep and cattle the way they were grazed in New Mexico – on open range. But when cattle ranchers insisted on fencing off their holdings, Romero returned to a previous occupation of hauling freight. He had acquired land in Oldham County and then leased out some land to build businesses in Tascosa, then the county seat of Oldham County.His success in that led him to invest in other commercial real estate. Romero continued his freight business to service these businesses and ranchers by moving merchandise from Dodge City to Tascosa.
Later, Romero moves his family to Dodge City so his children could go to school. While he continued to work as a freighter, he also invested money establishing saloons in Dodge City, only to close them after Kansas enforced a state constitutional ban on selling alcoholic beverages. As ranchers extended their fencing and the Fort Worth & Denver railroad built tracks from Tascosa northward to Dodge City, shipping by wagons became obsolete and the trail drives from Texas to the railhead in Dodge also faded away. He returned first to Tascosa, and when drought and a shrinking farm economy dimmed his economic opportunities there, he returned to New Mexico to raise sheep.
The implication of this history, one can argue, that from the indigenous tribes, to the Spanish explorers, and to the Mexican farmers and ranchers, each played a role in showing the viability of life on the Llano Estacado, even if the cities of gold did not exist, and that force and violence often drove change in the area.
The book details the “fact that Spanish, Hispanic, and Mexican travelers, explorers and settlers pre-dated ‘Anglo-European’ exploration and settlement,” Hunt points out. “The names on the map tell us this. Carrying that knowledge forward should rightly lead to us telling a much more balanced and nuanced account of our region’s history, heritage, and culture.”
“I’m not interested in replacing one here-first narrative with another,” he states. “Of course, the indigenous people of the region get that status; I’m interested in telling a story of our region’s diverse cultural roots.”
Los Llaneros takes the reader through the evidence from archeological digs, written accounts that date back to the Coronado expedition and his reports to the Spanish king, to art, poetry and songs written to honor the vaqueros and the ciboleros (the bison hunters) who rode the range long before the Anglo-American ranchers staked out their ranches.In recognizing this history, we then recognize the presence and contributions of Hispanics today. To deny the history, lessens the standing of the present.
