Social settlements established in the United States in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century were important sites of literacy sponsorship for immigrant families. In Texas settlement houses differed from their larger Eastern and Midwestern counterparts in that they were founded against a backdrop of often angry anti-Mexican sentiment and in a region in which the white settlers themselves were often the more recent immigrants. An understanding of these differences contributes to a more complete picture of the varieties of social settlement experiments and their literacy practices in the United States.