Last November, a delegation of citizens from the far West Texas border city of El Paso made the long journey to Plymouth, Massachusetts. The purpose of the El Pasoans’ visit was to challenge Plymouth’s long-held—and nearly universally accepted—claim that it was the site of the first Thanksgiving to be held on what is now United...

As American migrant workers took to the fields in the first harvest season after the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (the sweeping new federal law to control illegal immigration), Herminio Muñoz, a sixty-five-year-old Mexican-American from Progreso, Texas, told the Dallas Times Herald: “We think there is going to be a...