Alsace in Texas: Doctoral student wins Mellon/ACLS Fellowship for her research project

The United States is a nation of immigrants, a melting pot of cultures that eventually blends into a single American identity, or so the national myth runs.

But native languages don’t disappear overnight and cultural traditions may linger through generations, shaping communities and even the landscape. Patricia Markert, a doctoral student in anthropology, studies how a historic migration of Alsatian immigrants affected two communities in Texas, from their town planning to their language and the stories they tell about themselves.

A native of Philadelphia, she came to Binghamton University in 2015 to work on Anthropology Professor Ruth Van Dyke’s Castro Colonies Archaeology project, which conducts research and archaeological excavations in the Texas community of Castroville and the surrounding area.

Recently, Markert won a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, which will give her the opportunity to focus solely on her research and writing during the final year of her doctoral program. As a graduate student, it can be a struggle to juggle teaching, research, writing, committee work and other projects — not to mention the impact of the pandemic on financial security.

At home in her pajamas when she received the email, she greeted the news with shouting and tears.

“It was extremely unexpected and exciting! I had applied the year before and not made it, so I didn’t know what to expect this time around,” she remembered. “We celebrated by getting take-out and having a Zoom dinner with my family.”

A railroad divides

In a twist of history, Castroville and D’Hanis took two different paths to development owing to one simple factor: the path of a railroad.

They had similar origins. In the 1840s and 1850s, more than 2,000 people from Alsace — the Rhine region between France and Germany — settled on land grants west of San Antonio thanks to the empresario system, in which individuals or colonization companies were given government contracts to recruit and settle migrants on granted land. Henri Castro, a French empresario, was given a contract by the Republic of Texas and chose to recruit from the embattled region, which was subject to changing national borders repeatedly through its history.

He ended up establishing four colonies, including Castroville in 1844 and D’Hanis in 1847. Fun fact: one of Van Dyke’s ancestors was among Castroville’s original Alsatian settlers.

Twenty miles apart, the two communities were largely Alsatian and Catholic. In the 1880s, the railroad first came through Texas, bypassing Castroville by around 5 miles but running only 1½ miles away from Old D’Hanis.

Castroville remains the Little Alsace of Texas even today, with an Alsatian-style bakery and restaurants, a walking tour of the original stone homes and an Alsatian festival, among other features. D’Hanis, on the other hand, abandoned the original settlement and rebuilt along the tracks — becoming a historic railroad town like others in the country, with brick buildings, storefronts and a classic American Main Street.

“My research looks at how connections to Alsace – and that shared migration story – have taken different shapes through time in each of these places, through the stories people tell and the choices they make on the physical landscape,” Markert explained. “I am interested in how places are made in the wake of migrations and how landscapes, histories and heritage practices are created around migrations through time.”

The area’s architecture shows a mixture of Alsatian, Texan and Mexican elements, and residents’ language was also shaped by the migration. While use of Alsatian — a dialect of German — declined during the two World Wars, some native speakers remain until this day. In fact, several of Markert’s interview subjects grew up learning Alsatian, German and Spanish, and weren’t exposed to English until they reached elementary school.

Van Dyke conducted excavations at the Biry-Ahr House in Castroville from 2013 to 2016, and artifacts — ranging from bottles and ceramics to personal items such as toys, jewelry and shoes — are processed at the Castro Colonies Archaeology Lab on campus. Markert has directed the lab since 2015, and has trained more than 20 student volunteers. Several of them have since graduated and gone on to graduate programs and positions as professional archaeologists.

“Trish has brought tremendous energy and creativity to the Castro Colonies Archaeology Project. She is a superb historical archaeological, a gifted teacher and an inspirational mentor for undergraduates,” Van Dyke said. “I have been particularly impressed (but not surprised) by the way in which the local Alsatian-Texan community has embraced Trish ... and vice versa, over the course of her research.”

Van Dyke has been an inspiring mentor, and had a deep impact on Markert’s scholarship. Other guiding lights include Assistant Professor of Anthropology Sabina Perrino, D

For her own research, Markert digitized hundreds of historical documents, photographs and maps, and collected oral history from residents of the towns.

In 2018, she spent two months mapping and documenting several ruins in Old D’Hanis with a field crew of three recent Binghamton graduates who had worked with her in the archaeology lab: Hunter Crosby, Nolan O’Hara and Emily Sainz. While there, they also participated in community outreach, designing kindergarten and first-grade archaeology activities for a field trip, giving public talks and tours, and holding open houses. For their efforts, they won second place as part of the Society for Historical Archaeology’s Mark E. Mack Community Engagement Award competition.

In February and March 2019, Markert headed back to Texas for two participatory mapping workshops, where she invited local residents to add important places to large paper maps and share related stories.

Funding sources for her research include the Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Geographic and the Council for Texas Archeologists.

Even after earning her doctorate, she hopes to continue her Texas research in partnership with the communities there. She also loves teaching and community outreach, and can see different possibilities for herself — in academia, but also in the museum world.

Migrations aren’t isolated events, but take place within and alongside many other forces and movements, tying into larger ideas about nationhood, place and belonging, she explained. Markert wants to explore the roots of that thinking, and to flesh out how migration has shaped Texas and the Southwest.

“We often hear about the U.S. being a nation of immigrants, but this has meant so many different things — at different times, for different groups — throughout our history,” she reflected. “By looking at historic migrations and how those have been conceptualized, remembered and treated through time, we can bring present-day perspectives on migration into sharper focus.”