One of the most important goals of New Spain in the 16th through 18th centuries was to strengthen its occupation of North America through territorial expansion and settlement. While colonization was ultimately overseen from Europe by the Council of the Indies and approved by Spanish royalty, the actual development was carried out from the seat of government at Mexico City. Decrees affecting the welfare of a continent-sized kingdom were issued with patient anticipation for results that might take years to unfold and be analyzed. Therefore, when Viceroy Cerda Sandoval considered tactics for securing the northeast reaches of New Spain in the late 17th century, his appointment of resources to organize a province in the Tejas tribal region was strategic, not commemorative. Only in the centuries since his directive has its impact become clear: on January 23, 1691 the era of Spanish Texas was officially begun.
The purpose for boosting Texas settlement seemed straightforward in the 1690s: New Spain’s northern border was to be treated the same as Spanish homeland territory in Europe when it came to preventing French encroachment. But the attempt to plant mission settlements as a hedge in the territory adjacent to New France had not succeeded, and apart from the continuing appointment of governors for the static Tejas province, earnest development of the frontera region was set aside.
Furthermore, the turn of the century brought complications in the strange new arena of global politics. King Charles II of Spain died in 1700 with no immediate heir, and in the crisis of succession, Philip V—grandson to King Louis IV of France—assumed the throne for the duration of the debate. Fear sparked throughout the Old World that an alliance of the two countries created a superpower that could debilitate other European nations. But in the New World, the shakeup in monarchy had a different effect. The momentary calm between France and Spain opened a window of opportunity for their respective provinces on the northern rim of the Spanish Sea to deepen their roots in relative peace.
Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, a soldier and explorer of French Canada and Louisiana, was first to capitalize on the truce. After rallying his compatriots to build a French fort to found Natchitoches, St. Denis crossed into the Tejas province in 1714 to enjoin New Spain in amicable trade relations. He arrived at Mission San Juan Bautista in Nuevo León south of the Rio Grande and was detained immediately for his unlawful presence and possession of contraband. On justifying his purpose to authorities, St. Denis was not only freed, but deputized to join the return expedition of Domingo Ramón to East Texas in 1716. Ramón was bound for the north gulf region to jumpstart colonization in the area that flanked New France and benefit from collaborative trade for as long as the political accord lasted between their countries. For New Spain, the colonization was to be accomplished through the reintroduction of Catholic missions among the Tejas tribes.
The new religious communities would be developed and managed by Franciscan clergy from the missionary training institutions of Mexico known as “colleges.” One such foundation in the state of Querétaro, the College of Santa Cruz, had been co-founded by Damián Massanet, the president of the first mission to the Tejas in the 1690s. In the second campaign that was underway, Massanet’s student Isidro Félix de Espinosa joined the expedition to head the Querétaran effort. Guided by Ramón and St. Denis to the same area 100 miles west of the Sabine River where Massanet had burned the failed mission 21 years before, Father Espinosa tapped the families, livestock, and resources that had been brought on the expedition to institute a new mission of the same name: Nuestro Padre San Francisco de los Tejas. Within days, Espinosa founded two more missions in the vicinity: Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción and San José de los Nazonis.
The entourage also included representatives from other Franciscan colleges. Sponsors from Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe at Zacatecas, a college established by Querétaran alumnus Antonio Margil de Jesús, rounded out the religious contingent in Ramón’s vanguard. Infirmity had prevented Margil from launching personally with the expedition, but his associates succeeded in planting the Guadalupe Mission at Nacogdoches in behalf of the Zacatecan college. Margil recovered soon, caught up with Ramón and St. Denis, and participated in a 1717 follow-on expedition to establish Mission Nuestra Señora de los Dolores and Mission Los Adaes. The three Zacatecan missions that were founded either indirectly or directly by Margil lay to the east of the three Querétaran missions and closer to settlements of New France.
Mission presidents approached their evangelistic task with a panoramic excitement that was complementary to their vision for a vastly successful Spanish Texas. When Father Margil launched into his work, it was with fresh recollections of the religious effort throughout rural Guatemala and in the vast hub of churches at the Antigua capital. It was with savvy that he wrote to the viceroy in 1716, encouraging that “for the greater glory of God,” the mission scenario unfolding in East Texas be adopted as a “Nuevas Filipinas.” This vision for Texas drew from Margil’s extensive missionary accomplishment in the captaincy general at Guatemala while invoking the recent royal patronage of Spain’s King Philip II for New Spain’s other captaincy in the Philippine Islands. Querétaran counterpart Father Espinoza cemented the creative new moniker quickly in a letter of his own to the viceroy with hopes of prodding current King Philip V to endow the new territory in a similar fashion. For years to follow, “New Philippines” functioned as a semi-official name for the Tejas province.
The newly chartered missions confronted immediate and existential challenges. Though each was begun with an allotment of the expedition supplies transported from the Rio Grande, each also faced the need to become self-sufficient as rapidly as possible. Leaders set to work acquiring critical life amenities for anywhere from dozens to hundreds of new Catholic converts. For their part, parishioners who relied on the mission community for religious catechism also collaborated to hunt and forage for food and build their own rudimentary dwellings. Despite the industry of their first year, unexpected struggles came through drought and epidemic and resulted in the loss of hundreds of native lives. Their circumstances seemed to echo the ill-fated attempt of the 1690s to evangelize the region: hundreds of miles from their nearest Spanish neighbors and starving for critical sustenance, the Tejas missions might perish rapidly if not better supplied by Mexico.
Anticipating this situation, New Spain’s strategy for the broad Tejas province called for the creation of new stations at midway points between Rio Grande settlements and the new East Texas outposts. The appointed governor of Coahuila and Tejas, Martín de Alarcón, took control of development, and set out from Saltillo in 1718 to deliver goods to the missions that Ramón and St. Denis had established the year before. On their way to East Texas, he and Father Antonio de Olivares of the Querétaran College stopped at a site that they had scouted previously and christened Mission San Antonio de Valero; the mission would relocate twice in the same vicinity before settling permanently into the site where it is recognized today as The Alamo. Father Antonio Margil complemented the strategy of New Spain by planting mid-range missions in behalf of the Zacatecan College. A few miles downriver from Mission San Antonio, Margil founded Mission San José y San Miguel in 1720; a year later he fixed his attention on the gulf coast near Lavaca Bay to plant Mission Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo, which found permanent settlement later at modern Goliad.
Each new mission was instituted in anticipation of being eventually secularized—a status recognizing that its adherents had become self-sufficient in practices of the Christian faith and Spanish society. When the full mission population could demonstrate its ability to thrive with the autonomy of a typical Spanish community, Catholic clergy processed the transfer of their civilian constituency to local government rolls and reassigned their religious welfare to the regional diocese. More often than not for the Spanish missions of provincial Tejas, though, dreams for evangelization did not end with secularization. The floundering of East Texas missions increased to the point where all faced closure by their third year of operation. Complicating matters, Old World politics became a factor again in 1715 when the Treaties of Utrecht brought definitive closure to the issue of succession of the Spanish throne. The success of European nations in breaking the dangerous union of Spanish and French powers would shortly destabilize New World relations in East Texas. French soldiers overran Los Adaes in 1719, leading to the abandonment of the three easternmost Zacatecan missions. All six East Texas missions were revived in part or full by 1721, but the three struggling Querétaran missions closed operations in the region and relocated to join the Zacatecan missions already thriving on the San Antonio River in 1731.
Father Margil’s “New Philippines” vision for the Tejas province might have come nearest to fulfillment in the five Spanish missions that were grouped into a ten-mile stretch of the San Antonio River. It was in this setting where individuals who were receptive to the clergy’s religious message worked within a conducive tribal situation and viable geographic environment to form successful autonomous mission communities. As people and resources multiplied, missions matured from exposed clutches of rugged wood structures into broader complexes built from stone. Many compounds featured outer walls that were lined with cell apartments and inner grounds that contained gardens, granaries, mills, workshops, and chapels. Full churches of stone took decades of dedication to raise, and their architecture reflected the deep reverence of their constituents for Catholic tradition and Spanish design. Beyond the walls, members carried on aspects of mission life that were equally crucial to the sustenance of the community. Milk, meat, wool, and other products came from the cattle, sheep, and goats tended at remote ranch extensions of the mission. Fields of crops that were positioned adjacent to the river were irrigated directly by ditches, while remote fields received water over long distances via acequia canals.
Few of the missions that unfolded throughout the province matched the prosperity of those on the San Antonio River. Still, as long as the indigenous tribes that attracted the interest of Catholic evangelists also represented their greatest threat, no mission functioned free of struggle and fear. The strange new religious players in New World tribal relations faced the ironies of training their peaceful parishioners in techniques of self-protection and incorporating defensive features into mission architecture. An egregious reminder that Spanish leaders functioned at the edge of open danger came in 1758 when a band of mixed-tribe Indians raided the compound of Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá 150 miles northwest of the San Antonio River settlements, burning the structures and killing the priests. Fending off attacks of indigenous adversaries became equal with repelling international foes in the case for establishing presidios in missionary regions of the province.
New mission plantings tapered after the mid-18th century, and were accomplished primarily by the Zacatecan College. When the Querétaran College reprioritized objectives and recalled its workers back to Mexico permanently in 1772, authority to administer their missions was accepted by the Zacatecan College, who went on to found Mission Nuestra Señora del Refugio on the coastal bend of the gulf in 1793, the last mission of Spanish Tejas.
Featured image: “Convento y cupola, Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, San Antonio” by Textrella, all rights reserved.
Would you like to explore more of this topic?
Experts recommend …
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Our Catholic Heritage In Texas by Carlos E. Castañeda, Von Boeckmann-Jones Company, 1936 (rare). Castañeda’s work is, to date, the most definitive standalone resource exploring the Catholic mission component of New Spain’s campaign to settle the Tejas province. Volumes 1-5 cover the Spanish Texas era of missions. (Research online at HathiTrust Digital Library ) |
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A History of French Louisiana: Years of Transition, 1715–1717 by Marcel Giraud, LSU Press, 1993. The expansion French territory in the New World collided in Louisiana with Spain’s interest to dominate the continent. Giraud’s volume covers the brief moment of tenuous colony coexistence in the contested region of western Louisiana, as seen through the political lens of New France. |
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The San Sabá Mission: Spanish Pivot in Texas by Robert S. Weddle, Texas A&M University Press, 1999. San Sabá is the tragic story of a mission that perished in its infancy at the hands of a population that its priests had ultimately come to Texas with dreams of serving. Weddle’s account reveals not only a difficult chapter in early Texas settlements, but the characteristic sacrifices faced by frontier communities and their leaders. |
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The Art and Architecture of the Texas Missions by Jacinto Quirarte, University of Texas Press, 2002. Whether you have seen a Spanish mission up close or not, the historical background and visual documentation presented in Quirarte’s resource bring vivid new dimension to missions planted by the Franciscan Colleges of New Spain in the Tejas province. |
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The Spanish Acequias Of San Antonio by I. Waynne Cox, Maverick Publishing Company, 2004. To succeed in both temporal and religious objectives, Spanish mission leaders invested as much skill in designing water delivery systems for remote irrigation as they did in the masonry of stone for constructing churches. Cox reviews the technology of acequias—man-made channels for conveying water over extended distances—and documents the history and methodology of their use in each of the five 18th century Spanish mission operations on the San Antonio River. |
Original sources …
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Captain Don Domingo Ramón’s diary of his expedition into Texas in 1716 by Paul J. Foik, St. Edwards University, 1933. For 21 weeks in 1716, Captain Domingo Ramón of Nuevo León kept a journal of his expedition to East Texas. This firsthand account follows the party from its February 17 launch at Saltillo to its July 11 conclusion near Nacogdoches after the establishment of four Catholic missions among the Tejas. (Research online at HathiTrust Digital Library ) |
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Nothingness Itself: Selected Writings Of Ven. Fr. Antonio Margil, 1690-1724 by Antonio Margil De Jesús, Franciscan Herald Press, 1976 (rare). Father Antonio Margil de Jesús was a dynamic force in the shaping of the Texas mission field. Astonished by his sheer industry in Central America, parishioners and peers tagged him the “Flying Father.” This book, named for the title taken by Margil for himself—La Misma Nada, or “Nothingness Itself”—contains many of his private letters with notes, figures, and maps to provide readers with rich context for each correspondence. |
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Crónica apostolica y seraphica de todos los colegios de Propaganda Fide de esta Nueva-España de Missioneros Franciscanos Observantes by Fr. Isidro Felis de Espinosa, Nabu Press, 2011 (Spanish language). Original: Mexico City, 1746. Dubbed “Julius Caesar of the Faith in New Spain,” Father Isidro Felis de Espinosa was tireless in his effort to document the investment of New Spain’s religious colleges in the Texas mission field, of which this chronicle is the most widely known and consulted. (Research online at HathiTrust Digital Library ) |