The Viral Mexican “Joke” White Liberals Love That Needs To Die!
This story was originally published by The Pugilist with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
Since Tuesday night, my phone has been a nonstop parade of the same “joke” in slightly different fonts. It goes something like this: Greg Abbott spent years warning Texans that Mexicans were coming to take their jobs. Turns out he was right. One came for his.
It’s funny the way a root canal is funny. I laughed every single time, even on the fortieth version, and by “laugh” I mean I sighed, ground my teeth to nubs and developed a migraine.
The meme treats Gina Hinojosa, who is Mexican American, as the newcomer who showed up and took something. The history of Texas tells a different story. In this particular matchup, the name with the deep roots on that land belongs to the woman who won, not the white man she defeated.
A very old Texas name
Hinojosa is a Texas name in the oldest sense of the word. It was there before Texas was Texas. When Texas was Téjas, and part of the kingdom of New Spain.
In 1692, a Franciscan friar named Joaquín de Hinojosa received a land grant from the Spanish Crown, for property along the Rio Grande near what is now El Paso. That’s 144 years before the Republic of Texas, and more than 150 years before the United States drew its new border along that river. Back when half of what’s now the USA was New Spain.
In the mid-1700s, Spanish colonists under José de Escandón founded a string of river towns: Laredo, Mier, Camargo, Reynosa, Revilla. Hinojosas were among those founding families. Spain built no presidios there, so the settlers who got land were also its militia, farming and ranching by day and defending the frontier of New Spain whenever they had to.
Then there’s Rosa María Hinojosa de Ballí, who historians call the first cattle queen of Texas. She was the daughter of original settlers in the lower Rio Grande Valley, and she ended up controlling an enormous stretch of land there, at a time when a widow running an empire was not exactly the norm. Her family held the barrier island that still carries her son’s title: Padre Island, named for Padre José Nicolás Ballí. I know some of you are devastated to learn your favorite “beer keg till you need a hospital” spring break destination was Spanish first. You’ll get over it.
And just last year, two Hinojosa brothers from Texas joined the Sons of the American Revolution. They didn’t get in through some Mayflower line. They qualified through their fifth great-grandfather, Don José Manuel Hinojosa, a founding settler of Mier, whose frontier service under the Spanish crown counts toward that same revolution. Those Hinojosas have been Americans, in the broadest sense, since before there was an America. And long, long before Greg Abbott’s first ancestors arrived on these shores at all.
Meanwhile, the Abbotts
Greg Abbott was born in Wichita Falls in 1957. He’s a Texan, born and raised, and I’ll give him every bit of that.
Still, his surname arrived in Texas the way most Anglo surnames did: after the 1820s, when Mexico opened its northern province to American settlers, and in larger numbers after 1836 and 1848, when that land changed flags twice in twelve years. The people already living along the Rio Grande didn’t cross the border. As the old saying goes, the border crossed them.
So when a governor named Abbott spends a decade stringing razor wire and floating buoys across the Rio Grande to keep out brown-skinned people with names like Hinojosa, the joke writes itself. It just isn’t the joke the memes are telling.
The point
Gina Hinojosa’s mother was born in present-day Mexico, and her father’s family comes out of Brownsville and the Valley. Like millions of Texans, she carries both the old story and the newer one, and both are Texan. That’s the point.
In Texas, as in my home state of New Mexico, many Spanish names were written on the land before the United States existed. We did not cross the United States border; it crossed us. Hinojosa was among the first of those names. Abbott came later, and that’s fine. Texas has always had room for latecomers. It’s just a little rich for the latecomers to keep calling everyone with a Spanish surname with roots here longer than their own to keep assuming all Latinos are foreign in their own land. This is a stereotype deliberately created by Anglo-American land developers to justify theft of land in the American West through repeated violations of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It has become such a widespread misperception, perpetuated by Hollywood and the news media, that today we see many well-meaning white liberals defaulting to an ignorant, history-immune “joke” about Hinojosa that erroneously exoticizes Mexican-Americans and proves, yet again, how little most United States citizens know about the centuries of Spanish colonial history in literally half of their own nation.
Governor-elect Hinojosa didn’t come for Greg Abbott’s job. His ancestors came for ours, and our land.
Her name was pure Tejano long before his was.
Sources: Handbook of Texas Online (Texas State Historical Association) entries on the Joaquín de Hinojosa Land Grant, Rosa María Hinojosa de Ballí, and Land Grants; “Family shares historical roots,” San Benito News, Nov. 7, 2025.
