The ephemeral movement of capital, people, and ideas across the US–Mexico boundary has always been mirrored by and intrinsically related to the movement of everyday objects, goods, and materials— even heavy inertial matter like stone, excavated hundreds of miles from the US–Mexico border and carried north.
Oliver Cueva in front of his home in Manor, Texas, 2019; Courtesy of Sarah Lopez
As an architectural historian working at the intersection of material history and US–Mexico migration, I have been studying Mexican stone since I first noticed it about ten years ago. During research trips to Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán, I became aware that many of the buildings projected similar aesthetics; all were made from so-called local stone. This set me down a path that has spiraled into a larger book project on the history of Mexican stone and networks of labor, through which I met a stone distributor and architect from Nuevo Leon (but living in Austin, Texas) who introduced me to Oliver Cueva, the protagonist of this short essay. Here, I explore how his life, entangled with Mexican and American places and peoples, has resulted in a home that speaks not only to his personal trajectory but also to a macro history of inter- and intranational exchange. Indeed, evidence of an ecology of home building tethered to migrations and movements is nested in the history of Cueva’s house in Manor, Texas.
Cueva’s migration history mirrors in some ways that of his family. The Cueva family lost land and wealth during the Mexican Revolution of 1910–17 when his great grandfather’s hacienda was expropriated; the land was broken up into small parcels and redistributed in national efforts to abolish indentured labor and create a self-sustaining class of small-scale land-owning farmers. Political and social tumult ignited movement that continued four generations later. Born in Los Angeles, Cueva moved with his family back to Jalisco when he was a baby, only to return to the United States when he was six. Thereafter, he would make annual visits to Mexico during the summers, and it was in Mexico on his grandfather’s agave ranch that both Cueva and his father learned how to work heavy equipment. In Austin, Cueva’s father worked as a hauler, moving trash to landfills. Cueva remembers being eight and going to the yard where they parked the dump trucks. “I didn’t like it, but it shaped me. . . . I know what it is to start at the very bottom and build something.”[1]
Notes:
[1] Oliver Cueva, interview with author, April 2019.
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
Oliver Cueva’s cantera portales (arcaded porch) under construction, with a view of undeveloped land in Manor, Texas, 2019; Courtesy of Sarah Lopez
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Sarah Lopez