Havana

🏛️The era

Long before Texas was a state, or even a Mexican province, the lower Rio Grande valley was a frontier of the Spanish Empire. In the mid-1700s, Spain organized a new colony called Nuevo Santander on both banks of the river. Settler families founded towns on the south bank and ran their cattle and sheep across the brushland to the north.

In 1767 the Spanish crown sent officials to formally divide the river lands among the settlers. They used a distinctive layout called the porción: a long, narrow strip of land with a short frontage on the Rio Grande that stretched far back into the brush. That way every family got some access to river water, which was the most precious thing in a dry land. The strips were numbered, and Porción 46 is one of them.

Those old strip boundaries still matter. In much of South Texas, property lines, roads, and even land titles can be traced back to the porciones of 1767. Havana sits on top of that colonial map.

👥People & events

The marker names Don José Matías Tijerina as the man who received Porción 46 from the Spanish crown in 1767. It also preserves a family story about where the community got its name. On his way from Europe to the New World, Tijerina stopped in Havana, Cuba, the great Spanish port of the Caribbean, and the name stayed with him all the way to this stretch of the Rio Grande.

Over the generations, families took root here. The marker remembers the family of Josefa de la Garza Salinas among the early settlers. That's a good reminder that the women of these ranching families held land, raised households, and kept communities together on a hard frontier.

It also names Patricio Perez, a Union soldier in the Civil War. That detail may surprise visitors. Texas joined the Confederacy, but along the Rio Grande a number of Tejanos chose to serve the Union, and Perez's service is part of that less familiar side of the war.

In 1891 the people of Havana built a frame church and dedicated it to St. Joseph, giving the community a spiritual center. Many of the pioneers now rest in the Havana Cemetery, and their descendants still live nearby, which makes this a living community and not just a historic site.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Most American history lessons start in Jamestown or Plymouth and move west. Havana's story goes the other way. It began with the Spanish crown, came up from Mexico, and was organized more than a century before most of the American West was settled. Places like this were Spanish, then Mexican, then Texan, and finally American, and the same families lived on the land through every change of flag.

The porción system belongs to American history too. Spanish and Mexican land grants were recognized and argued over in American courts, and they shaped land ownership across the Southwest. Many Texans living today hold land whose title goes back to a royal grant like Tijerina's.

Patricio Perez's Union service adds one more strand. It shows that Tejanos took part in the nation's defining conflict, sometimes on the opposite side from the state's official choice.

🧭If you visit

Havana is a small community in western Hidalgo County, in the Rio Grande Valley near La Joya. It's a landscape of flat farmland, brush, and big skies, and the river is never far away. Look at the long, narrow fields and roads that run back from the river. The old porción layout is often still easy to see in the shape of the land.

The Havana Cemetery is the community's most personal landmark. Please visit respectfully. Many headstones carry the family names of early settlers, and families still tend their relatives' graves here.

Havana fits well on a drive through the historic Rio Grande Valley, where Spanish colonial roots, ranching traditions, and Tejano heritage show up in the churches, cemeteries, and small towns all along the river.