On this day in 1861, Mission Concepción in San Antonio was solemnly reopened as a training center for postulants and novices of the Marianist order. Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña Mission was originally established in East Texas in 1716 and moved to its present site in San Antonio in 1731. The four San Antonio missions were partially secularized in 1794, a process that was completed with Mexican independence in 1823. In 1841 the Republic of Texas conveyed the title of ownership of the Concepción church and land to the Catholic Church, represented by Bishop J. M. Odin. Andrew M. Edel, a French Marianist, conditionally purchased the ninety-acre property in 1855 as a farming project to support St. Mary's Institute, a boys' school he had founded. The Marianists transferred the title of Concepción to the bishop in 1911. Soon afterwards an orphanage was built on mission grounds, staffed by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, who also built a convent there in 1926. Concepción is now part of San Antonio Missions National Historical Park.

On this day in 1924, the U.S. Congress established the United States Border Patrol as part of the Immigration Bureau, an arm of the Department of Labor. Its duties included the prevention of smuggling and the arrest of illegal entrants into the United States. During Prohibition smuggling absorbed most of the attention of the border patrol, as bootleggers avoided the bridges and slipped their forbidden cargo across the Rio Grande by way of pack mules. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt united the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization into the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and in 1940 the patrol moved out of the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice.From 1942 to 1964, the border patrol recruited Mexican nationals, called braceros, authorizing them to visit the United States for specific periods of time as legal agricultural workers. In 1954, however, as illegal immigration along the Mexican border soared, the patrol inaugurated Operation Wetback, a large repatriation project. The 1980s and 1990s saw an influx of thousands of immigrants, both legal and illegal, from Mexico and Central America to the Rio Grande Valley.

On this day in 1971, the three-day Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza started at Magnolia Park YWCA in Houston. Also known as the National Chicana Conference, it was the first interstate assembly of Mexican-American feminists organized in the United States. An estimated 600 women from twenty-three states attended it. Many of the participants were students, social workers, and others who represented the radical elements of Mexican-American women's political movements. Nonetheless, they were linked to earlier, more moderate women's groups, such as Cruz Azul Mexicana and Ladies LULAC. Gender discrimination, abortion, and birth control were given as much importance at the conference as inadequate educational opportunities, racism, welfare support, and employment discrimination. The conference participants were not, however, united. An estimated half of the delegates walked out of the meeting, urging that the conference focus on racism, not sexism.