In 2016, Digital & Web Services and the Wittliff Collections worked together to create an exhibit based on material in the Dick J. Reavis collection. The National Tour of Texas is an interactive website based on Dick J. Reavis ’s 1987 year long journey driving every highway in Texas.

More recently Dick Reavis gave us permission to digitize and make available his 1978 book Without Documents, which sets out to examine the history of undocumented aliens in the United States. It examines the history of immigration, and in particular the history of Mexican immigration.

The entire book is now freely available in our Digital Collections Repository https://digital.library.txstate.edu/handle/10877/7761

The issues examined in the book are not only relevant forty years later, but have taken center stage in our current political debates. Dick Reavis was quite prescient in his final statement in the forward:

“For a variety of reasons, it is unlikely that Congress or federal agencies will do anything soon to resolve the question of undocumented immigration, or to alleviate the problems of immigrants themselves. Legislation currently pending in the Senate and House is largely of value for vote-getting purposes, and it is likely that undocumented immigration will continue to be an element in campaigning into the future. Therefore, this book should make important reading for a long time to come.”