LOOKING FOR DONA ESTEFANA ALONG MILITARY HIGHWAY

 

By Juan Montoya

As children living in San Pedro, west of Brownsville, we used to go picking wild raspberries from several bushes growing near an old cotton gin that used to stand across a ditch west of where Riverside Golf Resort is today.

Off in the distance in the cotton fields adjacent to the gin we could see several headstones from an old, abandoned rural cemetery, one of many dotting the side of the road historically used by the U.S. Army to shuttle between Ft. Brown in Brownsville and the Ringgold Barracks in Rio Grande City.

Whoever used that cemetery were long gone, and after a few decades after the berry bushes and the gin were also gone, the river levee was moved, the Border Wall built, and the cemetery disappeared under next year's cotton crop.

It wasn't until much later – in 2007 – that I was told by the late Praxedis G. "PG" Cavazos, that the State of Texas' Historical Commission was erecting a marker along Military Highway near the ancient cemetery which had belonged to Estefena Goseascochea de Cavazos y de Cortina, the descendant of   Salvador De la Garza, the original recipient of the "El Potrero  del Espiritu Santo" by King Charles III of Spain on September 26, 1781. 

It encompassed fifty-nine and one-half leagues (263,369.9 acres) including almost all of what today is Cameron County, Texas. 

The marker was placed along Military because just about all traces of her original ranch was gone, as was the cemetery which she stablished on that land and where she was buried upon her death in 1867 as per her wishes.

Her request was that she was buried in "El Campo Santo que yo tengo en este rancho de mi propiedad" (cemetery that I have on this ranch of my property), near where her home once stood. Her funeral was largely attended.

Before she died, however, she had built a substantial home on the property near Santa Rita, the first seat of Cameron County. She had also built a church so ranch hands and neighbors could attend. 

P.G. was the family genealogist and a member of the Cameron County Historical Commission and the driving force to get the marker near his ancestor's ranch site and cemetery.

I remember when he – before his death in 2014 – took me to see it after its erection along Military in 2007.

"The original ranch and its church and cemetery stood behind the Border Wall and the levee toward the river," he told me pointing toward the site of the old gin where we picked raspberries as kids. "That's all gone, too."

Fast forward to 2026, when author/researcher Dr. Marie Theresa Hernández, a professor at the University of Houston's World Cultures & Literatures Program Department of Modern & Classical Languages, who is doing research on a book of her son Juan Cortina, that the subject of the El Carmen ranch and cemetery came up an we decided to go look for any trace of either.

This past Tuesday, we went up and across the levee entry where the gin had stood and were able to drive along the cotton field looking for any sign of the cemetery or buildings. 

Everything was gone, but as we passed a spot near where the rural cemeteries register indicated the campo santo should be we spotted a bare spot not visible from Military or the levee with a lone marble tombstone surrounded by the cotton. It wasn't Doña Estefana's, but of another ranchito dweller who had been buried there in 1929, decades after she had been buried there in 1867.

To the rancher's credit, they have respected the only small patch of dirt in the field that indicated a cemetery had been there and have farmed around it. That is the only thing left of her ranch, the cemetery, and the El Carmen Ranch House.

The Espiritu Santo grant no longer exists, having been broken up and lost by Doña Estefana's descendants in the years after her death.
The process of dispossession involved lawyers, the courts, land-hungry speculators and other newly-arrived Anglo adventurers.

Dr. Walter Prescott Webb in his book, "The Texas Rangers", published in 1935 wrote: "Not only were the Mexicans bamboozled by the political factions, but they were victimized by the law. 

"One law applied to them and another, far less rigorous, to the political leaders and the prominent Americans. The Mexicans suffered not only in their persons but in their properties. The landholding Mexican families found their titles in jeopardy and if they did not lose in the courts, they lost to the American lawyers."

"One law applied to them and another, far less rigorous, to the political leaders and the prominent Americans. The Mexicans suffered not only in their persons but in their properties. The landholding Mexican families found their titles in jeopardy and if they did not lose in the courts, they lost to the American lawyers.

Such was the case of Doña Estéfana, members of her family and their grant. In 1852, Charles Stillman, after taking over a valuable portion which included the 1,500 acres in the present city of Brownsville and Fort Brown, from the Espíritu Santo Grant, continued his assault on the grant, leading to the Cortina raids, the worst border disturbances in Texas history.

Her son Juan N. "Cheno" Cortina is one of the most disputed figures in border history. Because Doña Estéfana’s son would not submit to intolerance and had the courage to stand against tyranny and oppression, he was branded a bandit (especially by his enemies) and by others a Latin Robin Hood. 

A military figure, he once captured Brownsville (September 28, 1859) and held it for 13 hours when he became incensed at American treatment of Mexicans whose lives were being destroyed by the post-Mexican War occupation. 

Today, Doña Estefana and "Cheno" are gone, but her legacy as Cameron County's largest land owner and pioneer settler remains on the same ground where she rests today.