Recovering the Hispanic History of Texas

Perales, Monica, Ramos, Raúl A., Perales, Monica, Ramos, Raúl A.

• Publisher: Arte Público Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781558855915
• eBook ISBN: 9781611927504
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The eight essays included in this volume examine the dominant narrative of Texas history and seek to establish a record that includes both Mexican men and women, groups whose voices have been notably absent from the history books.

Finding documents that reflect the experiences of those outside of the mainstream culture is difficult, since historical archives tend to contain materials produced by the privileged and governing classes of society. The contributing scholars make a case for expanding the notion of archives to include alternative sources. By utilizing oral histories, Spanish-language writings and periodicals, folklore, photographs, and other personal materials, it becomes possible to recreate a history that includes a significant part of the state's population, the Mexican community that lived in the area long before its absorption into the United States.

These articles, originally presented as part of the Hispanic History of Texas Project's first conference held in conjunction with the Texas State Historical Association's annual conference in 2008, primarily explore themes within the field of Chicano/a Studies. Divided into three sections, Creating Social Landscapes, Racialized Identities, and Unearthing Voices, the pieces cover issues as diverse as the Mexican-American Presbyterian community, the female voice in the history of the Texas borderlands, and Tejano roots on the Louisiana-Texas border in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In their introduction, editors Monica Perales and Raúl A. Ramos write that the scholars, in their exploration of the state's history, go beyond the standard categories of immigration, assimilation, and the nation state. Instead, they forge new paths into historical territories by exploring gender and sexuality, migration, transnationalism and globalization.

CREATING SOCIAL LANDSCAPES

Lost in Translation: Tejano Roots on the Louisiana-Texas Borderlands, 1716-1821

Francis X. Galán
Our Lady of the Lake University

IN THE SUMMER OF 1821 AT NATCHITOCHES, LOUISIANA, A SMALL PARTY OF Tejanos under the leadership of Erasmo Seguín met with a young, ambitious Stephen F. Austin and escorted him along the Camino Real into Nacogdoches and San Antonio de Béxar. The year before this peaceful encounter, a Spanish report listed twenty-two Indian nations in Texas divided into “friendly” and “hostile” camps with Caddos among the former and Comanches and Lipan Apaches among the latter group.¹ Lost somewhere in the transition period following Mexican independence from Spain are the roots of Tejanos in East Texas among soldier-settlers who traveled the Camino Real that stretched from Mexico City into present-day Louisiana at a place called Los Adaes and those with whom they came into contact with in the “Kingdom of the Tejas.”² Most telling is that a borderland emerged in the 1730s between Louisiana and Texas that held until the early 1800s without the bloodshed that scholars describe elsewhere in North America.³ Tejanos took advantage of whatever opportunities the borderlands offered far from Mexico City and so close to the United States that frequently required “finding the balance” among competing indigenous and Euro-American interests while negotiating changing identities at the edge of empires.⁴

Forgotten Borderland

The founding of the Spanish fort Nuestra Señora del Pilar de los Adaes (“Los Adaes”) and nearby mission in 1721 on the northeastern fringe of Spain’s colonial empire in Mexico was the culmination of historical accident and human misunderstanding. It represented Spain’s third, and final, effort to block French expansion from Louisiana. Following La Salle’s provocative but disastrous efforts to establish a French outpost on the Gulf coast of Texas in the late seventeenth century, the Spanish Crown imagined Texas primarily as part of a defensive perimeter protecting its mining communities in northern New Spain. Meanwhile, Franciscan missionaries viewed Texas as an opportunity to convert indios bárbaros into Spanish subjects. Yet the mission system of incorporation fizzled under both indigenous and European pressure, leaving the military as the only viable option for colonization, besides defense, in such a distant land.⁵ Rather than keeping the “enemy” out, however, the Louisiana-Texas borderlands that emerged at the Arroyo Hondo, a creek located about midway between Los Adaes and the French post at Natchitoches, became an imperial borderland as the Adaeseños (soldiers and residents from Los Adaes) settled onto the countryside and accommodated themselves to their surroundings in order to survive.⁶

Broadly defined, the Louisiana-Texas borderlands is the region from present-day Natchitoches on the lower Red River in northwestern Louisiana, westward across the Sabine River to the lower Trinity and Brazos rivers of East Texas, including the upper Texas Gulf coast east of present-day Houston to southwestern Louisiana. Its natural environment encompasses the western edge of the vast woodlands of North America that extends to the Atlantic coast, and hence a dramatic contrast to the mostly semiarid desert of northern Mexico. The eminent historian, David Weber, describes the borderlands of Louisiana and Texas as one of the “strategic frontiers within the Spanish Empire, areas that faced the possessions of other European powers” and where independent Indians held greater leverage. The Caddos in particular played Spain and France against each other since the region had been their homeland for centuries. Their geographic location on the margins of the woodlands, prairies, and plains, which historian David La Vere explains, essentially “functioned as a door between peoples of the Plains and Southwest and those of the Southeast,” positioning the Caddos as a people quintessentially “in between.”⁷ The Louisiana-Texas borderlands marked the tipping point of military, political, and cultural conquest between Anglo-American expansion from the east and the rising Comanche empire from the west on the Southern Plains.⁸

Tejanos also found themselves “in between” rising pillars of fire like their Caddo neighbors on this crossroads of North America, yet the story of the Adaeseños in particular is overlooked in Texas history for several reasons. Los Adaes was abandoned in the 1770s, and the archaeological site is located across the Sabine River state border in Louisiana near the present-day community of Robeline. Demographically, the Adaeseño community remained very small with no greater than 500 Hispanic residents.⁹ Its mostly ranching and subsistence economy remained in the shadows of the more densely settled and agriculturally developed bordertown at Natchitoches with its French and African creole population that lured both Adaeseños and Caddos into the emerging Atlantic market and slave-based economy.¹⁰ Lastly, there are no visible architectural reminders of Spanish missions like those of San Antonio. Descendants of the early Hispanic pioneers, however, are still found in the rural communities of Moral and Chireno near Nacogdoches, Texas, and the Spanish Lake and Ebarb communities near Robeline, Louisiana off the same old, beaten path of the Camino Real that blends into Natchitoches. The significance was not the number of Hispanic settlers or even physical structures, but the fact that they fit into the larger historical process of conquest and negotiating one’s identity amid the violence often associated with borderlands, smuggling, and immigration.

During the eighteenth century, the remoteness of the Louisiana-Texas borderlands, from legal ports of entry in Mexico and close proximity to French Natchitoches and Caddo settlements in the backcountry, made Los Adaes a smuggler’s paradise. Spanish Bourbon officials could not stamp out the burgeoning contraband trade in hides, horses, captives, cattle, guns, ammunition, tobacco, alcohol, ironware, clothes, and other goods. The nearest source of reliable Spanish goods was approximately 800 miles away at Saltillo in northern Mexico along the Camino Real. Adaeseños, however, more often found themselves smuggling in New Orleans and Natchitoches, where travel down the Red River to its confluence with the Mississippi was faster, and likely safer, than overland routes to the Rio Grande through contested boundaries of Apachería, Comanchería, and Spanish Texas.¹¹

For many years the governors at Los Adaes illicitly trafficked deerskins and buffalo hides at Natchitoches with the aid of officers and muleteers. Like their counterparts in New Mexico, the governors of Spanish Texas dominated this economic activity and left no opportunity for the development of a merchant or middle class.¹² Deerskins and tobacco became the effective currency of the Louisiana-Texas borderlands, frequently exchanged for desirable French and British goods similar to other backcountry regions in North America in what historian Dan Usner describes as the frontier exchange economy.¹³ Spanish governors at Los Adaes also circulated silver pesos along with livestock into smuggling operations at the expense of withholding salaries or properly equipping the troops, which became the greatest source of soldiers’ complaints.¹⁴

Smuggling, face-to-face bartering, and kinship ties defined commercial relations among the French, Spanish, Caddos, and Africans on the Louisiana-Texas borderlands. According to historian H. Sophie Burton, the Indian trade had been the “only systematic economic activity that linked the region to the Atlantic World.” But the rise of Spanish control over New Orleans in 1769 following the Louisiana transfer to Spain in 1762 increasingly brought the Louisiana-Texas borderlands into the Atlantic economy. Tobacco plantations and commercial livestock ranching in the region played dominant roles in social and economic relations as trade with dwindling Indian populations declined over the late colonial period. Spanish Bourbon economic policy encouraged tobacco cultivation through free seeds, agricultural training, African slaves on credit, and guaranteed markets in Mexico and Spain. Burton eloquently states that the “plantation system revolutionized the remote borderland by replacing the frontier exchange economy as the main framework for cross-cultural relations and encoding more strict and permanent notions of ethnicity and race.”¹⁵

Founding Mothers and Fathers

Three individuals who hailed originally from the Mexican border province of Coahuila and another from Los Adaes help flesh out frontier social development on the Louisiana-Texas borderlands before, during, and after its transitions into imperial and national boundaries. The first is Manuela Sánchez Navarro who was both doña and madame, the Spanish and French terms for a woman of nobility. Doña Manuela was born in 1697 at Monclova to parents originally from Saltillo. In 1716 at Presidio San Juan Bautista, Manuela married Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, a French-Canadian adventurer who became commissary officer and guide in the Ramón expedition that reoccupied East Texas for Spain later that year.¹⁶ The historian Donald Chipman says that St. Denis set events into motion that “would change the course of Texas history.”¹⁷ The same may be said about Manuela for she and St. Denis had seven children—five daughters and two sons. The first two were born at Presidio San Juan Bautista where Manuela remained behind for several years before rejoining her husband at the French Natchitoches post where their remaining children were born. Historians Chipman and Denise Joseph note that despite Manuela never having actually resided in Texas, she was “assuredly a high-profile colonial woman of importance to the province.”¹⁸

The newly wed madame Manuela Sánchez Navarro de St. Denis became a political, commercial, and cultural broker with real and fictive kinship connections from northern Mexico to New Orleans. Her story parallels that of a female contemporary named Angelina, a Caddo Indian woman from East Texas who studied at Mission San Juan Bautista on the Río Grande next door to the presidio of the same name. Angelina had served as a guide along with St. Denis for Spanish reoccupation of East Texas. By 1721, Manuela had rejoined St. Denis at French Natchitoches while Angelina disappeared from the written record.¹⁹ Over the next several decades, St. Denis became the godfather of the region in what Patricia Lémee has called “frontier trade cartels,” which made Manuela the godmother since both became godparents to French, Spanish, Indian, and African peoples on the Louisiana-Texas borderlands.²⁰ Manuela, much like Angelina, helped bridge the often violent encounters between men in Texas.²¹

Manuela outlived her husband, who died in 1744, and did not remarry unlike most widows on the frontier. She belonged to the elite class in French Natchitoches society with tremendous wealth, power, and influence. In 1755 at French Natchitoches, Marie de St. Denis, one of Manuela and St. Denis’s many children, married a Spanish deserter from Los Adaes named Manuel Antonio Bermúdez de Soto, and they carried forth their parents’ legacy on the Louisiana-Texas borderlands into the next generation. When Manuela passed away in Natchitoches in 1758, she was a landowner, businesswoman, and regional cultural broker. She was a trailblazer from Mexico who became a role model for young women from multiethnic backgrounds on the Louisiana-Texas borderlands.²² Manuela wielded significant power during the period of the Bourbon reforms that promoted the transformation of society under greater secular and patriarchal control.²³

The second unheralded person is Lt. Joseph González, a forty-year veteran at Presidio Los Adaes. He was born around the year 1700 in Saltillo and married María Gertrudis de la Cerda in 1720 at Monclova.²⁴ González and his wife arrived at Los Adaes after General don Pedro Rivera’s military inspection in the late 1720s. A military roster of Los Adaes in 1731 listed González as an español (Spaniard) with the rank of Second Lieutenant, evidently a recent promotion following the reorganization of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Hispanic History of Texas Project
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Building a Project to Expand Texas History
• Creating Social Landscapes
• Racialized Identities
• Unearthing Voices
• Contributors
• Footnotes