The real crime, Boullosa seems to argue, is not the mere act of stealing, but how theft becomes enshrined into law and then retroactively justified. By the end of the book, only a few months have passed. Nepomuceno’s brief, thwarted rebellion has failed, and an Anglo power structure is solidifying. The novel’s Robin gang, a band of bandit brothers “skinnier than mine mules” who started out robbing mail coaches, gain cachet by aiding the fight against Nepomuceno’s militia. The Robins spend their ill-gotten gains on bribing judges to wrest land from Mexicans: “They dispute with the rightful owners, accusing them of theft, and by using judges, lawyers, and witnesses—they were well trained by King, who had taught them himself—they became wealthy without so much as dirtying their shoes.” In relatively short order, they’ve achieved respectability; they’re now better known as “the Robin family,” even though, as Boullosa reminds us, “the blood of thieves, not nobility, still runs in their veins.”
Texas: The Great Theft covers the period when a fluid, hybrid world begins to take the shape of the “Texas Story” as told by the 1836 Project. The crimes it took to get there have been papered over by a heavily mythologized history. Greed and exploitation are reframed as “fortitude and nerve,” and the result—Texas as it is today—is presented as if it is not only natural and inevitable, but also righteous. Texas: The Great Theft isn’t so much a rewriting of the Texas story, though, as a gossipy undermining of it, one that exposes the whole grand myth as silly and self-serving, nowhere near what was really going on. {read}