300 Years of San Antonio and Bexar County

We Are All Visitors Here

People the world over have settled in San Antonio for millennia. Following flowing streams and their own dreams has led them to this verdant river valley in search of new opportunities and the chance to start new lives. We Are All Visitors Here focuses on identity, specific personalities, cultures, and the dynamic interweaving of values and ideas between them that created a new culture resulting from this collision of diversity. This new culture has most recently been celebrated by the city’s inscription into UNESCO’s World Heritage list; the inscription in particular addressed this new, dynamic, and continuing culture.

Lavanderas (Wash Day on San Pedro Creek) by Jean Louis Théodore Gentilz (American, 1819–1906). n.d., oil on canvas, h. 9 in. (22.9 cm); w. 12 in. (30.5 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, gift of The J. Laurence Sheerin Family, 2016.8.18. San Antonio Museum of Art, photo Tom Jenkins

A Munificent and Utopian Frontier

Tejano Legacy in San Antonio and Texas

TEXAS IS DISTINCTIVE because of its Spanish and its Mexican heritage. The people who founded Texas as a state were the first Spaniards who established the frontera line of northern Mexico, or New Spain, in the late 1600s. They were the first Texans. In Spanish, Texan was pronounced Tejano. Tejanos developed a distinctive way of life because they were in a unique environment in a remote region, between two frontiers. They also differed from other Mexicans because Tejanos were the first Mexicans to interact with incoming Anglo Americans.

In 1821, Tejanos won independence from Spain. Establishing their own democratic government, Tejanos drew on their Spanish and Mexican traditions to write laws and define a Texas lifestyle that Anglo Texans would later adopt as their own. Anglo Americans came into Texas because Tejanos had won their independence from Spain and forged a liberal government. It drew the Anglo American immigrants in overwhelming waves because of its liberal advantages. For example, Tejanos wrote their own land grant laws to give away Texas land to settlers, over four thousand acres per head of household, rather than sell it. Tejanos developed the first homestead laws, which protected a man’s land from foreclosure. They wrote the first community property laws, giving a woman equal ownership rights to the family land and to assets. Here, Anglo Americans encountered the first child adoption laws, which allowed a child to be adopted into a family rather than be placed in an orphanage, as in Britain. Tejanos were the first to dedicate state land proceeds for education in Texas. They were also the first Mexicans to adopt the American concepts of a trial by jury and a local sheriff and the first to have English and Spanish bilingual election ballots and religious toleration. And when capitalism developed in Mexico after independence, Tejanos were the most liberal promoters of a market economy. That’s what Anglo Americans came to Texas for. They were fleeing high tariffs, an economic depression, and land foreclosures back in the United States—and replacing those with free land grants and homestead protection from the Tejano government in Texas.

Free land—4,280 acres, free, forever, no foreclosure? No foreclosure for any reason, neither by the government for back taxes nor by any bank for mortgage default?

A democratic government, where a woman could own her own land? Where her house title was in her husband’s name and in her full name as well—not listed only as the property of her husband James Smith et ux? Even in twentieth-century United States, a woman had to fight to get her own bank account. Even today it is common for a woman to live in a home that a quick look will show to be listed as belonging to her husband et ux. Any home built before the mid-twentieth century will probably still belong to him et ux. Who is et ux anyway? That’s an Anglo American woman without the community property rights that Tejanas had back in 1820.

Bilingual ballots to vote for the mayor, or alcalde? English and Spanish both legal in the 1820s?

These were the liberal principles that Stephen F. Austin called munificent.

Of course, Anglo Americans had to learn to say lasso instead of rope, corral instead of stockade, and rancho instead of farm. But that was about as easy for them as learning to eat guacamole instead of corn pone. And few Americans, even today, turn up their noses at good ol’ guac. They’ve even learned to pronounce it in Spanish, waka moley.

All of this was found by Anglo American and European immigrants to Texas in old Béxar. Munificent, yes, but it must have been difficult for these early immigrants to relate these advantages to the 1820s Tejanos they encountered. One early immigrant wrote home to Tennessee to say that he had encountered some Tejanos eating a horrid stew. He said it had chilies in it and admitted that he had asked for a second bowl of it—with chilies. A big, black pot of deep reddish-brown stew must have looked repulsive the first time this Anglo American saw Tejano chili. Today, Anglo Americans in Texas probably eat more chili con carne on any day of the week than Hispanics do. But the first impulse so often for early immigrants was revulsion. It’s not difficult to imagine that many of them reacted the same way to the people they saw in the thatched-roof jacales surrounding the Military Plaza.

The issue is not one of how the early Anglo American immigrants came to love chili and the free land and the guacamole. It’s of how they related those advantages to the Tejanos they met.

Many of the early accounts or letters of the early Texians indicate that they had the same negative reaction to Tejano natives in San Antonio as they did to the horrid stew. Admittedly, some Anglo Americans, like Stephen F. Austin, wrote that these Tejanos were as sophisticated and well dressed as any American back in Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. Austin met and worked with José Antonio Navarro, Erasmo Seguín, and Governor Agustín Viesca. He was convinced that their vision of Texas was a better future for many Americans. It was a powerful vision of free land in the most fertile prairies he’d ever seen. This was the viable plan that Austin conveyed to his own colonists and to the thousands who followed them into Texas. Austin admitted that this plan was the legislative nest egg of the Tejano policy makers.

But as tens of thousands of Americans left their communities and abandoned their homes in the United States, many of them struggled to envision this utopian frontier being dandled in the arms of Mexican peons. Many Anglo colonists, like Green DeWitt and William Wharton, openly conflicted with their native Tejano neighbors, unable to accept them or even to perceive them as equals.

Was it difficult for the early Anglo American immigrants to equate the beauty and promise of Texas with the native Mexican residents in Béxar? Is it easy today for Anglo Americans to perceive that the greatness of Texas sprang from the native Mexicans who lived in the thatched-roof jacales of La Villita in the 1820s? Certainly, the Texas history books have not taught that Texas was built by the Tejanos before Austin’s colonists arrived. And yet, everything that Texas brags about today was Mexican. Tejanos were the first cowboys, vaqueros or buckaroos. Tejanos bred the world’s only longhorn cattle. They bred more cows than anyone anywhere else in the world. Longhorns don’t grow on trees, so somebody had to know what they were doing to propagate 6 million of them. Mustangs, descendants of Colonial Spanish horses and a symbol of the American West, are a DNA-testable breed that sprang up nowhere but on Tejano ranches. In Texas. Not Mexico. Not Spain. Nowhere in the world but Tejano ranches. All of these accoutrements of Texas are Tejano. Now, what self-respecting San Antonian isn’t proud of the SPURS? The BOOTS and SADDLES and SPURS are all Tejano.

Sobre la Huella by Jean Louis Théodore Gentilz. As the founders of Texas, the Tejanos had to develop their own distinctive way of life on the remote northern frontera of New Spain. They taught this unique Texas lifestyle to the settlers from the United States. Much of Tejano culture came from both medieval Spain and Aztec culture. In Sobre la Huella we see early Tejano law enforcers at work; they would be the precursors to the Texas Rangers. Witte Museum, San Antonio

Many American women today may not know that their ownership rights to property only exist because Tejanos taught Stephen F. Austin their community property laws.

Again, the issue is how many Texans relate their pride to the native Mexicans who lived in 1820s Béxar? How many American women today know that their ownership rights to their homes in Michigan or Massachusetts only exist because Tejanos taught Stephen F. Austin the Tejano community property laws? That a family in Tennessee today can adopt a child only because Sam Houston learned the Tejano child adoption laws here in San Antonio? There is no adoption of children in the Anglo Saxon legal tradition of old England or New England—only orphanages, as in the story of Oliver Twist. Tejanos knew that families were the pillars of their community, and they wrote laws to bind the members of the family as one. That’s why today an American couple can file jointly as one on the IRS Form 1040.

It may have been difficult for an immigrant from Alabama to conceive that so beautiful a law as the child adoption law could have been transmitted to American law by the Tejanos of Béxar. But it was the easiest thing in the world for a poor Tejano family living in the smallest jacal on the Military Plaza to bring a parentless child into the family. For him to share their last name, along with the other children in the family, with no stigma and to inherit the family land if he was the oldest son.

That is the stark contrast: the highly prized uniqueness of Texas contrasted with the unpretentious Tejanos, willing to take a back seat in the 1836 Texas Revolution to fight for the independence they had already been fighting and dying for since 1810. Tejano descendants sit by today and watch the celebrations of Texas independence and see the history textbooks that still depict Stephen F. Austin as the Father of Texas in 1836 and Mirabeau B. Lamar and Sam Houston as the great lawmakers who crafted the foundation of modern Texas education and economy. Nary a word about Governor Agustín Viesca, who plotted with José Antonio Navarro and Juan Martín de Veramendi to craft the land grant and homestead laws. Instead, Walter Prescott Webb wrote that the American cowboy casually discovered the Cattle Kingdom, just lying there, waiting for him to drive the longhorns north. Modern Texas schoolchildren can name the Texas cattle trails, like the Chisholm Trail. They can name the cattle towns, like Kansas City, Dodge City, or Sedalia. By contrast, how many Texans can identify the southern end of the Chisholm Trail? Where did the 6 million cows come from? Few Texans would know that the longhorns came from such great ranches as El Randado of the de la Garza family or La Noria Cardenena of the Cardenas family. The message for the seventh grade student taking the required Texas history course is that Texas did not exist before 1836. The Texan was born in 1836 in the Alamo, and Texas democracy sprang from that fierce independence. Tejanos do not fit in the popular creation myth of Texas taught to seventh graders.

Fandango by Jean Louis Théodore Gentilz. DRT Collection at Texas A&M University–San Antonio

Sworn affidavit from Francisco Ruiz testifying that Toribio Losoya’s body was found among the dead Texans in the Alamo after the battle of 1836. Ruiz and Losoya were two of the Tejanos who took part in the battle. Ruiz’s testimony also includes information on the identification of the bodies of Travis, Bowie, and Crockett and the funeral pyre Ruiz and others were forced to arrange. Bexar County Archives

That narrative has functioned in Texas for over a hundred years. Ironically, it’s not only Americans who have failed to see the Tejano influence before 1836. In mirror image, Mexico teaches a public history that implies that Tejanos ceased to exist after 1836 when Mexico lost Texas. One simple example of this is that the popular narrative in Mexico completely omits any mention or commemoration of the Tejano contributions to Mexico. Texas was the first Mexican state to print and publish its declaration of independence from Spain in 1823 after Hidalgo declared the Mexican Independence Grito. Tejanos fought one of the largest battles of the war for Mexican independence just 15 miles south of San Antonio. The Battle of Medina in 1813 was also the largest battle ever fought on Texas soil. Mexico hardly ever mentions and never commemorates that battle, where over 1,200 Tejanos lost their lives fighting for Mexican independence. Another example is the beautiful tejana dress that young girls wore to a Tejano fandango in Béxar, as depicted in the famous Fandango painting by Jean Louis Théodore Gentilz. Every September 16, when Mexicans in Mexico and in the United States celebrate the Mexican patriotic Fiestas Patrias, they traditionally display the regional dresses of all the states of Mexico. Dancing girls perform the traditional dances, displaying the china poblana dress of Puebla, the chiapaneca of Chiapas, and the jarocho of Veracruz. There has never been a replica or display of one of the most beautiful Mexican dresses of 1810 Mexico—the tejana. As seen in the Gentilz painting, the tejana would rival any of the other Mexican dresses, but even in Mexico, the Texas native culture is ignored. This traditional narrative is being challenged lately, not only because Tejano history is making its way into Texas schoolbooks, but also because the Tricentennial and other celebrations have begun to expose the discrepancies.

The most obvious discrepancy in the 1836 Texas creation narrative for San Antonio’s Tricentennial is the mathematical formula. Simply put, 2018 minus 1836 is not 300 years. The claim that the Texan was created in 1836 is an inescapable contradiction. Nor does it explain why the most distinctive Texas characteristics were already in place for a hundred years before Stephen F. Austin became the Father of Texas. The 300 years clearly predates 1836. To truly celebrate the 300 years, San Antonio must dig deeper to find the people of San Antonio in 1718, and those are the Tejanos, the native Mexicans of Béxar. It may be an uncomfortable epiphany, but the munificence of Texas predated immigration from the United States. And it was indeed in the swaddling sarape of a Tejano, smoking a cigarillo, speaking Spanish.

Another imperative in the Tricentennial focus was exposed by the UNESCO World Heritage Landmark inscription of the San Antonio missions. This international inscription was granted to the San Antonio missions, not to the major tourist attractions or only to the Battle of the Alamo site. Indeed, the wonder is not so much that the popular narrative is so heavily weighted to popular attractions as it is that so little attention has been given to the missions. Certainly, the City of San Antonio has collaborated with the state and federal government agencies to preserve and expose the missions to tourists, but little attention has been given to the role of the missions in Texas history. Even less attention has been given to the history of the Indians who lived in the missions. The Indian is as transparent in Texas historical discourse as the landscape or the stone walls of the missions. In contrast, Texas schoolchildren typically can name all the famous Texans who fought in the Alamo, but even the most knowledgeable San Antonians cannot name the tribes of Indians in the missions of Béxar.

Ironically, the heroes of the Alamo were in Béxar only a few weeks, while the Indians of the San Antonio missions were the major population base of Béxar for over a hundred years. They were the only people who were here before Béxar or Texas were even established in 1718. They were the only people who were living in Texas when La Salle planted the French flag near Matagorda in 1685. They were baptized as Christians under the flag of Spain, and they fought in the Battle of Medina for the Mexican independence flag in 1813. They remained in San Antonio during the time of the Republic of Texas, when even Tejanos like Juan Seguín were being driven out of San Antonio. They outlived the Confederate state of Texas during the Civil War, and their descendants are still living today in the environs of this modern city under the American flag. Indeed, they are the only people of Texas who are documented to have lived continuously in Bexar County under all of the iconic six flags over Texas. Few modern schoolchildren in San Antonio today could identify the bands of the Sarames, Papanac, Payaguan, Siguam, Pajalat (Pajalache), Pacao, Tilijaes, or Venados who lived in the San Antonio missions. And although San Antonio high schools are named for newly arrived immigrants who fought in the Battle of the Alamo, none are named for Indians who built the Alamo, the streets, and acequias of Béxar. The popular narrative has reserved the name Texan for colonists, while the natives are called Indians or Mexicans.

Fortunately, the San Antonio Tricentennial celebration has stimulated an interest in the natives of the Béxar of 1718. A local college, the Northwest Vista College, has conducted a project to identify and document thousands of direct descendants of the original native Indians who lived in the missions of San Antonio before 1836. It may seem unlikely for modern citizens of San Antonio to imagine that these outlying residents are truly the descendants of the original mission Indians, but history has recorded more than the names on the list being compiled by the Northwest Vista College project. The 1731 ordinance of the Spanish viceroy of New Spain archived in the Texas General Land Office in Austin decreed that the mission lands three and a half leagues South of Mission Concepcion be granted to the chiefs of the Venado and Tilijae Nations, for all those nations. Moreover, the decree specifically provided that the land grant was inviolable so that … they cannot be dispossessed nor have the title voided to the lands. Recently, scholars in Mexico have discovered documents in the church archives that record the daily lives of the San Antonio mission Indians. Most remarkably, they have discovered the pages of a bilingual dictionary that translates the native Indian words to Spanish. If published, this dictionary would represent not only a rare Rosetta text, but an imperative to develop the history of these original residents of San Antonio.

Spanish authorities granted full political authority to the Native American tribal government that included Governor and Mayor as conferred by the Acto de Posesión. This Act of Possession granted the inviolable title to the mission lands and named the Governor of said Pueblo the Captain of the Venados. Texas Grant and Land Office

The contrast between the triumphal Texans and the humble Tejanos of Béxar pales in light of the reality of mission Indians who once had official title to San Antonio real estate. But some of the mission Indians, like Canuto and Julian Diaz, had more than land. The Diaz brothers not only were born in the San Antonio missions, but both received veteran pensions and are recorded in the Bexar County archives as having served with Texian forces in the Texas Revolution. Their patrimony is not only the mission land, but also their record as soldiers and scouts along with Jim Bowie and the others at the Battle of Concepción and at the Siege of Béxar in 1835, months before the Battle of the Alamo. This reality strikes not only at the knowledge gap in the Texas public discourse but also at the very identity of the true Texan. If it is heroic to die for Texas independence, how much more valid is it to be born, fight, and die in a mission for Texas independence?

The mission Indians not only intermarried with the Spanish and Mexican Tejanos, but undoubtedly took their names and identified as Tejanos, then and now. Likewise, their service to the community was not limited to the independence movement. Many of them also served their community in law enforcement on the rugged frontera in times of peace. Just as Tejanos were excellent horsemen, they also adapted their superb vaquero skills to law enforcement in the unique compañías volantes, or flying squadrons. They were like the modern county sheriff, only mounted and not limited to one town. A unique, light mounted cavalry, the Tejano flying squadron patrolled the remote frontera with paramilitary authority. They had authority to deputize, to prosecute in any jurisdiction, and to execute summarily in the field. When Anglo Texan settlers like Stephen F. Austin were ordered by the Tejano government to organize their own flying squadrons, they called them the Texas Rangers. Like the Texas cowboy, the rangers simply adopted the Tejano clothing, methods, and vocabulary. Thus, the Tejanos gave Texas one more unique characteristic, not shared by any other state in the union. There probably have not been many books, comic books, or movies about a Michigan Ranger. The Texas Rangers are unique. And they’re as Tejano as chili. They are as Tejano as the names of rivers like the Brazos, the Colorado, and the Rio Grande. It’s why a Texan today gets in a car he calls a Bronco, drives down a street he calls Guadalupe across a river named Brazos, and sits on a patio next to a corral to eat his barbacoa. The Mexican Tejano culture is so ingrained in modern Texas life that many Texans may take it for granted. They may fail to see the Mexican in their own laws, culture, and value system. But if it were not for its Tejano culture, Texas would be Ohio or Michigan.

The promise of the San Antonio Tricentennial and the UNESCO World Heritage designation is that these commemorative events offer to augment the public discourse, not to revise it with perfunctory political correctness or to detract from the fame of Texas heroes. Celebration of the Tejano laws and history does not detract from Texas history. It enhances the pride and appreciation, it enriches the audience and the heritage, and it binds the modern community.

Andrés Tijerina

Waterways

The Life Blood of Community

LIKE THE FINGERS OF A HAND, five major rivers and creeks rise from and cut through the Hill Country before their downstream flow gives shape to the valley in which San Antonio is located. From east to west, these systems include Cibolo and Salado Creeks; Olmos Creek and the San Antonio River (conflated as the upper and lower watersheds of the San Antonio River); Leon Creek; and the Medina River. Each is fed by the crystal-clear waters of the Edwards Aquifer that bubble up from its springs, bogs, and wallows. Each periodically captures an immense amount of rainfall that can turn a relatively placid stream into a raging torrent. Together these watersheds form the upper reach of San Antonio River Basin, which encompasses nearly 4,200 square miles and extends from Kerr and Medina Counties to the northwest all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way, it drains approximately half of Medina County, the majority of Bexar, Wilson, and Karnes Counties; approximately one-third of Goliad County; and parts of Bandera, Kendall, Comal, Guadalupe, DeWitt, Kerr, Atascosa, Victoria, and Refugio Counties. It joins the Guadalupe River, but 11 miles north of where their combined course empties into San Antonio Bay. During its 240-mile run from its varied sources to its mouth, the San Antonio River covers a lot of ground.

This dynamic riparian ecosystem is also the reason why human beings have settled within this larger basin for more than twelve thousand years. Archaeological evidence confirms that indigenous peoples made extensive use of the local waters. They hunted and foraged along their banks and in their pools, utilizing the native flora and fauna for food, clothing, and shelter as well as for ritual and cultural purposes. To reach hunting grounds on the Edwards Plateau, indigenous peoples followed these waterways north and ascended through the passes that over the millennia the streams had carved out of the carbonate (limestone) bedrock; to take advantage of the rich biota of the coastal plains, they trailed south along the San Antonio River.

These early people migrated in an arc, west to east and back again, paralleling the Balcones Escarpment, the roughly 200-mile-long geological break between the plateau and the plains. That they did so was as shrewd as its timing was seasonal, for they sited a series of semipermanent settlements along this route to benefit from the artesian springs that once gushed forth from the fault lines of the Balcones. Like the legendary Blue Hole now surrounded by the University of the Incarnate Word campus in San Antonio, these were fertile locations and communal centers. They were economic nodes set within a far-flung trade network for the exchange of goods and services between these peoples and others with whom they bartered directly (and others they never encountered but whose existence they knew of indirectly, via the stories and objects that made their way to what the Spanish later would call San Antonio).

The richness of these landscapes—natural and human—were what first attracted Spanish