A heavy federal presence in Brownsville remains today, but now the people in uniform are Border Patrol and Customs agents, not soldiers, and the war is with illegal immigrants and drug smugglers, not a nation. One of the singular events in the history of the Valley was the so-called Brownsville Raid. One resident was killed and the police chief wounded. In this well-done book, Weaver focuses on two men who figured in the story, Ohio Senator Joseph B. Foraker, who risked his political career by protesting Roosevelt's action, and Dorsie Willis, in the early 1970s the last survivor of the black soldiers mustered out of service. In 1972, Willis and his fellow infantrymen were exonerated by Congress, which voted to make their discharge honorable.
History is about what has changed.
While the land itself is more enduring, it, too, has changed. The book is Longoria's well-written personal lament of the shrinkage of the brushland in favor of agriculture, which is one of the Valley's economic mainstays, and a call for preservation of what little of the chaparral country remains. Any of these four books are good windy night reading.