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Growing up in Brownsville, Cecilia Ballí would often hear members of her extended family say, “We used to own the island.” They were talking about Padre Island, the sliver of land that runs more than one hundred miles along the South Texas coast. Ballí’s forebears had come to the region in 1749, and ten years later, King Carlos III of Spain granted them the entirety of the island. But in the 1930s, a New York lawyer (now deceased) persuaded several dozen of them to sell him their land—about 27,000 acres—and to sell it cheap.The Ballís were supposed to retain a portion of their oil and gas rights and the resulting royalty payments, but they never received the money. All her life, the family would talk about…

The post The Ballí Saga on Padre Island Reminds Us That the Little Man Can Win appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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