San Jose de la Mulada Ranch

🏛️The era

Long before Texas was Texas — before the United States existed at all — the lower Rio Grande belonged to a Spanish colonial project unlike any other on the northern frontier. In the mid-18th century, the crown sent José de Escandón to settle the region then called Nuevo Santander, planting river towns like Camargo on the south bank of the Rio Grande.

The land itself was parceled out in a distinctive way. Instead of square blocks, surveyors drew long, narrow ribbons called porciones, each with a short frontage on the river and a deep run inland. That shape was deliberate: on a semi-arid plain, river access was survival, and every grantee needed a piece of the water. Porción 74, the ground beneath this ranch, was one such ribbon.

By the time the marker's story begins, this was cattle country in the making — open, sun-scoured brush where ranching, not farming, was the way to make a living. The families who took up these grants were building a ranching culture generations before the cowboy of American legend ever rode onto the scene.

👥People & events

The paper trail here is unusually rich. Porción 74 was first granted to Pedro Lugo in 1767 by the king of Spain. Two decades later, on the day after Christmas in 1787, Pedro José Pérez bought the grant's 6,740 acres from Lugo — and it is the Pérez family whose name runs through the next two centuries of this land.

The Pérezes were not newcomers to the frontier. The family is remembered as having helped establish La Villa de Santa Ana with Escandón at Camargo back in 1749, and Camargo census records note Pedro José's marriage to Manuela de la Garza in 1769. They named their spread San José de la Mulada, and they ran it like a business built to last. An 1870 census counted 31 people living at La Mulada, and the family kept detailed ledgers recording what each worker did and what they were paid — an everyday archive of ranch life that most places simply never preserved.

The land stayed in the family across the generations; as late as 1968, Pérez descendants were still buying and consolidating acreage from other heirs. One descendant in particular caught the wider world's eye: Casimiro Pérez-Alvarez, a great-great-grandson of Pedro José. He rode as a deputy U.S. marshal along the border from Brownsville to Laredo — on horseback — between 1902 and 1913, and again in 1921.

The family's history was eventually recognized well beyond Starr County. La Mulada was featured as one of the oldest ranches in Texas in the “Los Tejanos: Sus Huellas en la Tierra” exhibition at the LBJ Library in 1997–98, and the family's saddle, rifle, revolver, photographs, and papers were displayed at the Museum of South Texas History in Edinburg.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

It's easy to imagine that American history on the ground began with wagon trains and the westward push of English-speaking settlers. Places like San José de la Mulada correct that picture. Here was a working ranch, held by one family and documented in its own ledgers, generations before the United States ever reached the Rio Grande.

That's the larger meaning of the porción system and the families who worked it: the ranching economy of South Texas is Tejano at its foundation. The cattle, the land grants, and the skills of handling stock on open range flowed north from these Spanish and Mexican beginnings into what the wider country would later romanticize as the American cowboy.

When an exhibition titled “Los Tejanos” — Texans of Mexican ancestry — set out to trace their mark on the state, a ranch like this one belonged near the center of the story. It is a reminder that the deep roots of Texas run through families who were here first, and stayed.

🧭If you visit

This is quiet ranch country in the brushlands of Starr County, far from the main highways, and that remoteness is part of the point. Stand here and you're looking at roughly the same horizon the Pérez family did — low, dry, big-skied land that rewards cattle and patience more than crops.

Come with the long view in mind. The value of this place isn't a grand building; it's the sheer depth of continuity, a single family's tie to one stretch of ground reaching back to a Spanish land grant. Let yourself feel how far 1767 really is.

If your travels take you down the Rio Grande valley, pair the visit with the Museum of South Texas History in Edinburg, which has told the Pérez family's story — and the broader Tejano ranching heritage — through artifacts like a marshal's saddle and revolver. It's a good way to put faces and objects to the names carried on this marker.