A Spanish Borderlands Community: San Antonio

Jesús F. de la Teja

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
14 (Summer 2000). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 2000, Organization of American Historians
 

San Antonio de Béxar (the settlement's name honored the Duke of Béjar, brother to the viceroy of New Spain in the late 1710s) had its origin in Spanish imperial defensive measures. It was a trait shared by many other borderlands communities. In the case of Florida, Spanish St. Augustine (1565) was founded in response to French Huguenot activities along the North American Atlantic seaboard. During the reoccupation of New Mexico in the 1690s, following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Santa Fe was made a garrison town. In 1769 and 1770, Spaniards permanently occupied California by establishing garrisons, or presidios, at San Diego and Monterey. As a frontier military post, the presidio was as impermanent as the cavalry posts of the nineteenth-century American West. Like them, the garrison towns' legacy was to serve as nuclei of permanent civilian communities, some of which became important modern cities. Soldiers brought their families to the borderlands—which includes Tucson, Arizona, San Francisco, California, and Pensacola, Florida—where in time they acquired property and sank roots (1).

Soldiers, of course, were not the only Spanish subjects in the borderlands. Franciscan missionaries and civilian settlers also served Spanish strategic goals. From the earliest days of the conquest, Spanish policy was not simply to occupy the land, but to incorporate the native populations into the empire. The conversion process entrusted to the friars was, therefore, aimed not only at producing new souls for heaven, but new Spanish colonial communities as well. Particularly in Texas and California, a symbiotic relationship developed between presidios and missions, although only in the latter province did the Franciscan missions prove a widespread success.

Like the presidio, the mission was theoretically only a transitory institution. Once the work of organizing the Indians into a recognizably Spanish Catholic community was complete, land and chattel would be distributed to individual Indian families, the church would be turned over to diocesan administration, and the friars would move on to the next mission field (2).

The presidio-mission dyad served as Spain's primary means of extending its occupation of New Spain northward across an ever expanding frontier. In selected locations, however, purely civilian settlement efforts took place. The Crown, always eager to reduce the costs of maintaining garrisons and missionaries, looked favorably upon civilian frontier expansion. Unfortunately for the royal treasury, neither population pressures nor discoveries of precious metals compelled significant numbers of settlers beyond the Rio Grande or the Sonoran desert. Only in New Mexico did natural expansion of the Spanish colonial population lead to the founding of towns and villages, the most prominent of which was Albuquerque (1706). In California both Los Angeles and San Jose came into existence at the direction of royal policymakers. In Texas, the town of Nacogdoches was founded by a large group of settlers who had been uprooted from what had been the capital of Texas until 1773, Los Adaes (now Robeline, Louisiana). Unlike presidios and missions, towns were expected to be the ideal expression of Spanish civilization. Upon reaching the status of a chartered town, or villa, a Spanish settlement qualified for separate town government, which could exercise jurisdiction over the surrounding countryside. Towns thus formed the basic building blocks of Spanish government, and their infrequency in the borderlands attests to the region's frontier character (3).

In the case of San Antonio de Béxar, military, missionary, and civilian settlement coexisted for most of the colonial period. Originally established as a presidio-mission-town complex in 1718, it was augmented by the addition of four more missions between 1720 and 1731, and the location of the province's first civilian settlement in the latter year. Situated in fertile and well-watered prairie country at a strategic interval along the road between the Rio Grande and the Louisiana border, San Antonio became the province's nerve center and its most dynamic and populous settlement. The preferred home of governors, even before it became the official capital in 1773, San Antonio contained, as far as frontier circumstances permitted, the multiplicity of functions often associated with cities. It was a seat of secular and religious administration, a transportation hub, and a center of productive economic activity—commercial, agricultural, and artisanal. In the struggle for survival on a remote and often hostile frontier, San Antonio's disparate elements forged bonds of community that contributed to its endurance (4).

San Antonio came into being in the spring of 1718 when Governor Martín de Alarcón led a company of thirty-four enlisted men, including seven of their families, into the area and, with royal approval, established a presidio and a villa. Fray Antonio Olivares, who led a missionary contingent that included assimilated Indians from the Rio Grande area, described the founders of Texas's oldest city disparagingly as nothing more than "mulattoes, lobos, coyotes, and mestizos, people of the lowest order, whose customs are worse than those of the Indians" (5). Alarcón had recruited them in the frontier region of Coahuila-Nuevo León, and although they might not have made a favorable impression to a man of the cloth, they were seasoned pioneers.

San Antonio's earliest inhabitants knew exactly what tasks had priority in raising a mission and presidio out of the wilderness. Throughout New Spain's northern frontier, with the important exception of New Mexico, the Spanish did not enjoy the luxury of building on Indian foundations. Simple structures called jacales (composed of upright wooden poles, latched together, daubed with clay or mud, and roofed with thatch) served as the first dwellings, storerooms, and chapel. These buildings could be erected quickly and, given the circumstances, even more quickly abandoned. Having provided for their shelter, soldiers and the mission's cadre of assimilated Indians set to work clearing fields and opening acequias (irrigation ditches). In the meantime, Fray Olivares, accompanied by Indian translators and guards, turned to the task of attracting nearby bands of Coahuiltecan Indians to become Mission San Antonio de Valero's first "neophytes"—the name given to Indians under Christian instruction, meaning literally "new to the faith."

During the 1720s the settlement achieved a measure of stability, despite chronic Indian resistance. Lipan Apaches discovered San Antonio in 1720 and began a prolonged period of raiding, mostly targeting the presidio horse herd and supply convoys from Coahuila. In that same year the viceroy appointed the Marqués de San Miguel de Aguayo governor, and entrusted him with securing the province following a 1719 raid into east Texas by the French. His decision to increase the garrison to fifty-four officers and soldiers was a significant boost to the settlement, representing as it did a vote of confidence in the outpost. Also in 1720 San Antonio benefitted from increased missionary interest in the area. Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús, the most famous Franciscan to serve on the Texas frontier, founded Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo downstream from the presidio.

By the end of the decade San Antonio was evolving into a typical frontier community. About three hundred settlers--soldiers, their families, and a few civilians--planted subsistence crops of corn, beans, and squash; tended a small number of livestock; and performed various military duties. The missionaries tried to keep a fluctuating number of neophytes, between two and six hundred, as they taught their charges to perform the very same tasks that made up the everyday routine of the settler population.

One new skill the Coahuiltecan peoples learned side-by-side with the military settlers at San Antonio was construction. As nonsedentary hunter-gatherers, many of the mission residents made use of temporary brush lean-tos. The missionaries and their soldier assistants demanded work of a very different nature--cutting substantial logs for jacales, making adobe bricks, and constructing church buildings, storehouses, and stables along with family dwellings. Undoubtedly some Indians also worked on presidio structures. Aguayo had left for Coahuila in 1722 with a fortification well under construction. Workers had molded thousands of bricks, cut logs, and begun foundations. The fort was never completed, however, although the barracks, commander's house, and other garrison-related structures formed enough of a compound that, in times of Indian hostilities, wooden stockades could seal off streets and other gaps. When Brigadier Pedro de Rivera inspected San Antonio in 1727, he found the presidio under good management and the company so effective at responding to Apache attacks that he recommended reducing the garrison by ten soldiers.

Far more significant for the development of the community were two other actions resulting from Rivera's inspection. The brigadier found that the plentiful agricultural and grazing land in the vicinity of San Antonio would prosper under more intensive cultivation, and he proposed to send twenty-five families to the area to start a civilian settlement. He also recommended that another Texas presidio, located in East Texas among the Tejas Indians (for whom the province was named), should be closed. Over the complaints of Franciscans, who rightly argued that without Presidio de los Tejas the local Indians would abandon the nearby missions, Rivera's recommendation was carried out in 1729. By 1731 three of those missions had relocated to the San Antonio River valley below the original settlement. Missions Purísima Concepción, San Juan Capistrano, and San Francisco de la Espada, were the last missionary establishments on the upper San Antonio River and to this day remain, along with Mission San José, the most visible reminders of the Spanish presence in Texas.

Rivera's other recommendation also received attention, both in Mexico City and Madrid. In 1731, after almost two years of travel, fifty-four Canary Islander men, women, and children arrived, the first and last participants in an expensive and flawed experiment to populate a hostile Indian frontier with groups of Old World peasants. Unprepared as they were to meet the challenges of the borderlands, they nevertheless received privileges and favorable treatment, which contributed to decades of animosity with other elements of the settlement but granted them mythical status in San Antonio's history.

The Isleños (Canary Islanders) fought with everyone about everything. Having been granted sole vecindad (citizenship) in the villa of San Fernando de Béxar, adjacent to the presidio, they occupied all the municipal offices. Despite the fact that many presidio settlers--soldiers, retired soldiers, and their families--had more than a decade's residence in the settlement, the Isleños at first denied them citizenship and the attending land and water rights. They argued with the missionaries over access to water from the San Antonio River, use of Indian labor, and the right to be the primary agricultural suppliers to the province's presidios. Relations between the Isleños and San Antonio de Valero grew so poor that at times citizens removed the log bridge across the river that separated town and mission.

Gradually, the forces of integration restructured the relationships among the various sectors of the settlement. Small as the Isleño group was, those reaching marriage age had to find partners among the military settlers. Economic necessity required them to establish partnerships with members of the presidio community, just as it required them to realize that the missions represented business opportunities. A handful of Islander men even crossed over the line and abandoned their civilian status for enlistment at the province's presidios. The military settlers also brought pressure to bear on the Isleños for inclusion in town life. By 1741 they managed to get one of their own selected an alcalde ordinario (magistrate). As the original members of the town council died (the original Isleño regidores [aldermen] were granted life tenure), elections began to be held, and the custom of dividing the available posts between military settlers and Isleños took hold. As a result, non-Isleños, many of them of mixed Spanish-Indian-African ancestry, became successful petitioners for land and prominent members of the community in the latter decades of the eighteenth century.

The process of integration among the disparate population segments is evident in the sacramental registers of the town and missions, not only in the notation of marriages between members of different groups, but in the creation of ritual kinship bonds among them. Fernando de Veramendi, a petty merchant from Pamplona, Spain, established himself in San Antonio in the 1770s by marrying Josefa Granados, daughter of Isleño settlers. By the time he died in 1783, during an Indian attack on a mule train he was taking to Mexico City, he had become San Antonio's wealthiest citizen. He owned numerous parcels of agricultural land and house lots, as well as the most expensive house in town; operated a well-stocked general store; and served numerous times as a member of the town government.

Despite the occasional epidemics, losses to Indian attacks, and temporary reductions in the garrison's size, San Antonio could support a handful of people such as Veramendi because the settlement enjoyed a strategic location that made it indispensable to holding New Spain's northeastern frontier. As long as the Crown saw a need for a military presence in Texas, San Antonio's existence was assured. And as long as there was a military market for their produce, a small population of farmers and ranchers--often the same individuals--could maintain themselves and a few dependents.

The town's continued growth in the decades preceding the Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821) coincided with the decline of the missions. Although the south-central Texas region had seemed fertile ground for conversion efforts, the relatively small hunter-gatherer population provided insurmountable obstacles to the creation of self-sustaining Catholic Indian communities. On the one hand, disease, work regimentation, and cultural dissonance meant unstable mission populations, in which periods of successful recruitment were followed by precipitous declines. On the other hand, some Indians survived to become successfully assimilated and move into the civilian settlement.

By the early nineteenth century, San Antonio's population stood at over two thousand, made up mostly of mixed blood and Indian laborers, although all families who traced their ancestry back to the Isleños considered themselves Spanish. The settlement included an increasing number of outlying ranches, mostly to the east along the tributaries of the San Antonio River. Farmland was concentrated near the central settlement area in three large irrigated farms in which some townspeople owned individual plots and rights to irrigation water. Farming also went on, although on a strictly subsistence basis, at the outlying missions. Military activity had moved east of the San Antonio River, with one army unit occupying some of the old Mission Valero buildings. It was this unit, known as the Alamo de Parras company, that gave the future Texas Revolution battle site its famous name. The town center included two plazas, one in front of the parish church--which was periodically enclosed so that bullfights could take place during the Christmas season--and the other behind the church, dominated by a large stone house long occupied by garrison commanders and known today as the Governor's Palace.

Development came to a violent halt in 1811. As Mexico's decade of struggle against Spanish rule began, San Antonio faced a series of crises that could easily have wiped out the settlement had a sense of community and belonging not existed among its core population. But San Antonio survived to become Texas's most populous city in the nineteenth century and, along with Houston and Dallas, one of its major twentieth-century metropolitan areas. Visitors today can still find traces of the Spanish Borderlands community, as the city boasts of its ties to Mexico and the heavy Hispanic flavor of its culture. q

1. The single most comprehensive work on the presidio system is Max L. Moorhead, The Presidio: Bastion of the Spanish Borderlands (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975).

2. There is no single work that treats the Franciscan missionary effort across the Spanish Borderlands. An institutional overview that has remained influential since its publication over eighty years ago is Herbert E. Bolton, "The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish-American Colonies," American Historical Review 23 (October 1917): 42-61.

3. For an institutional view of Spanish town building on the frontier, see Gilbert R. Cruz, Let There Be Towns: Spanish Municipal Origins in the American Southwest, 1610-1810 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1988).

4. Discussion of San Antonio is based on Jesús F. de la Teja, San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain's Northern Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).

5. Quoted in de la Teja, San Antonio de Béxar, 18.

Jesús F. de la Teja is an associate professor of history at Southwest Texas State University. He is the author of a number of studies on Spanish colonial and Mexican Texas, including San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain's Northern Frontier (1995). He is also the book review editor for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and managing editor for Catholic Southwest: A Journal of History and Culture. His current projects include a socioeconomic history of the annual Saltillo trade fair and a popular history of Texas during the age of Mexican independence.