When Julio Provencio sold his lands along the Rio Grande border line between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua to Santiago Alvarado in 1885, he articulated a predicament that many Mexican landowners in his community faced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “I find myself in a sad plight on account of poverty and being quite old,” he wrote in the deed. He was selling, he wrote, because he could not “wait any longer for the fixing of the boundary line by the Governments of the United States of America and Mexico, in accordance with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.” He described his lot as “a piece of agricultural land situated on the left bank of the river of this Municipality [Paso del Norte] of the district of El Chamizal … which was abruptly thrown by the floods on the foreign side.” 1
Provencio’s deed exemplifies the tensions that were mounting between landowners in the urbanizing area along the riverbanks of the Rio Grande between the cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez over the course of the nineteenth century. Provencio was one of dozens of local Mexican claimants embroiled in what would become a century-long boundary conflict over a tract known as El Chamizal. Periodic flooding between the cities in the latter half of the nineteenth century caused the riverbanks to change shape and location over time, moving the Chamizal lands to the “U.S. side” of the river border and troubling the boundary established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Poverty and old age prevented Provencio from awaiting the resolution of the international dispute, which remained at an impasse until the Chamizal Treaty of 1963 returned approximately 630 acres to Mexico and relocated the river channel.