A century before the arrival of Stephen F. Austin's colonists, Spanish settlers from Mexico were putting down roots in Texas. From San Antonio de Bexar and La Bahia (Goliad) northeastward to Los Adaes and later Nacogdoches, they formed communities that evolved their own distinct "Tejano" identity. In Tejano Journey, 1770-1850, Gerald Poyo and other noted borderlands historians track the changes and continuities within Tejano communities during the years in which Texas passed from Spain to Mexico to the Republic of Texas and finally to the United States. The authors show how a complex process of accommodation and resistance--marked at different periods by Tejano insurrections, efforts to work within the political and legal systems, and isolation from the mainstream--characterized these years of changing sovereignty. While interest in Spanish and Mexican borderlands history has grown tremendously in recent years, the story has never been fully told from the Tejano perspective. This book complements and continues the history begun in Tejano Origins in Eighteenth-Century San Antonio, which Gerald E. Poyo edited with Gilberto M. Hinojosa.

A century before the arrival of Stephen F. Austin's colonists, Spanish settlers from Mexico were putting down roots in Texas. From San Antonio de Bexar and La Bahia (Goliad) northeastward to Los Adaes and later Nacogdoches, they formed communities that evolved their own distinct "Tejano" identity. In Tejano Journey, 1770-1850, Gerald Poyo and other noted borderlands historians track the changes and continuities within Tejano communities during the years in which Texas passed from Spain to Mexico to the Republic of Texas and finally to the United States. The authors show how a complex process of accommodation and resistance—marked at different periods by Tejano insurrections, efforts to work within the political and legal systems, and isolation from the mainstream—characterized these years of changing sovereignty. While interest in Spanish and Mexican borderlands history has grown tremendously in recent years, the story has never been fully told from the Tejano perspective. This book complements and continues the history begun in Tejano Origins in Eighteenth-Century San Antonio, which Gerald E. Poyo edited with Gilberto M. Hinojosa.

Winner, Texas Reference Source Award, Reference Round Table, Texas Library Association, 2003 T.R. Fehrenbach Award, Texas Historical Commission, 2004 Since the early 1700s, women of Spanish/Mexican origin or descent have played a central, if often unacknowledged, role in Texas history. Tejanas have been community builders, political and religious leaders, founders of organizations, committed trade unionists, innovative educators, astute businesswomen, experienced professionals, and highly original artists. Giving their achievements the recognition they have long deserved, this groundbreaking book is at once a general history and a celebration of Tejanas' contributions to Texas over three centuries. The authors have gathered and distilled a wide range of information to create this important resource. They offer one of the first detailed accounts of Tejanas' lives in the colonial period and from the Republic of Texas up to 1900. Drawing on the fuller documentation that exists for the twentieth century, they also examine many aspects of the modern Tejana experience, including Tejanas' contributions to education, business and the professions, faith and community, politics, and the arts. A large selection of photographs, a historical timeline, and profiles of fifty notable Tejanas complete the volume and assure its usefulness for a broad general audience, as well as for educators and historians.

Although Mexico began its national life in the 1821 as one of the most liberal democracies in the world, it ended the century with an authoritarian regime. Examining this defining process, distinguished historians focus on the evolution of Mexican liberalism from the perspectives of politics, the military, the Church, and the economy. Based on extensive archival research, the chapters demonstrate that--despite widely held assumptions--liberalism was not an alien ideology unsuited to Mexico's traditional, conservative, and multiethnic society. On the contrary, liberalism in New Spain arose from Hispanic culture, which drew upon a shared European tradition reaching back to ancient Greece. This volume provides the first systematic exploration of the evolution of Mexican liberal traditions in the nineteenth century. The chapters assess the changes in liberal ideology, the nature of federalism, efforts to create stability with a liberal monarchy in the 1860s, the Church's accommodation to the new liberal order, the role of the army and of the civil militias, the liberal tax system, and attempts to modernize the economy in the latter part of the century. Taken together, these essays provide a nuanced and comprehensive analysis of the transformation of liberalism in Mexico. Contributions by: Christon I. Archer, William H. Beezley, Marcello Carmagnani, Manuel Chust, Brian Connaughton, Robert H. Duncan, Aldo Flores-Quiroga, Alicia Hernández Chávez, Sandra Kuntz Ficker, Andrés Reséndez, Jaime E. Rodríguez O., and José Antonio Serrano Ortega

Presents essays dealing with literature written by Hispanic Americans from the sixteenth century through 1960, evaluates individual authors, and examines the contributions of Latino authors in a multicultural, multilingual society.

This revised and expanded edition of the authoritative history of Spanish Texas features significant new discoveries throughout. Modern Texas, like Mexico, traces its beginning to sixteenth-century encounters between Europeans and Indians. Unlike Mexico, however, Texas eventually received the stamp of Anglo-American culture, so that Spanish contributions to present-day Texas tend to be obscured or even unknown. Spanish Texas, 1519–1821 undercores the significance of the Spanish period in Texas history. Beginning with an overview of the land and its inhabitants before the arrival of Europeans, it covers major people and events from early exploration to the end of the colonial era. This new edition of Spanish Texas has been extensively revised and expanded to include a wealth of new discoveries. The opening chapter on Texas Indians reveals their high degree of independence from European influence. Other chapters incorporate new information on La Salle's Garcitas Creek colony and French influences in Texas, the destruction of the San Sabá mission and the Spanish punitive expedition to the Red River in the late 1750s, and eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms in the Americas. Drawing on new and original research, the authors shed new light on the experience of women in Spanish Texas across ethnic, racial, and class distinctions, including new revelations about their legal rights on the Texas frontier.

Revising the standard narrative of European-Indian relations in America, Juliana Barr reconstructs a world in which Indians were the dominant power and Europeans were the ones forced to accommodate, resist, and persevere. She demonstrates that between the 1690s and 1780s, Indian peoples including Caddos, Apaches, Payayas, Karankawas, Wichitas, and Comanches formed relationships with Spaniards in Texas that refuted European claims of imperial control. Barr argues that Indians not only retained control over their territories but also imposed control over Spaniards. Instead of being defined in racial terms, as was often the case with European constructions of power, diplomatic relations between the Indians and Spaniards in the region were dictated by Indian expressions of power, grounded in gendered terms of kinship. By examining six realms of encounter--first contact, settlement and intermarriage, mission life, warfare, diplomacy, and captivity--Barr shows that native categories of gender provided the political structure of Indian-Spanish relations by defining people's identity, status, and obligations vis-a-vis others. Because native systems of kin-based social and political order predominated, argues Barr, Indian concepts of gender cut across European perceptions of racial difference.