Contested Geographies: Place-Making Strategies among the Indigenous Groups of South Texas and Northeastern Mexico

The borderland between northeastern Mexico and Texas has been a contested place for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. This chapter describes the strategies employed by indigenous groups to gain access to contested hunting territories, seek relevance in the pluralistic social space of the missions, and claim for themselves a small corner of the symbolic world of the afterlife. During Late Prehistoric times (750–1750), interband relationships forged through exogamous and patrilocal marriage practices served to gain access to otherwise inaccessible hunting territories. These same social strategies were later used to carve out contested social spaces within the pluralistic context