On the first day of the Siege of the Alamo, Juan Seguin helped Jim Bowie compose a letter to Santa Anna. The substance of the letter isn’t important for now…but how they closed the letter is. At first, they signed off with the customary “Dios y Federacion,” “God and Federation,” a declaration of their commitment to the Federalist Constitution of 1824. But then, before sending it, Bowie scratched out the word “Federacion” and – with shaking hand – wrote instead “Dios y Tejas”: “God and Texas.”

I’ve always understood this moment to be the great moment where Bowie, Seguin, and the others symbolically realized what they are fighting for: an independent Texas. But recently, I’ve come to wonder if this moment might actually be symbolic of a tragic misunderstanding. Maybe Jim Bowie and Juan Seguin – and for that matter, many of the others fighting for Texas in 1836 – had very different things in mind when they spoke of “independence.”

Fortunately for us, there was another Federalist War of independence in South Texas that took place just two years later. From 1838 to 1840, the people of the states of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas fought against the Mexican central government for their independence. They fought under the battlefield leadership of one of the most remarkable men in Texas history and – as best I can tell – the only Afro-Tejano to have a Texas county named after him. I’m talking about Antonio Zapata, the “mulato” son of a domestic servant and a cowboy born on the Rio Grande. For the better part of a year, Zapata reigned supreme as the uncontested military leader of the region and as the avatar of his people. With his army of Rio Grande vaqueros, Carrizo Indians, and Anglo-Texian volunteers, he held as many as three Mexican centralist armies at bay, and won the respect of his enemies and the love of his men. In following Zapata’s fight for Fedearlism, we get a sort of second run at the war of Texas independence, a control case - as it were - to help us understand what it was that Tejanos – like Juan Seguin, who will join forces with Zapata toward the end of his war –meant when they signed on to fight and die for “independence.” And I’ll tell you something now: in this light, Tejano independence comes to look like something very different than the classic, Anglo-American notion of independence as a “fresh start.” In fact, I’ll argue that it starts to look like something much more recognizably Texan. It’s looks like a fight for autonomy within a tradition, rather than independence from tradition.

To learn more, join us this season as we ride alongside Antonio Zapata and his fight for the Republic of the Rio Grande.

Las Villas del Norte

Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode 1: Las Villas del Norte. I’m Brandon Seale.

Out of the corner of his eye, Francisco Rocha saw something. Or more accurately, he felt something, because when he turned his head, he saw nothing more than the tops of a few young mesquite trees. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something out there, and two decades of working the brush country north of the Rio Grande had taught him to trust his instincts.

It was moments like this that reminded Francisco of the terrors that came with the freedom of the frontier. It was the freedom that had drawn him here, just as it had drawn the other first Spanish settlers of the lower Rio Grande valley. Yet this “freedom” that Francisco and the other early settlers of the Rio Grande sought wasn’t something that they were fleeing FROM. No, Francisco and his people were always moving TOWARD something, seeking autonomy WITHIN the tradition that had produced them moreso than independence from it. This is why one of the first thing that the residents of Revilla did after founding their town in 1750 was to build a stone-church, a reminder of the great Hispanic and catholic tradition of which they were a part and which at that time was the empire upon which the sun never set.

The residents of Revilla completed their red sandstone church in about 1767, the same year that the twenty-six founding families of the region were formally granted their ranches. These ranches were so large that they were measured in 4,400 acre “sitios,” and founding families were often assigned more than one. Revilla’s grants straddled the Rio Grande for thirty miles to the north, reaching halfway up to Laredo, each one touching the river along a narrow band just a few hundred yards wide but then extending inland for as much as five or ten miles. And in 1767, these newly patented ranches needed workers, which led the region to put out a call for goatherds, cowboys, and domestics from neighboring Nuevo Leon and Coahuila. Francisco Rocha had answered this call.

When Francisco arrived in the little town of Revilla situated on the south side of the Rio Grande near where it is joined by the Rio Salado, he found a splendid, fully-formed little community of maybe 500 or so people. And this was exactly what had been envisioned seventeen years earlier by the architect of the settlement of the lower Rio Grande, José de Escandon. Rather than relying on missions to turn Native Americans into Spanish citizens or on Spanish soldiers to bring their families with them when they established strategic forts, Escandon’s idea was to bring entire civilian communities and plant them, enteras, at their new locations. In some way, he was drawing on the old Spanish tradition of viewing the town as the basic building block of society. To use the Spanish terminology, it was villas, pueblos, and ciudades (depending on their size) that were granted rights by and against the Crown. It was villages, towns, and cities that ensured that the daily exercise of government continued uninterrupted even when the government was in dispute or when the seat of authority was far away. It was a system that had worked in the Iberian peninsula for the better part of a millennia, and had been perfected over two centuries in the New World by the time it reached the Rio Grande with Escandon in 1750.¹

Over an eight-year stretch, Escandon settled almost twenty such frontier communities throughout the region stretching from the San Antonio River in the north, arcing west across the Rio Grande, tracing the eastern foothills of the Sierra Madre, and ending down at the long-established community of Tampico. Most of these twenty little “pueblos” wouldn’t survive, such as the one that Escandon planted at the future site of Corpus Christi, Texas. But the five along the lower Rio Grande became spectacular successes. Recall of course that in 1750 the Rio Grande – or Rio Bravo, as they called it - wasn’t a border. The neighboring province of Texas ended at the Nueces and Medina Rivers. The Rio Grande was the heartland of this new province that Escandon called “Nuevo Santander.” The five pueblos along the lower Rio Grande – which grew quickly into “villas” - were Laredo on the north side of the River, and Revilla, Mier, Camargo, and Reynosa on the south bank in that order. In 1784, Matamoros was established on the Gulf Coast and would quickly grow to become perhaps the most populous and commercially important of the Rio Grande Villas.²

Yet precisely because these Rio Grande Villas were part of such a gloried and globe-spanning empire, they were pretty far down the list of concerns of the Spanish crown and its representatives in the New World. The entire Spanish imperial system, in fact, was set up to collect revenue from the fringes and funnel it back to the centers of power. It wasn’t designed this way out of heartlessness – it was simply expensive to administer and protect such a large domain! Appreciating that didn’t help you much though if you were Francisco Rocha, living out on the edge of civilization. And this was the downside of the freedom and opportunity that Francisco had found in his new life in Revilla: neglect. This became the great unifying grievance of the Rio Grande villas, a sense that their sovereign was supremely indifferent to their concerns. Indeed, the only real contact that a goatherd like Francisco had with his king was when he paid inflated prices for trade goods that passed through all the different middlemen, monopolies, and trade tariffs required for those goods to reach the edge of empire. And yet what did all of this buy Francisco? What protection did all of his dutiful remittances to the crown secure for him from whatever was rustling around out there in the brush now?³

Francisco shifted his eyes over to his goat herd, looking for any signs that they had picked up on the sounds that had unsettled him. But the goats grazed on, more interested in their next bite than in anything going on downwind. Francisco checked over his other shoulder, but again saw nothing. Francisco crossed himself and decided not to think about it any further. He nudged his mare forward, angling her into the grazing goat herd and pushing them toward fresher pasturage up ahead.

After his arrival in the villas in 1767, Francisco quickly married a local girl named Magdalena, with whom he would have three daughters over the next eight years. During that time, Francisco bounced around various ranches, learning the skills that the residents of the Spanish North American frontier came to pride themselves most on: stockraising and horsemanship. In more “civilized” parts of New Spain, a common man like Francisco would never have been able to afford a horse much less be permitted by law to ride one. Here, on the stockraising frontier, however, no one would have even tried to enforce such a ridiculous law. Around 1780, Francisco sought out work with the same the family that his wife, Magdalena, worked for most of her life, a family with a large ranch located about halfway between Revilla and Laredo on the north side of the Rio Grande.

Francisco was quickly promoted up to horsebreaker in his new outfit, a position of some respect in a community like Revilla. Being a horsebreaker also meant that Francisco was particularly well-attuned to his mount, so that when Francisco’s mare perked up her ears all of the sudden, Francisco’s stomach dropped. She too had heard something. Francisco scanned the horizon through the June morning mugginess, resting his eyes on 15-minute sectors long enough to detect even the subtlest movement. After several minutes of scanning, however, he again saw nothing.

Francisco told himself that he was just on edge. He had good reason to be. On his thirty-mile ride up the Rio Grande from Revilla a couple days prior, he’d stayed the night in a Native American village. The village was on full alert since a gruesome attack in Laredo back in March had left six dead and much of the town of Laredo smoldering in ruins. The “Carrizos” – as the Spanish called these friendly natives - openly wondered if their little village was next. Their village sat just a day’s ride south of Laredo, at a location that would later become Zapata, Texas, but that even into the 20th century, was often referred to by locals as “la habitacion” as in “la habitacion de los Carrizos.” Which was also a subtle acknowledgement that, unlike most other tribes in Spanish North America, the Carrizos had been given full legal title to their land. The Carrizos were actually very much a part of the community of the Rio Grande Villas. They had never been “reduced” to missions, and in fact by 1790 most of them spoke Spanish. In Laredo, they constituted fully 1/7th of the population. They were at least nominally catholics, though in truth they lived a mixed practice that included ancient peyote medicine rituals. Indeed, it would be the Carrizos that would pass their peyote rituals into North American native American religious practice, ironically, through the tribe that was terrorizing both the Carrizos and the Rio Grande villas now: the Apaches.⁴

Sometime between 1400 and 1600, the Apaches had followed the buffalo down the Great Plains and into Texas. The Lipan Apaches in particular broke off from the larger Apache Migration perhaps sometime around 1650 and continued to push south and east, into the regions decimated the century prior by European diseases and New Spanish slaving expeditions, the Lipanes now greatly aided by their weaponization of the horse. By the mid-1700’s, they appeared on the Lower Rio Grande – just as Escandon and his settlers were doing the same. ⁵

Initially, Lipan raiders had contented themselves with taking horses and livestock, and a sort of uneasy peace prevailed for the first generation of contact. But a series of raids in 1780 that left several dozen inhabitants of the villas dead marked a violent turn, for reasons that are hard to know but easy to imagine. The growing villas sat right on the key river crossings and trade routes across the Rio Grande. And by 1780, the Apaches had come to rely on a trade in stolen Spanish livestock to French traders in Louisiana to arm themselves against the newest arrivals to the Texas plains: The Comanches, who soon enough would make their presence known in the Villas as well.⁶

The 1780 Lipan Apache raids forced the Rio Grande villas to work together for their common defense, including with the Carrizos who decided to cast their lot with the Spanish. And in this coordinated action, you can begin to see the initiative, autonomy, and local control that the villas would so come to treasure. Starting in 1783, the Rio Grande villas organized citizen patrols – like the companias volantes of San Antonians we saw in Season 1 - against Lipan Apache raiding trails and watering holes in the region to their north. And they seemed to work. For seven years, there were no major attacks on the Rio Grande villas. Peace prevailed. ⁷

Which is what made the violent Laredo raid of March 1790 all the more shocking. The Lipans had returned! Yet intensified patrols since the March attack had found nothing. Even the Carrizo scouts who rode out with the companias volantes had been unable to find any clues as to where the Lipanes had gone or where they were going. Which was particularly concerning to a man like Francisco, who esteemed the Carrizos and their knowledge of the land above all others. The Carrizos had taught Francisco and many of his countrymen so much already: how to grind mesquite beans into flour, where to find sources of clay for pottery making, how to weave the fibers of native plants into rope or “ixtle” as they call it, how to boil the bitter bark of althorn bushes to treat the fevers that came with the recurring malaria outbreaks in the region, and more.⁸

Actually, according to Carrizo tradition, Francisco was himself part Carrizo. Which maybe helps to make sense of the name that some Spanish observers gave to the Carrizo language: “Mulatto.” Here’s what I mean. Normally, “mulatto” in the Spanish caste system of the period described a person of mixed Spanish and African descent: an afro-Spanish American. Which makes it a strange term to apply to an Indian dialect. But it leads one to wonder: Was there some kind of regular mixture of Carrizo Indians and afro-Spanish Americans going on in the Rio Grande valley at this time? The Rio Grande villas did boast an unusually high population of “mulattos.” According to one historian, “at one time or another African genes coursed through the blood of 25-47 percent of the inhabitants of the riverain villages.” Including through the veins of our own Francisco Rocha, who appears in the census roles – like his wife Magdalena – as a mulatto. ⁹

Like restrictions against the riding of horses and the wearing of spurs, rigid class and caste distinctions in New Spanish society decreased in direct proportion to one’s distance from the centers of authority. Everyone on the frontier had to work and, as a corollary, everyone - even “mulatos” like Francisco Rocha – had the opportunity to rise, as indeed Francisco had. Maybe this was yet another form of “freedom” that had drawn Francisco to the frontier: freedom in the form of opportunity. By 1790, the forty-something Francisco who had started at as a humble goatherd had been promoted from horsebreaker to caporal, or range boss, which gave him responsibility for two other goatherds who were out there with him campeando on the morning June 9, 1790. Francisco and the goatherds had split up the herd that morning to try to separate the animals as far as possible and maximize their grazing efficiency. So now, when once again Francisco was CERTAIN that he had felt a movement off to his left, he hoped/prayed that maybe it was just one of his goatherds come back to tell him something. Francisco rotated his hips, turning his whole mount toward the northwest, toward the movement that he had had felt, hoping/praying to see one of his companions riding toward him. Instead, a quarter mile away, he saw what he had not wanted to see: six Indians, themselves mounted, facing him head-on. They were tall, taller than his brother Carrizos, these Indians close to six feet tall, made to seem even taller by how comfortably and erectly they sat their mounts. Two of them carried man-length lances with two foot-long blades, ornamented with feathers; one carried a rifle; and the others carried longbows. All of them seemed to have either a club or a knife or both strapped to their waists, and painted buffalo-hide shields strapped to their backs. They wore pants of worked buckskin, with a slit up the outside fastened with buttons, tucked into high topped soft-soled boots – moccasins I suppose you could call them, but in truth they were brush-popping, snake-proof boots. Being summer, their painted, buffalo-hide cloakslay across their horses backs and their torsos were bare, except for the red, black, and white paint which decorated them. Their hair hung down their backs, some fastened at the nape of their necks, others ornamented with silver buckles, and others with braided-in horse tails which hung down to their horses’ croups. It was only once they were close enough for Francisco to realize that their faces were entirely hairless – no wisps of beard, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, as was the Apache fashion- that Francisco’s brain screamed at him: Lipanes! ¹⁰

He debated in his head what he should do: fighting them seemed out of the question. He carried with him a long club or “macana” and he could make a pretty fair weapon out his horsehair lasso, but he was simply outnumbered. He could try to talk to them, project confidence, and hope that they just wanted to trade. Not every encounter with the Lipan Apaches ended violently. Indeed, there were many in Revilla who made a tidy living buying livestock from Lipanes, nevermind that it was probably livestock that had been taken from their own countrymen somewhere else along the Spanish frontier. But something in Francisco’s gut told him that these six weren’t in a deal-making mood.

And then Francisco remembered his two goatherds. He was responsible for these younger men, he was their caporal. And maybe it was that thought that led him to spur his horse and ride. His little mare had been bred to have the quick reflexes of a cutting horse, and so she kicked up into a gallop almost from a standstill. Francisco and his mare rode hard, northeast, away from the River, following the property lines of the Rancho, trying to reach the other two goatherds…

It would be six months before Francisco’s body was found. The two other goatherds were killed that day as well. After the Lipanes finished them off, they then killed two more goatherds on a neighboring ranch. Then, two weeks later, they struck again, killing five more residents of the Rio Grande villas and taking six children captive. Between March and July of 1790, Lipan Apache raiders killed 25 people, took seven children captive, and stole or slaughtered 23,499 pesos worth of livestock. By September, the Lipanes had grown so bold as to attack the Presidio del Rio Grande itself just northwest of Laredo, where they killed twenty-two of the soldiers there! The entire Spanish Rio Grande frontier retreated in on itself, to mourn, to recover, and to figure out how to respond.

But they did respond. After they had dried their tears and mourned their dead, the residents of the Rio Grande villas rode out to meet the Lipan Apache threat head on, just as they would meet the Comanche threat, the Spanish royalist threat, the Centralist threat, the Texian threat, and every other threat that came their way in the turbulent first century of the Rio Grande villas’ existence. That’s what this season of our podcast is about, about a land and a people that have had to fight at almost every turn just to survive. Changing governments and changing flags have, more often than not, brought the residents of the Rio Grande more of the same: neglect and a mistrust of their deeply independent nature. Yet time and again, the people of the Rio Grande have risen up to fight for their freedom and to fight for their traditions. ¹¹

We don’t know exactly how Francisco Rocha’s youngest daughter, María Antonia, processed the trauma of her father’s death. But I feel like it says something that when her first son was born seven years later, she didn’t name him after her murdered father, or after her new husband: she named him after herself. As if she wanted to pass on her strength in the face of trauma, rather than the memory of the trauma itself. And indeed, her son, Antonio, would come to represent the concentrated strength of the Rio Grande frontier more perfectly than any man before or since. His strength would attract hundreds, thousands of men to him, men willing to fight and die for the independence of the land where his grandfather, Francisco, had been killed, and the land that would eventually come to bear his name. This is the story of Antonio Zapata, namesake of Zapata County Texas, and the baddest ass Afro-Mexicano-Tejano that you have never heard of. On the next episode of the Republic of the Rio Grande.

Thank you for listening. So many of you ask how you can support this podcast, and I’m so grateful for that, and this season I have a good answer for you: go to www.tinyurl.com/FindingMedina and support our upcoming digs to locate the long-lost Battle of Medina. In February of 2022, we will be conducting almost a month’s worth of field work to uncover archaeological evidence for the location of the Battle of Medina, the largest battle in Texas history. If you want to learn more about the Battle, go back and listen to Season 2 of this series…if you want to learn more about our search and our partnership with the 501(c)3 American Veterans Archaeological Recovery project, go to www.BrandonSeale.com

Editing for this episode was provided by Susana Canseco. Sound engineering by Stephen Bennett. The cover art for this season was created by artist Matt Tumlinson. Check him out at Matt_Tumlinson on Instagram. The theme music was performed also by Stephen Bennett, but it was actually composed by Mercurio Martinez. Mercurio Martinez was a Zapata County treasurer, school principal, and descendant of one of Escandon’s founding families. He was also the co-author of the first history of Zapata County, which he titled “The Kingdom of Zapata.” Deep in the stacks of Texas A&M’s Cushing Memorial library, you can find his collected papers, including a handful of corridos that he himself penned. The theme music that Stephen set to song here was from the score that Martinez composed for his Corrido de la Presa, the story of the construction of Falcon Lake, and of his role in preserving what he could of the communities later flooded by that lake.

I want to call out here for recognition in this first episode the work of Juan José Gallegos. A retired NASA engineer, Gallegos went back to get a masters in history from the University of Houston and produced an incredible thesis dedicated to the life of Antonio Zapata, which in part inspired this season. Thanks as well to Professor Stan Green at Texas A&M University in Laredo. Professor Green actually has a book coming out soon about these events and others, currently titled Villas del Norte: a History 1748-1821. Don’t forget to check out the Museum of the Rio Grande in downtown Laredo if you are ever there too, they have brand new exhibits that have just opened telling more of the story recounted here, and if you’re interested in the history or genealogy of the Villas del Norte, check out Moises de La Garza’s website, lasvillasdelnorte.com. Thanks additionally to Cesar Hinojosa, my touring buddy for these old towns in Mexico and descendant himself of the first founders there. And thank you to Javier Cervantes with the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation and Juan Mancias with the Carrizo Comecrudo Nation.

You’ll note that the modern, complete name of the Carrizos is Carrizo Comecrudo. Comecrudo means “raw eaters” a reference to the observation of an earlier Spanish explorer who noted that the natives of this region ate their meat raw. Well, I can’t help but observe that at almost precisely the point in his journey that placed Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca at this spot along the Rio Grande, he tells us a story about trying to cook some meat over a fire and having one of the natives run over and frantically slap it out of his hands. Which suggests to me that the regional taboo against cooking meat reached back several hundred years in this region. I just love these threads of continuity. And there’s a lot of them in this season, be on the lookout.

For more information generally, check us out at www.BrandonSeale.com.

Young Zapata

Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode 2: Young Zapata. I’m Brandon Seale.

The priest asked the 22-year old María Antonia Rocha de Zapata for the name of the baby boy that she clutched in her arms. “Antonio”, she answered him, the name echoing through the red sandstone church where she’d said farewell to her murdered father seven years prior, the same church where she had married her husband, Ignacio, a year and a half before. Ignacio was about twenty-six now, the illegitimate child of a more prosperous resident of their town, Revilla. Ignacio was also – like Maria Antonia - a “mulato,” a person of mixed but predominantly African descent. Which meant that their newly baptized first son Antonio Zapata was also recorded as a mulato in the baptismal register. The date was January 29, 1797.¹²

And that’s pretty much all that the historical record tells us about the early life of Antonio Zapata. But that doesn’t mean we can’t fill in some blanks.

First off, the fact that Maria Antonia, Ignacio, and little Antonio were “mulatos” didn’t make them exceptional in the frontier town of Revilla. By 1797, the year Zapata was born, the population of Revilla was more than 30% “mulato.” The role of Afro-Mexicanos and Afro-Tejanos is badly under-covered in the academic literature in both Texas and Mexican history, and hopefully someone will do something about it, but I think part of the reason it doesn’t get more coverage today is because the presence of men and women of African descent along the North American Spanish Frontier didn’t seem to merit much mention in the accounts of the time. Which is not to say that race didn’t matter, just that the shared hardships of the frontier were more defining for people at the time than the color of their neighbors’ skin. And indeed, the frontier had an objective and largely agreed upon way of defining the worth of a citizen: by his or her ability to contribute to the community, and particularly to its defense. Mulato shepherd boys were called on to fight alongside ranch-owning Spaniards, while mestiza servant girls stepped in to do the so-called men’s work when the men didn’t return home. One contemporary described the residents of the frontier as: “every citizen a worker, every worker a soldier, and every soldier a hero.” Some contemporaries went even further, describing the Rio Grande villas as straight-up “warrior villages,” adding that “there was not a single resident…that had not participated in military life.” ¹³

They had to. By the 1770’s, just a generation after Revilla and the other Rio Grande villas had been founded, the Lipan Apaches had established themselves as a permanent presence and a permanent threat to the safety of the Villas. Recall that it had been the Lipanes in 1790 who had killed little Antonio’s grandfather. The Lipan Apaches in all likelihood, were put off by the newcomers’ mucking up all their watering holes with their goats and sheep and blocking all the easy crossing points of the Rio Grande with the towns they founded there. And they had come to rely on stealing the livestock of the Rio Grande residents to sell to French traders in Louisiana for much-needed firearms, which the Lipanes needed to defend THEMSELVES against a new enemy pressing down on them from the north: the Comanches.

Yet the presence of this truly existential threat meant that everyone was NEEDED in the Rio Grande villas, whether mulatto or mestizo, indio or espanol. And by 1797, Revilla had grown to more than 1,125 people, representing a more than threefold increase since its founding in 1750. Almost the entire population increase in these years was from newcomers moving in. Infant mortality rates and the hazards of frontier life tended to prevent the population from growing from natural increase. Maria Antonia’s sons – she would have two more after little Antonio – were thus welcome additions to the little frontier town, no matter their skin color or ancestry.

After the horrific raids of 1790 which had killed Maria Antonia’s father, the Lipanes had raided again in 1792 and 1793. Which pretty well gives the lie to a claim I made in the first season of my podcast that by 1792, the Lipan apaches were a “broken nation.” They weren’t. If anything, the great Battle of Soledad Creek in 1792 that I had referred to simply drove the Apaches deeper into South Texas, into greater proximity with the Rio Grande villas. Yet the Rio Grande villas fought them to a peace as well, in 1799, when a Lipan chief came to Laredo and signed a treaty of friendship. The Rio Grande villas felt pretty good about themselves…for a few months. Then, that same year, the Comanches appeared, hinting at the real reason that the Lipanes had sought peace: because they couldn’t afford a two-front war. And yet the presence of their mortal enemies, the Comanches, would only drive the Lipanes to more desperate measures to provision themselves and protect their families, setting off another generation of frontier warfare along the Rio Grande.

This was the decade that young Antonio was born into. Even setting aside the constant attacks by “indios barbaros” as they called the Apaches and Comanches, life in the Rio Grande villas was hard. His mother worked as a house servant and his father worked as a vaquero. As you might imagine, these were not high-paying jobs; they may not have paid in cash at all. Antonio’s parents might have been paid simply in livestock – which the region was rich in – and which they would have used to supplement the little garden they cultivated at home with corn, beans, squash, and maybe some melons. Education was more of an informal affair in such a community, and if Antonio and his brothers were ever taught to read and write, they would have been the exception. Antonio’s practical education and frankly his distraction from the hardships of life came in the form of the region’s games, which were almost entirely horse-based: proto-rodeo events like steer-wrestling, bronc-busting, and horse-racing.

As soon as young Antonio Zapata had proven himself proficient enough in these “games”, he would have been sent out to help his father on the range. I like historian JJ Gallegos’s description of a young vaquero’s upbringing: “A vaquero’s life in the lower Rio Grande was one of enduring hardships. He often faced the intemperate extremes of life-sapping heat waves and bone-chilling nortes. He ranged a territory that was an arid chaparral where white caliche dust was easily disturbed into a suffocating aerosol cloud. The dust would envelop the perspiring vaquero and cake on his skin and further dry out an already parched throat… He became a jinete, an expert horseman, whose equestrian skills came to be admired and respected by the Anglo-Texans—one exclaimed that ‘rancheros.. .are unsurpassed by any people in horsemanship’ and another marveled that ‘They are astonishingly expert in the management of horses—not surpassed perhaps by any other people on this Globe.’ A vaquero surviving an apprenticeship in such an inhospitable environment, therefore, honed his survival skills to a fine caliber and all these skills gained in wrangling horses, cattle or other minor herds had an immediate application in the realm of premodem warfare: the vaquero became a natural cavalryman. He learned to fight much as an Indian did, many a time mano-a-mano. In this type of conflict, firearms became useless so he used a saber, a knife or a macana (billy club) with agile skill. Sometimes he prevailed; sometimes he did not.”¹⁴

Based on some of his later feats, we have every reason to believe that young Antonio was an excellent horseman. This would have brought him to the attention of the older men of the community, who would have watched his development carefully to determine the right time to invite him out on his first patrols north into the “wild horse desert.” And, also based on later evidence, it’s probably not unreasonable to believe as well that young Antonio had something about him that simply drew others to him. Maybe he was a naughty little boy, travieso, playing tricks on the priest during mass to the laughing approval of his friends. Maybe he had a knack for including kids from different backgrounds into his games. Or maybe even at a young age his peers could tell that his fearlessness would propel him to deeds they could only dream of performing. In any case, it was clear that young Antonio had a certain charisma about him, a mischievous little angel that followed him all his life attracting people to him and protecting him from harm.

Which might explain why another charismatic Revillan took an interest in young Antonio. Which in itself is a bit interesting on its face. For all of the democratizing effect of the frontier that I’ve raved about, as they say in Mexico, “Hay niveles” there are still levels, classes, and they matter. And this charismatic Revillan was of a decidedly different level than young Antonio. He was descended from one of the founding families of Revilla. Actually, his grandfather had been running livestock near the future site of Revilla even before the Escandon expedition formally founded the town. That’s how his grandfather had gotten hooked up with Escandon, because he already knew the land and because the Escandon expedition offered Grandpa a way to legalize an activity he was already engaged in: not paying taxes. Previously, he’d been avoiding them by grazing on lands that weren’t properly monitored by tax collectors. By joining up with Escandon’s first settlers, however, he won a ten-year period of relief from what one contemporary referred to as the “tyranny of the alcabalas,” the Spanish crown’s rather exhaustive and far-reaching tax system. Even after that ten-year period expired, taxes would remain a touchy subject for residents of the Rio Grande Villas, including for his charismatic grandson.¹⁵

This charismatic Revillan was a generation older than young Antonio, twenty-three years Antonio’s senior. Unlike Antonio, he’d probably had at least some form of primary education, if we’re to judge from the fact that his brother went on to become a well-read and radical priest, and from the fact that we have an abundance of writings from the charismatic Revillan’s pen himself. Using the power of his pen and the power of his words, this charismatic Revillan would go on to build one of the largest multi-ethnic armies that the continent had seen up to this point, an army which he often led from the front. He was a polymath of sorts as well: an accomplished rancher, a pretty talented merchant, and at according to at least one account, a passable blacksmith. At some point, he established commercial relationships in New Orleans, which would not have been unusual since New Orleans was the trading hub of the region during these years, but it was – like his grandfather’s early running of sheep on the Rio Grande – of questionable legality.¹⁶

The charistmatic Revillan was none other than José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, protagonist of pretty much the entire second season of this podcast. And the impact he is going to have on young Antonio’s life is further proof of the reasons we should all probably know more about him. Yet the truth is that we don’t know exactly how Gutiérrez de Lara and Zapata came into each other’s orbits. We just know that by the 1830’s, they were partners in some pretty extensive stock-raising enterprises that must have been going on for years. In the context of such a small town like Revilla, and in the context of the intensely local, almost clannish allegiances of the region, I find it hard to believe that Gutiérrez de Lara and Zapata hadn’t known about each other from a relatively young age. Antonio Zapata would have been thirteen in 1810, old enough to have started participating in some of his first Indian patrols, and I don’t think it would be unfair to speculate that it might have been during these patrols that these two men began to develop a bond. The camaraderie of the campfire after a hard day in the saddle is a place to really get to know someone, for an older man to size up a younger man and for a younger man to learn from an older one. And now that I am crossing over into older man status myself – certainly by the standards of the 1800s – and now that I have kids of my own, I’m gonna make a possibly controversial statement here: you can tell things about kids, about their personalities, even from a young age. It’s a little uncomfortable to admit that, we Americans in particular like to believe that we can reinvent ourselves at any age, but if we’re being honest, I think we’d admit that total personality reinventions are the exception, not the rule. The confident, inspiring, charismatic adolescent more often than not turns into the confident, inspiring, and charismatic adult. And it seems reasonable to believe that a mature Gutiérrez de Lara noticed something like this in young Antonio.

Or – since we’re speculating anyway - maybe it was an ambitious Antonio who made the first move, seeing in Gutiérrez de Lara’s various enterprises an opportunity for himself to improve his fortunes. Gutiérrez de Lara’s core business was simple enough: drive a herd of the nearly free-for-the-taking sheep, goats, cattle, and horses crawling all over the region – there were something like a million of them in the Villas del Norte by 1800 – drive them to New Orleans, sell them there, then use the proceeds to buy things like cotton, tobacco, or even corn, then bring it back to the Villas and sell it for two or four times what you paid for it…because you’d still be half the price of what the official suppliers were selling it for! As I’ve commented many times in this podcast, Spanish monopolies, tariffs, and other mercantile laws created strong incentives for those living on the border to seek extra-legal ways to procure goods from foreign markets. Yes, you could buy your goods the legal way, by buying them from middlemen who transported them from Cádiz to Veracruz to Mexico City, Queretaro, Saltillo, and then to the Rio Grande – or you could just go get them yourself in New Orleans for a fraction of the price. For example, 25 pounds of cotton sold for 2-4 pesos in the US around this time but for 7-8 pesos in Mexico because technically imported cotton was illegal. A fanega of corn sold for less than 1 peso in Texas but for 4-6 pesos in Mexico. 100 pounds of tobacco could be bought for $1-$1.50 in New Orleans and sold for $50-$75 in Mexico! One historian estimates that by the end of the 1820’s, two-thirds of the foreign products in Mexico had been imported without paying duties. ¹⁷

In the perverse way that restrictive trade systems often do, the Spanish mercantilist system essentially made smugglers out of honest citizens. No man wants to be a smuggler, but no man living on the edge of civilization should be asked to pay eight times a product’s natural price just to enrich some distant monopolist! And more over, what did all their taxes go toward anyway? It sure as hell didn’t go toward defending the homes of the residents of the Rio Grande villas, who had to look after that themselves apparently. What kind of system made criminals out of the very men who were asked to defend the borders of the empire that their taxes supported and for which they got little more than contempt whenever they voiced their complaints?

On September 16th, 1810, in the form a parish priest, Gutiérrez de Lara found a man who articulated his sense of grievance against Spanish rule better than anyone he had ever heard before. Gutiérrez de Lara’s full-throated support for Father Miguel Hidalgo might seem a bit strange, since the revolutionary priest put things more in terms of class and caste than in the crude commercial terms that you might have expected to appeal to the relatively prosperous son of a Creole rancher like Gutiérrez de Lara. But issues of class and commerce were related, then as now, in a way that the thirty-six year old Gutiérrez de Lara intuitively understood. The “privilege” that he possessed as a creole over the mestizo and mulatto members of his community was as arbitrary as the royal monopolies assigned to favorites of the king and as unjust as the duties that were assessed on the residents of the perilous frontier to pay for the projects of the comfortable center. And so from the start, Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara became an apostle for Father Hidalgo’s revolt. At great personal risk, he developed, printed, and distributed material advocating that Spain’s north American possessions should dissolve their allegiance to the distant monarch across the sea. And the people in the villas, particularly in his hometown of Revilla, began to agree with him. They had seen for themselves how a community might organize itself without a strict adherence to a caste system; most of them had worked alongside people of all different skin tones and bled the same blood in their joint fights against the “indios barbaros.” And Revillans of all backgrounds had felt the neglect of a distant government that viewed them more as a source of revenue rather than as fellow citizens worthy of the protection.

But just as his fellow residents of the Rio Grande began to come around to Gutiérrez de Lara’s way of seeing things, fortunes turned against Father Hidalgo. After reaching the outskirts of Mexico City, Hidalgo’s ragtag army was put to flight by royalist forces, and then pursued all the way to Guadalajara, where the royalists routed Hidalgo’s army. Hidalgo and his closest allies went into full-fledged retreat through the central highlands of Mexico and up to Saltillo. From there, Hidalgo’s plan was to try to get to San Antonio, amongst the famously independent inhabitants of Texas and closer to sympathetic sources of support in the United States.

Sensing the criticalness of the moment, in March of 1811 Gutiérrez de Lara resolved to ride out to Father Hidalgo’s aid, with twelve of his most trusted companions from Revilla. Fourteen year-old Antonio Zapata was just a little too young to ride with him…but not too young to follow attentively everything that Gutiérrez de Lara would make happen in Texas over the next two and a half years. On the next episode of The Republic of the Rio Grande.

This episode, by the way, was recorded at the Rivers Pierce Foundation in San Ygnacio, Zapata County. This town is incredible! It’s like a preserved Spanish colonial ranching town on the Texas side of the border. I really recommend folks making a trip down here, because I’m also pretty sure this place is due to get “discovered” by a broader audience soon. Check it out at posadapaloma.com.

Mexican Independence

Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande: Episode 3, Mexican Independence. I’m Brandon Seale.

After his defeat outside of Mexico City, Father Miguel Hidalgo retreated northward, bound for San Antonio where he hoped to regroup. Somewhere between Saltillo and Monclova, José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara caught up to the revolutionary priest, who appointed him his emissary to the United States. Without wasting any time Gutiérrez de Lara and twelve of his closest allies rode out of Father Hidalgo’s camp to the east. And not a minute too soon. Just four days after they left him, Father Hidalgo was ambushed, captured, and sent off for execution.

For more details on Gutiérrez de Lara’s epic journey that follows, I’ll refer you to Season Two of this podcast, but I’ll also give you the cliff notes version again here. In the course of just two years, Gutiérrez de Lara traveled from New Orleans to Washington DC, met with Secretary of State James Monroe, President James Madison, and many others, returned to Louisiana, built a multi-ethnic army of Tejanos, Native Americans, and Anglos, crossed the Sabine River, captured Nacogdoches, marched on Goliad, captured it, then marched on San Antonio, and captured it, defeating every Royalist army he encountered along the way and making Texas, arguably, the first former Spanish province in the New World to rid itself entirely of a Spanish royalist presence. And even the first punitive expedition that the crown sent to recover Texas was beaten back decisively by Gutiérrez de Lara’s army, which he proudly called the “Republican Army of the North.”

Following this string of victories, on April 6, 1813, Gutiérrez de Lara declared the independence of Texas: “We the people of the province of Texas, swearing by the Supreme Judge of the Universe the rightness of our intentions, declare that the binds that have held us beneath the domination of European Spain are forever broken; that we are free and Independent…” On April 17, 1813, he published a constitution for a provisional government of the state of Texas…But there’s something in that Constitution that I want to flag here that I didn’t notice in my first telling of these events. It’s the apparent inconsistency of Gutiérrez de Lara’s Declaration of Independence and of his Constitution when it comes to how independent Texas was really going to be. Here’s the opening line of Gutiérrez de Lara’s Texas constitution: “The province of Texas shall henceforth be known as the State of Texas, forming part of the Mexican Republic, to which it remains inviolably joined. [italics mine]” huh? How should we square this declaration of solidarity with Mexico with the rather unequivocal declaration just a few days prior that claimed the People of Texas to be “forever free of duty or obligation to any foreign power.”¹⁸

I’ve started to wonder if maybe “independence” meant something different to Gutiérrez de Lara than we would take it to mean today in the Anglo-American tradition. In fact, it created some confusion at the time as well, particularly amongst his Anglo volunteers. They were all for an independent Texas… but they were much more ambivalent toward a State of Texas “inviolably joined” to Mexico. This confusion may have contributed to Gutiérrez de Lara’s otherwise inexplicable overthrow by his troops in July of 1813 and his subsequent replacement by a young Spanish nobleman who promptly led the as-yet-unbeaten Republican Army of the North to total annihilation on August 18, 1813 at the Battle of Medina.

Gutiérrez de Lara was in Louisiana when news of the disaster in the Encinal de Medina reached him. And there he would remain – along with much of the male population of Texas and the Rio Grande Villas – for most of the next decade. This left an enormous generation gap back in the Rio Grande Villas. And seventeen-year olds – like Antonio Zapata – were thrust into positions of responsibility beyond their years.

Even at seventeen Antonio Zapata must have been a promising young man. He was an accomplished horseman, he was probably already a veteran of several skirmishes with indios barbaros, and he had probably already begun to attract other men to his orbit. In short, he was the kind of young man that men like Gutiérrez de Lara and the older generation of Revillans desperately needed now. Many of them had their property confiscated and were legally proscribed from conducting business in their own names after the Battle of Medina. Yet those men still had ranches to run, families to support, and taxes to pay. They HAD to reach arrangements with the younger generation to conduct their business in their names. Young men in the Rio Grande villas could suddenly command a price for their labor like never before. And the bolder the young man, the more he could command.

It was during these years that Zapata began to make a name for himself, as a man of integrity and a man of unique logistical ability when it came to planning complicated commercial operations. The Businessman in me would love to know the specifics of how Gutiérrez de Lara and Zapata structured their early deals, but all we can say for sure is that by the 1830’s, Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara and Antonio Zapata had been partners in the livestock business for some time. The relationship seems to have been one of investor and operator: Gutiérrez de Lara would stake Zapata on a herd of livestock, which he would drive to premium markets perhaps in Louisiana or perhaps just along the Texas gulf coast, and the two would somehow split the profits upon returning.

Of course, the decimation of the male population of the region only made this a more dangerous job than it had already been before. The occupying Royal troops weren’t particularly interested in protecting the property or the lives of the people in these rebellious and godforsaken frontier provinces, and they sure as hell didn’t want to go head-to-head with the Comanches, whom they also suspected – not incorrectly – of having assisted the frontiersmen in their uprising against Spanish rule. And so, Comanche raids became as regular as the full moon. During the eight-year period between 1813 and 1821, more than 300 residents of the Villas lost their lives to Comanches! In 1818, the town of Palafox just upriver from Laredo was wiped off the map! 37 of the 44 outlying ranches outside Laredo were abandoned! The road between Laredo and Revilla was marked with so many crosses memorializing victims of Comanche violence, that the road came to be known as the “Via Crucis,” a morose play on the Latin term for the “Way of the Cross.” ¹⁹

When it became obvious to the residents of the Rio Grande villas that the Spanish royalist troops occupying their towns weren’t willing to actually defend them, the frontiersmen did what they had always done: they took their defense into their own hands. They reestablished regular patrols of known watering holes and river-crossing points. In the absence of the generation above them, Zapata and his peers rose quickly to command these patrols. They rode in lightly-armed, fast-moving “companias volantes,” or ranging companies. Drawing on the equestrian traditions of the Iberian peninsula but modified to the conditions of the south Texas plains, the Rio Grande frontiersmen adopted the tactics of their native foes. They wore brushpopping leather coats and pants, and wide-brimmed felt and straw hats. They employed primitive shotguns, short rifles, and the occasional pistol, but relied more often on clubs, pikes, and even artistically worked lassos, woven from horsehair and ixtle yucca fibers. Seriously, they used lassos as weapons, roping their opponents from their saddles, and then finishing them off once they had gotten them onto the ground. Here’s too where you see how the skills that made a good cowboy and also made for a good cavalryman.

In the case of Antonio Zapata, even before he had reached adulthood, he had earned a reputation as both. He seemed even to enjoy battle, or at least to have some kind of natural aptitude for it. According to legend, he returned from his first battle with a pair of Comanche testicles around his neck. This story seems more likely apocryphal than real to me, but then you hear later stories and it doesn’t seem entirely implausible. The most famous tale of Zapata’s fearlessness begins with Zapata and his patrol stumbling into a much larger band of raiding Comanches. Zapata and the Comanche war chief see each other across the field, and call each other out. Zapata orders his men to fall back. He rides out in front of his line. The leader of the Comanche war party accepts the challenge, and rides forward to meet it. Zapata charges first, spurring his horse into a gallop. The Comanche sits motionless on top of his horse. Zapata keeps coming. The Comanche nocks an arrow. Zapata closes to within shouting range. The Comanches raises his bow. He draws the deer tendon string on his sinew-backed osage bow and looses his arrow. His aim is true this day. His turkey-feather fletched arrow parts the air and lodges itself in Zapata’s thigh, penetrating clean through to the horseflesh. But Zapata keeps coming! The Comanches wheels his horse to flee. But Zapata has the jump on him. Zapata catches up to him. Zapata grabs him by his long black hair and yanks him off his horse. Zapata reins up, dismounts, and walks over to the stunned war chief. Disdaining the pistol and saber strapped to his belt, Zapata stomps the Comanche to death with his bootheel.²⁰

With stories like these, it’s easy to see why Antonio Zapata’s legend began to grow. What’s maybe less intuitive, however, is how these kinds of stories probably helped make him an even more successful merchant. For all the stories of bloodshed we tell about the contacts between the frontiersmen and “indios barbaros” as the Spanish referred to the warlike Apaches and Comanches, the relationship between the residents of the Villas and the indios barbaros was principally commercial. Indeed, trade with Apaches and Comanches was a kind of a perk of the living on the frontier. Granted, trading with indios barbaros on the frontier brought with it significant risk and the almost certain knowledge that you were buying something that they had stolen from some of your countrymen living elsewhere on the frontier. Lipan Apaches stole cattle, horses, and anything they could drive away, but Comanches mainly stole horses, which held a special place in their culture and which they could also sell to horse-hungry Anglo-American traders who had recently replaced the French in Louisiana. And often, some of the best Indian fighters were also some of the most successful Indian traders. I’m thinking of Jose Francisco Ruiz up in San Antonio, another close ally of Gutiérrez de Lara, by the way, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t have been the case for someone like Antonio Zapata as well.²¹

Here too is where Zapata’s bravery on the field of battle against the Comanches might have brought him some commercial advantage in doing business with them. Comanche culture valued individual bravery, as did Lipan Apache culture and as did the culture of the Spanish frontier. Valiant fighters were the sports heroes of their day, and even if you don’t like LeBron James no one would dare deny his celebrity. By 1820 or so, Zapata started to become a bit of celebrity in Comanche camps. They called him “Sombrero de Manteca,” which literally translates to “Lard-hat,” but that doesn’t really do the name justice. The idea is more, “Sweaty hat,” as in the hat of someone who has worked their way up by the “sweat of their brow.” If you wear a cowboy hat for enough working hours in the saddle, the layers of grease and sweat from your head will eventually soak through the band. Somebody with a “sombrero mantecoso,” then, is an experienced hand, somebody that has spent a lot of time in the saddle and isn’t afraid of hard work. The idea, I think, was that Zapata’s “sweat-stained hat” was a mark of his work ethic and his experience, a term of respect for a hard-working SOB who got where he did because he earned it. And this recognition protected Zapata to some degree on the open plains, and also probably brought to him more and better commercial opportunities.

In May of 1821, the now twenty-four year old Zapata married Asunción Salinas, an orphan of the frontier of similarly humble origins to Zapata. They would go on to have five children over the coming years, four of whom would survive childhood, all four girls. And something else happened in 1821. Eleven years after Father Hidalgo’s grito, the armies of Mexican independence marched into Mexico City, victorious at last. Yet this isn’t as a triumphant or satisfying as you might suppose. Because the leaders of the army that marched into Mexico City in 1821 were for the most part the same men who had been fighting to oppose it for most of the previous decade. They switched sides when they realized that in an independent Mexico, THEY would be the ruling class, rather than simply PROXIES for an absentee ruling class in Spain. And indeed, when they took power, it was unclear whether outspoken opponents of the old regime such as the exiled Gutiérrez de Lara would even be permitted to return to the country.²²

By 1824, however, a new, much more revolutionary class had taken over the reins of Mexican government. This new class was decidedly Republican, “Federalist” in the new, post-Mexican independence terminology. And to these Federalists, old Republicans like Gutiérrez de Lara were heroes. In 1824, the federalist state legislature of Tamaulipas - the successor state to Nuevo Santander – acclaimed Gutiérrez de Lara the first governor of the new state. Soon after he had returned to take up that post, in 1825, Gutiérrez de Lara was appointed by the federal government as supreme military commander of Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, and Texas – effectively making him the successor to the man who had so violently quashed his independence movement in 1813 at the Battle of Medina, an impressive turnaround for a man who had been living in exile for the previous decade.

Twenty-eight years old in 1825, things seemed promising for Zapata as well. In addition to having friends in high places, Zapata was entering the prime of his adult years, and beginning to accumulate some real wealth and status. At some point along the way, he bought a house on the central plaza of Revilla for his wife and four daughters, a declaration of his arrival on the scene and of his optimism.

Yet despite having won their independence, not a lot changed. Even having local-boy Gutiérrez de Lara as Comandante of the Northeastern provinces couldn’t prevent problems with the Lipanes and Comanches. People in the Rio grande villas might have anticipated Gutiérrez de Lara to be more responsive to their decades’-old pleas for help in defending their communities, and yet Gutiérrez de Lara in reality was a commandant without an army. The few troops he nominally commanded were tied down in port towns like Matamoros and Tampico to protect their customs houses from the ever-present threat of attack by Spain and other foreign powers. The customs houses which were still charging the same, confiscatory tariffs that had so oppressed residents of the Rio Grande villas for the last half century, only now they were the new Mexican government’s primary source of revenue, which made it even less likely that they would ever change them! Suddenly, Gutiérrez de Lara might have had a different perspective on the neglect that he had so criticized the Spanish crown for. Even he couldn’t bring himself now to pull away his few regular troops from revenue-collecting ports to deal with a bunch of fast-moving indios barbaros located God-knows-where.

Which left folks like Antonio Zapata back in Revilla wondering what this whole independence thing had really been for. The real decision-making power, it seemed, was still located far, far away from the Rio Grande frontier. The new ruling class of Mexico City seemed just as indifferent to the plight of the residents of the frontier as the ruling class back in Madrid had been. And perhaps even moreso than the rulers back in Madrid who had been willing to permit certain forms of regional autonomy as long as the taxes were paid on time, the new rulers in Mexico City were even more convinced that their new nation had to be ordered from the top-down, from the center-out. And they were just as willing to fight for that view, as the original proponents of Mexican independence had been for theirs. On the next episode of the Republic of the Rio Grande.

The Constitution of 1824

Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode 4: The Constitution of 1824. I’m Brandon Seale. Constitución 1824

By 1824, Antonio Zapata was wealthier than he had ever had any reason to hope to be. In a violent, classist, and turbulent time, he had still managed to rise up by the sweat of his brow, sweat which shined through the hatband of the sombrero by which he had become identified. And yet most of those around him were as poor as they had ever been. Because the war of Mexican independence had been economically devastating. Quoting historian Timothy Anna: “Mexico’s gross domestic product per capita fell from roughly half that of the United States in 1800, to less than one-seventh by 1860.” And this: “Between 1806 and 1823, [Mexican] government revenue fell from 39 million pesos to 5.4 million; between 1809, coinage of silver fell from 24.7 million to 7.6 million; and exports fell from 20 million pesos in 1800 to 5 million in 1825.” Which is to say that across Mexico, economic activity had collapsed about 75-80% over the previous decade. For reference, the US economy only contracted something like 30% during the Great Depression, and recovered in the course of 10 or 15 years. In some ways, Mexico would never recover from the damage of its war of independence.²³

In real terms, this depressed livestock prices and the general volume of trade that men like Antonio Zapata depended on. Of course, livestock prices and trade volumes were mostly outside the control of men and governments…but things like tariff duties definitely weren’t. What had all the fight for independence been about if the Rio Grande villas most significant grievance remained unaddressed? Tariff duties still remained offensively high, only now they went to finance a central government in Mexico City rather than Madrid that refused to return any services to the tax-paying Rio Grande frontier.²⁴

Some things had changed, however. The Spanish flag had been replaced with the green, white, and red Mexican tricolor. The province of “Nuevo Santander” was on its way to becoming the state of “Tamaulipas.” And even Antonio Zapata’s hometown of Revilla soon renamed itself “Guerrero,” in honor of Vicente Guerrero, one of the most successful leaders of the Mexican independence movement and, perhaps not coincidentally, a Mexican of African descent – like Antonio Zapata and like a quarter or so of the inhabitants of the newly-renamed villa of Guerrero, Tamaulipas.

And in truth, through all the violence and economic devastation of the years following Father Hidalgo’s grito in 1810, it had been the pueblos and the villas – not the central government – that had provided citizens with something resembling stability. They never stopped electing alcaldes, organizing town fairs and religious festivals, and conducting the town’s business, not least of which for the Rio Grande Villas was coordinating their defense against the indios barbaros to the north. And we should stop for a moment to take note of this continuity in the face of chaos, because it demonstrates a real strength of the Hispanic system of government. Pueblos and villas formed the atomic, basic building block of Hispanic society, which meant that even when things were turbulent or disputed at the top, daily life continued on pretty much as normal. Even the word for a small town in Spanish, a “pueblo,” reflects something important related to this idea. Because pueblo can mean a “town,” but it also literally means, “the people,” as historian Timothy Anna points out, and whose working I’m drawing heavily from in this episode. And I’m not sure these pueblos were any less democratic than anything in the Anglo-American world at this time. In most pueblos and villas of the time, property-holders annually elected regidores or city councilmen who then chose from amongst their own number one or two alcaldes, a city attorney, a treasurer, a watermaster, or whatever else their town required to run efficiently.²⁵

This all makes sense if we recall that the town, in the Hispanic system, was descended from the republic model of an old Roman town, which I find to be a cool idea. And it also reminds us how the town, in the Hispanic system, preceded all other forms of government. This is a legacy of feudal times, when medieval cities incorporated themselves into the realms of kings but negotiated for special rights and privileges in exchange for doing so. There actually are still a few regions of Spain that retain some of these special rights and privileges, something which has made for no small amount of drama in the last decade or so particularly in the case of the independence movement of Barcelona and its associated region, Catalonia. And this continues even into the current Mexican Constitution, which stipulates that each Mexican state shall have a “republican, representative, popular form of government, having the Free Municipality as the base of their territorial division and of their political and administrative organization.” ²⁶

In the chaotic years of the War of Mexican Independence, Mexican towns and the men that led them – including men like Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara and Antonio Zapata – had also kind of gotten used to being in charge. When the newly independent Mexican government began to assert its authority over these towns, many of them – including the Rio Grande Villas – pushed back. And they had good grounds for doing so. Because the truth was – here comes the bombshell - Mexico didn’t really exist in 1821! Yes, Agustin Iturbide, the triumphant victor of the War of Mexican independence had proclaimed himself Emperor of Mexico in 1822. But it was really unclear in 1822 what all “Mexico” included. Mexico wasn’t just a successor state to New Spain, which is definitely a nuance I have been lacking in my previous seasons. New Spain, in fact, was just one of three different kingdoms that Madrid ruled over in North America, the other two being Nueva Galicia and Nuevo Leon, not to mention the self-governing Captaincy-General of Yucatan, twelve military intendencies including the vast military intendencies of the Northeast (including Texas and Nuevo Santander) and others reaching as far south as Panama and as far north as Oregon. Immediately prior to Mexican independence, these different political subdivisions had all reported directly to the Spanish crown. As such, there was nothing pre-ordained about the eventual unification of the different component parts of Spanish North America into a single Mexico, much less any sort of consent by any of these provinces to be ruled by any other one. Yet the residents of the central Valley of Mexico certainly believed that they were the natural heirs to the King’s authority. And from the beginning, the provinces resisted.²⁷

Among the more vocal opponents of this centralizing unification project was the twenty-eight-year old commander of the Port of Veracruz, an ambitious young army officer by the name of Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. In 1822, he pronounced against Emperor Iturbide, tapping into a deep pool of suspicion at the provincial level of the Emperor and the men around him. It had never sat right with many of the most zealous proponents of Mexican independence that “the men who won Mexican independence were, to a very great extent, the same men who previously fought it.” It would be as if General Cornwallis had triumphed at Yorktown, made a gesture of peace to George Washington, then pushed him aside and started to rule over a newly independent America. Can you bring yourself to root for Cornwallis in that version of history? And proof of how widely Iturbide’s centralizing project was opposed was how readily the provinces rose up against him. Barely eight months after he was ordained emperor, he was deposed and exiled. When he tried to return to Mexico in 1824, he made the mistake of landing in Tamaulipas, where the governor captured him, and had him executed. Who was that governor? None other than the hyper-Republican Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara. Gutiérrez de Lara would always defend his execution of Iturbide in strictly legal terms, and to be fair, the Mexican Congress had passed a death sentence on him, so Gutiérrez was justified. Still, it’s hard not to believe he didn’t take some satisfaction from executing a man who represented everything that Gutiérrez de Lara had fought so hard against for the last decade and a half.²⁸

With Iturbide dead, it was as though Mexico could now get serious about self-government. Historian Timothy Anna summarizes it, “The creation of the Mexican Empire by Agustin de Iturbide was an interim step characterized chiefly by continuity; the federalist revolution was the great break with the past.” And the enduring product of that “federalist revolution,” was the great Constitution of 1824.²⁹

Students of Texas history of course know of the Constitution of 1824 because its repudiation in 1835 is what set off the 1835-6 War of Texas Independence. According to legend the defenders of the Alamo died under a tricolor Mexican flag with the numbers 1824 in place of the Eagle and Cactus. Others might recall that Lorenzo de Zavala, first Vice President of Texas, had actually been the President of the Constitutional Convention that wrote the 1824 document, which really was a much more elegant and widely-revered document than I had appreciated before I undertook this project. It wasn’t just “a monstrous graft of the constitution of the United States onto the constitution of Cádiz,” as some contemporary critics claimed. If inspired by anything in North America, it was probably more like the earlier U.S. Articles of Confederation. But mostly it was a homegrown attempt to tailor a system of government to the realities of life in Spanish North America.³⁰

First, and importantly, the Constitution of 1824 affirmed that the new “Mexican nation is composed of the provinces.” This is a recognition of the reality of power in 1824, when the provinces had been self-governing for most of the last decade and had just banded together to overthrow the Emperor Iturbide. Actually, ten of the nineteen constituent provinces represented at the Constitutional convention remained in a declared state of total independence, with no acknowledged allegiance or fealty to any other province. It was, thus, important to acknowledge their primacy to bring them back to the table for this new act of nation-creation, but this also made it an important foundational principle, extrapolating on the primacy of the “pueblos” in the Hispanic tradition. And the Constitution of 1824 took the concept of the “pueblo” (by which here I mean, “the people”) to the extreme; it guaranteed the vote to perhaps the broadest franchise of any polity on the globe at the time. Indians, mestizos, creoles, mulatos, lobos, coyotes, everyone, every male had the right to vote, without any property qualifications. Granted, entrenched inequality within Mexican society blunted some of the impact of this, but this was a truly radical genie that elites in Mexico would never quite be able to force back into the bottle.³¹

Really the only borrowing from the U.S. Constitution was the Constitution of 1824’s establishment of a bicameral legislature, which may have been adopted as a sort of check on the expansive franchise we just talked about. But no real check was ever meant to come from the executive branch. In theory at least, the bicameral legislature would reign supreme. The Constitution of 1824’s executive – much like the North American executive under the Articles of Confederation – was a highly-neutered administrator, not a surprise perhaps for a document written by men who believed that their greatest triumphs to-date had been the defeat of two autocrats.³²

But then the framers of the Constitution of 1824 ran up against the issue of “sovereignty.” And this really is the core dispute in 1824, who is sovereign? The province or the nation? We already mentioned that at least half of the provinces believed themselves to be in a state of total sovereignty, albeit while still in a sort of cultural communion with the other provinces. Here’s how the Constitution of 1824 split the baby: The document declared that sovereignty resided “radically and essentially” in the nation; but that that sovereignty is then invested in the legislature; and that that legislature is in turn elected by the provinces which retain their status as independent, free, and sovereign states. Hmmmm…that feels like a lot of sovereignties, though, doesn’t it? Can you ever really have a system of “shared sovereignty”? Isn’t that an oxymoron? It feels to me a little bit like this is Mexico’s equivalent of the 3/5ths compromise, the attempt by the framers of the North American constitution to punt on the otherwise irreconcilable issue of slavery. In the same way that you can’t really have a system that counts some people as only 3/5ths of a person, you probably can’t really have a system of truly shared sovereignty. Indeed, both of these issues kind of came to a head in the US in the form of the US Civil War.³³

This compromise on sovereignty, anyway, seems to have been what was required for the constitution of 1824 to make it out of the drafting committee, and for the convention to agree on a founding document for their, “representative, popular, federal republic.” And that third word was the key word which the proponents of the document took to describe their system: Federal. Indeed, the proper name for the Constitution of 1824 is the “Federal Constitution of 1824.” We Americans need to be a little careful here now, because in U.S. history, we class “federalists” as those who were in favor of a much stronger, central Federal government, while in Mexico history, it’s kind of the opposite. Mexican federalists conceived of their new nation as a merger of equals. Not so much a treaty amongst truly independent states forming some larger state, but a “pact between equal participants,” somewhat akin to “an alliance, league, or union…made between princes and republics.” ³⁴

And yet fatally, the Constitution of 1824 wouldn’t actually be ratified by the provinces, a la the US constitution. It was adopted and ratified by the same congress which drafted it – which sort of ran counter to the entire principle of shared, devolved sovereignty, but which was probably necessary because there were already strong forces at play trying to undermine this new Constitution. The framers knew that if they didn’t very publicly adopt something, the old royalists who still held many of the levers of power in Mexican society would by default end up in charge of the new nation, as had happened after 1821. And so, on October 4, 1824, the province-friendly Federal Constitution of 1824 was enacted – without most of the provinces having ever seen it. This meant that to men on distant frontiers – men like Antonio Zapata – the Constitution of 1824 never quite felt like a document that they had a stake in. In some ways, it seemed just as top-down or center-out as any of the other stuff emanating out of Mexico City.

Particularly to the people of Mexico’s four northeastern provinces – Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and Texas. During the early years of Mexico’s independence, it wouldn’t be unfair to think of them politically as “a single geographic unit,” in the words of Nuevo Laredo historian Manuel Ceballos Ramirez. They had a lot in common. Their “wide open spaces, common course of their rivers, and the primary livelihoods in the states” made them natural markets for each others’ goods. The northeastern provinces were also characterized by a “certain equality between rich and poor,” which inclined them toward more radical ideas of representative government that were probably influenced by contacts with the Anglo-American republic to their north. Lastly, their shared isolation from other parts of New Spain and their remoteness from the centers of power also contributed to a powerful sense of autonomy and of self-reliance.³⁵

This, in turn, also created a tradition in northeastern Mexico of broad-based political engagement. In such communities, if the mulato son of a cowboy made enough money to buy his own ranch and to buy a house on the central plaza, it was only natural that he should be elected to the city council and take part in the sacred act of self-government, as happened for Antonio Zapata sometime in the late 1820’s. His position as an up-and-coming businessman and then as a city councilman would have given him an interesting perspective on the ideological battle that was raging throughout the new Mexican nation as to where true decision making-authority should reside: with the provinces or with the nation. The 1820’s marked the end of a nearly thirty-five period when the northeastern provinces had been largely UNgoverned from afar. Starting in 1786, the provinces were detached from the viceroy of New Spain, to whom they had always been a distant afterthought; and for most of the 1810’s they had been governed as a single unit from Monterrey by our old antagonist from Season 2, Royalist General Joaquin Arredondo. In this sense, following independence from Spain, it was much more natural for these four provinces to think of themselves as a single political unit, rather than as a part of some larger experiment based in far-off Mexico City. In the first years of the 1820’s, the northeastern Mexican provinces even spent considerable time and energy trying to form their own superstate. The idea seems to have been that Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and Texas would join together as a ““Estado soberano confederado de la republica,” a sovereign, “independent” state loosely confederated with the Mexican republic.³⁶

To the ruling class in Mexico City, however, this wasn’t really an issue open for debate. The natural order of things, they believed, was that society should be ordered from the center – only now the center should be Mexico City instead of Madrid. When Federalists argued that “political power was based on the privileges of cities and that the Spanish Empire itself was essentially a confederation of provinces or kingdoms,” Centralists countered that all of that worked only because there was a strong power at the center mediating and ordering those constituent parts. When the Federalist Constitution of 1824 came along, centralists feared that “The movement toward federalism meant Mexico would constitute itself as a republic of many independent centers…and the business of ruling would be much more complicated, especially for those who preferred not to consult with the ruled. This was a mortal threat to national elites, and a cause of genuine confusion and alarm for centralists who witnessed the end not only of rule from Spain but the threatened end of rule by themselves.”³⁷

And there was no doubt in centralists’ minds where the center of that rule ought to reside: in Mexico City. Here we hit upon a factor that the early American republic did not have to contend with. Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, and Boston and others were all major cities in North America in 1776; but none was so disproportionately large, wealthy, and powerful as Mexico City relative to the rest of Spanish North America. In 1826, Mexico City accounted for 20% of the entire 6.2 MM population of the new Mexican nation; New York City, by contrast, the largest city in the U.S. at its birth in 1790, had less than 1% of the nation’s 4 MM people. Mexico City’s wealth was even more out of proportion: One-third of the wealth of the country was in Mexico City. And by the way, the poorest states of the new nation? The four Northeastern provinces of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and Texas at 1/278th as wealthy as Mexico City, though it’s worth noting that these impoverished provinces actually had the highest rates of property-ownership.³⁸

Yet the groundswell of support for federalism following the overthrow of Emperor Iturbide was too much for centralists to resist, and they seemed to realize this. “Centralists decided, in effect, to let the provinces have federalism because it could not be prevented in any case but to make certain that it was a federalism that was modified and interpreted by the center.” Centralists would continue to use their allies in the army and the church to undermine Federalist institutions from the get-go. In the four years following the adoption of the Federalist Constitution of 1824, Mexico City would send out armies commanded by ex-Royalist generals to quell boisterous federalist provincial governments in Guadalajara, San Luis Potosi, Oaxaca, and Puebla, while punitively carving off parts of the states of Jalisco, Oaxaca, and Yucatan because of their continued support of overly-federalist ideals.³⁹

For the moment, the northeastern provinces’ remoteness spared them the worst of these battles. In a sense, it gave the frontiersman what they had wanted all along: to be left alone. As before, as always, they fell back in on themselves and took over responsibility for providing for themselves. And they entered a brief period of peace and stability. Cattle and sheep herds grew rapidly along the Rio Grande, up to 3 MM head up from just 800,000 a generation before. Antonio Zapata seems to have ridden this wave of prosperity. During the second half of the 1820’s, Zapata accumulated a “fortune in sheep and land.” And to be clear, he accumulated this through his own sweat equity, sweat which soaked through his famed sombrero and marked him to all who saw as a working man. He was personally running these animals across the plains, through the lands of the indios barbaros, all the way up into Texas and Louisiana. It didn’t hurt that Zapata’s long-time mentor and partner in the livestock business, Gutiérrez de Lara, was now the military governor of the four northeastern provinces. Again, we don’t know specifics, but it’s never a bad thing to have friends in high places. Surely this brought Zapata more business opportunities. It certainly brought with it increased responsibility for Zapata in the militia patrols in the region…Zapata and the local ranging companies would have been some of the few forces that Gutiérrez de Lara felt like he could truly trust. By the late 1820’s, Zapata was the default commander of his town’s militia, leading it regularly as far north as the Nueces river and as far west as the mountains of Coahuila.⁴⁰

By 1830, thirty-three year old Antonio Zapata had risen far beyond what could have been expected of the mulatto son of a servant girl and a cowboy, even in the more socially mobile northeastern provinces. The first ranch he bought was a humble 300-acre parcel on the north side of the Rio Grande. By 1835, he had acquired almost 20,000 acres. And in every single one of these transactions he was represented by a man named Antonio Canales, who we should take a moment to meet.⁴¹

Antonio Canales was five years younger than Antonio Zapata, but was born into a family of means in Monterrey. He conducted his life with the easy confidence of the well-born, and came to neighboring Camargo during the 1820’s to make his name. He was licensed to practice law in Tamaulipas in 1829 and also trained to work as a surveyor, which was an incredibly lucrative job in these days where the going surveying fee was something between ¼ and 1/3 of the land surveyed, payable in land! A small man with a high forehead and slightly darker complexion than your average northern Mexican creole, Canales’s “magnetic personality” quickly gained him notice, and in the early 1830’s he was elected to the Tamualipecan state legislature. In the legislature, he earned a reputation as a staunch Federalist, and by 1836, he became a bit of a standard-bearer for Federalism along the Rio Grande.⁴²

Canales was also, like, Zapata, a man of some personal courage. Like everyone who lived in the communities along the Rio Grande frontier, Canales was called upon to ride with the companias volantes that patrolled the Wild Horse desert to their north. In this setting, again Like Zapata, he distinguished himself, slowly rising through the ranks of the local militia. Here, I suspect, is where the Zapata and Canales might have met, and where they might have come to respect each other’s obvious talents.

By the time Zapata and Canales found each other in the late 1820’s, the Rio Grande Valley had recovered from the devastation of the previous decade and entered into a bonified economic boom. In 1826, the Mexican government finally legalized trade through the port of Matamoros. The tariffs still remained, but at least the ACT of trading was no longer illegal. Consequently, the population of Matamoros exploded from 2,320 in 1820 to 16,372 by 1837, far outstripping the other Rio Grande Villas, but accruing back to their favor as well as they now had direct access to foreign markets. The opening of a US consulate in Matamoros testifies to the newly expanded trade and to the increasing communications between residents of the Rio Grande Valley and their American neighbors across the Sabine.

But, then, the Mexican Presidential election of 1828 brought it all crashing down. To the horror of Federalists and frontiersmen alike, the Centralist candidate won the 1828 election! There were claims of fraud and manipulation – and there was little doubt that centralists had done everything in their power to hobble the new Federalist constitution – but on its face, it looks like the Centralist actually did win the election. Federalists responded poorly. They took to the streets and mobilized a mob to overturn the results of the election, letting loose a decidedly undemocratic frenzy of destruction that terrified Mexico City’s ruling class. Enough so that the ruling class yielded to the Federalist mob’s demands. The centralist president was pushed aside and kicked out of the country. His federalist vice-president, Vicente Guerrero – the revolutionary hero for whom Zapata’s hometown had renamed itself! – took office.

But a terrible precedent had been set. Just a year later, in 1829, Guerrero was overthrown and executed by his centralist Vice President. Now that centralists had returned to power, they felt justified in all manner of suppression of their federalist rivals. And the provinces – technically now “states” – were just teeming with such potential rivals. Those states and municipalities who had so loudly proclaimed their loyalty to the constitution of 1824 now looked to Centralists like revolts waiting to happen. Centralists, with “undisguised contempt” as one historian calls it, began to call these provincial leaders “caudillos” or “little bosses.” And to Centralists, it was these Caudillos who were destabilizing Mexico, not the “overwhelming desire of Mexico City and its immediate area to control all of Mexico.” Nevermind that these so-called caudillos had been the only things defending and truly governing these communities for most of the last decade. Nevermind that these caudillos were, in most cases, the people whom these communities had selected to represent them, which was more than could be said for most leaders of the central government. And nevermind that these caudillos were the ones generating the economic output of the nation and remitting the funds upon which the center depended to sustain itself.⁴³

Which is to say that overnight, the duly-elected political leaders in the provinces – men like Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara, Antonio Zapata, and Antonio Canales – became enemies of the state.

Of course, Gutierrez de Lara, Zapata, and Canales were from states that were too remote and too poor to really matter. But other so-called “caudillos” spoke out against this centralist persecution. And one caudillo in particular had the means and the following to make a difference. This caudillo had been among the first to oppose Emperor Iturbide’s usurpations of power; recently he had fended off an attempted Spanish reconquest of Mexico via Tampico, making him a national hero; and he controlled the customs houses of Veracruz, which were in truth the purse strings of the nation. And in 1832, this caudillo pronounced in the name of the Federalist Constitution of 1824 against the ruling centralist president and forced him to resign. When new elections were held in April 1833, there was no doubt who would win. On May 16, 1833, this caudillo named Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna took office as President of Mexico. As a Federalist. Which probably sounds strange to Texas history buffs, but there’s actually more to it than you’ve been led to believe. On the next episode of the Republic of the Rio Grande.⁴⁴

The Federalist Revolts

Welcome to The Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode 5: The Federalist Revolts. I’m Brandon Seale.

By 1835, the people of the Rio Grande villas were pissed off at the Mexican central government. Twenty-five years after Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara had led the region’s independence movement against Spain, their government still did little to protect them from the hazards of life on the frontier, all while continuing to assess them import duties at twenty-five percent or more of the value of the goods they bought. Unfortunately for them, the Mexican central government depended on import duties for 80-90% of its revenue, so it’s understandable why they were reluctant to lower duties. But that didn’t explain why some goods were prohibited from import altogether, including basic essentials like cotton and cloth! The sale of those goods was reserved for well-placed monopolists at artificially high prices, even as the same goods sold for a quarter or an eighth as much in New Orleans. This was something that affected people up and down the economic ladder, from stockraisers like Antonio Zapata to lawyers like Antonio Canales, and created a really unfortunate dynamic. In the words of a contemporary: “As might be reasonably expected in any country where the duties on foreign goods amount almost to prohibition, smuggling ceases to be a crime and identifies itself with the best part of the population, and connects itself with the romance and legends of the frontier.” For those living on the frontier, of course. For those living in the center, all they saw were a bunch of ungrateful opportunists with little respect for the rule of law that the new nation was so desperately trying to establish.⁴⁵

Yet how seriously could borderlanders have taken those in the center’s commitment to the rule of law? For all that men like Antonio Zapata could see, the first thing that those in the center did when a new federalist constitution was in 1824 was try to undermine it by forcing it into a Centralist mold. The provinces – in particular the four northeastern provinces of Coahuila, Texas, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas had willingly given up their dreams of forming their own superstate in favor of federating with the larger collection of former Spanish North American provinces…but they had very explicitly conditioned their federation on the preservation of their local “sovereignty.” Which hadn’t really panned out. What sovereignty they had preserved was more an artifact of the disorganization of the central governments in Mexico at the time, rather than out of any respect for the rights of the pueblos. 16 different men had worn the Mexican presidential sash between 1822 and 1835. It was worse at the state level: Tamaulipas had had no less than 30 governors over the same period.

Then, in January of 1835, the central government instituted a new level of bureaucracy. As a part of the Centralist Congress’s restructuring of government, the latest governor of Tamaulipas was authorized to himself appoint a regional “jefes politico” to sit between himself and the elected officials of each municipality. The position was entirely unelected and would depend only on the governor – himself unelected, under the new centralist structure of government. Elected city councilmen – particularly the up and coming new generation, men like Antonio Zapata and Antonio Canales – spoke out. And when they spoke out, in some way, they were appealing to the man who sat now at the center of Mexican political life: Santa Anna. Santa Anna had become the “indispensable man” in Mexican politics, as a contemporary called him. He was the man to whom almost every faction in Mexican politics turned at one time or another. He was brave, he was charismatic, and he had a keen sense of political timing. Even though he had set in motion the events that would lead to the downfall of Emperor Agustin Iturbide, Santa Anna had the sense not to overplay his hand so early in his political rise and resisted calls to assume the presidency then. In 1829, he played a genuinely heroic role in the defense of Tampico against an attempted Spanish re-invasion, which won him the affection of the entire country. And even when he provoked the downfall of yet another Mexican President in 1832, he once again had the sense not to just take the presidency by force. Instead, he called for elections in 1833, in which he triumphed comfortably – as a Federalist! Indeed, it was to Santa Anna’s identity as a Federalist that representatives of the Rio Grande Villas were appealing when they spoke out against the newly appointed jefes politicos. But what they didn’t appreciate was that Santa Anna had drifted much closer to the Centralist camp by that point.⁴⁶

Because – if we’re being fair – Federalists had taken things a little too far between 1833-35. Famously, Santa Anna had allowed his very-Federalist Vice President to do most of the actual governing during that two year period, during which time his Vice President had proven himself to be quite a radical. He had even gone so far as to begin nationalizing church property and exiling political opponents. Then, when folks spoke out against the exile measure, he moved to exile them too. This turned off a lot of people in the Mexico City political class, for understandable reasons. Indeed, as one contemporary put it, “the most persuasive proof that could be given that the federal system no longer suited the nation was that now not even [Santa Anna] wanted it.” Yet when Santa Anna took steps to moderate the Federalists’ more extreme measures, the Federalist-controlled Congress refused to go along with him. So he dissolved the Congress and called for new elections. The Mexican electorate endorsed his move by returning a much more centralist slate of legislators to Mexico City in the second half of 1834, a slate of legislators who now felt justified in trying to structurally advantage their own position in the same way that they felt federalists had earlier in the year!⁴⁷

To that end, one of the Centralist Congress’ first acts, then, was to limit and disarm the local, state militias, which they viewed as bastions of federalist sympathy and a menace to their larger unification project. The problem with this measure for frontier states like Coahuila and Tamaulipas, however, was that disarming their militias promised to leave them defenseless against the threats that were a real part of their existence. Through the eyes of frontiersmen like Antonio Zapata and Antonio Canales, the measure was beyond insensitive – it was murderous. Members of their communities – of their families! – would die at the hands of indios barbaros because of it. Then, when the Centralist Congress moved to dissolve elected state legislatures, convert “sovereign” states into dependent departments, and replace elected governors with appointed ones, it set off a tidal wave of discontent reaching well beyond just the frontier states. From San Luis Potosi to the Yucatan to Quertero to Jalisco from Guanajuato to Michoacan, and of course, in Coahuila, Texas, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas, federalists uprisings began to take form. But it was in Zacatecas, a fantastically wealthy mining city in central Mexico with a well-armed and well-led state militia, that the uprising broke out into the open first. In the spring of 1835, the governor of Zacatecas declared against the Central government. Santa Anna, being a man of action, resigned the presidency and marched out to meet the Zacatecans. He met them, defeated them, and then allowed his men to sack the town of Zacatecas, which would never truly recover its prominence again.⁴⁸

The Rio Grande Villas’s opposition rejection of their appointed jefe politico, then, looked to Santa Anna like a similar act of personal and political defiance. Combined with the mini-civil war that had broken out in neighboring Coahuila between two rival state legislatures, Santa Anna felt obliged to dispatch Martin Perfecto de Cos to monitor the situation. Perfecto de Cos put his finger on the scales and endorsed the centralist legislature of Coahuila and gave orders for the arrest of the fugitive Federalist governor of Coahuila, but also for the arrest of a few other notables who had all fled to Texas, such as the president of the Federalist Constitutional convention of 1824, Lorenzo de Zavala; a loudmouth printer and debt-dodger named William Barrett Travis; and a diminutive twenty-six year old San Antonio polymath named Jose Maria Carbajal, who had been the secretary of the federalist Coahuila legislature and whose name you should take note of. Antonio Zapata and Antonio Canales certainly did.⁴⁹

September of 1835 found General Perfecto de Cós approaching the Rio Grande and passing through Laredo in pursuit of the Coahuiltecan fugitives. The recent regional and national turmoil had left little frontier Laredo quite exposed to Lipan Apache and especially Comanche attacks. Since Perfecto de Cos was nearby with quite a larger number of men, Laredo’s alcaldes wrote to him asking for aid against an anticipated Comanche attack. Perfecto de Cos responded in the most tonedeaf way possible by ignoring the alcalde’s request and instead demanding that the alcaldes supply his army with provisions, horses, and conscripts. It landed like a bad joke, or like an open mockery of Laredoans’ legitimate cry for help from the government that they supported through their import duties and yet that seemed to refuse to give them anything in return!⁵⁰

And so Laredo and the other Villas del Norte refused Perfecto de Cos’s demands, just as they had refused the earlier appointment of the centralist jefe politico. They sent the General nothing, and took their sweet time in even responding. Their quiet resistance to Perfecto de Cos’s demands made them a bit of a gathering spot for deserters from Perfecto de Cos’s army. Eventually, Perfecto de Cos felt compelled to send another letter to Laredo ordering the alcaldes to return to him any centralist deserters in their presence. Once again, the alcaldes found ways not to comply. By the time Perfecto de Cos arrived in Laredo, he was so annoyed by the stubborn little frontiersmen that he took to openly stealing the provisions that the inhabitants had refused to give willingly…which only further hardened their hatred for this government that only seemed to care about them when it wanted to take their stuff.⁵¹

Perfecto de Cos’s stopover in Laredo on his way to defeat at the Siege of Bexar left Laredo so poorly supplied that, sure enough, the town made an easy target for Comanches. A raid in December 1835 killed three leading citizens outside of town and made off with too many horses to count. In the midst of this tragedy, an army of reinforcements destined for Perfecto de Cos showed up on the south bank of the Rio Grande and ordered the alcalde of Laredo to drop what he was doing to ferry them across. The alcalde objected that he was overwhelmed and reminded the general what all his town had endured in the last few months, not least of which was the last visit by a centralist army. In the great passive-aggressive style of Mexican bureaucratic-speak, the Laredo alcalde simultaneously threatened the centralist general and begged that he take into consideration the lamentable condition of his town “if this town [still] be considered as an integral part of the Mexican nation.” In laymen’s terms: if you don’t start treating us like fellow citizens, we just may not feel obliged to consider ourselves your fellow citizens.⁵²

Things, of course, did not go well for those centralist reinforcements once they got to San Antonio. They made it to Perfecto de Cos just in time to be a part of his surrender to the so-called Revolutionary Army of Texas. When Santa Anna crossed the Rio Grande a few months later to avenge Perfecto de Cos’s defeat in San Antonio, neither Santa Anna nor Perfecto de Cos had forgotten the antagonisms of the residents of the Rio Grande villas. Yet they knew better than to provoke them this time around, and “graciously” exempted the local militias of Laredo, Guerrero, and the other Rio Grande villas from service in Santa Anna’s army. Ostensibly, this was to allow them to remain in readiness against any possible Indian attacks; more likely, it stemmed from Santa Anna’s open mistrust of the frontiersmen, for which reason he also refused to allow San Antonio’s presidial company to participate in the assault on the Alamo.⁵³

Of course, the decision not to muster the Rio Grande militias into service also denied Santa Anna the services Antonio Zapata. Now thirty-eight years old, a respected member of the community with maybe 20,000 acres to his name, and a commission as a lieutenant in the regional militia, Antonio Zapata was precisely the kind of grizzled veteran of the frontier that Santa Anna could have used to face off against Juan Seguin and his ranging company that left Santa Anna blind by the time he made it to the San Jacinto bayou. And yet, Zapata and his “sombrero mantecoso” wasn’t with Santa Anna’s army, at San Jacinto, or afterward. And, as most listeners probably know, Santa Anna himself wasn’t with the remnants of Santa Anna’s army after the battle of San Jacinto. No one – federalist or Centralist, Texian or Mexican - was quite sure in April of 1836 whether San Jacinto was really the end of the fighting, or just an interlude. And so the remnants of the Mexican Central Army were ordered to halt their retreat, and await further orders. To the great misfortune of those living there, the Mexican central army took up quarters in the Rio grande villas, and settled in for a long stay. ⁵⁴

To support themselves, the army fell back on making “requisitions,” as they called them. But given that the requisitions were never actually paid for, it sure felt a lot more like stealing. When local leaders – men like Antonio Zapata from Guerrero and Antonio Canales from Camargo – objected, the commanding centralist publicly called them traitors for not being willing to give more. In private correspondence, however, even this same centralist general confessed that “the hatred toward the military here is very great and each day it grows more as long as they are weighed down and injured with the exactions required to maintain this army.” And the general’s need to support his men is understandable. What is less understandable, however, was the army’s refusal to engage in frontier defense against the Comanches. The view of the centralist officers seems to have been that they were only there on the Rio Grande for the “Texas Campaign,” the impending reinvasion of Texas that everyone on both sides of the Rio Grande was sure would come soon. Chasing a bunch of half-naked savages on the Texas plains wasn’t in their play book. Once again, when residents of the Rio Grande villas asked for relief, their pleas were met by entirely unhelpful assurances that they leaders were “fully convinced of how exposed that place is to being seriously attacked by the barbarous Indians…” and were simply advised to “rush to the defense of their town.” Like calling 911 and having them tell you that your situation sounds really bad and you should probably do something about that….⁵⁵

Predictably, Indian violence along the undefended Rio Grande spiked. In 1836, Comanches killed 21 people in Laredo alone and made off with more than 1,000 head of livestock. By 1838, the population of Laredo was maybe half of what it had been in 1824, and the ranches north of the Rio Grande had been all but abandoned. But not by Antonio Zapata. The fact that his ranches were located north of the Rio Grande may have been part of the reason that the self-made Zapata wasn’t inclined to abandon the land north of the river…but it also had just as much to do with the fact that he was a man of duty. His community’s lands had always stretched as far north of the river as south, and he resolved to protect them. ⁵⁶

It seems that old sombrero-mantecoso Zapata spent a large portion of his time during these years in the saddle, pursuing Comanche raiders and adding another layer of sweat to his famed hatband. In February of 1837, a 500-strong party of Comanche warriors descended on Zapata’s hometown of Guerrero, killing 1,400 horses and cattle and too many sheep and goats to count. Despite being badly outnumbered, Zapata pursued the war party, and caught up to them. And he whipped them, killing or capturing sixteen of the raiders without any apparent loss on his side. The Comanches retaliated, this time with a party 1,000 strong, sweeping the north side of the Rio Grande all the way to the coast. It was during the pursuit of this raiding party that Zapata engaged in that memorable bout of individual combat with the Comanche chief that we described back in Episode 3, where he isolated the chief, charged him, yanked him off his horse by his ponytail, and then stomped him to death with his boot heel, all this too after the Comanche had put an arrow through his thigh. And this was but one example of Zapata’s prowess as a horseman and as a warrior. He stood out for it, his “sombrero de Manteca” shining out to his native opponents even amongst all the others on the field, all of whom were probably dressed in a version of the classic Tamaulipecan attire of the multi-layered leather brush jacket, which served as a sort of plains armor against thorny bushes and well-aimed arrows.

One final anecdote from this period demonstrates the extent to which Antonio “sweat of his brow” Zapata’s legend had taken hold by 1838. After being captured by a Comanche raiding party, a girl from the Rio Grande villas had the presence of mind to tell her captors that she was Zapata’s daughter. The amusing part about this was that she was notably light-skinned; even the Comanches knew that Zapata was dark-skinned, a “mulato” to be precise. They challenged the girl her on her claim, but she didn’t back down. She might have been lying, but the Comanche warriors weren’t willing to bet their lives on it. The warrior carrying her on his mount stopped, dismounted her, and told her to go away. “We want nothing to do with Zapata,” he said.

As amusing as that one anecdote may be, however, these were hellacious years for the Rio Grande villas, none of which was made easier by the appearance of the new Republic to their north. The Republic of Texas claimed that its borders reached all the way to the Rio Grande, and though Texians never really tried to enforce this claim, they did test it frequently. Famed scout Deaf Smith led a force into the no man’s land between San Antonio and Laredo in 1837, and the famous Ranger Captain Jack Hays did the same in 1838. Mexican government forces returned the favor, harassing trade routes up to San Antonio and in particular targeting the ranches of prominent Tejanos like Juan Seguin. The primary wealth of the region remained its endless herds of cattle and horses, and many of these raids blurred the lines between rounding-up and rustling. Texians would frequently cite raids by Mexican “bandits” along the Nueces; Mexicans – including Antonio Canales – would claim that Texian “colonists” – stole over 1 MM pesos worth of livestock during these years.⁵⁷

The Mexican central government maintained a position of open hostility toward Texas, yet in some ways this policy punished its own citizens more than it did the Texians. When the government forbade under punishment of DEATH any “criminal and treasonous” trade with the Texians, they hamstrung the economy of the Rio Grande villas. When the government prohibited its citizens from even crossing to the north bank of the Rio Grande, they effectively forfeited the region to the indios barbaros and Texian raiders.⁵⁸

Then something happened in 1838 that brought Zapata into the centralist government’s crosshairs. We don’t know exactly what it was. Maybe he got caught smuggling. Maybe he just got on the wrong side of the customs-collector. But in short, they took everything from him. One estimate placed the value of the property confiscated from Zapata at nearly 70,000 pesos, which would be a staggering sum and so is probably exaggerated, but the clear fact is that in 1838, sweat-of-his-brow Zapata had to sit by as debt-holders auctioned off his land, his livestock, and “all his earthly possessions.” All of this too came on the heels of family tragedy as well. In 1836, his wife Asunción, died of dropsy. In a cruel final touch, Zapata was forced to sell his dead wife’s jewelry to settle his debts. Zapata, the great self-made stockman and protector of Guerrero, Tamaulipas, was, at the age of 41, broke, widowed, and left to raise his four daughters by himself.⁵⁹

It seems that what saved Zapata from total ruin in 1838 was none other than the generosity of his old mentor and partner, Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara. Apparently, Gutiérrez de Lara was Zapata’s largest debt-holder. And Gutiérrez de Lara forgave Zapata his debts. I think we have to read this as a testimony to their long and deep relationship…but we might also read it as an indication of how bad the times were. What good would calling the note do for Gutiérrez de Lara? It’s not like Zapata was sitting on the money in some other account.

Things weren’t going very well for the Mexican central government either. Following the events of 1836, Mexican centralists had taken over all the levers of power in Mexican government, annulled the Federalist Constitution of 1824, and enacted a new, centralized system. Tensions remained high in the Mexican political system during this period; government receipts did not. The government was perennially underfunded, over-indebted, and squeezed by European lenders. This situation too was coming to a head in 1838. This is gonna sound like a joke but it’s not: in 1838, the government of France demanded 600,000 pesos from the Mexican government as – again, not a joke – reparations for damages suffered to a French pastry chef’s shop outside of Mexico City. When Mexico predictably refused, the French blockaded Veracruz, cutting off the government’s principle source of revenue. The Government responded to the crisis by implementing a new tax on June 9, 1838. In light of everything else they were enduring – the confiscation of their property by the central army, attacks by Indians and Texians, and the artificial restriction of trade in a self-defeating policy meant to punish the Texians, the tax felt like a final straw for the residents of the Rio Grande Villas.

Still, Antonio Zapata was not a radical. And really, politics in most of human history is the privilege of the privileged. Zapata was more worried about raising his daughters and getting back on his feet financially. But the thirty-six year old Antonio Canales knew how to seize a political moment. Canales had actually been a member of the radical Federalist legislature that Santa Anna had dissolved in 1834. And for Canales, this new tax of June 1838 was proof of the centralist regime’s desperation and total indifference to the concerns of borderlanders. He began to ask aloud what this new tax really aimed to do, other than “aggravate the misery” of the Rio Grande villas. Would the villas receive any benefit or increased aid from the new revenue? I think we all know the answer to that. All of which raised the question again, what were frontier states like Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, and Coahuila really getting out of this new Mexican nation, other repeated middle fingers from those at the center of power? Mexicans are quite good at reading subtexts, and indeed, much of Mexican politics today focuses on the subtext of political statement and maneuvers. And what does it say to a people who have complained and petitioned and begged for years now for protection, for relief from artificial trade restrictions, for just a little bit of sympathy for Christ’s sake…what does it say when these people have reached their lowest point in living memory that their government’s response is to simply levy a new tax on them?⁶⁰

As Antonio Canales circulated in the villas asking these questions, he found that he was not alone, not only in his frustration but also in his sense that the time for patient suffering had passed. On October 7, 1838, the army garrison in Tampico in the opposite corner of Tamaulipas pronounced against the Central Government and declared for the reestablishment of the Federal Constitution of 1824. Centralist forces in the region moved their focus to Tampico, weakening their presence in the Rio grande Villas. And as he looked upon the almost entirely unguarded armory in his adopted hometown of Camargo, Antonio Canales got an idea. On the next episode of the Republic of the Rio Grande.⁶¹

Editing for this episode was provided by Susana Canseco. The portrait of Antonio Zapata that serves as the cover art for this season was created by artist Matt Tumlinson. Check him out at Matt_Tumlinson on Instagram. Sound engineering for this episode was performed by Stephen Bennett, who also arranged and performed the theme music. The theme music was actually written by Mercurio Martinez, a Zapata County rancher, treasurer, school principal, and descendant of one of Escandon’s founding families. Martinez was the co-author of the first history of Zapata County, which he titled “The Kingdom of Zapata,” and in the spare time he penned corridos. I found one of his corridos in his collected papers at Texas A&M’s Cushing Library, and in that corrido Martinez had written a melody that he had intended for his Corrido de la Presa, the story of the construction of Lake Falcon, and of his role in preserving what he could of the communities later lost to the lake. I love that we have been able to bring it back to life here, you can check him out at NOSOmedia that’s nosomedia.com.

Order and Disorder Along the New Border

Welcome to The Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode 6: Order and Disorder Along the New Border. I’m Brandon Seale.

Antonio Zapata was hurting in 1838. As if it wasn’t hard enough to be a single father raising four daughters – the oldest of which was only fifteen years old – he was also now bankrupt. It’s unclear if the government impounded his goods for violating their impossibly restrictive new trade laws, or whether they’d requisitioned them to support the 2,000 man strong army that had taken up residence in the Rio Grande villas following their defeat at the Battle of San Jacinto… but did it really matter?⁶²

And then the French blockade began. On April 16, 1838, French warships sailed into the ports of Tampico and Veracruz and demanded the repayment of the losses endured by a Pastry Chef near Mexico City during the instability of the previous decade. Again, not a joke, and the consequences of this war certainly weren’t trivial for the residents of the Rio Grande. First, the blockade threatened to cut off their access to world markets. But worse, the spectre of war and the loss of tariff revenue occasioned by the French blockade forced the Mexican central government to levy new taxes in June of 1838, which hit the long-suffering residents of the Rio Grande villas particularly hard.

If Antonio Zapata was like others in the Rio Grande villas at this time, he heard his frustrations articulated most clearly by his former lawyer and surveyor, Antonio Canales. Canales had been born to a family of some means in Monterrey and come to Camargo to make his name. Now thirty-six years old in 1838, a contemporary described him as “a small man of brown complexion” with a high forehead and obvious intelligence. He was a charismatic leader with a “magnetic personality.” Zapata had known Canales for ten or fifteen years now and had used him to purchase the nearly 20,000 acres worth of land he had acquired over the previous decade. It seems likely that Zapata and Canales overlapped in the course of their service in the local militia, of which Zapata was sort of the default commander by 1838. But by 1838, Canales had found his calling as a politician, most recently as a deputy in the Tamaulipas legislature and then briefly as a Senator for Tamaulipas at the federal level, where he earned a reputation as a radical Federalist. He had even flirted with joining the Texians in their revolt against the centralist government in 1835, but pulled back when he began to suspect that the Texians’ goal was independence, rather than a Federalist reformation of Mexico at-large. Now, he was loudly banging the drum of discontent: “National Liberty has been Destroyed!” one of his broadsides from August of 1838 shouted.⁶³

Initially at least, Zapata held back from fully endorsing Canales’s rabble-rousing. I’m inclined to believe that Zapata wasn’t an overly political man, or at least not yet. He was fundamentally more practical: he had to be. Old Sombrero Mantecoso – as his Comanche enemies called him - was a son of the monte, a man who had risen up by the sweat of his own brow, to a position of real respect, and he wasn’t about to risk all that now at his most financially vulnerable moment.

Others were less reserved, however. And among the most vocal of these was the twenty-nine year-old Jose Maria Carvajal, whom I mentioned briefly in the last episode. Carvajal was born in 1809 in San Antonio. His father had fought and perhaps died in the Battle of Medina, and it seems that little four-year old Carvajal and his mother were among those placed into La Quinta with the other wives and daughters of the defeated rebels in 1813. It shouldn’t be a surprise to listeners of this podcast that that experience made the young Carbajal a radical anti-royalist and anti-centralist for the rest of his life. In 1832, at the age of twenty-three, Carvajal married María del Refugio de Leon, daughter of the wealthy founder of Victoria, TX. Just a few years later, in 1835, the twenty-six year old Carvajal served in the proscribed federalist state legislature of Coahuila y Tejas, and was initially a rabid member of the “war party” in Texas. In October of 1835, he rounded up as many cattle as he could, drove them to New Orleans, sold them, and bought $35,000 worth of arms to bring back into Texas to face the imminent centralist attack. When a Mexican government schooner surprised him as he was starting to unload in Lavaca bay, however, Carbajal lost everything, for which he would never be reimbursed by the later Republic of Texas, by the way. And worst of all, Carvajal and his compatriots were captured and carted off to prison in Matamoros, where he would spend two months imprisoned there in the infamous Casamata – “Killing house” – prison.⁶⁴

Carvajal managed to escape, however, and was soonafter elected to represent Victoria at the Texas independence convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos. But Carvajal didn’t go. He realized – like Canales – that the revolt in Texas had already gone a different direction. Carvajal had hoped that Texas might set off a more general Federalist revolt across Mexico…but an anglo-dominated independent Texas, he knew, would have little concern for the fate of the rest of Mexico. Yet Carvajal was by no means “anti-Anglo.” Indeed, if anything, Carvajal might have been the most gringified, anglicized Tejano in the state. You see, Carvajal as a youth had been something of a prodigy, something which Stephen F. Austin had noticed very early on. The childless Austin took on the fatherless Carvajal and basically adopted him. At the age of fifteen, Austin sent little José María to Kentucky for schooling, where they apparently pronounced his name, ‘Hosa Murrah,” which for some reason makes me smile. He worked for a brief period as a saddle-maker in Kentucky, carrying on that centuries old San Antonio leather-working tradition, then went for one more year at a seminary in Virginia. During his years in the United States, Carvajal acquired a native fluency of English, a radical Protestantism, and an uncompromising admiration for Anglo-American political ideals.⁶⁵

After the massacres at the Alamo and Goliad, however, this wasn’t enough to protect him. Despite the fact that Carbajal actually had a brother who died at Goliad, Carbajal and many of his in-laws were marched to the coast at gunpoint and loaded onto a ship to Louisiana. Incredibly, however, this didn’t seem to engender in him any particular bitterness toward Anglo-Texans. If anything, it only heightened his hatred of centralism in Mexico, and he soon relocated to – drum roll – Camargo in the Rio Grande Villas. With Carbajal’s “great intelligence” and face “like a Scotch terrier,” the fiery twenty-nine-year old quickly made an impression in his new hometown, not least of which upon Camargo’s most prominent Federalist, Antonio Canales. They quickly befriended one another and began to follow developments in other parts of Mexico with interest.⁶⁶

Because earlier that summer, a federalist revolt had broken out in Sinaloa, on the other side of the country. Centralist forces quashed that revolt, but the movement didn’t die. It simply moved to the other coast, to Tampico more specifically, which was suffering from the effects of the ongoing French blockade. On October 7, 1838, the army garrison in Tampico declared for the reestablishment of Federalism. Canales and Carbajal sensed that this was their moment of opportunity. The closest Centralist military commander was all-consumed with putting down the revolt in Tampico. He wasn’t paying any attention to the Rio Grande villas. This was the time, Canales in particular, realized, to make some noise. In later years, he would earn the nickname “el zorro del chaparral,” or the “brush fox,” which seemed to suit well Canales’s native cleverness, which he memorialized in the words: “mientras la fuerza no pueda, que valga la astucia” which we could translate as, “what force can’t do, cunning can.” And Canales was ready to try a little bit of both.⁶⁷

On November 3, 1838, Antonio Canales defiantly called a federalist convention of twenty-two delegates from throughout the Rio Grande Villas. He named the fiery Carvajal his chief-of-staff and secretary to the Convention. The Convention met on November 3 in Camargo, and resolved “to perish first before continuing to be a toy for the army.” They sent notice of their intentions to the Commanding Centralist Colonel, and then Canales, Carbajal, and their co-conspirators entered and took possession of the armory in Camargo. The same day, in a coordinated action, other co-conspirators did the same in Reynosa.⁶⁸

Preoccupied as he may have been with events in Tamaulipas, the centralist colonel wasted no time in marching on Canales. But Canales avoided him long enough to call a second convention. On November 9, thirty-eight representatives from Camargo, Reynosa, Mier, Guerrero, and Matamoros attended, including many of the commanders of the local militias – though not, we should note, Antonio Zapata. There, they declared their commitment to the Federalist cause, made common cause with their compatriots in Tampico, and resolved to sustain their cause until they should shed “the last drop of their blood.” Over the course of a week, heated rhetoric had transformed into open revolt. Over the next few days, 500 volunteers from the Rio Grande villas marched into Canales’ camp and joined their destinies to the Federalist cause.

Still, this wasn’t nearly enough to face off against the centralist regulars descending on Camargo now. Canales, Carvajal, and the rest were forced to retreat north, to the next town up the river: Guerrero, formerly known as Revilla, that ancient hotbed of federalism, hometown to Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, and hometown, of course, to Antonio Zapata.

Up to this point, Zapata had remained on the sidelines. The commanding centralist colonel had been in regular communication with him, flattering him, reminding him of his officer’s commission from the government, and promising him opportunities if he would remain loyal to the central government. And as late as November 15th, Zapata reciprocated, dutifully passing the Centralist Colonel updates on rumors of Canales’s movements, fulfilling what he viewed as his duty as an officer in the irregular forces of the state and as a city councilman of Guerrero. Zapata also knew the consequences of defying the government – the same government which had just taken nearly everything he owned. And he wouldn’t lightly commit his community – a community that had suffered so much in the last few years – to a course of frivolous bloodshed and suffering. It didn’t matter how well he knew Canales or any of the others marching toward Guerrero now, Zapata was accountable to his “pueblo” in both sense of the word, to his town and to his people. And it was altogether unclear to him that Canales and Carvajal and all of their flowery proclamations held out anything good for the residents of Guerrero.

The scene was set for a showdown. Two rising stars of the Rio Grande Villas, Antonio Zapata of Guerrero and Antonio Canales of Camargo, the Sombrero Mantecoso and the Brush Fox, were poised for a faceoff.

Thus far, we have referred to the events since the taking of the Centralist armory in Camargo as Antonio Canales’ revolt. Yet it becomes clear the moment that Canales’ army met Zapata’s irregulars outside of Guerrero that it is ZAPATA who held the future of the revolt in his hands. Zapata could have crushed Canales then and there, or at least held him off long enough for the Centralist Colonel to arrive. Or, he could let Canales pass, and offer him the safety of his town. Antonio Zapata – son of a cowboy ad a housemaid – was now the kingmaker of the Rio Grande villas. And this is why Canales needed Antonio Zapata. It may be the real reason that Canales “retreated” to Guerrero. If he’d really thought he’d have to face off against Zapata, he’d NEVER have marched north. No, Canales must have been marching TO Zapata.⁶⁹

It wouldn’t have taken much for Canales – who intimately knew Zapata’s strained financial situation – to appeal to Zapata’s own frustrations. E.g., the presence of an enormous centralist army that refused to actually defend their citizens against hostile natives and raiding Texians; the forced requisitions of private property required to support that army; the arbitrary prohibitions promulgated by the Centralist commanders preventing residents of the villas from even accessing their ranches north of the Rio Grande; and now, new onerous taxes that promised to funnel more money out of the already poor Rio Grande Villas back into the centralist government that was so abusing them. Etc. Etc.

In the words of Antonio Zapata scholar JJ Gallegos, Zapata’s decision on November 18 to allow Canales safe passage into Guerrero and to join his substantial name to the Federalist cause “was the result of pragmatic Federalism instead of an ideological one…the ideology of Federalism provided the rationale for rebelling, but what motivated the rebellion against Centralism was the adverse impact of its policies on the Villas.” Going back to an earlier point, we have no evidence up to this point that Zapata was a particularly ideological man. But he could relate to Canales and the men in his party as neighbors, men with whom he’d shed blood in the defense of their communities since they were teenagers. Nothing like that could be said of the representatives of the central government.⁷⁰

Canales offered Zapata a commission as a Lieutenant Colonel and the command of all of the mounted forces of the new northeastern Federalist revolt. In a region that so-prized horsemanship and which had perfected mounted warfare, this was the most esteemed military post that Canales could offer. And it was the most appropriate. Zapata accepted, and after resting for a day in Guerrero, Canales, Zapata, Carvajal, and 500 or so others turned their retreat around and began marching south. Zapata rode at the front of the column, and when on November 20th they rode into sight of Centralist forces, it was Zapata and Canales who rode forward together to parley.⁷¹

The Colonel invited Canales and Zapata to come meet with him at a ranch called El Puntiagudo on November 22, 1838. Canales presented his grievances to the Centralist Colonel, after first acknowledging the great risk to which they had exposed themselves and their families by taking up arms against the government. And yet “There remains for them no other recourse,” he told the Colonel. “Legal channels had proven useless” he continued and so his community had taken up arms “only so that they might be heard.” The principal grievance, Canales clarified, was the new tax law of June 9. How did the government expect a bunch of ranchers who had now also been forbidden from even accessing their ranches north of the Rio Grande to pay such a tax? Plus, the Colonel should have well known that centralist soldiers had already “requisitioned” nearly everything the poor Rio Grande villas owned! Even while still expecting those villas to handle all the actual real fighting with the Comanches and Lipan Apaches that raided them!

Enough was enough. Canales informed the Colonel that he was giving him twelve days to redress his complaints or else the Rio Grande villas would have no choice but to revolt.

The Centralist Colonel was unsympathetic. He told the Federalist rebels to lay down their arms and return to their homes. The conference at Puntiagudo accomplished nothing, other than to give the name to the Plan del Rancho de Puntiagudo that Canales would publish as the justification for his revolt. Which officially began twelve days later when – unsurprisingly – Canales’s complaints had not been redressed.

Three things happened next. First, with the bilingual Carvajal’s help, Canales wrote the newly-installed President of the Republic of Texas, Mirabeau Lamar, and began lobbying him for men and resources to fight their old common enemy: the centralist government in Mexico City. Indeed, Canales’ appointment of the San Antonio-born, bilingual Carvajal was a nod to the role that he expected Texas to play in his plan. As early as July of 1838, Canales had had agents in San Antonio putting out feelers to see how Texians felt about a revolt amongst their old sister states in the northeast. He had found that Texians – individually – were quite sympathetic. What he was about to find out, however, that that did not necessarily translate into an official government position.⁷²

Second, Canales and Zapata went to Tampico to meet with other Federalist insurgent leaders in the region, leaving with a clearer picture of their role in the larger movement. This secured their role as regional leaders in what was still a national movement.⁷³

And third, and more impactfully, Antonio Zapata set off on one of the most remarkable cavalry campaigns in the history of the continent. On the next episode of the Republic of the Rio Grande.

Zapata Unleashed

Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode 7: Zapata Unleashed. I’m Brandon Seale.

On November 22, 1838, Antonio “the brush fox” Canales and Antonio “Sweat of his brow” Zapata met with the centralist colonel commanding government forces near the Rio Grande Villas. Canales and Zapata voiced their grievances against the distant and indifferent central government that had just levied an unconscionable – in their view – tax on the long-suffering citizens of the frontier. They gave the colonel twelve days to do something about it…or else. Twelve days later, nothing had changed however. And so Canales and Zapata pronounced against the centralist government and aligned themselves with other Federalists in Mexico fighting to restore the Constitution of 1824.⁷⁴

Antonio Canales and his chief of staff, the fiery José María Carvajal, kicked off the political side of the movement by shoring up their bases in the Rio Grande Villas, which one by one, rallied to their side. On December 23, Zapata’s hometown of Guerrero (formerly Revilla) openly pronounced. Laredo followed on January 5, 1839, declaring that: “As the present administration does not merit our confidence…this town will continue in the future to act under the Constitution of the year 1824…as the only thing that can save the pueblo under the present circumstances…” Reynosa fell into line a few days later.⁷⁵

Yet it was Antonio Zapata who turned Canales’s war of words into an actual war. Just a few days after Canales’s twelve-day ultimatum to the Centralist Colonel had expired, Zapata attacked the Centralist Garrison in Mier…and drove them out! He continued on with a force of about 400 men toward Matamoros. Men from the Rio Grande villas poured into his ranks. The famed Sombrero Mantecoso Antonio Zapata was on the warpath! People wanted to be a part of this. Zapata’s Federalist Army, if we can start to call them that, soon grew from 500 men to 900. Zapata also began to recruit heavily from his network of native American allies, most notably, the Carrizo Indians who had lived peacefully alongside Spanish and later Mexican residents of the lower Rio Grande for most of their time there. Present day Carrizo Indians claim the Zapata was part Carrizo himself, and their loyalty to him in 1838 lends credence to this claim. The 60 or so Carrizos who joined him would soon grow to almost 200, and would never waiver in their loyalty to Zapata.⁷⁶

Over the next few weeks, Zapata’s Federalist force surrounding Matamoros grew to over 1,000 men. By contrast, the centralist garrison in Matamoros numbered only 650 men. Yet the Centralist commander there was no slouch and neither were the soldiers he commanded. He sensed or suspected that the Zapata’s army was not as organized as they might be, and so on January 6, he ordered his men on to the offense and attacked Zapata… and the Centralists won, losing only 23 men wounded to the Zapata’s 18 dead. The Centralists pressed their advantage, meeting Zapata in battle again on January 12th and once again defeated him!⁷⁷

Zapata quickly learned that this was a different kind war than he had been used to on the Texas plains. His initial defeats were instructive, however. Zapata realized that his army of vaqueros and Native Americans had neither the firepower nor the training to engage in a set-piece battle with centralist soldiers. What they had, however, was mobility, and a knowledge of the countryside. Zapata decided to turn that to his advantage. He resumed the offensive, but this time, resolved to stay on the move, preferring multiple small targets to concentrated large ones. Something that men like Antonio Zapata had learned over the years of plains warfare was the virtue of the attack. The only way to ensure that you wouldn’t be surprised by your enemies, was to surprise them first. And Zapata knew that although the Centralists may have just defeated him on the battlefield, HE actually had the centralists pinned down in Matamoros. They didn’t dare venture out of the port city. Which meant that the great northern Capital of Monterrey was cut off from supply by sea, even if they didn’t realize yet. And so in early February 1839, Zapata – joined now by Canales - began marching on Monterrey.

Centralists in Monterrey got word of the Rio Grande federalists’ advance and sent out an army to stop them. Whereas before, Zapata had only been tangling with Centralist colonels, this time, he won himself the attention of a Major General. But Zapata struck the first blow. With only “a few horses” and a few men, Zapata launched a daring nighttime raid on the Major General’s camp. He caught the General sleeping, literally, surprising the Major General in his quarters and taking him prisoner! As if that prize weren’t enough, Zapata then stampeded the centralists horseherd, leaving his enemies unable to pursue him. In the ensuing confusion, Zapata and his men melted back into the brush and took the Centralist General back to Camargo for ransoming.⁷⁸

The shocked and demoralized Centralist army tried to pull back to Monterrey. Of course, this was slow-going since they’d lost most of their horses. So slow-going, that Zapata had enough time to ride to Camargo to deposit his prisoner, and then return and hit the stranded Centralist army with larger force this time on March 13, 1839. This time, he won outright. He destroyed the Centralist rear guard and sent the entire force fleeing in disorder back to Monterrey. After this victory on March 13, Zapata got word of another sizeable centralist army about fifty miles southeast of Monterrey. Without a moment’s hesitation, he directed his force toward them and, a week later, on March 20, Zapata surprised and defeated them in battle as well!

Zapata was bringing the speed of plains warfare to the Mexican heartland. At his core was a simple strategy: once he had his enemies on the run, he resolved never to lose contact, never to give them a moment’s peace. Frankly, he was employing old Lipan Apache strategies. With a highly mobile strike force whose size we can only speculate at – maybe a few dozen? Maybe a hundred? – Zapata had just immobilized three different centralist armies numbering in the thousands: one he had pinned down in Matamoros, one he had kicked back to Monterrey, and the third he had just sent packing back for Tampico.⁷⁹

Speaking of the Lipan Apaches, however…the Lipanes were carefully watching the tumult south of the River…and they sensed Zapata’s absence from the Rio Grande Villas. Taking advantage of the turmoil in the region, a combined force of 500 or so Lipan Apaches attacked Guerrero – Zapata’s hometown, where presumably his four daughters were still living – in the most devastating attack on that pueblo since the 1790 raid that had killed Zapata’s grandfather. 50 townspeople were left dead, wounded, or captured, and hundreds of horses and mules had been carried off!⁸⁰

As soon as the Lipan force was sighted, the alcalde of Guerrero sent a message to Zapata begging him to come to the town’s aid. Which wasn’t a huge surprise, given Zapata’s fame as the greatest Indian fighter of the region. But hearing of this plea, the centralist governor of Nuevo Leon decided to make political hay out it. He published a rebuke of the alcalde of Guerrero for calling on the aid of a “traitor” to defend his villa. Note, however, that what the centralist governor DIDN’T do was send actual forces. Zapata, on the other hand - despite being more than 120 miles away! - broke off his pursuit of the centralists and rode at full speed toward Guerrero. A few days later, he picked up the trail of the Apache/Tonkawa party. And on March 29th, just a week after he had received the news!, he routed the raiding party, who must have been shocked to see sombrero de Manteca come riding toward them through the brush. Wasn’t he supposed to be a couple hundred miles away? Zapata liberated 17 of his fellow citizens from Lipan captivity, mostly women and children, as well as 111 horses and mules. And he didn’t let up! He continued pursuing the remnants of the war party, catching up to them again one week later northwest of Laredo, maybe another 75 miles away, and once again whipping them, and sending them into flight back up into the Texas Hill country.

After his victory over the Lipanes, Zapata couldn’t resist: he published notice in a Monterrey newspaper, informing the Nuevo Leon governor there of this “traitor’s” service to his fellow citizens while centralist politicians had done nothing.⁸¹

But the really crazy part is that for this entire month of campaigning up in the wild horse desert of South Texas, the Centralist armies that Zapata had pinned down in northern Mexico still hadn’t moved! Which infuriated the Centralist president, Anastasio Bustamante. On a map, it looked easy! As best as President Bustamente could tell, Zapata didn’t have three armies forked: he was surrounded by three armies! President Bustamante decided to take the field himself and finish off the Rio Grande Federalists. Bustamante began pushing up from Mexico City toward Tampico, where in April he routed two other Federalist rebel armies. That same month, April 1839, the “Pastry War” finally came to an end. France’s overly exuberant attempts to collect on the damages suffered by a French pastry chef near Mexico City did not play well in the courts of international opinion. And it didn’t help that the port city of Veracruz had managed a spirited defense against a French landing there, led by none other than Mexico’s freshly-returned prodigal son, Santa Anna. This too may have motivated the President Bustamente to leave Mexico City and move himself closer to the action along the coast, to keep an eye on the ambitions of the ever-intriguing Santa Anna.

President Bustamante marched north and made camp in Southwest Tamaulipas, adding a fourth army to the mix – fifth I guess if you count the Lipanes – that Zapata would now have to worry about. Yet all Zapata saw was another lumbering, isolated force. Zapata selected fifty of his hardest riding, most trustworthy men, and rode south. Way south. He rode clear around President Bustamente’s camp, and on May 9th, he struck the town of Soto La Marina, about halfway down the coast to Tampico and more than 300 miles away from Laredo, where Zapata had last been seen! Bustamante and the centralist commanders were shocked by Zapata’s brazenness, and once again paralyzed by his mobility. Defying expectations, Zapata didn’t just melt back into the Tamaulipecan brush. Instead, the week later, he rode straight for President Bustamente’s camp itself and stampeded the Centralist President’s horse herd. The enraged President sent a unit of dragoons after Zapata…who calmly wheeled his small force around and defeated the dragoons in battle on May 24th, once again capturing the unit’s commander and taking him along as prisoner when he returned to the Rio Grande villas at the end of May. President Bustamante was stumped as to what to do next. Chasing Zapata was like chasing the wind. After thinking about it long enough, the President decided that he had more important things to deal with. He returned to Mexico City and split his forces between the Matamoros and Monterrey garrisons, leaving everything in between to Zapata. ⁸²

I don’t think it’s too much to say that Zapata’s bold campaign in the Spring of 1839 made Canales’s revolt REAL. It made what would have otherwise been a lot of flowery words in newspapers an actual threat to the centralist government. And it was Zapata’s tactical genius that had made this work. Had Zapata not so effectively paralyzed the area’s centralist commanders into inaction, they could have easily converged on Canales’s disorganized Federalist army and crushed them as easily as they had the other Federalist armies in the region.

Zapata had purchased critical time for Canales and his chief-of-staff, the bilingual San Antonian, Jose Maria Carvajal, to open up the diplomatic channels they would need to wage a protracted war, namely, diplomatic relations with the new Republic of Texas. This wasn’t an easy thing for Canales to come around to. Canales was always leery of dealing with the Texians. On good days, he viewed their separation from Mexico as a regrettable fait accompli; on bad days, he viewed them as little more than “adventurers” and cattle thieves. Still, his chief of staff Carvajal made the case to him that he and the newly installed President Mirabeau Lamar had a common enemy in the centralist government of Mexico, which still openly claimed Texas as a part of the Mexican republic and which every spring launched raids into the new Republic. And Canales also knew that Texians and residents of the Villas del norte shared important ideological and familial ties. And recall too that these events are occurring before the Mexican-American War of 1846-8, an event which everafter would cause Mexicans to view their neighbor to the north as a menacing bully, but prior to which, many northern Mexican federalists looked quite admiringly on the Anglo-American example and viewed them as natural allies. And the best proof of this was Canales’s chief of staff, Jose Maria Carvajal himself. If anyone had cause to feel aggrieved by the Texians, it was Carvajal, who despite personally losing $35,000 in the cause of Texas independence was marched off his land at gunpoint following the Texian victory at San Jacinto because he spoke the same language as Santa Anna. And yet Carvajal was as vocal and proactive as anyone in the Federalist movement in seeking an alliance with the Texians and recruiting them into the Federalists’ ranks.⁸³

President Lamar received Canales and Carvajal, politely but cautiously. Lamar knew that intervening in a Mexican civil war was the best way to provoke an invasion from a centralist government that was just itching for a reason to do it. And so initially, President Lamar declined to recognize Canales or even to require that all Texian trade with Mexico go through the Rio Grande Federalists. And yet – wink wink - he would do nothing to stop Canales and Carbajal from espousing the virtues of their cause should any Texian volunteers wish to join them. Because at his core, Lamar did want to help them! The reason may have been self-serving moreso than ideological, but he knew that a divided Mexico was a Mexico that wouldn’t reinvade Texas. Or better still, a divided Mexico might result in a more friendly “sister republic” along Texas’s southern border, eliminating the threat of a border war entirely.⁸⁴

Canales and Carvajal must have foreseen Lamar’s train of thought on the matter, and couldn’t have been terribly disappointed with this initial outcome. Especially after they saw how well their recruitment efforts went. They benefited from the fact that the economy of the Republic of Texas was in shambles. The Texas dollar had fallen to $.03 on the U.S. dollar. And the panic of 1837 in the United States had only weakened the U.S. dollar pretty considerably as well, leaving Texas full of a lot of poor, desperate men. In those circumstances, Canales’ promise of 2,200 acres per man plus $25 a month got a lot of attention. And sure enough, Texians started to sign up.⁸⁵

In dealing with the Texians, however, Canales and Carvajal were making a bit of a Faustian bargain. It was one thing to oppose an unpopular centralist government. But it was quite another to dialogue with the leaders of a breakaway state that Mexico didn’t officially recognize. To elites in Mexico City, there was already an “otherness” to Zapata and his Federalist insurgents, before even adding in a bunch of Texian adventurers. Zapata and his “chusma de ladrones,” his “mob of thieves” the government newspapers called him, with an unmistakable class and even racial tinge to the word “chusma.” Because Zapata’s “chusma” looked a lot like him: mulato, mestizo, and Indian. Though even more offensive to centralist elites, it seems, was the chusma’s usurpation of the centralists’ “rightful” authority to tax and requisition goods from the citizenry.⁸⁶

Of course, Zapata could have responded to their question with his own: why was it thievery when he did it and legitimate when somebody from the center did it? What was the difference? The color of his uniform? The color of his skin? Hell, if there was a difference, it was that Zapata actually did seem to take the time to deliver a service in exchange for his taxes, namely, his own personal defense of the towns under his watch. And in addition to defense of the frontier, the Rio Grande federalists also set up the first reliable postal system since colonial times, evidence too of their desire to govern, not just disrupt.⁸⁷

Even as I defend Zapata from the attacks, you’re already starting to hear Centralists’ two main lines of propaganda that they will use against Zapata and Canales: that the Rio Grande Federalists were little better than bandits, cloaking their lawlessness with a thin veil of Federalist ideology; and that the Rio Grande Federalists were traitors conspiring with Texian adventurers to tear apart their country. Ironically – or perhaps by design – the more that centralists newspapers repeated this last line, the more it became true. The more that centralists accused Canales and Zapata of being in bed with the Texians, the harder it became for them to find allies within Mexico, and the more that Canales and Zapata were forced to turn to the Texians for support. On the next episode, of the republic of the Rio Grande.

The Kingdom of Zapata

Welcome to The Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode 8: The Kingdom of Zapata.

By May of 1839, the residents of the original Rio Grande Villas - Laredo, Guerrero, Mier, Carmargo, and Reynosa – had rid themselves entirely of any centralist government presence. Over the course of a few months and a few thousand miles in the saddle, local legend Antonio Zapata had immobilized centralist forces in Matamoros and Monterrey and Tampico, establishing de facto dominion over the countryside. Eventually, the Centralist Mexican President himself felt compelled to lead troops out into the field to confront the Rio Granders, but Zapata ran him off too.

Zapata also commanded the hearts and souls of large swaths of the population. Sure, the centralist press dismissed him as a rabble rouser for arming his mounted legion of Indians, mestizos, and mulattos…which is to say, men like him! And they called him a traitor for starting to accept Texian volunteers into his ranks. But his men adored him. Even the Anglo-Texians drifting into his Federalist ranks were immediately drawn to Zapata and his leadership, which stood out to them far more than the color of his skin.⁸⁸

Riding high on the success of his Spring 1839 campaign, Zapata was arguably the most powerful man in the region. He didn’t seem to be a personally ambitious man, at least not in the political sense, yet he seems to have realized his role at this moment as kingmaker. And that this movement that he was a part of needed clear leadership. So in August of 1839, Antonio Zapata called a convention. He called civic leaders from throughout the old Northeastern provinces. He called refugees from the Tampico federalist uprising the year before. He called frustrated ranchers from Nuevo Leon, from whose towns many of the founding families of the Rio Grande villas had come. He called the Coahuilans, always a cantankerous bunch and as Federalist to the core as the Tamaulipecans. And of course, he called on his Rio Grande Villas.⁸⁹

The conference met on August 4th in Villaldama, Nuevo Leon, about forty miles north of Monterrey, near Canales and Zapata’s field headquarters. Interestingly, it wasn’t his old comrade Antonio Canales that Zapata supported for the leadership of their movement. Instead, it was Pablo Anaya, a much older and more senior Army officer with national stature and a long history of supporting Federalism. You don’t really need to bother remember his name, because he won’t last long, but I find it interesting that Canales – who was a politically ambitious man – went for this. I can’t find anywhere how Canales felt about this. Antonio Canales was, nominally at least, the commander the of the Federalist army and the instigator of the revolt, taking back to his raid on the armory in Camargo in November of 1838. And so he had a claim to leadership of the movement. Maybe the thirty-seven year old Canales recognized the advantages of placing the fifty-three year old Anaya at the head of the movement. Then again, maybe Canales went for it because Zapata told him to.⁹⁰

Canales of course technically outranked Zapata, but Zapata was an intimidating dude. A contemporary of both men would later claim that Canales was “overawed by Zapata.” “On one occasion, when Canalis became alarmed, and manifested a disposition to Compromise with the Government, Zapata told him, that he Canalis had pledged himself never to be bought up, or to abandon the cause, and said Zapata, if you dare to do either whilst I am living, I will as surely kill you. Death shall be certain my vengeance shall be more speedy and terrible, than that which you apprehend from the foe, and drives you into treachery. You know very well that it is my spirit that holds our soldiers together, that it is to me that you yourself as well as the army, looks for victory, and at the first signal of betrayal or desertion, the force now under your command shall be turned upon you as a foe, more hateful than the central despots.” This may be an exaggerated, literary version of the two men’s relationship, but there’s enough anecdotes like this to give it the ring of truth.⁹¹

Having selected the old Pablo Anaya as the leader of their movement, Zapata and Canales promptly sent him to Texas to try to raise more money and troops. The convention broke and the various representatives returned to their homes and began to arm themselves, in an apparent effort to replicate Zapata’s strategy by fielding small, quick-strike forces throughout the northeast that could harry the centralists into exhaustion. But before the Coahuilans could even really get going, a new Centralist commander caught up to them near a town called Santa Rita de Morelos. Bold and competent, the thirty-seven year old centralist General Mariano Arista had played a critical role in quelling the. Federalist uprising in Tampico a few months ago. He was of the same generation as Zapata and Canales, and actually was widely suspected of harboring Federalist sympathies himself. Yet he had no sympathy for insurgents, or for the Federalist revolts that he felt were destabilizing his new nation. It had been General Arista who had quelled the uprising in Tampico a few months prior. And once he turned his attention to Coahuila, it didn’t take him long to quash the new uprisings there either.⁹²

Zapata and Canales realized they were facing a new caliber of enemy. Canales ordered the bulk of the Federalist forces under his command to pull back to the Rio Grande villas, for their own protection and that of the villas themselves. To further draw General Arista’s attention away from the Rio Grande Villas, on August 6, 1839, Zapata made a feint toward Monterrey. Leading a 260-man contingent, he raided the town of Salinas Victoria, a town that has today been absorbed by the larger Monterrey metropolitan area, but which was still several miles north of settlement in the 1800s. In Salinas Victoria, he confiscated 12,000 pesos from the customs house, armory, and church, an enormous sum that would go a long way toward supporting the revolt’s expenses for months.⁹³

A different kind of centralist general would have been too afraid to march out against Zapata, and would have let him return to the safety of the Rio Grande villas with his new bounty. But when General Arista heard that Zapata was in Salinas Victoria with 260-men, the general realized that Canales and Zapata had divided their forces. He wasted no time in sending a large party after Zapata and his raiders. Having grown accustomed to Centralist complacency, Zapata had paused northeast of Salinas Victoria to rest his men. But in his uncharacteristic delay, Zapata gave the centralists the opportunity they had been looking for. On August 10th, General Arista’s men caught up to Zapata and attacked them. Ten of Zapata’s men were killed and thirteen fell prisoner. The rest fled in disarray. One of the newly arrived anglo-Texian recruits tells the story of how he lost his mount and was being pursued by a centralist lancer, when suddenly he saw Zapata reverse his own flight, bear down on the lancer, and kill him before he could catch up the Texian. The grateful Texian did not fail to tell his compatriots – or anyone who would listen for years thereafter – about his rescue.⁹⁴

Still, it was a bad beat for Zapata and his unit. In addition to the twenty-three men lost, Zapata lost over 100 horses and large quantities of saddles and ammunition. Zapata and his remaining men made it back to the Rio Grande villas, but with Arista his entire centralist army hot on their tail. Back in on Rio Grande, Zapata and Canales took counsel, but realized they couldn’t resist General Arista’s oncoming centralist onslaught. They made the difficult decision to abandon the Rio Grande villas and retreat to the north side of the river.

All of this gave General Arista and the centralist government a much-needed public relations victory. In addition to being a competent battlefield general, Arista had a knack for the PR game. His newspapers mocked the great Sombrero Mantecoso’s flight, describing Zapata as “fleeing precipitously in his shirtsleeves and without his sombrero” in “the most shameful cowardice.” And the newspapers once again played up the horror of Zapata’s “chusma” or mob of multi-colored vaqueros and the increasingly large number of Anglo-Texians serving in Zapata’s ranks. ⁹⁵

Yet where else could Zapata and Canales turn at his point for aid except to the fledgling Republic of Texas? Desperate now and with fewer and fewer domestic allies, in late August 1839, Canales undertook another diplomatic mission to Texas, once again alongside his Chief of Staff, the fiery Jose Maria Carvajal. And yet Texas President Mirabeau Lamar remained noncomittal. He just couldn’t risk openly provoking the Mexican central government at the same time that he was trying to keep it from reinvading Texas. Recall, the centralist government had left a couple thousand troops along the Rio Grande after San Jacinto precisely for this purpose.

Of course, those were the same troops that Zapata and Canales were keeping tied up. President Lamar realized that as long as the Centralist government of Mexico was fighting new insurgents inside their borders, they wouldn’t bother old insurgents located beyond them.

So, as a half-measure, President Lamar agreed to turn a blind eye toward the Rio Grande federalists’ recruitment of Texian volunteers Canales and Carvajal were permitted to set up a recruiting station on the grounds of the new Capital! Canales and Carvajal appealed to Texians’ genuine ideological sympathy to the cause. And they also appealed to their pocketbooks. They promised all men who enlisted in their cause 2,200 acres of land and twenty-five dollars a month, plus as much loot as they could take from centralists. Two hundred twenty-six Texians took the deal, about 180 of them Anglo, and fifty or so Tejanos.⁹⁶

There was one major elephant in the room, however, when Texians and Rio Grande Federalists got together. Technically, the Republic of Texas claimed all the land north of the Rio Grande. As most Texas history buffs know, however, the old Spanish province of Texas had always ended at the Nueces River. What’s more, Canales, Zapata, and many others in the leadership of the Rio Grande federalists actually owned substantial ranches on the north side of the Rio Grande. It was a sensitive issue that both sides kind of artfully danced around. But the issue came to a head as the two hundred and twenty-six new recruits came marching south. As soon as they crossed the Nueces River to the southern bank, Antonio Canales was horrified to see them unfurl a Texas flag at a small trading post there called Casa Blanca!

Canales objected to this immediately and in no uncertain terms to President Lamar. He informed Lamar that he considered the opening of a customs house south of the Nueces “a new aggression against the Republic, that I because I am closer than you with an armed force view it as my obligation to protest and even attack.” And to show how serious he was about it, Canales added that “this is the only cause for which I would cease to be a federalist, because territorial integrity and national honor come before all else.”⁹⁷

And Canales wasn’t just blustering. After sending the letter of protest to President Lamar, Canales immediately turned and told his centralist enemy, General Arista, about it. Further, he actually invited General Arista to join him ASAP in a punitive expedition against the Texian transgressors. Which inadvertently turned into a masterful stroke of psychological warfare on Canales’s part. Because when General Arista received Canales’s invitation, he naturally assumed that it was a trick, that Canales was just trying to lure the Arista into across the Rio Grande into the no-man’s land of the Wild Horse desert, where the centralist general would be ultra-vulnerable to the plains tactics of Zapata and his vaqueros. And so General Arista paused on the south bank of the Rio Grande. So he remanded his orders to cross the Rio Grande in pursuit of Canales and Zapata, which he was otherwise planning to do. Ironically, then, Canales’s invitation to Arista to cross the Rio Grande is precisely what kept him from doing it, and what gave Canales and Zapata time to integrate their forces with the newly arriving Texian volunteers, who had been then quietly lowered their Texas flag.⁹⁸

In September of 1839, Antonio Zapata, Antonio Canales, his chief of staff Jose Maria Carvajal, and others, felt emboldened by their new recruits and by Arista’s refusal to pursue them north of the Rio Grande. At Zapata’s urging, the Rio Grande federalists once again took the initiative, crossing over to the south side of the Rio Grande, near an old Carrizo Indian habitation which the natives called, appropriately enough, Carrizo. As soon as they crossed, Zapata once again rode off with his mounted force, northwest, bound for Laredo, which he arrived at in time to lead the townfolk there in their 16 de Septiembre celebrations. One of the listeners recorded the stirring speech he give, preserving for us one of the few instances of Zapata’s own words: “Soldiers of liberty, do not be seduced: the cause of the People is the most just of causes, you are the supporters of public liberties and national independence…” Continuing: “Let us march, yes, let us march united on the path of honor, and your names will be memorable; your children, spouses and relatives will bless your memory and enshrine you with the true heroes of the Fatherland…in defense of your liberty and that of your children, nothing will frighten us, my friends, not even our death; and that with your help and that of the People, my friends, always trust I will constant labor for such a just cause until shedding the last drop of my blood.”⁹⁹

That last line of his, swearing to fight until shedding “the last drop of my blood,” is a direct quote from the convention that Canales had convened on November 9, 1838, where thirty-eight representatives – at that time, not yet including Zapata – resolved to sustain their call for the establishment of representative government and the re-estabslishment of the Constitution of 1834 until “shedding the last drop of their blood.” But when Zapata said it, he meant it, something that wasn’t always as convincing when it came from the mouths of some of the others in the Federalist leadership. Yet Zapata’s sincerity always rang through, and new recruits flocked to his ranks as he marched out of Laredo to the northwest.

Zapata’s goal seems to have been to open a new front against the Centralists. As his target, Zapata selected the old Presidio del Rio Grande, the spot from which all of the old Spanish entradas had crossed the Rio Grande into Spanish Texas, the spot where the Alamo Mission, Mission Valero had been originally founded, the spot where Santa Anna had crossed with his army three years prior. In September of 1839, it was commanded by a man whose name was none other than Manuel Menchaca, a direct descendant of the men who had been defending the Presidio del Rio Grande for 150 years, as listeners of the very first episode of this podcast might remember. Menchaca’s name in northern Coahuila meant what Zapata’s did in the Rio Grande valley. And so when Manuel Menchaca put out a call for aid to nearby towns, it was answered with the same vigor with which Laredoans had answered Zapata’s call. Including I should note, volunteers from the small town of Santa Rita de Morelos, whose volunteers had also been critical – along with Menchaca – with routing the Coahuilan federalist uprising the previous month.¹⁰⁰

On September 24, 1839, at 5 PM, Zapata attacked the old Presidio. His vaqueros circled the old fort like Comanches, trying to exhaust the defenders’ ammunition and hoping to draw them out into the open field. But Menchaca wasn’t some reformed Spanish aristocrat from Mexico City, he was a veteran of the same kind of mounted warfare as Zapata. He remained behind his walls and conserved his ammunition. The next day, Zapata tried a different Comanche tactic. Zapata’s men stampeded the presidio’s horseherd, capturing most of them and daring Menchaca to come out in pursuit. Yet Menchaca didn’t budge. In frustration, Zapata ordered an all-out attack, but even against the crumbling 100 year old walls, it was useless. When it was clear that the Presidio would not fall, Zapata ordered a general withdrawal. While pulling back, however, Zapata’s famous sombrero was shot off his head. With his typical bravado, Zapata wheeled his horse around and returned to the spot where it had fallen. He picked it up at a canter and kept on riding toward the old Presidio, galloping now to within ear shot of the defenders, to whom he shouted: “Well done to the people of Rio Grande and its commander, who…well know how to sustain their cause with enthusiasm!” You can imagine the impression this left even on his enemies.¹⁰¹

Even though Zapata didn’t capture the Presidio, his raid up into Coahuila had accomplished its purpose. The horses were a welcome prize, and Zapata’s surprise appearance so far from his home base reminded Centralist General Arista that he could not venture too far from Monterrey without leaving it exposed. Which once again meant that Zapata had bought the Rio Grande federalist movement the breathing room that it needed to survive. And in this case, to recover from their defeats in early August. By then end of September, their restructured army numbered perhaps 1,000 men, as strong as it had ever been, and a colorful crew now of Rio Grande vaqueros, Carrizo Indians, and Anglo-Texian adventurers. And they were itching for a fight.

On September 30, 1839, Antonio Zapata, Antonio Canales, and Jose Maria Carbajal – among others – formed up to re-capture Guerrero, Zapata’s hometown. At this point in time, Guerrero was lightly held by only a small centralist force, but it was led by one of the most accomplished battlefield commanders in Northern Mexico. Indeed, between 1812-13, this commander had not lost a battle during the course of a year spent fighting Spanish royalists in Texas. Any guesses? That’s right, the commander of the centralist forces defending Guerrero was none other than, José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara! Now sixty-five years old, Gutiérrez de Lara had mellowed out quite a bit, however. Gutiérrez de Lara – first President of an independent Texan state, first governor of independent Tamaulipas, executioner of the reactionary first ruler of an independent Mexico, Agustin Iturbide – this same Gutiérrez de Lara was now fighting on the side of the establishment! And against his old mentee and business partners, Antonio Zapata? Luckily for us, Gutiérrez de Lara told us why, in a poignant letter which he penned to Zapata as his forces encircled Guerrero. On the next episode of the Republic of the Rio Grande.

The Battle of Alcantra

Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande: Episode IX, the Battle of Alcántra.

Growing up in Guerrero – which was known as Revilla back then – as the poor son of a cowboy, Antonio Zapata probably grew up admiring José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara. Gutiérrez De Lara was a generation older than Zapata. He had land, he had some capital, and he had received an education. But what made Gutiérrez de Lara really stand out was his charisma, particularly after 1810 when he became one of the most outspoken advocates of Republicanism against the ancient rights and privileges of Spanish Royalists. Even as a poor boy from a radically different background, Antonio Zapata likely could have related to this cry for autonomy; it was, after all, the lived ethos of the entire Spanish North American frontier.

Which is what makes it so strange that now, in 1839, the sixty-five year old Gutiérrez de Lara found himself in command of nearly 500 centralist government soldiers arrayed against the 1,000 or so Federalist insurgents under the command of Antonio Zapata. Indeed, even the composition of Zapata and Canales’s Federalist force must have reminded Gutiérrez de Lara of the old Republican army of the North that he had commanded back in Texas in 1813, comprised in near equal parts of Spanish frontiersmen, Anglo-Americans, and native americans. Hell, the commander of the Anglo-Americans in Zapata and Canales’ army in 1839 was actually the nephew of the Anglo-American who had eventually commanded the Anglos in Gutiérrez de Lara’s army! He even had the same name, Reuben Ross, there was no mistaking it!¹⁰²

How could Gutiérrez de Lara justify his apparent flip-flop, his conversion into an establishment man this late in his career? Could he not see the connections to the cause that he had fought and bled for? one source I’ve found even claims that two of Gutiérrez de Lara’s sons were actually serving under Zapata and Canales, further confirmation that there was something incongruous about Gutierrez de Lara’s new allegiance!

Fortunately, we don’t have to guess as to what was motivating him. The ever wordy-Gutiérrez de Lara tells us himself, or rather, he told Antonio Zapata in a letter written to him as the younger man’s forces took up positions outside Guerrero on September 22, 1839. “Mi siempre querido amigo,” Gutierrez de Lara begins. “My always beloved friend.” He seems to mean it too. Because the entire letter has the tone of fatherly advice. It’s not about ideology for Gutierrez de Lara at this stage…its about Zapata’s choice of allies. These men serving under you are nothing more than “adventurers and vandals”, Gutiérrez de Lara says, apparently agreeing with the centralist government’s propaganda. Separate yourself from them, Gutiérrez de Lara pleas. These “adventurers,” Gutiérrez de Lara continues, referring now specifically to the Anglo-Texians, are “not even supported by their own colonies.” And yet, he’s not necessarily banging an anti-Anglo drum, as you might suspect from someone who’d been abandoned by some – but not all – of his Anglo allies back in 1813. More than anything, Gutiérrez de Lara is voicing a generation’s worth of fatigue at all of the instability and bloodshed that had brought Mexico to where it was in 1839: fractured, broke, and in desperate need of a few years of peace. “Lay down his arms for the good of [your] country,” Gutiérrez de Lara begs his “beloved friend,” and do it “as well as for [your] own well-being.”¹⁰³

There was wisdom in Gutiérrez de Lara’s suggestion, wisdom he was pulling from a deep well of experience. But his friend and mentee, Zapata had already committed himself to his course, heart and soul, until he should shed “the last drop of his blood.” And once committed to a course of action, Zapata was not the type of man to deviate from it, to the point of being “headstrong and stubborn.” In this case, he was unmoved by his business partner’s pleas. He waited for a week, to see if Gutierrez De Lara would give in, or come over maybe to the Federalist side. But Gutierrez De Lara could be headstrong and stubborn in his own way. Zapata probably knew this about Gutierrez De Lara. Just as Gutierrez De Lara must have known this about Zapata.

On October 1, 1839, Zapata and Canales split their Federalist forces, Zapata crossing the Rio Grande upstream and descending on Guerrero from the north, Canales crossing downstream and attacking Guerrero from the South. Gutierrez De Lara was either unprepared for this or taken entirely off guard. In either case, he made a surprisingly weak showing for a man who had not lost a battle back in Texas a generation prior. It didn’t help, of course, that the forces under his command were not particularly committed to their cause, or to the idea of dying in this remote little frontier town. Once the battle began, and the Federalists converged on Guerrero from north and South, the Centralist conscripts realized they been trapped between Zapata and Canales’ pincers. Most of them fled downstream without a fight. Already outnumbered even before this mass desertion, Gutierrez De Lara was now outmaneuvered, even more outmaneuvered, and totally out of luck. The man who had never lost a battle to the Spanish crown in 1813 was no match for an army of vaqueros in 1839.

Here’s an account of what happened next: “After the garrison was overrun by the Federalists, Don Bernardo was captured as he tried to cross the Salado. One of the Texan soldiers recognized him and pointed him out, whereupon Don Bernardo demanded to be taken to the commanding officer, who turned out to be Col. Reuben Ross. Don Bernardo then asked him if he was related to Major Reuben Ross, who had fought with him in Texas in the Republican Army of the North. Colonel Ross replied that he was Major Ross’s nephew, and Don Bernardo said that, in that case, he knew he would be treated in a humane fashion.” Maybe. Relations between Uncle Reuben Ross and Gutierrez De Lara hadn’t been the best back in 1813. Another probably-exaggerated account has Canales being less conciliatory. He supposedly walked up to the aged revolutionary and ripped the gold epaulettes off of his government uniform, then sacked his home. It’s hard to believe that any more protection was needed for Gutierrez De Lara than his old friendship with Zapata, or for that matter that Zapata would have allowed Canales to mistreat his old “siempre querido amigo.” In either case, Gutiérrez de Lara was allowed to live, paroled, and released into the care of his family. He lived for a year with one son, who passed him along the next year to his daughter, who a few months later took him to another one of his son’s house. Old age was not kind to people in the nineteenth century. On May 13, 1841, José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara died at the age of 66 in Santiago, Nuevo Leon, where he is today interred in the cathedral on the plaza there. A quiet end to a decidedly unquiet life.¹⁰⁴

Zapata didn’t hang around Guerrero to philosophize after defeating his old friend, however. In his typical fashion, he continued downriver toward Mier in pursuit of the fleeing Centralists with 476 cavalrymen, 106 infantry, 111 Indians, and 250 mounted riflemen, a classically frontier-style breakdown of forces with a heavy reliance on mounted troops. They entered Mier the next day, October 2, again, reminding us of the speed with which Zapata moved. The Centralists didn’t even stop to put up a fight, and kept fleeing down river. But again, Zapata didn’t let up. He and his force pursued them through the night, until at least the Centralists gave up and selected a piece of high ground on which to make their stand about 15 miles east of Mier. Yet Zapata immediately identified their weakness: in selecting the high ground, they had neglected to ensure access to water. Zapata force-marched around them and cut them off from the only nearby watering hole. The next day, October 3, 1839, Zapata attacked, and the Battle of Alanctra was begun.

Zapata personally led his 300-strong core of vaqueros and the 100 or so Carrizo Indians. The Carrizos are an ever-present factor in the story of Antonio Zapata, an indication of their loyalty to him. Modern Carrizos hold that Zapata was himself part Carrizo. Yet we also shouldn’t underestimate their ideological commitment to the cause. According to one chronicler, their full-throated support of Mexican independence had brought about severe retributions from Spanish authorities, the losses from which “considerably diminished the tribe.” According to another contemporary, the Carrizo tribe “had suffered greatly from military oppression, and was more alive to the Revolution than the Mexicans.” At one point in 1839, they would be mass incarcerated in Matamoros by centralist authorities, an act which of course only hardened their hatred of the centralist government authorities.¹⁰⁵

Zapata and his vaqueros and his Carrizos threw themselves into the fight, encircling the Centralists in a swirling mass of horses and dust and gunpowder. The Centralists put up a fair defense, however, using their ammunition wisely and effectively, and preventing Zapata from closing in. The Texians were held back from Zapata’s initial assault by Antonio Canales. This was perhaps a calculation meant to limit the involvement of the Texians in the battle unless absolutely necessary, to avoid playing into Centralist propaganda about the so-called “adventurers and vandals.” Canales deployed his meager artillery to try to soften the Centralist lines, but to minimal effect. By this time, Zapata and his 300 men had closed in on the Centralists, but many had dismounted and the fight had devolved into a general hand-to-hand melee. Yet Canales still held pack the Texians. Even Canales’ chief of staff, Jose Maria Carvajal was baffled. Zapata and his men needed help. Seeing the desperateness of the situation, Carvajal personally rallied 25 men and charged into the fray. From that point forward, the fiery Carvajal was seen at all points of the action, even after being wounded in his left arm. His heroics helped turned the tide, and won a similar respect from the Anglo-Texians as that which they held for Antonio Zapata, who was his usual badass self in this battle as well. At last, Canales committed the rest of his forces, including the Anglo-Texians, and the Federalists carried the day.¹⁰⁶

The Battle of Alcantra – as it came to be known by Anglo-Texian chroniclers – was the Federalists’ greatest victory to-date. At the cost of only a few dozen men killed and wounded, Zapata and Canales killed 150 Centralists and captured 350, 100 of which came over to the Federalist side. And yet, the Federalist victory at Alcantra – which by the way, goes down in Mexican history books as “La Meca” -- didn’t play like a victory in the national press. In actuality, it played right into the centralist narrative. This movement wasn’t about Federalism! This wasn’t about the grievances of hundreds or thousands of neglected borderlanders! This wasn’t even about self-government! This was nothing more than a foreign invasion, a treasonous alliance with “foreign adventurers and vandals” to use Gutiérrez de Lara’s words. Despite attempts to minimize their involvement, the mere presence of Anglo-Texians at the seemed to prove the centralists worst characterizations of the Rio Grande Federalists. Even some of the residents of the Rio Grande villas began to second guess the cause. One of the Villas, Mier, actually depronounced at this juncture, something which surely landed as an emotional gut-punch to the Federalist revolutionaries.¹⁰⁷

And in a vicious cycle, it pushed them even further into a state of dependency on Texas. Around this time, the Federalists sent a former governor of Coahuila and Texas to Texas to invite the New Republic to join into union with the other northeastern Mexico states– the first hint, perhaps, that the Federalists insurgents were starting to think of themselves not so much as proponents of a Federalist revolution perhaps as founders of a Federalist state. The Republic of Texas did not seriously consider the offer, but they did quietly allow for more men and supplies to make their way into Zapata and Canales’s army.¹⁰⁸

This presented Zapata and Canales with a dilemma, a dilemma that perfectly exposed their differences in disposition and demeanor. From Zapata’s standpoint, they had the momentum for the first time since the Spring! Their army sat between the Centralist garrisons in Matamoros and Monterrey. To Zapata’s tactical mind, he had the Centralists forked. All he had to do was pick which garrison to defeat first. Matamoros was open for the taking.

Yet Canales, the politician, saw the makings of a strategic defeat in the guise of a tactical victory. He knew that an army full of Anglo-Texians and unpolished vaqueros from the Rio Grande sacking Matamoros wouldn’t play well in the national press. He held Zapata back, to the great frustration of Zapata and to the even greater frustration of his Anglo-Texian volunteers, whose eagerness to attack to Matamoros probably only unnerved Canales even more.

Just then, the Comanches came to the rescue of the Rio Grande Federalist army, in the sense that they prevented it from tearing itself apart over what to do after the Battle of Alcantra. Just a week or so after the Battle, reports of a major Comanche raid descending from the north began to circulate in the Rio Grande Villas. In the first days of November, the rumors were confirmed, when the Comanches attacked San Antonio, killing eighteen residents there. A few days later, they showed up in the Wild horse desert between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. Yet so too did old Sombrero Mantecoso, Antonio Zapata. The man who “always wanted to fight” had been dissuaded from attacking Matamoros when another, older enemy presented itself to his view. Zapata fell seamlessly back into his old role as commander of the local compania volante, peeling his best men out of the larger Rio Grande Federalist and stormed them north to face off against the Comanches. The evidence we have of his effectiveness in this campaign was that the Villas del norte did not sustain the kind of losses that San Antonians did. In fact, as best I can tell, there were no deaths or kidnappings at all to report. In a matter of just a few days, Zapata turned the momentum of the Comanche raid. Soon, they were on the run from Zapata.

Zapata and his core group spent a month in the saddle chasing the Comanches out of South Texas. This of course neutralized any ability on Canales’ part to continue his offensive against the centralists, but it also begged the question: why did the Federalists continuously have to break off their war with the Central Government to do the job that the Central government was supposed to be doing? Namely, protecting its citizens from the indios barbaros. And even more, in the year since the Rio Grande Federalists had taken the armory at Camargo, they had increasingly taken on the form of a shadow government: in addition to providing for the defense of the “pueblos” from indios barbaros, the federalist movement was now actually collecting more than half of the customs duties and taxes in the region. They’d even set up a postal service than had ever existed before, something which had never existed previously at a functional level. There was even talk now about setting up public schools, a long-held Federalist dream. What was this movement now if not a government? An independent government. An independent, dare we say, Republic? Hadn’t the example of Texas two years prior just shown the viability of an independence project? Hadn’t the last year – the last fifteen years for that matter shown that Mexico City would never accept any form of federalism or power-sharing with the outlying states? Why not return to that short-lived dream of a generation before of a separate or at least quasi-autonomous “Republic of the Northeastern Border”?

And perhaps most importantly, if the Rio Grande Federalists were going to be able to make good on their victory at Alcantra, they needed the support of foreign governments, something that could never happen if they were perceived as simple partisans in a domestic civil war. Diplomatic assistance could only come, Canales came to realize, with recognition as a legitimate, independent state. Canales had resisted this idea for the last year. His ambition truly seems to have been sparking a Federalist rebirth across Mexico at-large. And we saw in the previous episode the rancor he still felt toward the Texians for having cleaved themselves off from the patria, even as he continued to rely on them for aid. Yet it was clear to Canales that nationally, the Federalist movement was at a nadir. And it was clear that for all his suspicion of the Texians, he needed their aid, something which they could not give until he had taken the step of formally declaring a separation from the rest of Mexico.

On November 10th, 1839 – almost exactly one year after he had pronounced against the centralist government at Camargo – Antonio Canales issued a rather bold circular to “all the inhabitants of the three states of the frontier” – Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas, of course. He called on the people of the northeastern border to “decide once and for all to sustain that government that in their conception has offered them the most protection or which seems most just.” For him the answer was self-evident. And of course, the just answer is that there can only be one legitimate government, the government that legitimately provides for them, and the citizens of the state owe a duty to that government. Over the course of 11 paragraphs, Canales laid out what this duty looked like: first, all men in Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo Leon were called to service his Federalist army; “whoever may oppose or not aid in such a sacred objective will lose the rights that they may have to tracts of land that they may possess within the territory of the same state.” Which is a pretty dictatorial assertion with respect to individuals, and yet it was cleverly couched by a keen respect for the tradition role of the pueblos in his new Government. The towns or pueblos “that joined in the reestablishment of the federal system,” Canales continued calling them out, would recover the primacy they had always enjoyed in the Hispanic legal tradition as the building blocks of his new government. Which is what he’s actually declaring here: Canales is laying the foundation for a new “Government to be established.” “El Estado, “The state” he calls it here, for the first time that I have found. To make this a reality, Canales invites the pueblos to appoint commissioners to convene at a later date and form this government: “Dios, libertad, y federacion,” the scribe closes.¹⁰⁹

When Zapata returned from his campaign against the Comanches and rejoined the main body of the Rio Grande federalist army sometime in early December 1839, Canales now felt ready to attack. He had laid the political, legal foundation for his campaign, such that a victory now in Matamoros would accrue to the benefit of the Federalist movement, not to the Texian adventurers or the “chusma” of vaqueros under his command. And so Canales and Zapata resumed the offensive. On December 10th, 1839, they reached the outskirts of Matamoros, where actually they were outnumbered by the centralists defenders, 1,600-1,000 and outgunned 18 cannon to 4. And yet numbers could be misleading in these kinds of conflicts, where a motivated 1,000 could defeat an unmotivated 1,600 any given day of the week…hadn’t that more or less been the troop count at the battle of San Jacinto?¹¹⁰

As per usual, Zapata led the initial approaches himself. He led a mixed company of vaqueros and Texians against the centralist outposts that guarded the approaches into Matamoros, and overwhelmed them without losing a man. But the rest of the city was now alerted, and seemed much better defended. Zapata wanted to rush the rest of the defenders in Matamoros, but Canales held him and his men back. The size of the Centralist force and the strength of their position was becoming apparent. The Texians protested loudly at Canales’ hesitation…though their impatience only confirmed for Canales his reservations at turning them loose on the people of Matamoros. Once the Texians realized they weren’t going to get to plunder the prosperous port town, half of them left in a huff, reducing Canales’ headcount by 100 men and reducing the larger force’s morale. All of which gave the Centralists saw. Soon, the Centralists were lauching sallies probing the Rio Grande Federalists, exposing their weaknesses, and preparing a counterattack.¹¹¹

Canales and Zapata knew they needed a new plan. Matamoros hadn’t been nearly as vulnerable as they’d thought. Yet one advantage they still had was their mobility and knowledge of the countryside. What if they could catch Monterrey unguarded? That would be an even greater prize than Matamoros! The Centralists would have to sue for peace then!

After six days of skirmishing outside of Matamoros, Canales and Zapata pulled up stakes on December 16th and wheeled their forces west through the barretas and anacuites of the Tamaulipan plains toward the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental. On December 27th, 1839, the Rio Grande federalists entered Cadereyta, a town just east of Monterrey. They had covered nearly 175 miles in ten days, a really remarkable feat in the dead of winter…and yet they found the Monterrey even more stoutly defended than Matormors. The federalists’ nemesis, centralist General Mariano Arista had actually just received reinforcements the day before, bringing his numbers up to 2,000 men – more than double the number that Canales and Zapata commanded. This was the same General Mariano Arista who had sent Zapata and Canales high-tailing it across the Rio Grande in August, just a few months prior, and whose propaganda campaign had so effectively worn down Mexican support for the Rio Grande Federalists. The irony of his role in this war was that he was actually known to be pretty sympathetic to the federalist cause, and when he later became president he would do so as a federalist. Yet he was a man of duty and he abhorred the presence of foreign “adventurers” inside Mexico, and he was suspicious of the freewheeling actions of Zapata and his “chusma” or rabble, which he did not fail to have centralist newspapers continuously highlight.¹¹²

Realizing the futility of a direct assault on Arista’s garrison, Zapata devised a different plan. Zapata took his cavalry – a few hundred men in total – and over the course of 24 hours, wheeled them clear around Monterrey, and surprised the town from the northwest. Descending on the city along the flank of Topo Chico Hill, and yes, that’s the Topo Chico where the mineral water comes from, Zapata suddenly appeared in Arista’s rear. Zapata had caught the veteran Arista entirely by surprise, and over the course of the next forty-eight hours, he pushed his way boldly inside the northwestern city limits of Monterrey, to within rifle shot of the famed bishop’s palace.¹¹³

Yet as even Zapata knew, forty-eight hours on a battlefield is quite a lot of time. And it was plenty of time for General Arista to shuffle his forces around to meet Zapata. By the 1st of January, 1840, General Arista had brought Zapata’s attack to a grinding halt. General Arista then deployed his considerable political prowess as well. He sent messengers out amongst Canales’ men left behind on the east side of Monterrey to sow dissension, doubt, and fear amongst the Federalist soldiers who – Arista’s agents reminded them – were engaged right now in the kind of treasonous activities that could get them lined up against a wall and shot. It worked on 100 or so of the federalists, who defected over to the Centralists.¹¹⁴

With Canales’ force on the east of Monterrey now depleted, General Arista returned his attention to Zapata. He sent out cavalry who managed to whip one of Zapata’s foraging parties on January 2, 1840 now. The show of strength alerted Zapata to his vulnerability and forced him to pull back. On January 2nd [CHECK DATE] he was lucky to re-establish contact with Canales, and rejoin their forces. The second Federalist Assault of Monterrey was over, and they knew it. The Rio Grande federalists were right back to where they had been in August: retreating back to the Rio Grande Villas.

It’s too simplistic to call Canales and Zapata’s campaign of November=December 1839 a failure, just as its too much to really claim the October Battle of Alcantra as a “Victory.” They had attacked the two largest cities in the region and had certainly demonstrated to outsiders and locals that the Centralist government did not control this part of Mexico. Which sounds like the kind of clever strategy you’d expect from a brush fox like Canales. And never was Canales more of a fox than in the months to come. He was about to – simultaneously! - undertake two virtually self-contradictory initiatives. On the one hand, he began to negotiate a surrender to centralist General Arista….and on the other hand, he would declare the independence of the Republic of the Northern Frontier – the Republic of the Rio Grande, as it would become known in english. On the next episode, of, yes, The Republic of the Rio Grande.

The Republic of the Northern Border

Welcome to The Republic of the Rio Grande: Episode 10, The Republic of the Northern Border. I’m Brandon Seale.

“Zapata always wanted to fight.” Such was the recollection of a famous Laredoan years later, and it rings true. After his victory at the Battle of Alcantra on October 4, 1839, Antonio Zapata wanted to force-march immediately on to Matamoros and take the port city before the Centralist garrison army even knew what hit them. But the commander of the Rio Grande Federalists, Antonio Canales, was more restrained: maybe he feared letting loose the Texian volunteers on the port city…maybe he feared letting loose Zapata’s vaqueros and indians…or maybe he felt that he could achieve his political goals without any more loss of life or destruction of property. Texas histories have long favored Zapata’s personal courage to Canales’s calculated restraint, but I think this in part is due to the fact that uncompromising men are easy to admire, as Robert the Bruce’s leprous father reminded us in Braveheart. Maybe, however, we ought to consider more seriously the virtues of the man who – unlike Zapata – didn’t always want to fight.

Everything about Antonio Canales’s public life and pronouncements up to 1838 gives the impression of a man driven by personal ambition. And Canales’s reluctance to fight – at least when compared with Zapata – was often interpreted by his enemies through this lens. But Canales’s raging personal ambition didn’t mean that he wasn’t genuinely committed to Federalism. The Republic of the Rio Grande Museum in Laredo has a copy of an instrument by which Canales personally guaranteed a loan of $5,000 to his fledgling army! which by the way also puts his reluctance to commit his forces to battle in a different light. It was his money at stake! But more than that, I think Canales never lost sight of the fact that his goals were political, not military: he wanted a Federalist government returned to power in Mexico City, by whatever means possible, and the battlefield was just one possible avenue for accomplishing this.¹¹⁵

Yet the Battle of Alcantra may have confirmed for Canales that the battlefield was NOT the best way to achieve his goals. Because in the aftermath of his great battlefield victory…nothing else happened. Canales had expected a long-dormant silent Federalist majority to re-emerge clamoring for Federalism! And yet this didn’t happen. The rest of the country didn’t seem to care. In fact, the Pastry War over, the centralist government could now concentrate even more resources on addressing Canales’s brief little surge of momentum following the Battle of Alcantra. This is what motivated them to send the reinforcements to Monterrey that Arista had deployed to beat back Canales and Zapata there for the second time in five months that January of 1840.

Canales’s other problem was that for as grand as the victory of the Battle of Alcantra seemed to the Federalists, the Centralists had control of the narrative. Particularly the centralist commander in the northeast, General Mariano Arista. Several months ago, General Arista had begun pushing the narrative that Canales and Zapata’s “movement” was really just a mob of vaqueros, Indians, and – valgame Dios! - Texians out to pillage the countryside. General Arista had successfully separated the Federalists from their ideology and instead associated them with the kind of foreign intervention that Mexico had just barely survived during the Pastry War!

As he retreated back to the Rio Grande (again), Canales knew that his movement was on life support (again). Combined with attrition, desertion, and casualties, Canales and Zapata’s army was now down to maybe only 600 men in the opening days of 1840. At this point, the only thing that was keeping their centralist pursuers – who outnumbered him three to one - at bay was Zapata. Every time the centralists got too close, Zapata would about face his rearguard and form up in a battled line as if was preparing to charge them. The centralist troops would halt and fall back: “[Zapata’s] very name was sufficient to do this,” one of Zapata’s Texian volunteers later recalled.¹¹⁶

And yet a name couldn’t hold off a 2,000 man centralist army forever. Canales made it back to the Rio Grande villas with the main body of his army on January 7th, 1840, but General Arista’s forces weren’t far behind. For six more days, Zapata’s outnumbered force fought off the centralists long enough for Canales and the rest of the men of the Federalist army to cross over to the north bank of the Rio Grande.¹¹⁷

It was like a bad re-run of exactly what had happened back in the summer of 1839. A federalist thrust toward Monterrey, a centralist counter-attack, a centralist pursuit all the way to the Rio Grande, and the Federalists left in the no-man’s-land between the Rio Grande and the Nueces. Last time, Canales and his chief of staff, Jose Maria Carvajal, had placed all their hopes on forming an alliance with the Republic of Texas. For various reasons, that hadn’t worked. This time, Canales resolved to try something different.

On January 18, 1840, Antonio Canales formally called for a convention of all the pueblos of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas, following through on the circular he had published the previous November. Canales called for the convention to meet on the south bank of the Nueces River, at the town known as Casa Blanca, close to modern-day Sandia, Texas, on January 23rd. For four days they met there, concluding on the 26th of January, 1840. They published a report, summarizing the Articles of Convention to which they had all agreed, a document uncovered in the Secretary of Defense archives in Mexico City by Professor Stan Green, who was gracious enough to share it with me. And it’s a pretty fascinating document. But, it’s not a constitution. The Rio Grande federalists already had a constitution after all, the Constitution of 1824. It was more a charter creating a new “provisional government for the northern border.” In that provisional government, Antonio Canales, unsurprisingly, was to be the Commander-in-chief. As President, the Convention named Jesus Cardenas, “a noble-looking man, about thirty-four or five, clear headed, mild, collected, and very handsome” – but more importantly, a close ally of Antonio Canales. And as secretary of the governing general counsel the Convention selected Jose Maria Carvajal, the fiery little San Antonian, his arm now cradled in a bright silk sling from the wound he had suffered at the Battle of Alcantra. Tradition holds that Laredo was selected to serve as the provisional capital, but for most intents and purposes it seems that old revolutionary Guerrero was the seat of government, if for no other reason than that they had the only printing press. As their motto, this new provisional government chose three words: Dios, Libertad, y Convención. God, Liberty, and Convention, the last word referring of course to the Convention which they had just closed out, but also to the idea of “custom,” as in the “conventional” rights of the Pueblo against their sovereigns in the Hispanic tradition. Which was, really, the core idea at the heart of Mexican Federalism. “The Government exists because of the Pueblos; the Pueblos don’t exist because of the Government,” the Articles remind readers.¹¹⁸

But there’s a tension in this document that’s a little hard to reconcile. The Articles of Convention declared the current centralist government illegitimate and, in Article 9, declared any subsequent act by that government null and void. And yet the Articles of Convention also specified that the new provisional government would rule on behalf of the “pueblos of the Northern Frontier of the Republic” – meaning the Mexican “republic,” suggesting that they still viewed themselves as a part of a larger Mexican polity. And to complicate it further, Article 2 declares that “Until such time as a national convention freely elected by the Pueblos declares a form of Government that better suits the Republic, a provisional Government will be established in These States.” – by which they seem to mean Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas. And this is what I find hard to reconcile: if the Articles of Convention are declaring the central government illegitimate, and if they are standing up a new provisional government for their three states in opposition to that other government, aren’t they effectively declaring themselves independent? How can they still be considering themselves part of the “Mexican Republic”?

If the Casa Blanca Articles of Convention are a declaration of independence, they aren’t a declaration in the mold of the American Declaration of Independence. Or for that matter of the Texas Declaration of Independence of 1836. But it does have some pretty striking similarities to the Texas Declaration of Independence of 1813, which you can listen to in Bonus Episode number 1 of Season 2 of this podcast. The Declaration of 1813 declared, slightly abridged, that “We the people of the province of Texas….declare that the binds that have held us beneath the domination of European Spain are forever broken; that we are free and independent; that we have the right to establish our own Government….and that we are forever free of duty or obligation to any foreign power.” But that then a few days later, in the opening of the 1813 Texas Constitution, that same revolutionary junta declared that “The province of Texas shall henceforth be known as the State of Texas, forming part of the Mexican Republic, to which it remains inviolably joined.”¹¹⁹

It’s the same conundrum we’re faced with in 1840, but it’s a conundrum only if we insist on interpreting it through the Anglo-American model of independence. The Anglo-American model holds that when you declare your existing government illegitimate, you are de facto independent. Yet that’s not the case in the Hispanic tradition. In the Hispanic tradition, when you declare the government illegitimate, each pueblo or town reverts to a sort of state of “temporary autonomy,” as scholar JJ Gallegos calls it. Which is to say, you sort of are independent, and you have to stand up a government to do all the things a government does, yet you aren’t severing the binds that tie you to the geography or culture with which you share a history. Think of like a succession dispute in a monarchical system, where you have two claimants to the throne. Each pueblo keeps doing their thing while the claimants fight it out – they might even support one claimant over the other – but the idea that you would dissolve the ties that bind you to a certain cultural community does not follow from that.¹²⁰

That said, Centralist newspapers at the time certainly made out the Articles of a Convention to be a declaration of Independence. They mocked Canales and his “new republic of Northern Mexico.” But this was probably a way of linking his movement to what had happened in Texas just a few years before. Which is to say, it was a way that the centralist government at-large was able to disparage the Rio Grande Federalist movement without having to reckon with its arguments about the primacy of the Pueblos and the questionable legal basis on which the Centralists had repudiated the Constitution of 1824 a few years prior.

You’ll note that we haven’t heard from Antonio Zapata in a while. It’s because Zapata wasn’t present in Casa Blanca. While all of this political theorizing and posturing was going on in Casa Blanca, he had taken up quarters in Guerrero, his hometown, where he was continuing to hold off Centralist General Arista. When the Casa Blanca convention ended on January 26, 1840, Canales, Carvajal, and the entire new Federalist government came and rejoined Zapata and his forces. There, Zapata threw them the Pachanga to end all pachangas. The enlisted men were issued their back pay and set loose to party in the streets. And the officers Zapata hosted personally in his home for a great dinner. And that night, in one great ceremonial act, the men – and perhaps the women and the rest of the citizenry as well – swore allegiance to the new flag of this new Government. Traditionally, this flag has been depicted as consisting of white and black horizontal sections and a red hoist-side section with three white stars representing the founding states of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas. A contemporary account actually describes the flag as consisting of three horizontal bands of white, red, and black with a blue vertical band on the hoist-side populated by three white stars. Yet a third, less well substantiated contemporary description holds that the flage consisted of red and white horizontal stripes Texas-style on the fly-side with a green vertical field on the hoist side, again, which three white stars on the green field. Maybe we can do a future podcast about the search for this flag…my good friend and collaborator Cesar Hinojosa tells me he might have a line on it in Mexico City!¹²¹

The first thing the new Rio Grande federalist “government” did following their inaugural ball was return to Texas to seek out President Mirabeau Lamar. This time, they hoped, he would receive them as representatives of a legitimately-declared government, not just as partisans in a civil war. But just to be sure, they decided to line up a few endorsements first, a task that fell to the fiery Jose Maria Carbajal, childhood victim of the Spanish Royalists after their victory at the battle of Medina, quasi-adopted son of Stephen F. Austin, and radical Federalist through and through. And who did he go see first to line up support in Texas? Our old friend Jose Antonio Navarro, who I hope you remember from season 1 of this podcast.

But Canales had learned not to peg all of his hopes on Carvajal’s far-fetched schemes to bring on the Texians as allies. And so he, always the brush fox, secretly set in motion a Plan B. Which is to say that one of Antonio Canales’s first acts as commander in chief of this new Provisional Government of the Northern Frontier was to seek out the enemy, Centralist general Mariano Arista – and to begin to negotiate a surrender. On the next episode, of the Republic of the Rio Grande.

The Articles of Convention of Casa Blanca

Welcome to The Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode XI: The Articles of Convention of Casa Blanca. I’m Brandon Seale.

I’m a bit of a sucker for declarations and constitutions, and so I’m proud to include here a reading of the “The Casa Blanca Articles of Convention.” As we said in a previous episode, this isn’t quite a declaration of independence, at least in the form in which the Anglo-American tradition thinks of Declarations of Independence. It’s also not a constitution: the Rio Grande Federalists had a constitution they were fighting for, the Constitution of 1824.

But it is a statement of the Rio Grande Federalists’ grievances, and of their motivations. We don’t have to take all them at face value and we should recognize this as an exceedingly hastily drafted document. I still think it’s powerful, however, and worth hearing, and I thank Professor Stan Green for uncovering it in the Secretary of Defense archives in Mexico City, and I thank Licenciada Jacqueline Pasquel for her notes to my translation. And so it begins:

“Report presented by the executive committee of the Convention and approved the 26th [of January] and finalized in Casa Blanca:

Honorable Assembly:

The commission appointed to report on the measures which should be adopted in order to ensure the security and defense of the Pueblos of the Northern frontier of the Republic has the honor to present here to the honored general body the following report which, for lack of time means to detail with complete perfection this matter of utmost importance, has instead been forced to limit itself to the briefing of the vicious origins of the current government of Mexico, the enumeration of the insufferable evil which that Government has caused on account of its illegitimacy, and a judgment on how to remedy to the extent possible the present anarchy in which the Nation finds itself.

f. 41

Public and notorious is the fact that in the ill-fated year of 1834, General Santa Anna by means of his proclamations most despotic and offensive to the sovereignty of the nation destroyed the principle of representation and savaged the principle that “the Government exists because of the Pueblos; the Pueblos don’t exist because of the Government.” From that moment on we witnessed the legislatures of the States stripped of their sacred duty to attend to and remedy the complaints of their constituents because they feared falling to a similar fate as that of the National Congress, should they incur the wrath of the omnipotent central Government. This most dishonorable act – which amounted to nothing less than the States’ total loss of freedom - wasn’t the only thing that General Santa Anna had to do to establish the Government he desired by means of force (because in those years, the army was his, and not the Nation’s). The states of Puebla and Zacatecas made great efforts to salvage their moribund liberties, but these were useless, perhaps because they decided to pursue their aims alone which only had the effect of increasing the Terror and fright permeating the entire Republic; in the end, placing the resources upon which the nation depended to defend itself in the hands of a despot through the scandalous “sale” – if not theft – of the rich mines of Fresnillo [Zacatecas].

With this act, General Santa Anna managed to disarm the nation and thereby multiply the power of his own arms, and without needing to physically coerce the many Ayuntamientos lined up in support of the change of Government. These illegitimate and reactionary deeds by a few chambers that declared themselves authorized to decree this change were the cause of the infamous decree of eternal damnation for all Mexicans which toppled the government which had been freely and naturally formed in [18]24, and were the spurious origin of the monster which now calls itself the government by deceit and which has inflicted so many ills upon this nation. Since that unlucky time, the evils have only multiplied each day and increased the state of abandonment in which the Pueblos find themselves. But what else could be expected of a Government that owes its existence to the same Pueblos whose interests it diametrically opposes? Little more than evil upon evil, violence upon violence, disgrace upon disgrace and in sum the gradual destruction of the Republic, for which proof the simple enumeration of some of the misfortunes we have endured on this frontier will serve.

An illegitimate government fears everything and focuses only on its own preservation. Similarly, the Government of Mexico began by gutting the presidial companies, the only formal defense these states had against the savage tribes which daily harass them, simply because these companies were composed of frontiersmen themselves, in whom the government never had confidence, and so the government feared that if they left these companies under arms, sooner or later they would rise up against the government’s illegitimacy alongside the Pueblos. For the same reason, the government cut all funding and support for the local militias, by means of the same law which destroyed the Republic, leaving the residents of the frontier even more entirely defenseless and at the mercy of the barbarians who had in many cases even managed to occupy the central plazas of these communities. Yet this too was not enough to calm the fears of the Government and so it was the armies of the government returned to the field with the pretext of the Texas campaign and have sent and maintained an army of no less than 2,000 men in these tiny Pueblos for the purpose of keeping them subjugated and in order to live off of their labor, destroying what little remained of their fortunes, and by this means remove from them any hope of crying out for the reestablishment of a true, national government. To the same end, [the Government] dissolved the local governments [of these Pueblos] and replaced them with political chiefs appointed by a prefect or subprefect without any familiarity at all of the Pueblos or their people. And even to this appointee they denied the power to repel the continuous attacks of the savages! Instead, whenever called upon for help, these so-called Army garrisons answered mockingly, “We didn’t come here to guard a bunch of ranches, we came here for the Texas campaign!”

And how did that disgraceful campaign go? The commission will deal with that in a few words. Having already denied aid to the Pueblos against the barbarians that were assaulting this region, General Filisola then published a Sultanic decree that made it a capital crime for anyone to cross the Rio Bravo [Rio Grande], and that all inhabitants should withdraw at least ten leagues from the River, effectively forcing those with lands within ten leagues of the river to abandon them. Having done this, the Army began to send out parties with orders to murder and depredate those they found in that no-man’s-land with Texas, which invited all manner of evil from [Anglo] Colonists and certain bad Mexicans who lived there only for the opportunity to come steal whatever they might find, given that everything had been abandoned and so whatever remained came to belong to the first one who took it... All of these deeds placed so many of our belongings - the entire wealth of the Pueblos, in truth! - in the hands of these evil men and in the hands of the barbarians who proudly exhibited them on the other side of the Rio Bravo, and which ended with them delivering death to the honorable people of these communities, dragged by a desire to defend the property which had been taken from them by [Centralist] General Filisola and instead turned into victims of his barbarity. This is the real result of the Texas campaign.

And to what end did [the Government] undertake such evil? They did it in order to impoverish and reduce into debased misery all of the inhabitants of the frontier. As has been mentioned, the majority of the people of Mexico raised their voices against the illegitimacy of the Government of Mexico. And despite all their efforts, the [Government] has not achieved their criminal objective. Because their just petitions went unheard for so long, the Villas [del Norte] finally raised their voice in revolt on the 3rd of November 1838, even as they were surrounded by an army of 2,000 men. This story is well known by all, and there is no point rehashing it here, but suffice it to say that this [revolution] has increased in power and expanded the limits of its jurisdiction each day since. As such, it has now become indispensable to give great proper form and structure to our actions by the establishment of a provisional Government duly empowered to provide for the security and defense of all the Pueblos who have revolted, and that such Government be pronounced in order to provide resources to the Army and in order to take the measures necessary given the exigencies of the Territory. The commission has considered this point with much deliberation and in light of the necessity of action that the current circumstances require, and in order to give the greatest respectability to the dispositions, the commission hereby submits for consideration to the Honorable Assembly the following articles:

Article 1) The Pueblos of the Northern frontier do not recognize the legitimacy of the current Government of Mexico.

Article 2) Until such time as a national convention freely elected by the Pueblos declares a form of Government that better suits the Republic, a provisional Government will be established in These States.

Article 3) This Government will name a President and five property-owning individuals with three alternates to serve as a governing council, all to be elected by the current representatives of the Pueblos.

Article 4) The following shall be the responsibilities of this Government:

1) Defend the Territory from any enemy that should invade.

2) Protect the lives and properties of all inhabitants [of the Territory] who have for so long been abandoned by the current Government of Mexico.

3) Raise and administer funds from inside and outside the Republic, guaranteeing such Public debt with the goods and incomes of the Nation.

4) Organize and maintain sea and land forces and any other force required to carry out the first and second responsibilities above.

5) Convene on May 28th of this year [1840], or before if the circumstances permit, a convention of all the States that find themselves free of the oppression in which they currently reside in order to form the Government contemplated in Article 2 above.

Article 5) In any financial negotiation and in all such other actions that are not merely administrative, the President shall preside at the pleasure of the council.

Article 6) The citizens and authorities of the Pueblos in revolt and the officers and troops of its army shall take an oath of obedience to the provisional Government in the following form: “Do you swear before God and commit to the Pueblos to obey and succor with your lives and properties the provisional Government established by this convention of these States, and any other such orders that should emanate therefrom?” If he so swears, he shall respond and answer, “So I shall do it. May God grant us to see our homeland free and if not, may God and man punish us.”

Article 7) The President of this Convention shall receive the oath of the president of the Government as well as those of the individuals elected for the council, promising each to obey and see obeyed the present commitments agreed to by the Pueblos.

Article 8) He who opposes or in any way does not support the Provisional Government herein established forfeits his right to own property.

Article 9) Any declaration made going forward by the force of the Government of Mexico toward the Pueblos represented here in their full and complete liberty shall be null and void.

Article 10) Similarly, any act by this provisional Government which contravenes the principles laid out in this document shall be considered null and void.

Article 11) The Government as well as the council and their deputies shall be personally responsible before the Pueblos for the just and exact execution of their duties as imposed by this document.

And with that, the Government of the Rio Grande was formed. Now, it was up to the folks who had declared that Government to keep it. On the next episode of the Republic of the Rio Grande.

Desperate Measures

Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode 12: Desperate Measures. I’m Brandon Seale.

On January 26, 1840, representatives from the towns, villas, and pueblos of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas met at Casa Blanca on the south shore of the Nueces river and established a new government. Antonio Canales was named commander-in-chief, and the fiery José María Carvajal was selected as General Secretary of the General Counsel, basically the Secretary of State of this Republic of the Northern Border – or the Republic of the Rio Grande, as it came into English.

After celebrating their new government, Jose Maria Carvajal traveled to San Antonio. They were going to try one more time to strike an alliance with the Republic of Texas, which had already rebuffed them at least twice. But this time, they were coming as the representatives of a separate, legitimate government, not just as partisans in a Mexican civil war. Granted, they had self-declared that government, but that’s kind of all a government really is anyway, a group of folks calling themselves a government with an army to back it up. And in the case of the Rio Granders, that army had even won a battle since the last time they’d been to Texas, the Battle of Alcantra.

Carvajal’s diplomatic mission also that had one other thing going for it. This time, he had the support and personal recommendation of Jose Antonio Navarro. Depending on how you count it, Jose Antonio Navarro had been or would be a part of more than a half dozen Texas declarations of independence and constitutional conventions in his lifetime. Navarro was also a relative and lifelong friend of the now-thirty-year old Rio Grande secretary of state. And Navarro was as hardcore a Federalist as Carvajal was.

Navarro was also known as a close ally of then-President Mirabeau Lamar, a relationship that Lamar would abuse the next year when he asked him to accompany the ill-fated Texian attempt to conquer Santa Fe. That affair ended with Navarro in a Mexican jail cell for almost three years. But for now, Navarro was comfortably situated in San Antonio which he represented in the Texas Congress. That gave him perspective, of course, on the delicacy of President Lamar’s position with respect to the Rio Grande federalists. The young Republic of Texas very much wanted a friendly Federalist republic as its neighbor as a buffer to the still vengeful centralist regime governing in Mexico City. Yet openly supporting the further dismemberment of the Mexican nation was just as likely to provoke retaliation as it was to end in the recognition of a breakaway republic. The centralist Mexican government had already begun protesting the presence of Texians in Canales and Zapata’s army, eventually forcing President Lamar in December of 1839 to make a statement “warning and admonishing all citizens of Texas to abstain from all attempts to invade the territory of Mexico.” His statement seems to have made exactly zero impact, however, as volunteers continued to trickle south, which eventually prompted the Centralist president to actually ask the Mexican congress to declare war on Texas on January 1, 1840. His request stalled out, but the message it sent was clear, and news of its proposal probably arrived in Texas about the same time that Carvajal did. ¹²²

Still, Navarro gave Carvajal his full-throated support, which Carvajal carried with him into the offices of President Lamar. Once there, Carbajal made the case that to NOT support the Rio Grande federalists – particularly when they were endorsed by Lamar’s most significant and vocal Tejano ally, Navarro – would be a betrayal of the federalist principles that Texians had supposedly revolted over less than five years before. Further, Carvajal argued, if the centralist regime was already intent on declaring war on Texas, what choice did Texians have but to support their federalist allies in the northeast and make common cause against Mexico City?

Lamar weighed his options and tried to take the measure of the moment. In addition to geopolitical factors, Lamar was constrained by another reality: the Republic of Texas was dead broke. And despite the Rio Grande federalists victory at Alcantra, their subsequent defeat outside of Monterrey in December of 1839 seemed to confirm the improbability of their ultimate victory. And so Lamar did what any good politician would…he hedged his bets. Of course he couldn’t openly recognize the new provisional government of the northern frontier and publicly he let stand his prohibition against Texians serving in the Federalist army…but, privately, he opened the Republic’s arsenals and sanctioned the withdrawal of weapons to help arm the outgunned federalists. Further, he allowed Carvajal and his delegation to make a quick but successful tour of Texas to help raise funds from private Texians, who were less encumbered by the diplomatic complexity of the moment and many of whom were genuinely sympathetic to the Federalist cause. It was something, to be sure. But it wasn’t enough to change Antonio Canales’ minds about the prospect of a Texian alliance saving the day.¹²³

Antonio Canales, the brush fox, and now officially Commander-in-Chief of the Rio Grande Federalist Army, had always been skeptical of the Texians. His biggest sticking point was Texians’ continued claims to the lands lying between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers. Those had always been a part of Tamaulipas and they belonged, in large part, to the families of the men serving under his command now. He had been skeptical of Carvajal’s assurances that Texians would come to their aid from the get-go. And so, just two days after the Casa Blanca convention – before Carvajal had even made it to San Antonio! - Canales sent a centralist General Arista a secret letter.

Canales informed Arista that he was “disposed to terminate the war.” Which should sound shocking given Canales’ public rhetoric around the same time and indeed even his actions just two days prior back at Casa Blanca! He had just declared a new government, for chrissakes? Canales’ message to Arista continues, full of an oddly casual confianza. This whole affair is a real shame, isn’t it, buddy? Hey, but this is what the centralist government Mexico has brought us to, you know what I mean? You know how they are, right. Hey, aren’t you kind of a federalist too? I mean, you know what people like us have suffered for the last decade on the border. And it’s only gotten worse in the time that our little battle with you guys have gone on! The Texians have stolen almost 1,000,000 pesos worth of livestock during the last few years, since there hasn’t been a meaningful government force to stop their overreach! Look man, I know you’re a reasonable guy, I’m sure we can talk this out and come to some sort of understanding.¹²⁴

It's really hard to square this message from Canales with his actions calling for and leading the Casa Blanca Convention. Was the convention all just political theater, meant to strengthen Canales’s hand to be able to negotiate a more favorable surrender with the Centralists? Or was he engaged in some kind of masterful deception now, trying to lower General Arista’s guard while he waited for Carvajal to bring him recruits and resources from Texas?

Arista, certainly, was having none of it. “How can I even speak with some one like you after reading your previous letter,” he responded. You say this conflict has left your precious Rio grande villas unprotected from Texians and Indians? You’re the one who invited the “band of thieves” who had stolen Texas into your homes, “Bringing strangers to thrust a dagger into [your] Mexican compatriots!” And still you are engaged in seeking a “traitorous agreement with the enemy of his motherland, the Texans, whose ambitions were to wrest away the land that the inhabitants of the Villas inherited from their grandparents.” After all that, how can you complain about their presence on your border! The solution is easy, Arista continued: just stop! Lay down your arms! We’ve just seen that you don’t have the force to actually capture any real cities, like Matamoros or Monterrey. So why are you dragging this out? Or are you waiting for “the Texian enemies” to come save you. Licenciado – as he repeatedly calls Canales, refusing to call him “General” – Licenciado, I’m not even gonna talk to you anymore until you rid yourselves of all the foreigners in your midst. Until then, I’ll let my weapons do the talking.¹²⁵

And then, General Arista went and published the whole exchange in the press. Which immediately made Canales look pretty bad and kind of sabotaged the hopes for any backchannel negotiations that might have ended this bloody affair. Canales was clearly suggesting that he was open to such a possibility, which was not an uncommon way for these kinds of pronuncamientos to end. But I have another theory: Maybe Arista’s goal in publishing the communication wasn’t just to embarrass Canales. What if the real goa was to drive a wedge between Canales and his allies! Or more specifically, between Antonio Canales and Antonio Zapata! Because at the same time that Arista was refusing to negotiate with Canales, he was privately reaching out to old sombrero mantecoso Zapata. Everyone knew – Arista especially – that Zapata was the key to this revolt. He was the physical embodiment of the spirit of the region: egalitarian, fearless, and self-made. The rank-and-file in the Federalist army followed Zapata because he looked like them, because he was one of them. And that loyalty translated into martial prowess. From January 2 to January 7, 1840, Zapata and about 200 men fought a rearguard action that held off General Arista’s nearly 2,000 man force, buying time for Canales and the rest of the Federalist army to pull back to the Rio Grande. It was during this time that General Arista first opened communication with Zapata, trying to convince him to lay down his arms and help bring peace to the region.¹²⁶

So what did Zapata make of Canales’s overtures to Arista to negotiate an end to the war? What Zapata’s men – vaqueros, Carrizo Indians, and increasingly the Anglo-Texians who mistrusted Canales already – how did those men interpret the news that Canales was negotiating to surrender? We don’t know the answers to these questions…but there is a hint in the events that follow that a rupture was forming between Zapata and Canales.

General Arista read Canales’s request for negotiations as a sign of weakness, and motivated him to press his attack even more aggressively. Sensing the oncoming onslaught, Canales and Zapata abandoned Guerrero, on February 18, 1840, and relocated to Laredo. There, in a stone house just off San Agustin square that today houses the Museum of the Republic of the Rio Grande, the Rio Grande federalists established their headquarters. Laredo at that moment became then the seat of the Republic of the Rio Grande.

Just a week and a half later, on March 1st, news reached the Federalists that Centralist General Arista had taken Guerrero – and was now heading for Laredo. Canales and Zapata decided they would have to abandon Laredo as well…but they couldn’t quite decide how, more evidence of the disagreements which were beginning to characterize Zapata and Canales’s relationship. With the centralist enemy bearing down on them, it took them several days before they marched out of Laredo, losing precious time and apparently without having a clear destination in mind. On March 8th, they arrived at the old Presidio del Rio Grande, which Zapata had unsuccessfully attacked the year before. And there again, they argued. Canales was content to sit tight at the Presidio del Rio Grande. There, his supply lines to Texas remained opened, and there were rumors that none other than Juan Seguin was gathering men in San Antonio to come to his aid. Worst case, they could easily pull back upriver, up into Lipan Apache country where Centralists wouldn’t dare follow. But to Zapata, it felt like running away, like retreating. And “Zapata always wanted to fight.” That same commentator continued: “Canalis was affraid to move without having Zapata with him; and yet Zapata could not get him to fight.”¹²⁷

By March 22 or so, Zapata and Canales’s differences broke out into the open. Zapata was tired of the brush fox’s endless strategery, of the lawyer’s foolish belief that negotiations with a faithless enemy could win a war, rather than the blunt end of a macana club poised over that enemy’s headand not men in saddles. Canales’s new government was starting to feel just like the old centralist one: a cabal of schemers, lawyers, and absentee landowners playing a game where the stakes were other people’s lives.

I’m speculating, of course. Ostensibly, the reason that Zapata broke away from Canales with 26 of his best men was because Comanches had been sighted in the area. Canales ordered him not to go, but Zapata couldn’t NOT pursue rumors of Comanches. In Canales’s words, Zapata was “contrary and headstrong” and rode out after the Comanches anyway. Only instead of riding out for the Comanches, Zapata and his 26 men rode for Santa Rita de Morelos, an island of Centralist sympathies in sea of Coahuilan Federalists. You might recall from Episode 11 when Zapata attacked the Presidio del Rio Grande, it had been this same town, Santa Rita de Morelos that had sent much needed reinforcements to the Centralist commander defending the Presidio. Perhaps Zapata hadn’t forgotten this.

On March 24th, 1840, Zapata and 26 of his most loyal vaqueros and anglo-texians – including one who had become engaged to his daughter – entered Santa Rita de Morelos. Zapata demanded the townsfolk pay their “taxes” to the new government of the Rio Grande. He would accept payment in horses and other provisions if necessary, he said. The townsfolk, of course, knew who Zapata was and knew his reputation. They agreed to his terms, and asked for a day to pull together the funds. They offered to slaughter a beev for Zapata and his men that night, and of course, no Rio Grande valley boy has ever turned down an invitation to a barbecue. And it felt good to be on the attack again.

What Zapata didn’t know, however, was that the citizens of Santa Rita de Morelos had immediately ridden out to announce Zapata’s arrival to a hidden force of 88 crack centralist horsemen waiting to ambush Zapata. Because two days prior, Centralist General Mariano Arista had found out about the split between Zapata and Canales. And in deciding which of the two federalist rebels to go after, it was an easy decision for General Arista: he went after Zapata “because of his personal valor and influence he carried within the Federalist division.” General Arista dispatched 88 of his best light cavalrymen to ride like hell for Santa Rita de Morelos, while he followed close behind with 1,400 infantry and artillery. On the next episode of the Republic of the Rio Grande.

The Battle of Morelos

Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode 13: The Battle of Morelos. I’m Brandon Seale.

When Antonio Zapata rode out of the federalist army camp on March 22, 1840, the nominal commander of that army kept his cool. That commander – the so-called “brush fox”, Antonio Canales - knew that Antonio Zapata was impulsive. It’s what made Zapata such a great battlefield commander. Of course, the brush fox also realized that he couldn’t rightly punish Zapata, who held a nearly totemic power over his troops and frankly over Canales himself. According to a contemporary: “Canalis was affraid to move without having Zapata with him…Canalis seemed to desire Zapata's presence, only for his own personal protection.”

Zapata’s presence might very well have been the only thing that had kept Canales’s little federalist insurgency alive. At the end of 1839, Canales’ forces had been nearly annihilated outside of Monterrey for the second time in six months, saved only by the valor of Zapata and his 200-man rearguard in a multi-day running battle against Centralist General Mariano Arista’s 2,000-man pursuing force. Once Canales and the bulk of the Federalist army made it back to the Rio Grande, it fell once again to Zapata to fend off Arista’s centralists for another month while Canales and the political leadership of the northeastern federalist revolt convened and organized a political strategy. That month yielded the formation of an insurgent government to rival the hated centralist regime in Mexico city…yet this new Federalist Government of the Northern Border was a government in name only. It had no money, no diplomatic recognition, and increasingly, it had no territory it could legitimately claim to control. By February 18th, 1840, Zapata and Canales were forced even to abandon the lower Rio Grande villas…leaving Laredo as pretty much the entirety of the Republic of the Rio Grande, as it was called in English. Until Laredo fell as well three weeks later.

Up until now, Zapata and Canales had complemented each other well: Zapata’s native military genius and popularity with the people paired nicely with Canales’ political acuity and ability to articulate the people’s grievances in the ideological idiom of the day. And yet with Centralist General Mariano Arista closing in on them now in March of 1840, the relationship between Zapata and Canales began to fray, and their differences in disposition came to the forefront. Most notably, the fact that Zapata had only one gear: attack. And for the last six months, he had been retreating. Canales, on the other hand, was strategic to a fault. He often missed tactical opportunities because of fears they could interfere with his larger – albeit often unclear – political strategy. Now he was clearly outnumbered by the Centralists around him and frankly he was outmatched by the Centralist General pursuing him. In his mind, the best thing to do was play for time: time for his ally, the fiery little San Antonian Jose Maria Carvajal and others in Texas to raise funds and recruit more volunteers; or time for the Centralist leadership to come around to the idea of a negotiated peace.

But everything in Zapata’s nature recoiled at this strategy. And so when rumors of a Comanche war party in the nearby mountains of Coahuila reached him sometime around March 22, 1840, he took the opportunity to ride out after them with twenty-six handpicked Rio Grande vaqueros and Anglo-Texians, including one who had recently been engaged to his daughter. Canales protested, but he couldn’t stop the man whose stubborn self-reliance was so well known that it shined through his hat band, the sweat stain a reminder to all of the Sombrero Mantecoso’s origins and work ethic. And in the past, everytime Zapata had gone out on a mission, he’d come back with badly needed provisions for Canales’ army. Things were as lean now as they had ever been in the Rio Grande Federalist army. Many of Canales’ men hadn’t been paid in months; some were barely clothed. And it was always a struggle to keep their army actually armed. And so Canales let Zapata go pursue Comanches, or levy the countryside, or do whatever Zapata felt like he needed to do. But after Zapata left, Canales followed. A respectful five or six miles behind, but no further than the approximate distance at which the sounds of a skirmish up ahead might still be heard. ¹²⁸

On March 24, 1840, Zapata and his twenty-six men entered the town of Santa Rita de Morelos in Northeastern Coahuila. For whatever reason – despite the strong federalist sympathies in rest of Coahuila – Santa Rita de Morelos was a centralist town. The previous year, the townsfolk had actually even published a formal repudiation of federalism. Zapata certainly knew this and might very well have remembered the Morelenses from his tangle with them at the Presidio of the Rio Grande the year before, the battle which culminated in Zapata making a strategic though memorable retreat that included him riding within earshot of the defenders’ to complement their valor. In any event, Santa Rita de Morelos was a town that Zapata did not need feel any reservations about squeezing for a contribution to the Rio Grande Federalist cause, which he entered the town to collect on that 24th of March, 1840.¹²⁹

The townsfolk, of course, remembered Zapata as well. And they knew that they couldn’t tell him no. So when Zapata and his 26 men stormed into town and demanded provisions and horses, the townsfolk of Santa Rita de Morelos snapped into action. Some took Zapata and his men’s mounts off to the coral for water and rest; some went to collect what money they could from the town coffers to pay off the intruders; others offered to slaughter a beev in case Zapata wished to stay the night. But in the commotion, at least one of the Morelenses snuck out of town. And not too far outside of town, that Morelense rendezvoused with a Centralist cavalry officer.

This time, it was the centralists who were better informed as to the movements of armies through the northern Mexican countryside. Somehow, word of the split between Zapata’s and Canales’ forces had reached centralist General Mariano Arista. And here General Arista had a choice: he could go after the bulk of the Federalist army still attached to Canales, and potentially deal the Rio Grande Federalist movement a death blow on the battlefield…but then Zapata would still be out there. Alive. And menacing. At least, General Arista felt certain, he could always make a deal with brush fox Canales. Zapata was just a different kind of animal. Things were too black and white for Zapata, who had sworn to fight until the “last drop of blood,” and seemed destined to prove it. And so the centralist General directed his energies at exterminating Zapata, “because of his personal valor and influence he carried within the Federalist division.”

Arista directed his entire 1,400 man army now toward Santa Rita de Morelos. That almost 1,400 men were now directed against 26 men – at the leader of those 26 men, to be precise – tells you how big of a threat Arista perceived Zapata to be. He sent ahead an 88-man crack troop of light cavalry while he force marched the rest of his men to catch up…and it was those 88-men that were sneaking into Santa Rita de Morelos now.

The 88-man centralist troop waited until Zapata and his men had dismounted – until they been reduced to mere men, instead of centaurs! The townsfolk played their part well, inviting Zapata and his men to relax and dine in the comfort of a large white house sitting on the corner of the plaza. Zapata accepted the invitation: it felt good to be out again, doing something other than running away! And that’s when 88 centralist cavalrymen came pouring into the central plaza. Zapata and his 26 men barely had time to get off a few confused volleys before they realized what was happening. Musket balls were skipping off the ground all around them, and bits of rock and projectiles stinging them like a swarm of angry bees. Zapata and his men responded instinctually, but wildly with fire of their own, and Zapata called out to his men to take refuge in the large white stone house. The building offered good cover, and Zapata’s trusted 26 punched out windows and took up positions on the roof. They began to pick out their targets carefully, making their shots count and blunting the momentum of the centralist attack.

In between directing his men’s fire, Zapata debated what to do next. He was starting to make out the size of the Centralist force…it wasn’t too bad. 88 or so to his own twenty-six. Well, twenty-three now, three had been killed in the initial ambush. But 88 to 23…those were odds he could take! Or odds that he could at least endure. And so he resolved to hold off, rather than try to make any reckless breakout attempt. Plus, even if he could just make it until sundown, under cover of darkness, he and his men could perhaps fight their way out of town.

But then Zapata and his men heard a gut-wrenching chorus of “vivas!” rising up from outside in the plaza. Centralist reinforcements had arrived, the first units of General Arista’s much larger division. Then, another round of vivas – stronger this time – as yet another unit moved in. Almost 690 centralists in all now took up their positions in the plaza around the white stone house. The calculus had just radically changed for Zapata and his men holed up in the white stone house…even if they hadn’t quite realized it yet.¹³⁰

Just four or five miles away outside of town, Canales had heard the sounds of the ambush. Then the volleys had tapered off, followed only by the occasional potshots. Maybe Zapata had triumphed? At any moment, Canales expected a messenger to ride into view from Zapata, calling in the rest of Canales’s men, telling him what to do! And yet no messenger was forthcoming. What did that mean? Had Zapata been overwhelmed? And if so, how many Centralists must that have taken? All that was left of Canales’s cause marched alongside him now, 600 men or less. He couldn’t risk the destruction of his entire force just to save one man, could he? One “contrary and headstrong” man, as Canales later called him! If only Zapata hadn’t been so reckless! Maybe this would teach him to be more cautious. If he survived it that is. And if he didn’t? If he didn’t what would Zapata do now?¹³¹

The rest of the men in Canales’ force surely had similar thoughts racing through their minds. Particularly the contingent of Carrizo Indians, which numbered 80 or more. Yet those 80 constituted pretty much the entirety of the men of fighting age of the Carrizo nation. The Carrizos were a rare tribe. They had made peace with the Spanish years ago, yet had always refused to be “reduced” by them into missions or any other subservient status. They had actually even secured title to their own lands – title which the centralist government had run roughshod over and refused to respect. They came to this fight as ideological equals, and as fierce allies of Antonio Zapata, a man who had grown up among them. Maybe the Carrizos forced the issue for Canales here. Maybe his other volunteers did. Or maybe it was genuine concern for his comrade that drove Canales to do what he did next. For whatever reason, on March 24, 1840, the normally cautious Antonio Canales threw his caution to the wind, and ordered his men to prepare to assault Santa Rita de Morelos. 600 men arrayed now in battle formation – the mounted vaqueros on the flanks, the Texian volunteers and Carrizo Indians in the center– and marched south.¹³²

Back in Santa Rita, Zapata and his dwindling troop continued to hold off the centralists. The surrounded federalists poked their rifles through windows, over the roofline, and through self-made portholes just large enough to get a shot off. Zapata had hoped to hold out until nightfall, when he and his men could make a break for, or maybe he hoped his comrade Canales to come riding into town with the rest of the 600 man Federalist army where they might still make an honest fight out of it! But there was no sign of Canales. And Zapata, by now, was damn near out of ammunition. Zapata had sworn more than once in this war to “fight until the last drop of his blood.” But it’s one thing to fight until the last drop of your blood; it’s quite another to fight until the last drop of your people’s blood. Three of his twenty-six men were already dead. Four more were bleeding out on the ground in front him, including the man who would have been his son-in-law. Did Zapata think, in this moment, of his own daughters, waiting for him back in Guerrero?¹³³

At that point, Antonio Zapata considered something that he had never even entertained before: surrender. Principles are easy to die for, but life is complicated, as his rift with his old comrade Canales had just proven. In the din of battle, normally things became clearer for Zapata…but not this time. There was no clarity. Only darkness and blood and a lack of ammunition!

At last, sometime in the late afternoon, Antonio Zapata poked a white flag out through the splintered wooden door “pierced by hundreds of ounce balls.” Centralist officers ordered their men to cease fire. Zapata emerged from the stone house and the looked around, fresh sweat glistening through his hat band. Zapata grabbed his sword by the blade with his free hand and emphatically snapped it on his knee. Centralist soldiers moved forward to grab him, before he could change his mind, and took him and his men away.¹³⁴

By the time Canales and the rest of the Federalists came within range of Santa Rita, the firing had stopped. Zapata’s guns had fallen silent. Yet somehow, word had reached Canales that Zapata wasn’t yet dead, only captured. This landed as a shock to Canales. And for Canales on this occasion, everything became crystal clear. There was only one thing to do. Canales ordered a “ferocious charge,” an all-out frontal assault on the town. Canales himself was “rabid” in the attack. This wasn’t the cagey brush fox that so many had come to mistrust; Canales was a lion now. He had to be, he knew the stakes. Despite their differences or their argument a few days prior, Canales knew he needed Zapata. If there was one thing that Mexicans, Indians, and Texians could agree on, it’s that Zapata was the most effective and feared fighter in the region. Indeed, Canales’s intensity was exceeded in the battle of Santa Rita only by the Carrizos, who charged forward with horrifying recklessness in their desperation to save their brother Zapata!¹³⁵

When the federalists had advanced to within twenty-five paces of the houses and jacales on the edge of town, however, a wicked volley of fire stopped them in their tracks. Vaqueros and Carrizos and Texians fell to centralist balls and canister shot. The strength of the Centralist position was revealed, the momentum of the Federalists charge blunted. As darkness descended on the battlefield, it was clear even to a “rabid” brush fox that the Federalists were too late. Around 7 pm, Canales reluctantly ordered his men to fall back and regroup. But he wasn’t done with Santa Rita de Morelos. On the next episode of the Republic of the Rio Grande.

Rescuing Zapata

Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode 14: Rescuing Zapata. I’m Brandon Seale.

When Centralist General Mariano Arista rode into Santa Rita de Morelos on the morning of March 25th, 1840, he was exhausted. He and most of his men had been marching nonstop since the morning before, covering something like 40 miles in just 24 hours! But the sight of the sweat-stained hat of the prisoner being brought before him now reminded General Arista what it had all been for.¹³⁶

There in Santa Rita, General Arista looked upon Antonio Zapata – in the flesh – for the first time. In some way, the two men represented the forces warring for the soul of the new Mexican nation. Zapata’s dark-skin and distinctively African and Mestizo features spoke to his mixed heritage, a heritage that most of the population of Mexico shared. He also represented the revolutionary impulse that insisted that Mexico’s independence meant a break from the past, toward something better and something new. By contrast, General Arista was the creole son of a Spanish colonel, a veteran of the war of Mexican independence, most of which he had spent in a Spanish uniform. Yet he had come over with Iturbide to the side of Mexican independence and spent the subsequent twenty years in a uniform trying to preserve that independence and establish some measure of stability for the new nation. Arista represented the spirit of continuity, a spirit that insisted that whatever came after Independence for Mexico must respect the traditions that had formed Mexico in the first place.

The irony of the situation is that – despite their demographic differences - Zapata and General Arista shared a similar ideological vision as to how to bring about this new Mexico, in theory at least. Which is to say that Arista was an uncomfortably federalist general in an otherwise pretty heavily centralist army. And of course no one had fought more effectively for Federalism in Mexico over the previous two years than Zapata. Yet the ideological “alignment” between Zapata and Arista does more to illustrate just how little ideology moves history, and how much more significantly environmental or circumstantial factors do. Arista may have been a federalist, but Arista was born to the class that expected to rule, that engaged in arguments about the nuances of that rule because that had the luxury of assuming that they always would be ruling. And men like Zapata posed a risk to men like Arista, particularly when men like Zapata were backed up by hordes of disempowered vaqueros, half-savage Indians, and Texian mercenaries.

We don’t have the details of this first encounter between General Arista and Zapata on the morning of March 25, 1840, probably because it was a short one. The situation was still pretty-touch-and-go. General Arista’s 1,400 men were exhausted from their week of force marching and from the “rabid” attack they had endured the previous afternoon from Zapata’s long-time commander and would-be savior, Antonio Canales and what remained of the Rio Grande Federalist army. And though General Arista’s centralist division outnumbered the Rio Grande federalists now more than two to one, the affection that the Federalist rank and file felt for Zapata – vaquero, Carrizo Indian, and Texian – was a “force multiplier,” to use a modern term. And Arista knew that the federalists would not could NOT simply allow Zapata to be taken away from them. They would fight. A second battle was imminent.

Antonio Canales, presumably, had not slept much the night before either. His scouts must have picked up on the arrival of General Arista with an additional 700 men. Figuring in casualties from the day before, Canales was actually outnumbrered by more like 3:1 now, probably even more so in terms of artillery. They were abysmal odds, particularly without his most capable commander at the front. And yet, Canales knew that he had to fight, which gives the lie to some later detractors’ perceptions of him as “afraid” to fight. So early on the morning of March 25th, just as Arista and his reinforcements were shaking the dust off their boots, Antonio Canales ordered his men into battle formation - the mounted vaqueros on the flanks, the Texian volunteers and Carrizo Indians in the center, just as they had the day before. We don’t know if he gave any sort of rousing speech. He probably didn’t need to. His men knew the stakes. Their ideological movement. Their beloved Zapata. Their homes.¹³⁷

After he finished his interview with Zapata, General Arista formed up his men just outside of Santa Rita de Morelos, opposite Canales’s waiting force. At such odds, General Arista would have been forgiven for thinking that a show of force should have been enough to dissuade Canales from his plan. And initially, at least, Canales did not attack. He gave no sign of pulling back either, though. Convinced that Canales would offer battle, Arista ordered his men forward, methodically and supported by artillery, closing the gap in the lines. As the centralists closed in, the Canales and his men couldn’t restrain themselves. Frontiersmen made for poor set-piece soldiers. Instead of waiting for the centralists to come to them the rest of the way, they broke their lines and charged. The Centralists halted, presented arms, and opened fire, mowing down the front ranks of the federalists. The federalists returned fire and kept coming, the two lines now closing in on each other. Canales led his men that day in a way that would have made Zapata proud. Rabidly, ferociously, at all times at the hottest part of the action. JJ Gallegos, a biographer of Antonio Zapata, renders the battle scene vividly:

At the Battle of Morelos, as it would become called, Rio Grande Federalist gallantry was no match for centralist discipline. 150 or so federalists were captured, out of 450 or so fit for service that morning. The prairie fire consuming the 200 Federalist dead and wounded - including more than 30 Carrizos- was the perfect metaphor for the day, and the only thing allowing Canales and the few dozen federalist survivors to escape the field.¹³⁸

General Arista’s centralist force was not unbloodied; their casualties were maybe half of what the Federalists were…but then again, they had a lot more men to give.¹³⁹ The flower of the youth of the federalist Rio Grande villas had just been reduced to ashes on the field outside of Santa Rita de Morelos. Antonio Canales fled with what little remained of his “army” back to Texas. General Arista’s press release wasn’t far behind him. Arista sent notice to ever newspaper between Mexico City and Houston announcing his victory and announcing that the famed and feared Antonio Zapata was his prisoner. And that Zapata would stand trial for treason, sweaty hat and all.¹⁴⁰

On March 28, 1840, General Arista called to order the court martial of Antonio Zapata. Centralist officers served as judge, prosecuting attorney, and even as Zapata’s defense attorney, none others being present. The charge, as we mentioned, was treason, but in particular, the most egregious treason was treasonous act was Zapata’s alliance with the Texian adventurers. Quoting General Arista here : “The most terrible, the unpardonable for the nation was in betraying the fatherland by bringing foreigners; allying himself with the Texans and fighting in union with them against Mexican troops.”¹⁴¹

Witnesses were called from Zapata’s own men. Interestingly, the two men they called were mulattos, like Zapata, born in the Villas del norte, and even more coincidentally both – like Zapata – had lost grandfathers in the terrible Apache raids of 1790. It’s a window into the kind of men who followed Zapata, and a reminder of what was so terrifying about Zapata’s uprising to the ruling classes in Central Mexico. The witnesses testified that yes, they had been fighting alongside Texian adventurers, something which they couldn’t of course deny given that at least two of them had been captured in Zapata’s final desperate fight on the town plaza. Yet they categorically denied that they were fighting for Texas, or for any foreign government for that matter. Next Zapata himself was called to the stand. He was asked if he understood the charges against him. Yep, he replied. Are you fighting for any foreign government they asked him? Only federalism, he responded. Did you fight alongside Texians? Absolutely, Zapata responded, unflinchingly and without qualification, refusing to betray his men even when it threatened his life.¹⁴²

The prosecution then called their own witnesses, officers from the centralist army who unsurprisingly confirmed the very undisputed fact that there had been “foreigners” – i.e., Texians – in the Rio Grande federalist army. After a few more hours of this, the trial came to a close. A “jury” of 7 centralist officers withdrew to deliberate. They were gone for much longer than anyone had expected. Several hours passed. At least one of the officers on the jury, it seems, was opposed to convicting Zapata. Perhaps the dissident noted that there were quite a few foreigners serving in the centralist army, though these were mostly Europeans, which for some reason was less threatening. Perhaps, instead, he noted that Zapata could be of immense utility to the central government as an Indian fighter; the frontier remained a dangerous place, and perhaps keep Zapata at the helm of the defense of these frontier communities could go some way toward regaining borderlanders’ loyalty to the state. Or maybe – and here’s me just making stuff up – maybe that officer had been instructed by Arista to hold out long enough for General Arista to proposition Zapata.

General Arista certainly appreciated Zapata’s utility, and knew that a living, compromised or even allied Zapata was worth much more than a dead one. And so, Arista pulled Zapata aside while the jury was out for deliberations, and made him an offer. He would pardon Zapata, give him his life, let him return to his four daughters in Guerrero, if he would just do one thing for him. All he had to do was lay down his arms and renounce federalism. Look at me, General Arista might have pointed out to Zapata! I’m a federalist at heart too, I get it! But for Federalism or centralism or any of it to work, we’ve got to have peace in this country! Go back to your home, to your beloved Guerrero, and fight for federalism there, in the newspapers, in the statehouse, in the capital pordios. Frankly, you can save a lot of destruction and a lot of men’s lives – including your own – if you would just play along! Didn’t your comrade Canales teach you this? Actions are noble, for sure, but politics is the realm of words. Just say the words.

“Shoot me, then,” Zapata responded, “I will never lay down my arms until the rights of my people are redressed.” To make sure that Arista had understood him, Zapata continued, clarifying that he, Zapata, “would never lay down his arms as long as he was at liberty.” This cannot have been the answer that Arista was expecting.¹⁴³

After having studied Antonio Zapata for some time now, I’ve come to imagine him – right or wrong – as a nearly perfectly integrated man. By which I don’t mean to imply that he was a perfect man or anything of the sort, he clearly wasn’t. But that he was a man who was perfectly comfortable with what he was and who he was. He was complete at every moment. That he was incapable of doing something inconsistent with himself, which is really quite a thing. I’ve been around a few people like this in my life, not many, but they just draw you towards them with their wholeness. This is how I explain the magnetism that he clearly had, the spell that he could cast even on Anglo-Texians who didn’t speak his language. It’s rare to find men in the history books – much less in the history books of South Texas – that are so universally acclaimed by their friends and their enemies, by Texians, Mexicans, and Native Americans alike. There must have been something to this man, who otherwise remains a bit of an enigma to us, because we mostly only know about him from the accounts of others.

Zapata wasn’t giving General Arista much to work with, however. You get the sense that maybe even he had come under Zapata’s spell, or at the very least, that he didn’t really want to kill him. In this sense, even from his position as a prisoner, Zapata was controlling the course of events! General Arista shook his head and resigned himself to what would come next.

The jury came back with their verdict. They had found Antonio Zapata guilty of treason.

The next morning, Sunday, March 29th, the crews repairing the damage from the battle in Santa Rita de Morelos stopped their work and watched a priest ride into town. They knew that he wasn’t coming this Sunday morning to say mass. The priest was admitted to the house where Zapata and his men were being held. Zapata was pulled aside and permitted to give his last confession. The priest administered last rites. When the sacrament had concluded, Zapata grabbed his sweat-stained hat, and walked out into the street where an escort of centralist soldiers awaited him. Is it too melodramatic to try to place ourselves in the mind of Zapata at this moment? What does a condemned man think about in his final moments? About his four daughters back in Guerrero? About his wife, que en paz descanse? About his mother, María Antonia?

Or maybe he was thinking about his old partner, Antonio Canales. For all of their differences, he and Canales had had a sort of magic to their relationship. Zapata might never have entirely agreed with or understood Canales’s political scheming, but he had a respect for it, and he could tell it was its own game with its own logic. Zapata had played his part, according to his code, according to the rules as he understood them. Now it was Canales’s turn. Maybe, just maybe, the old brush fox had one more trick up his sleeve. Maybe, just maybe, he was orchestrating a rescue attempt at this very moment.

Five rifle shots rang out in Santa Rita de Morelos at 10 AM on Sunday, March 29th, 1840. A sweat-stained hat fell to the ground. On that morning, five nameless centralist soldiers managed to do what no Lipan, no Comanche, no Texian, and indeed no Mexican had ever been able to do for forty-three years so far: extinguish the life of Antonio Zapata.¹⁴⁴

Antonio Canales wouldn’t have been close enough to hear the shots. But that’s because he was already back in Texas. And he hadn’t given up the fight yet. On the next episode Republic of the Rio Grande.

The Concessions of Camargo

Welcome to The Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode 15: The Concessions of Camargo.

After his defeat at the Battle of Morelos on March 25, 1840, the old federalist brush fox, Antonio Canales, high-tailed it across the Rio Grande. One third of his Federalist Army had been left behind dead on the battlefield or consumed in the brush fire that followed it; another third or so were prisoners; and the fighting spirt of the Federalist Army of the Northeast, the very avatar of the Rio Grande, Antonio Zapata, had been executed.

Proof of this fact arrived in Laredo just a few days after Canales did, on April 4, 1840. There in San Agustin Plaza in the center of Laredo, the purported seat of government for the purported Republic of the Rio Grande, a company of centralist riders arrived, unloaded a cask of brandy, and pulled Antonio Zapata’s pickled head out of it. Two days later, they repeated the same grotesque performance in Zapata’s hometown, Guerrero, but with an added flair. They placed Zapata’s head on a pike right in front of his house, where Zapata’s four grieving daughters would have to see it every time they stepped outside. Only after three days of this cruel spectacle was the parish priest given permission to take it down.¹⁴⁵

The people of Guerrero – Zapata’s people – did not take well to this provocation. 400 enraged Rio Grande vaqueros and Carrizo Indians mounted up and rode down the centralist detachment that had delivered Zapata’s head to their central plaza, killing the unfortunate messengers almost to a man. And yet Centralist General Mariano Arista let this slide. He was back in “hearts and minds” mode, and so made a point not to retaliate against the people of Guerrero. He also made a point to very publicly pardon all of the men he had captured after the Battle of Santa Rita de Morelos. The war for the Republic of the Rio was over, in General Arista’s mind, and it was time now to win the peace.¹⁴⁶

And yet, the brush fox, Antonio Canales, wasn’t done. Back in Texas, he reunited with Jose Maria Carvajal, the fiery little federalist who had been named “Secretary to the General Council” of the Federalist government back at their convention along the Nueces River at the end of January, 1840. On April 8, 1840, Canales and Carvajal rode into that old bastion of Federalism – and Carvajal’s hometown: San Antonio. They were given a hero’s welcome by Mayor Samuel Maverick and other staunch old Federalist families, such as the Menchacas, Navarros, and Seguins. Carvajal reminded his townsfolk that the enemies of the northeastern federalists were “the same who shed the blood of the Texians in the Alamo and at Labahia [Goliad.]” And Carvajal and Canales left San Antonio two days later with a letter of strongest recommendation to Texian President Mirabeau Lamar that he formally receive the “Government of the northern border of the Mexican Republic,” signed by none other than the Senator from San Antonio, Juan Seguin.¹⁴⁷

On their way to Austin, Carvajal, Canales, and company passed through Carbajal’s wife’s hometown, Victoria, Texas, on April 10th, where the citizens there threw them an enormous ball in their honor. Again, the citizens of Victoria sent along to President Lamar their glowing support of the federalist government of the Republic of the Rio Grande. By the time the Rio Grande federalists arrived in Austin on May 2, 1840, an enthusiastic crowd was awaiting them there. There on the streets of Austin, the bilingual Carvajal gave one of the most eloquent speeches of his career, ending with the lines: “We are fighting for liberty, both civil and religious, the principles of which are the same everywhere; we are now following the footsteps of Texas, and wish to establish a government of our own independent of Mexico, and modeled after you own.”¹⁴⁸

Once again, Canales and Carvajal would not receive a formal blessing from President Lamar, who still feared centralist retaliation and reinvasion. Yet once again, Canales and Carvajal didn’t leave Texas empty-handed. They left with more men, more weapons, and more money. They rounded out their tour with a visit to the booming town of Houston, and apparently had some success there recruiting volunteers as well, as evidenced by a local newspaper editor’s complaints about young men leaving their jobs to go enlist with the Rio Granders. And as they marched back through San Antonio on their way south, they found waiting for them a company of 200 men comprised of a more or less equal split between Anglos and Tejanos, many of them veterans of the Siege of Bexar, San Jacinto, and others commanded by none other than Juan Seguin himself. Seguin was only thirty-four in 1840, but already had an unimpeachable track record as a federalist revolutionary. As long-time listeners of this podcast will recall, It was Seguin who had first led a contingent of Texians into Coahuila back in 1834, precipitating the events that would lead to the War of Texas independence, in which Seguin and his ranging company were present at almost every engagement. Now, in 1840, the temptation to go fight centralists one more time remained too was too strong to resist. Juan Seguin resigned his Texas Senate seat, and personally mortgaged his ranches and other personal property to provision the 200 volunteers who marched south now with him to rejoin the battered remains of Canales’s old Federalist army.¹⁴⁹

Against all odds, for at least the third time in three years, the Rio Grande federalist cause had risen from the ashes. It tells you something about the enduring appeal of Federalism as well as the depth of dissatisfaction that borderlanders had for the government in Mexico City that this kept happening. By July 1, 1840, an army of almost 600 federalists was gathering north of Laredo, consisting of Seguin’s 200 volunteers, 300 or so Rio Grande vaqueros, and again 80 or so Carrizo Indians. After a few weeks of drilling, strategic maneuvering, and some careful screening operations, this motley troop snuck into Laredo in the early dawn hours of July 25, scattering the small centralist garrison left there to defend it. Laredo was once again in the hands of the federalist government of the Rio Grande.¹⁵⁰

But then, in the heady aftermath of victory, one of the Anglo-Texian volunteers raised the Texas flag over San Agustin plaza. This infuriated Canales, reminding him of Texians’ attempt the previous year to raise a flag on the south bank of the Nueces, which he had objected to in no uncertain terms. And frankly, the Texian’s flag raising only played into the Centralists’ propaganda that the federalists movement was, really, simply the tool of foreign aggressors, who would willingly dismember the new Mexican nation just to serve the ambition of the movement’s leaders.¹⁵¹

The sudden reappearance of Canales and his Federalist force caught Centralist General Mariano Arista totally unprepared. And the very visible presence of so many Texians only lent credence to a widely circulating rumor that the Texians were preparing to invade Matamoros as revenge for the execution of Zapata. General Arista was forced to rush to Matamoros to shore up his defense of the port city and its precious customs houses…which left the old Rio Grande Villas unoccupied by Centralist troops!

Leaving Juan Seguin behind to hold Laredo, Antonio Canales marched triumphantly southward, into the vacuum left by General Arista’s hurried march to Matamoros, and the Rio Grande Federalists recaptured Guerrero, Mier, and Camargo in August.¹⁵² High on their victory, 200 of these Federalists decided to venture on further south all the way to Ciudad Victoria, the undefended capital of Tamaulipas 250 miles away! On September 29, 1840, Rio Grande Federalists actually succeeded in capturing the Tamaulipecan capital, marking the southernmost extent of their conquest! Unfortunately, they made themselves about as welcome as a fire ant infestation by ransacking the town…repeatedly, over several days. And once again they played into the narrative: the most visible of these ransackers were the Anglo-Texians, whose make-up increasingly seemed more mercenary than ideological. Within a week, the entire 200 man federalist force was run out of Ciudad Victoria. From there, they boldly decided to strike across the country to Saltillo, but turned on each other along the way. Some ended up surrendering to the centralist garrison in Saltillo – including, suspiciously, one of Canales’s brothers-in-law - and the rest only made it back to Laredo thanks to a relief party sent out by Juan Seguin to guide them back. ¹⁵³

And that’s a pretty good metaphor for how Antonio Canales’s luck went generally. When he re-entered the Rio Grande Villas this time, the toll of two years of warfare was evident at every turn. Even before Canales had fled back to Texas, some of the Villas had begun to publish statements of support of the central government. The people – the precious pueblos - were just exhausted. The reason they had risen up in the first place was because of the crushing financial burden of the centralist army from 1836 to 1838. Yet the previous two years of warfare had only made things worse! The statistics from Matamoros give us the best indications. Income from import duties at Matamoros fell from 1 million pesos in 1834 to 262,227 pesos in 1842. Exports through Matamoros fell from $625,515 in 1828 to $481,277 in 1842. Population too fell from 16,372 in 1837 to 7,000 in 1846.¹⁵⁴

And it also seems obvious that Antonio Zapata’s absence was palpable. As long as Zapata was alive the men fighting Canales’s war - who, overwhelmingly, looked more like the mulato-indian Zapata than the creoles Canales – the men fighting for the federalist cause trusted that their cause was the right one. They knew they were following a man like them, who was looking out for them. With Zapata’s execution, however, Antonio Canales had lost his intermediary to the people, to the men he was still asking to die for what increasingly looked like a hopeless cause.

Yet even as Centralist General Arista moved back in to re-occupy the Rio Grande Villas, he had to admit that Canales’s capacity for creating chaos remained intact. And he knew that he had to contend with it. In a weird way, Zapata’s death may even have given Arista more confidence that a negotiated peace with the Rio Grande federalists would be honored. Canales, at least, understood the idiom of the political world, and understood the virtue of living to fight another day.

General Arista invited Antonio Canales to a conference in Camargo. There they met, in that same town where Canales had launched his revolt by capturing the local armory. Two years and thirteen days later, on November 16, 1840, Antonio Canales and General Mariano Arista met there to negotiate the Convenio of Camargo, which I’ve translated as the “Concessions of Camargo.”¹⁵⁵

First, Canales insisted that the Rio Grande Federalists be granted total pardons, and that all of their property be restored to them. General Arista granted this, artfully, with the following language “With the object of avoiding future discord among Mexicans, all will be forgotten of the events since 3 November 1838” ie., the date when Canales and Company had first raised their revolt. But this language also meant that the Federalists were forced to acknowledge the legitimacy of the hated protective tariffs and the tax increase of July 1838. And, to make sure they didn’t get off too light, General Arista also insisted that Canales and Company publicly admit their sin of “exposing the border to the vengeance of foreigners that threatened it,” which they did. Their public confession was softened, however, by an acknowledgment of the “sacrifice” they were making now: “the federalists in these provinces sacrifice before the supreme government of their homeland their prior pretensions in order to preserve the dignity and decorum of the nation.” A line which also meant that the Republic of the Rio Grande – if it had ever existed - was no more.¹⁵⁶

Canales also extracted a commitment from General Arista to conduct an offensive the following year against the Indios barbaros of the north – a campaign that apparently didn’t go very well given that 150 residents of the Rio Grande villas died from Indian raids during that period, but the public commitment was perhaps the more important part in reconciling the Rio Grande villas to the central government.¹⁵⁷

And Canales also convinced Arista to honor the debts incurred by the Federalists, though the selective manner in which General Arista complied with this suggests that he may have agreed to this provision as a practical way to remove the incentive of any foreign (ie. Texian) merchants to intrigue against the peace settlement, and to make sure any remaining Anglo-Texians got paid to get good and well out of Mexico. As proof that this measure was probably guided more by realpolitik than by generosity, look no further than the fact that General Arista did not bother to pay any of the Federalists’ Carrizo Indians’ back wages. They were simply cut loose and sent home. Similarly, Juan Seguin’s expenses were refused as well. In a rather lengthy series of events that I won’t go into here, it was the financial losses that Seguin suffered in support of the Republic of the Rio Grande and his later attempts to recover them that would lead to his political downfall in Texas and eventual capture by centralist forces in Mexico.¹⁵⁸

Seguin’s fellow San Antonian and Antonio Canales’ chief of staff and secretary of state, José María Carvajal, didn’t come out particularly well either. Yes, he was pardoned, but he was also financially ruined, like most of the rest of the other residents of the Rio Grande villas. He would spend the next years working as a schoolteacher in Camargo to “survive” in his words. His son had married Canales’ daughter, by this point, however, and two of Canales’s sons were virtual if not actual god-sons of Carvajal, so I don’t think we should assume that he was left out to dry by Canales in this resolution. But it does seem to be the case that only the brush fox, Antonio Canales, emerged from the Concessions of Camargo better off than he had started. He was given a Colonel’s commission in the regular Mexican army and made the collector of internal revenue for Nuevo Leon, an incredibly lucrative posting in nineteenth century Mexico. And indeed, after the signing of the Concessions of Camargo, he entered his birthplace Monterrey at the head of what could have easily been mistaken for a victory parade. Federalism in the northeast had been defeated for now…but Antonio Canales had not. If Antonio Zapata had been the great power-broker and kingmaker for the previous two years, the Concessions of Camargo had confirmed Canales as his successor.¹⁵⁹

Yet Antonio Canales’s was about to be tested by his new masters. He was still looked upon skeptically by most of the authorities in Mexico City. And he was looked upon particularly skeptically by the man who regained the Presidency of Mexico in October of 1841: our old friend Santa Anna. After returning from his imprisonment in the United States following the Battle of San Jacinto, Santa Anna had cinematically re-emerged on the Mexican political scene through his personal heroics in defending Veracruz against a French landing there during the Pastry War. And now that he had recovered presidential sash, Santa Anna wanted Texas punished. When he’d crossed the Rio Grande in 1836, Santa Anna had refused to allow any Rio Granders to march alongside him into Texas, because he distrusted their loyalty. Now, because he still distrusted their loyalty, he wanted the Rio Granders to avenge him in Texas. And the Rio Grander he had in mind was Antonio Canales. On the next episode of the Republic of the Rio Grande.

The Republic of the Sierra Madre

Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode 16, the Republic of the Sierra Madre. I’m Brandon Seale.

As he would many times during his career, in 1841, Santa Anna returned to the Mexican presidency. And one of the first things he did was order an invasion of Texas. In March of 1842, a Mexican army crossed the Rio Grande and captured San Antonio! This provoked panic in the Republic of Texas as well as the so-called Archives War in Austin as then President Sam Houston order the capital relocated to Houston. The Mexican Army then retreated on its own after only two days in San Antonio, suggesting it was more mischief-making or simply probing Texian defenses than a true attempt at reconquest. No one was killed, no real shots were fired, and the event receded in Texians minds.

Until July. All through the early years of Texas Independence, Texian politicians continued to claim the lands lying between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. Partly in response to the San Antonio raid from March – but also in keeping with a nearly annual ritual that we’ve seen in many previous episodes of this season – in the early summer of 1842 a few hundred Texian militia began to take up a defensive position on the southern bank of the Nueces River, at a spot known as Lipantitlan. Actually, it was just a few miles away from Casa Blanca, the place where Rio Grande Federalists had established their short-lived government back in January of 1840. And in July of 1842, the Rio Granders returned to assert their claims to the Nueces. 600 Rio Grande vaqueros surprised the disorganized Texian force gathered there and resoundingly defeated them. The historical marker on the spot today makes it sound like a Texian victory, but this seems to have been a bit of a later attempt to rewrite the lopsidedness of a defeat that sent the Texian militia fleeing north and once again put the Republic of Texas into a panic. Both houses of the Texas Congress passed a war bill. President Sam Houston vetoed it, but mainly for financial reasons …the young Republic couldn’t afford to go to War.¹⁶⁰

Of course he may also have vetoed it because he knew that a punitive expedition against the Mexican force at Lipantitlan wouldn’t be some kind of walk in the park; that force was led by none other than Antonio Canales, the old Brush fox. For all that they might curse Canales, Texians knew not to take him lightly. And it should have come as no surprise that Canales had led this force: you might recall how violently Canales responded to any Texians claims or overtures toward possessing the land south of the Nueces and how he’d threatened before to attack any Texians that tried to claim those lands. This was a highly personal issue for Canales, who had written before that the territorial integrity of Mexico – but in particular, Tamaulipas’s historical claims to the lands all the way to the Nueces – was the only issue for which he would “cease to be a Federalist.” Finally, Canales was enjoying the opportunity to make good on his threats to the Texians.

Then, in October, another Mexican Army captured San Antonio again and this time held it for a week. A hurriedly mustered force of Texians and Tejanos eventually defeated them at the Battle of Salado, but the entire series of events was psychologically traumatic for the fragile young Republic, and Texians lashed out. An army of Texian volunteers marched south and captured Laredo, which was still governed as a part of Mexico. Some of those volunteers then continued south, on to the lower Rio Grande Villas. They entered the old town of Mier…but that’s also where their adventure ended when they were surrounded there by Mexican forces and forced to surrender. Texas history buffs will recall what happened next to the survivors of the so-called “Mier Expedition” – this is the famous “black bean episode” - but what even Texas history buffs may not recall was that the commander of the opposing Mexican forces in the battle of Mier was none other than the brush fox once again, Antonio Canales, who had now chalked up his second victory against the Texians in six months. Canales had never trusted the Texians. He was willing to use them as soldiers to advance the claims of his region, but frankly he was just as willing to use the Centralists to the same end whenever it seemed like Texas was the greater threat. And as proof of his dim view of Texian adventurers, we need only witness what Canales did to one of the Texian commanders of the Mier expedition, Ewen Cameron. Cameron had actually been one of the leaders of the Anglo-Texian volunteers serving under Canales during the war for the Republic of the Rio Grande. Cameron, however, had not left a favorable impression on Canales. Though Antonio Canales was not the man who ordered the black bean treatment, whereby the captured Texians were forced to draw white and black beans to decide which prisoners would live or die respectively, Canales did make it a point of privilege to order Cameron’s execution, anyway, even though Cameron had drawn a white bean. Later Texans memorialized Cameron’s misfortune by naming Cameron County after him, though even amongst Anglo-Texans this was not without controversy.¹⁶¹

Following the Mier Expedition, things quieted down along the Rio Grande…for all of about three years. Then, in January of 1846, a United States army under Zachary Taylor army landed at Corpus Christi – south of Antonio Canales’s sacred Nueces river. Incidentally, this occurred just days after a centralist administration in Mexico City had usurped the presidency from a Federalist incumbent, which triggered all kinds of bad memories for Rio Grande Federalists. As in 1838, it was unclear to men like Canales who posed the greater threat to the Rio Grande villas: an increasingly powerful northern neighbor, or an illegitimate homegrown administration that seemed little disposed to expend any resources on defending the people of the northeastern border. So Canales once again called up his fiery federalist ally, Jose Maria Carvajal, who was godfather to two of Canales sons and whose own son had married Canales’ daughter. And together they concocted a plan. Canales sent Carvajal to meet with General Zachary Taylor and to present him a proposal in Carvajal’s perfect English. If Taylor would support the Rio Grande federalists’ in a revolt against the usurping centralist administration, “these Northern States will separate forever from Mexico.” The Republic of the Rio Grande wasn’t dead, it seems…it had just gone dormant! And indeed, a newspaper in soon-to-be-occupied Matamoros started calling itself “The Republic of the Rio Grande” in the hopes that the movement might be resurrected. Canales and Carvajal even went so far as to draw up yet another declaration of independence with plans to publish it on March 1, 1846.¹⁶²

And yet Canales and Carvajal were playing last year’s game. The Texas government had wanted a buffer, sister state sitting between Texas and central Mexico. The United States government – of which Texas was now a part - could care less. General Taylor disregarded the proposal, if he gave it any thought at all. By May, Taylor had marched his army all the way south to the Rio Grande. He was met there by the Mexican army under the command of none-other-than General Mariano Arista – the man who had executed Antonio Zapata and brought Antonio Canales back into the fold. And indeed, Antonio Canales served under General Arista in the first two battles of the Mexican-American war on the north side of the Rio Grande. Things didn’t go well for Arista and Canales, however, at the so-called battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. General Arista ended up having to retreat with his forces across the Rio Grande and didn’t stop until he reached Monterrey. No effort was made to defend the Rio Grande villas. Once again, the government of Mexico was abandoning the Rio grande villas rather than fight for them!¹⁶³

Canales and Carvajal were legitimately torn at this point. Should they continue to serve a nation that continuously abandoned them whenever their people were threatened? Or should they seek again to ally themselves with foreign elements in some desperate ploy to create a semi-autonomous or even vassal-state of the United States?

But they knew the latter option wouldn’t really work. General Taylor had already blown them off…and there was pretty widespread disillusionment amongst Tejanos in Texas by this point as to how independence worked out and now – worse! – Texas had agreed to annex it itself to yet another distant foreign power that was probably even less concerned about Tejanos needs than governments in Mexico City and Austin had been. And so Canales and Carvajal navigated a clever middle path: They offered their services to the Tamaulipas state militia, but NOT any longer to the Mexican nation at-large. Their loyalty was and remained to their region, to their pueblos. The central government could go to hell. Which it did, rather quickly, over the course of the next two years as the United States army rolled over the Mexican regular forces and by September of the following year found itself masters of Mexico City.¹⁶⁴

Back in Tamaulipas, however, now-Brigadier General Antonio Canales and Colonel Jose Maria Carvajal proved to be some of the most successful commanders of Mexican forces during the otherwise disastrous war. They were a constant thorn in the side of U.S. occupying forces in Tamaulipas, and one historian has described Canales as “the U.S. army’s most resolute foe.” Canales’ and Carvajal’s vaqueros – which never numbered more than a few hundred men – ran circles around Taylor’s patrols and eventually forced his men to move only in highly armed convoys through the countryside. Even then, the road between Monterrey and Camargo was “dotted with the skeletons of men and animals. Roofless and ruined ranchos, and many a dark and smoldering heap of ashes, told the disasters.” The old Federalists’ effectiveness was illustrated in a perverse way by the series of atrocities and counter-atrocities that their raiding provoked: “entire towns were razed, when suspected of guerrillista sympathy.”¹⁶⁵

As if his role in defeating the Mier Expedition wasn’t enough, Canales’s effectiveness in opposing U.S. forces during the Mexican War secured for him the enduring hatred of Texan chroniclers, yet it also cemented his reputation locally as the consummate defender of his people, of the “pueblos,” to return to that term. Once again, when the Mexican central government had abandoned the Rio Grande villas, it was Canales who hung around to defend them. And he was rewarded for his service to his state in 1851 by his election as Governor of Tamaulipas.

Yet at precisely the same time, his deputy Jose María Carvajal went a different direction. Just as Antonio Canales was entering the warm embrace of the establishment, Jose Maria Carvajal resurrected the Republic of the Rio Grande! In a familiar echo of all of the revolutions prior, Carvajal’s principle justification for revolt were the same: the central government’s failure to protect the northeastern provinces from hostile Indians, who between 1847 and 157 were still killing an average of 130 civilians per year!; and the need to lower tariff duties, justifications which he published on September 3, 1851 in a document which he called the Plan de la Loba. And he didn’t call his new nation the Republic of the Rio Grande: reflecting his larger ambitions, he called it the Republic of the Sierra Madre.¹⁶⁶

There’s something a little more disturbing about Carvajal’s Republic of the Sierra Madre, however. Whereas the Republic of the Rio Grande was truly homegrown, and provisioned by the resourcefulness of the insurgents themselves, Carvajal’s movement in 1851, was heavily financed by a cabal of Brownsville merchants, covetous of the profits they would reap from a more open trade policy with Northern Mexico. The second source of funds for Carvajal’s revolt was the sale of disputed Mexican land titles lying between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, which helped contribute to several generations worth of litigation. And the third and final source of funding was even worse; Carvajal promised to enact a fugitive slave law in his new Republic, and to return the estimated 4,000 runaway slaves then living in Northeastern Mexico.¹⁶⁷

All of which is to say that the support for northeastern Mexican separatism by this point, at least amongst Anglo-Texans, was almost entirely mercenary. And yet some Texans did volunteer, most notably the famed Texas ranger RIP Ford, and Carvajal’s revolt did garner some local support, at least initially. Carvajal – with his left arm in a colorful silk sling since his wounding at the Battle of Alcantra in 1839 – crossed the Rio Grande in September of 1851 and made sure that his first conquest was Guerrero, that old hotbed of federalism and revolt, hometown of Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara, hometown of Antonio Zapata. Then Carvajal marched on Camargo, which he also captured, then Reynosa, which fell just as quickly. Carvajal quickly followed through on his promise to the Brownsville merchants, reduced tariffs by 1/3, and collecting a windfall the flurry of imports that followed. With these new revenues, Carvajal was able to recruit even more men, though again, principally mercenaries from Texas. By the time he marched on Matamoros, around October 8, 1851, more than half of his 700-man force were Texans. ¹⁶⁸

This, of course, created terrible optics for Carvajal. Because if the residents of the villas del norte had been skeptical of Anglos in 1840 – before the Mexican-American war – they were outright hostile to them now. And it didn’t help that Carvajal himself spoke English a little too well and, worst of all, was a protestant! Even amongst Mexican Federalists, that was cause for suspicion. As such, Matamoros put up a fierce resistance to Carvajal and his army, bogging them down in a multi-week siege. Not because they weren’t sympathetic to Carvajal. Some leaders of the city actually offered to join his cause…but only on the condition that he run the Texan mercenaries out of his army. Carvajal refused, however, given that Texans were a pretty key component of his support.¹⁶⁹

On October 30, 1851, as he was still besieging Matamoros, Carvajal received some disturbing news. The Tamaulipecan state militia was marching toward him. Which wasn’t surprising in and of itself. But what may have been surprising to Carvajal was who was in command of the state militia closing in on him now: his old companero and current governor of Tamaulipas, Antonio Canales, who resigned the governorship precisely to lead troops in the field against his old deputy. Wait, not just deputy, Carvajal and Canales were family by this point! Carvajal’s son was married to Canales daughter! And actually two of Canales’s sons were IN Carvajal’s army! Which was all a little too suspiciously incestuous even for commentators at the time as well. Was Canales marching to confront Carvajal? Maybe Canales was legitimately appalled at the presence of so many Texans in Carvajal’s army…he later disparaged the revolt as “toda extranjera,” totally foreign. Or was Canales perhaps marching to join up with him? If so, Carvajal did nothing to “hand over” his army once Canales arrived on the scene. Maybe Carvajal’s ego got the better of him: he had begun telling folks by this point of his desire to be the George “Washington of Northern Mexico.” Even at the time, the showdown between these two old allies puzzled people.¹⁷⁰

If the showdown was sincere, however, it does recall for me the similar scene that played out outside the town of Guerrero in 1839, when Antonio Zapata had squared off against his old mentor, Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara. Once again, two Federalist brothers-in-arms were ranged against each other, the elder in each instance having come to represent the establishment, the younger refusing to temper his revolutionary fervor; the elder counseling his protégé not to ally himself with foreigners to advance a domestic cause, the younger refusing to distinguish between allies in whatever form they might come. There’s a beautiful if not tragic parallel to it all.

As Canales approached Matamoros and it became clear that his intentions were hostile, Carvajal retreated. Canales followed. Near Cerralvo, a town about halfway between the Rio Grande villas and Monterrey, Canales caught up to Carvajal. Carvajal gave battle, but his men didn’t put up much of a fight. Carvajal and his men retreated, across the Rio Grande, where they spent the winter on the now undisputably Texas side of the river. Carvajal tried again in February of 1852, crossing the Rio Grande and this time capturing Camargo. Camargo—the town that Carvajal had relocated to after being run out of Texas following San Jacinto. The town where Zapata had come to Canales to engage his services as a surveyor, the town where Canales had come to make his name as a young man. The town where Canales and Carvajal had raised their Rio Grande revolt back in November of 1838. Whether he intended it or not, there was symbolism to Carvajal’s choice of Camargo. But it didn’t seem to matter to Canales. In the words of a Carvajal biographer, “Canales, not known for being an aggressive fighter, surprised all by ordering an immediate attack on Carvajal’s advancing forces.” Carvajal was routed once again, and in fact the battle threatened to dissolve into a massacre. At one point, Carvajal and his last 80 men were pinned down in a thicket and surrounded by hundreds of Canales’s regulars. For three hours Carvajal held off Canales and his men, but what ultimately saved them was the arrival of a contingent of Carrizo Indians from the Texas side of the river. Those old brothers of Antonio Zapata once again came to the fighting rescue of their friend, in this case, Carvajal, whose bravery on the battlefield was unquestionable and by this point a bit of the stuff of legends as well.¹⁷¹

And yet others would say that it wasn’t the Carrizos’s bravery that saved Carvajal. It was Canales’s mercy. Canales had Carvajal surrounded, and could have easily slaughtered the fiery little federalist there in the monte with his artillery But he didn’t. And not only did he forbear from attacking Carvajal’s desperate last stand, he actually ordered his forces to retreat at the end of the day. He would later claim that he had done this in an attempt to lure Carvajal out of his hole…but in retrospect, it looks more like Canales let Carvajal go.

And yet the Canales-Carvajal telenovela doesn’t end at the Battle of Cerralvo. After the battle, Carvajal returned quietly to civilian life. Until the next foreign intervention in Mexico, this time in 1861 by the French-supported Emperor Maximilian. To oppose Maximilian, Carvajal raised his own force, the “fieles de Tamaulipas,” they called themselves, and they played hell on the Imperialists up and down the gulf coast for three years. In much the same way that Canales had during the American intervention in Mexico, Carvajal emerged into the role of pre-eminent regional caudillo during the French intervention. And in 1864, Carvajal was appointed governor-in-exile of Tamaulipas in his own right. Right after the U.S. Civil War ended, Carvajal was dispatched to the U.S. by none other than Benito Juarez to buy arms and to help secure U.S. support of the Mexican anti-imperialist cause, both of which he succeeded in. Carvajal returned to the governorship of Tamaulipas after this mission, but his absence had weakened his political support. In 1866 – just as the French and imperialist forces were collapsing - the Tamaulipas legislature removed Carvajal, and appointed one of their own. A man named Servando Canales…son of Antonio Canales…son-in-law to Carvajal himself! who had served under Carvajal in his revolt of the Sierra Madre! It’s as hard now to make complete sense of this as it was then. An American observer at the time described it as “the funniest affair I had ever witnessed.”¹⁷²

The old brush fox (Antonio Canales) died a few years later in 1869; the fiery little Jose María Carvajal’s followed him in 1874. They could each make a case for having been heroes to their homelands, defenders of their patria. And yet, Mexican historiography mostly remembers men like Canales and Carvajal as “caudillos” who tragically destabilized the early Mexican republic. Quoting scholar Timothy Anna: “It is the more or less unanimous opinion of Mexican society today that the lack of political cohesion in the nineteenth century is what laid Mexico open to the greatest disasters of its national history – the loss of Texas in 1836, the loss of the northern provinces of the republic to the invading United States in 1847, waves of civil war, political chaos, and foreign intervention. The unspoken impression seems to be that the disunity that reined in Mexico by the 1830’s happened because of Federalism.”¹⁷³

What we have to remember, however, is that ultimately centralism prevailed in Mexico. In large part, much of the project of Mexican historians in the twentieth century became justifying the centralizing impulses of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, and linking them to the past. It was an understandable response to the trauma of the early years of Mexican independence and to the violence of the Mexican Revolution to look at regional expressions of autonomy as fundamentally destabilizing…but it probably doesn’t accurately explain the people’s – the pueblos – enduring attraction to more devolved forms of government in Mexico. And in that context, we might observe, as historian Nettie Lee Benson did many years ago, that: “It is time to recognize that the effort of the [Mexican] center to rebuild its weakened hegemony over all aspects of government in the early republic – not the refusal of the states to obey the center – was the more profound source of Mexico’s political turmoil.”¹⁷⁴

To that end, it’s worth pointing out that it was a federalist administration – under Benito Juarez – that ultimately defeated the last great foreign threat to Mexican independence – the French intervention of the 1860’s. Prior to Juarez’s presidency, there hadn’t even been published a map of “Mexico” as a single, national conglomerate entity. And, if we’re allowed to speak in generalities, the old centralists by-and-large aligned themselves with the French pretender, while it was the provinces that opposed and eventually defeated him. Yet even with this victory, elites in Mexico City continued to persist in “their assumption that the nation was themselves.” Tell a Mexican that you were in Mexico last week, and they will assume you mean Mexico City. By contrast, tell a resident of Mexico City that you were anywhere else in the country that week, and they will nod and acknowledge the beauty of the “provincia” – everywhere that isn’t the capital. All of this was only reinforced by the four-decade, centralizing rule of Porfirio Diaz…who ultimately was toppled, it should be noted, by a revolt of northeasterners from Coahuila who in large part planned, staged, and launched their revolt from the northern shore of the Rio Grande. And yet their eventual triumph as well would be coopted by the overwhelming centralizing impulse of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.¹⁷⁵

All of this has left the voices of those from the border outside of the official narratives, both of Mexican and American history, frankly. I think Texans ought to be uniquely well-equipped to sympathize with the injustice of this. And maybe to do something about it. On the next and final episode, of the Republic of the Rio Grande.

Y todo para que?

Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande. Episode XVII: Y todo para que? Because you can’t do a podcast about Zapata Texas without an allusion to an Intocable song. I’m Brandon Seale.

The twentieth century Mexican historical canon will tell you that the Republic of the Rio Grande never existed. And they lead off with a pretty strong argument: Mexicans don’t call the Rio Grande the Rio Grande…they call it the Rio Bravo. If anything it should be the Republic of the Rio Bravo, shouldn’t it? The great Mexican historian Josefina Vázquez – and I’m not saying that sarcastically, she’s phenomenal - wrote a paper on the subject called “The Supposed Republic of the Rio Grande,” in which she claims that “this ‘republic’ was mentioned only once in documents of the period, and this in a centralist newspaper that was reprinting an article from a Texas newspaper.” The great Nuevo Laredo historian, Manuel Ceballos Ramirez, goes further arguing that the history of the Republic of the Rio Grande was “invented” in order to suggest a pre-existent “tejanidad” or “Texanness” to the Mexican citizens of that region as “justification for Texan and north American expansionism.” ¹⁷⁶

But something clearly was going on between 1838 and 1840 in the Rio Grande villas. Something that men were willing to fight and die for. Maybe that something wasn’t specifically called the “Republic of the Rio Grande,” but as early as November 13, 1839, you can find mention in a Veracruz newspaper of a “new Republic of North Mexico.” You can find the same phrase in a letter on December 7, 1839. Then on January 17, 1840, in centralist Matamoros disparaging reference to Canales’ “republica Norte-Mejicana.” By March 3, 1840, a month or so after the convention at Casa Blanca, we get our first mention in English of the “establishment of the Republic of the Rio Grande.” Later that same year, Antonio Canales signed a debt instrument in his capacity as a representative of the “Government of Rio Grande,” and in another letter around the same time he makes reference to the “President of the Provisional Government of the Free States of the Mexican Republic.” So to say that there never was a “Republic of the Rio Grande” seems like a purely semantic argument, and frankly a losing one at that.¹⁷⁷

Mexican historiography has always been dominated by the center, in much the same way that the Mexican nation would be. The nation itself takes its name from the center, and its often unclear – even to Mexicans – whether they are talking about Mexico City or to the Republic of Mexico when they refer to Mexico. For this and many other reasons, northern, frontier Mexicans have always felt themselves to be a bit of a breed apart, a neglected if not forgotten sibling. And not just because people in Mexico City STILL haven’t heard of Topo chico mineral water…seriously, walk into a restaurant in Mexico City and order Topo Chico and they’ll try and figure out why you’re asking them for a tiny mammal. It’s because the concerns of the northern frontier have almost always been forced to take a backseat to the projects of the Mexican center.

In many ways, the great federalist-centralist struggle in nineteenth century Mexico was a proxy for this culture war between northern and central Mexicans – the northern provincials fighting for regional autonomy and low tariffs, the central, metropolitans claiming a monopoly on sovereignty and taxation. Actually, that same Nuevo Laredo historian I mentioned a moment ago has argued pretty persuasively that the Mexican revolution of 1910 was actually just another Northeastern, federalisty Mexican revolt, set off by a man from Coahuila, in the name of long-festering regional frustrations with an autocratic, centralist government in the Center, and launching his movement from reliable old federalist bases like San Antonio and Laredo. And here’s an even more recent datapoint: in December of 2020, fed up with the highly centralizing impulses of the current Mexican presidential administration, 10 of Mexico’s governors – principally from the northern states - formed an alliance to oppose the President’s economic policies. Do you know what they called themselves? The Federalist Alliance, la alianza federalista. Do you know which three states organized the Alliance? If you said Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas, then you’ve been paying attention.

This fight for autonomy by the northeastern states of the Mexican Republic is, in some ways, as old as the Mexican Republic itself, which is why I’m inclined to disagree when Mexican historians dismiss the “supposed” Republic of the Rio Grande as something “invented.” I think that northern federalists were fighting – and dying! – because of a genuine sense of alienation from the center. But I do think those Mexican historians are on to something: Rio Grande and northeastern Mexican federalists probably weren’t fighting for a Texan-inspired, Anglo-American form of independence. They seem to have had something very different in-mind.

If I may generalize from my own experience, I guess I grew up with the idea of independence or at least of American independence as a “fresh start.” “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp….Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free” the Statue of Liberty cries out to those who came to this continent freely anyway. The idea being that America itself represents a cutting off of everything that came before: the corruption of European monarchs, the wickedness of foreign despots, the tragedies of failed states. Indeed, the Anglo-American ideal of independence expects and sort of demands that we leave behind our individual pasts in order to be a part of a shared future.

But the Mexican tradition views the issue a little differently. You might recall here the Hispanic legal tradition we’ve talked about in this series, which was built on self-government at the level of the pueblos, which were bound to other pueblos through history, culture, faith, and sometimes but not always, through a shared sovereign. In a succession crisis for example, your town and my town might disagree on who the king should be, and we can govern ourselves in the meantime just fine…just don’t think that your town gets to govern my town if your king wins. Of course, what does this mean – as in the case of Mexico in 1821 and especially 1824 – when there no longer is a king??? Well, it means that I won’t deny my historical and cultural ties with other parts of Spanish North America, but I will fight to the death for my right to govern myself politically.

I think that this is what Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara had in mind back in 1813 when he declared Texas “Free and independent” while also declaring it “inviolably joined” to the Mexican Republic. In his mind, there was no inconsistency with these two ideas. Texas was and forever would be politically free and independent of any monarch or autocrat trying to exercise a claim over her…but that didn’t mean that she was suddenly disconnected from the rest of Spanish North America with which it shared centuries of history and culture.

Gutierrez de Lara’s enterprise died on the vine, of course, so in his case it’s more of an academic question. But for me, it really places the Texas Revolution of 1835-36 in a new and slightly tragic light, at least with respect to the Tejano participants – who, recall, outnumbered Anglos as a percentage of their population in their participation in the Texas Revolution. Do you recall the scene that I opened this season with? On the first day of the Siege of the Alamo, Juan Seguin helping Jim Bowie compose a letter to Santa Anna. Seguin signing off the letter with the customary “Dios y Federacion,” “God and Federation,” a declaration of their commitment to the Federalist Constitution of 1824. Then Bowie scratching out the word “Federacion” and writing instead “Dios y Tejas”: “God and Texas.” As I mentioned in the trailer to this season, I’ve always understood this moment to be the great moment where Bowie, Seguin, and the others realized they were fighting for an independent Texas. With the benefit of hindsight, that’s what it seems like. But also with the benefit of hindsight, you’ve got to wonder if maybe Jim Bowie and Juan Seguin had very different things in mind when they spoke of “independence.”

In fact, there’s no greater exemplar of this ambiguity as to what the Texas Revolution in 1835-36 was really about than the trajectory of José María Carvajal, the fiery little San Antonian who we’ve followed as a supporting character throughout this series. In 1835, Carvajal had been one of the most radical opponents of Santa Anna’s government, risking and losing most of his personal fortune attempting to arm the early stages of the Texas Revolution. But when he was elected to the independence convention at Washington on the Brazos in February of 1836, he declined to attend, sensing that Tejanos had lost control of their own movement. Juan Seguín persisted longer, becoming the great Tejano hero the Texas revolution in 1835-36, but becoming within the decade the most tragic proof that – in 1842 anyway – it wasn’t possible to be culturally Tejano and politically Texian. That same year, 1842, would find Jose Antonio Navarro at the start of a three year stay in a Mexican prison for his support of the Republic of Texas. In 1845, Texas’ vote to annex itself to the United States was the last straw for Francisco Antonio Ruiz, son of the great Tejano Patriot Jose Francisco Ruiz. Fransciso Antonio considered annexation such a betrayal of the Texan dream of independence that he and his father had fought for three decades that he went off and lived with the Comanches instead!¹⁷⁸

I still think that the most public discussion around the Texas Revolution of 1835-36 are rehashing of centuries’ old Anglo-American historical arguments overlain onto a single geographic segment of the state – at the expense of the viewpoints of the men and women who had been living in the state for much longer and who I think might more rightly make an argument as to having precipitated the events of 1835-36. I’m referring of course to Tejanos. But to acknowledge that, we must also acknowledge that those same Tejanos were eventually as disappointed by the results of the Texas Revolution as they had been with the results of the war of Mexican Independence. And this story of the Republic of the Rio Grande, I believe, helps us understand why. What I’ve come to believe Tejanos wanted – in 1813, in 1836, and in the Rio Grande in 1840 – was autonomy…within their tradition, not independence from tradition. They wanted to preserve their links with the past and to their larger cultural heritage. And actually, Lorenzo de Zavala, first Vice President of Texas, told us as much in the first season of this podcast, when he articulated his vision for Texas as “a combined regimen of the American system and the Spanish customs and traditions”. Autonomy within a tradition, not independence from tradition. Which as I say it outloud, might be the most “Texan” idea we’ve yet touched upon in this series, and I think captures Texans’ continuing and dual obsession with their “freedom” and their “history” far better than the American fascination with fresh starts and generational re-imaginings of the past.¹⁷⁹

In 1858, eighteen years after Antonio Zapata’s execution, a new county was formed in Texas along the Rio Grande. It was organized largely due to the efforts of English stocktrader and merchant named Henry Redmond, who had been trading in the region since the time when Antonio Zapata reigned supreme. Redmond had actually married a girl from Guerrero across the river, Zapata’s hometown, which means that he certainly knew the legend of Zapata, if not the man himself. When Redmond organized the county where Antonio Zapata had once owned almost 20,000 acres, there was no doubt in his mind as to who he should name it after. Thus, Zapata County was formed. The only county in Texas named for an African-American as far as I know, and so-named in 1858 when slavery was still legal in the state.¹⁸⁰

The little Carrizo Indian village sitting across from Guerrero became the county seat of Zapata County. And eventually, they renamed it too for the man that the Carrizo-Comecrudo tribe still claims as one of their own: Zapata.¹⁸¹

Just as Guerrero, Tamaulipas had always been a hotbed of Mexican Revolutionary fervor, Zapata County has always been a supremely “uncategorizable” place. During the U.S. Civil War, it leaned decidedly Unionist against the Confederate state government. From 1896-1910, it was a conspicuously Republican county in a single-party Democratic state. Actually, one of the local political bosses at that time was none other than the son of Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara. And the county judge during that same period, incidentally, was the son of José Antonio Navarro. The “Kingdom of Zapata” they called it for its insularity and peculiarity, a phrase which Virgil Lott and Mercurio Martinez took as the title of their history of the region written in 1953. And as proof of the County’s continuing uncategorizableness, in 2016, Hillary Clinton won Zapata by 33 percentage points; in 2020, Trump won it by 5 points, marking a thirty-eight point swing, the second-largest single county swing in the nation, behind only neighboring Starr County, Texas. Go figure.¹⁸²

Political systems abhor the uncategorizable, however. And so when in the 1940’s, the United States and Mexican governments got together and planned a dam in the lower Rio Grande valley, perhaps it wasn’t an accident that towns they flooded to make that reservoir were those of Old revolutionary Guerrero, Tamaulipas, and oddball Zapata, Texas. In an incredibly odd coincidence, some of construction crews building Falcón dam, were actually Lipan Apaches recruited from a reservation in New Mexico, descendants of the men and women who had alternately traded with and menaced the Rio Grande villas for so long. In 1953, impoundment behind the dam began. Old Guerrero and Old Zapata were rebuilt at higher elevations. By 1954, all that was visible above the waterline was the cupola of Guerrero’s red sandstone church…the church where young Antonio Zapata had been baptized, facing the plaza where the Zapata’s severed head had later been displayed.¹⁸³

Zapata has endured as a hero of the lower Rio Grande valley and of Texas history buffs in general. True, it’s anachronistic to “acclaim” Zapata a Texan, as his biographer JJ Gallegos points out: “Born a subject of the Spanish Crown, Zapata died a Mexican.” Yet so too did every defender of the Alamo, in theory at least. And the truth is that Zapata will probably never get his due in the Mexican centralizing cannon, because he was such an unrepentant provincial, a proud and independent borderlander. But every Texan knows that Texan identity is most truly and continuously reborn on the border, on the frontera, on the fronier and Antonio Zapata represents the paradigmatic frontiersman. Even nineteenth century Anglo-Texans recognized in Zapata’s desire for autonomy within a tradition something they could identify with, even if they had no cultural claim to that tradition themselves. Which, quite frankly, is no different than how I as a mere second-generation Texan can find so much meaning in the history of a place that my people had nothing to do with shaping. Like many Texans, my folks didn’t come here for a fresh start. We came here to be a part of something that started a long time ago.¹⁸⁴

Bibliography

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Berlandier, Jean Louis. The Indians of Texas in 1830. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1969.

Canales, Licentiate don Antonio. Proclamation. November 10, 1839, Republic of the Rio Grande Museum, Laredo, Texas.

Center for the Greater Southwestern Studies, University of Texas at Arlington Special Collections. “A Continent Divided: the U.S.-Mexico War.” Accessed July 1, 2025. https://library.uta.edu/usmexicowar/item?bio_id=50&nation=Mexico&topic_id=11&format_id=10&ofst=9&ni=11.

Chance, Joseph E. José María de Jesús Carvajal: The Life and Times of a Mexican Revolutionary. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2006.

De la Garza, Lorenzo. Dos Hermanos Heroes. Madison: Wisconsin, 1939.

De la Teja, Jesús F. ed. A Revolution Remembered: Memoirs and Select Correspondence of Juan N. Seguín. Texas A&M University Press, 2002.

De Zavala, Lorenzo. Journey to the United States of America. Arte Publico Press, 2005. Kindle.

Dixon, Sam Houston. “The Republic of the Rio Grande: A Story of Its Rise and Fall.” In Romance and Tragedy of Texas History Austin: Texas Historical Publishing Company, 1924. http://www.sonsofdewittcolony.org/riogrande.htm.

Drummund Debt Instrument. July 26, 1840. Museum of the Rio Grande, Laredo, Texas

El Ancla (Matamoras, Mexico).

Gallegos, Juan José. “Last Drop of My Blood: Col. Antonio de Zapata: A Life and Times on México’s Rio Grande Frontier, 1797-1840.” Master’s thesis, University of Houston, 2005.

González Esparza, Victor M. “Patriotismo Vs. Nación: Nueva Galicia Y Los Orígenes Del Estado Nacional En México [Patriotism vs. Nation: New Galicia and the Origins of the National State in Mexico].” IX Congreso de Historiadores Canadienses, Mexicanos y de los Estados Unidos, Mexico City, 1994.

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Lack, Paul. Searching for the Republic of the Rio Grande: Northern Mexico and Texas, 1838-1840. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2022.

Lamar, Mirabeau B. The Papers of Mirabeau B. Lamar. 6 vols. Austin: 1921-1927.

“Las Villas del Norte Genealogical Group.” Accessed on January 21, 2021, https://lasvillasdelnorte.com.

Ledesma, Pedro Alberto Herrera. “La República del Río Grande, 1838-1840.” Reynosa ciudad de futuro de villa a metrópoli (August 2007): 151-155.

Lindheim, Milton. The Republic of the Rio Grande. Waco: W.M. Morrison, 1964. http://www.sonsofdewittcolony.org/riogrande2.htm.

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Robinson, Sherry. I Fought a Good Fight: A History of the Lipan Apaches. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013.

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Vigness, David M. “Relations of the Republic of Texas and the Republic of the Rio Grande.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 57 (January 1954): 312-321.

Vigness, David M. “The Republic of the Rio Grande: An Example of Separatism in Northern Mexico.” PhD diss., University of Texas, 1951.

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Footnotes

Lorenzo de la Garza, Dos Hermanos Heroes (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1939), 2. ↩
Miguel A. González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 1830-1880 (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2020), 11. ↩
Manuel Ceballos Ramírez, “La conformación del noreste historico Mexicano: larga duración identidad geopolítica (The Configuration of the Mexican Historical Northeast: long duration, identity, and geopolitics,)” Secuenica (May 2006): 13. ↩
Sherry Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight: A History of the Lipan Apaches (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013), 150; Virgil N. Lott and Mercurio Martinez, The Kingdom of Zapata (Salem: Higginson Book Company, 1953), NEED PAGE NUMBERS; Joseph B. Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder: Antonio Canales and North Eastern Mexico, 1836-1852” (master’s thesis, University of Texas, 1994), 64-66; Art Martinez de Vara, conversations with author, 2021. Native Americans, of course, had been in the region even longer than any of the Revillans, though their numbers were drastically reduced from the 1530’s when the first Old Worlders had come through here. And by Old Worlders, I’m talking of course, about Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions, who likely passed right through this same area. I don’t think I mentioned it in my Cabeza de Vaca series, but there’s actually a moment in his account right when he’s around the future-site of Revilla where Cabeza de Vaca was trying to cook some meat over a fire and one of the natives he was living with ran over and frantically slapped it away from the flames. They seemed to have some kind of taboo against or aversion to cooking meat. Well, two hundred years later when folks like Escandon arrived, one name he gave these Indians was “Comecrudos” – the “raw-eaters” – apparently in reference to their long-enduring practice of eating their meat raw. I just love these little moments of continuity. ↩
Though maybe earlier! Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, Need Page Number. ↩
Juan José Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood: Col. Antonio de Zapata: A Life and Times on México’s Rio Grande Frontier, 1797-1840” (master’s thesis, University of Houston, 2005): 53. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Lott and Martinez, Kingdom of Zapata, 157-9. ↩
Juan Mancias, phone interview with author, May 21, 2021; Jean Louis Berlandier, The Indians of Texas in 1830 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1969), NEED PAGE NUMBER; Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 5. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 1, 177-178, 3, 48, 87, 12. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 49; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 150. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 18. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 44-45, 25; González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 16 quotes Governor Israel Cavazos Garza. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 47. ↩
Ibid., 33. ↩
See José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apología que el Coronel D. José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara hace de las imposturas calumniosas que se le articulan en un folleto intitulado: Levantamiento de un general en las Tamaulipas contra la República, o Muerto que se le aparece al gobierno en aquel estado [Brief apology that Colonel d. José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara makes of the slanderous impostures that are articulated against him in a pamphlet entitled: Uprising of a general in Tamaulipas against the Republic, or Dead Man who appears to the government in that state] (Ymprenta del Ciudadano Pedro González y Socio, 1827), 59. ↩
González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 24, 27, 26 ↩
“Constitution: First Independent State of Texas Part of Mexican Republic, San Fernando, April 17, 1813,” Sons of Dewitt County Texas, accessed June 6, 2025, https://www.sonsofdewittcolony.org/firstconstit.htm. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 63, 60; Gilberto Hinojosa, A Borderlands Town in Transition: Laredo, 1755-1870 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000), 28-32. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 71, 72. ↩
Ibid., 69. ↩
De la Garza, Dos Hermanos Heroes, 32. ↩
Timothy E. Anna, Forging Mexico: 1821-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 75. ↩
Stan Green, discussion with author, Laredo, TX, March 4, 2021. ↩
Anna, Forging Mexico, 211. ↩
Ibid., 35, 213. ↩
Ibid., 9, 21, 38. And so it’s important to respect the fact that it in 1821, it was anything but clear what the “nation” of Mexico was. Indeed, according to an essay by Victor González Esparza, the word “nacion” in Spanish wasn’t connected with the idea of a political state exercising sovereignty over a specific territory until the second half of the nineteenth century. Getting a little specific, but nation as it was used in 1824 refers to the act of the “birth” of a polity; and indeed, this is precisely its etymology, nation comes from the Latin root for birth or birthing. Victor M. González Esparza, “Patriotismo Vs. Nación: Nueva Galicia Y Los Orígenes Del Estado Nacional En México [Patriotism vs. Nation: New Galicia and the Origins of the National State in Mexico]” IX Congreso de Historiadores Canadienses, Mexicanos y de los Estados Unidos, Mexico City, 1994. ↩
Ibid., 78. ↩
Ibid., 35 ↩
Joseph E. Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal: The Life and Times of a Mexican Revolutionary (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2006), 22; Anna, Forging Mexico, 148. ↩
Anna, Forging Mexico, 101, 139, 125. ↩
Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, El establecimiento del federalism en México, 1821-1827 [the Establishment of Federalism in Mexico, 1821-1827] (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2010), 20; Anna, Forging Mexico, 109. ↩
Vázquez, El establecimiento del federalism en México, 32. ↩
Anna, Forging Mexico, 130, 100. ↩
Ceballos Ramírez, “La conformación del noreste historico Mexicano,” 13, 18 ↩
Vázquez, El establecimiento del federalism en México, 359, 397 ↩
Anna, Forging Mexico, xii, 116. ↩
Anna, Forging Mexico, 101-102; Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 22. ↩
Anna, Forging Mexico, 139. ↩
González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 12, 72. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 68, 103. ↩
González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 71; Pedro Alberto Herrera Ledesma, “La República del Río Grande, 1838-1840,” Reynosa ciudad de futuro de villa a metrópoli (August 2007), 153. ↩
Anna, Forging Mexico, 22, 25. ↩
Ibid., 224. ↩
González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 26, 97 ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 89, ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 80; Anna, Forging Mexico, 260. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 86, 88; Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 24; Anna, Forging Mexico, 260. And I do feel obliged here to make a clarifying point: despite its being repeated frequently in histories of Texas – including by your humble presenter – I can’t actually find where Santa Anna declared himself dictator at any point. ↩
Jesús F. De la Teja, ed., A Revolution Remembered: Memoirs and Select Correspondence of Juan N. Seguín (Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 23; Chance, 33 ↩
Sebron S. Wilcox, “Laredo during the Texas Republic,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 45 (October 1938), 90. ↩
Ibid., 92. ↩
Ibid, 93. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 66. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 103. ↩
Wilcox, 90; Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 92; González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 71. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 67; Wilcox, “Laredo during the Texas Republic,” 89; Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 35. Ridout confirms a drop from 2054 to 1746 from 1828 to 1834. ↩
Ceballos Ramírez, “La conformación del noreste historico Mexicano,” 16. ↩
Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,”58. ↩
Ibid., 54. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 93. ↩
Ibid., 95. ↩
Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 26. ↩
González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 71; Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 55, 57-58. ↩
Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal, 33, 38, 39. ↩
Ibid., 8, 17, 19. ↩
Ibid., 136. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 95; Ceballos Ramírez, “La conformación del noreste historico Mexicano,” 25. ↩
23 men total, including Canales and Carbajal. Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 96. ↩
Ibid., 103. ↩
Ibid., 11. ↩
Ibid., 105. ↩
David M. Vigness, “The Republic of the Rio Grande: An Example of Separatism in Northern Mexico” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 1951), 312-313. ↩
Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 46. ↩
De la Garza, Dos Hermanos Heroes, 10. ↩
On March 5, 1839. Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 41. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 107; Milton, Lindheim, The Republic of the Rio Grande (Waco: W.M. Morrison, 1964), NEED page number, accessed January 21, 2021, http://www.sonsofdewittcolony.org/riogrande2.htm. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 108. ↩
Ibid. ↩
The Papers of Mirabeau B. Lamar (Austin: A. C. Baldwin, 1921-27) 6: 129-130. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 75. ↩
Ibid., 109 ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 111; Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal, 48. ↩
González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 34. ↩
Vazquez, 53. ↩
Lindheim, The Republic of the Rio Grande, 1. Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 68. ↩
El Ancla, January 17, 1840; Gallegos, 111 ↩
Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 49, 101. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 127. ↩
Ibid, 115 ↩
Ibid., 120. ↩
Papers of Mirabeau B. Lamar, 6: 128-132. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 114-115. ↩
Ibid., 112. ↩
Ibid., 113. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 114; Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 89. ↩
Lindheim, The Republic of the Rio Grande, 1. González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 72, 77; Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal, 49; Lott and Martinez, Kingdom of Zapata, 106 ↩
Ceballos Ramírez, “La conformación del noreste historico Mexicano,” 25. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 119. ↩
Ibid., 120-121. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid., 122. ↩
De la Garza, Dos Hermanos Heroes, 13. ↩
Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande [Supposed Republic of the Rio Grande],” Historia Mexicana 36 (July 1986): 61; De la Garza, Dos Hermanos Heroes, 14. ↩
Joseph Nance, After San Jacinto: The Texas Mexican Frontier, 1836-1841 (University of Texas Press, 1970), 218-219; James C. Milligan, “José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, Mexican Frontiersman, 1811-1841” (Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University, 1975), 204-205. ↩
Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 65-6; Papers of Mirabeau B. Lamar, 6:129-130. ↩
Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal, 50. ↩
Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande,” 62. ↩
Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 34. ↩
Licentiate don Antonio Canales, Proclamation, November 10, 1839, Republic of the Rio Grande Museum, Laredo, Texas. ↩
González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 73; Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 130. ↩
Lindheim, The Republic of the Rio Grande [NEED PAGE]; James A Bernsen, “Ross, Reuben,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed July 07, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/ross-reuben-FRO83. ↩
El Ancla, January 7, 1840. ↩
Lindheim, The Republic of the Rio Grande, NEED PAGE. ↩
Lindheim, The Republic of the Rio Grande, [need page]; Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 134. ↩
Drummund Debt Instrument, July 26, 1840, Museum of the Rio Grande, Laredo, Texas. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 136. ↩
Ibid., 138. ↩
Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande,” 64; Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 16n24; Gallegos, 143 ↩
“Constitution: First Independent State of Texas Part of Mexican Republic.” ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 200. ↩
De la Garza, Dos Hermanos Heroes, 15, 254; Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 145n163; Ledesma, “La República del Río Grande,” 153. ↩
David M. Vigness, “Relations of the Republic of Texas and the Republic of the Rio Grande,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 57 (January 1954), 316; De la Garza, Dos Hermanos Heroes, 17; Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande,” 63. ↩
Lindheim, The Republic of the Rio Grande, [need page]. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 142. ↩
González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 73; Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 143. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 139. ↩
Ibid., 148. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 145. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 149. ↩
Ibid., 154. ↩
Ibid., 149. ↩
Ibid., 156. ↩
Ibid., 154-155; Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal, 54. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 155. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid., 156. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 159; Benavides quoted in Papers of Mirabeau B. Lamar, 6:129, confirmed by Barrera 6:130-132. ↩
Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 77. ↩
De la Garza, Dos Hermanos Heroes, 34. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 161-162. ↩
Ibid., 160 ↩
Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal, 54; De la Garza, Dos Hermanos Heroes, 34. ↩
Papers of Mirabeau B. Lamar, 6:130-132. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 163 ↩
Ibid., 200; Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande,” 67. ↩
González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 76. ↩
De la Garza, Dos Hermanos Heroes, 18; Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal, 53. ↩
González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 77; De la Garza, Dos Hermanos Heroes, 18. ↩
Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal, 53; David M. Vigness, “A Texas Expedition into Mexico, 1840” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 62 (July 1958): 20; Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande, 71. ↩
Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 89-90. ↩
Lott and Martinez, Kingdom of Zapata, 108. ↩
De la Garza, Dos Hermanos Heroes, 19; Vigness, “A Texas Expedition into Mexico,” 27; González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 78. ↩
Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande,” 67; González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 59. ↩
Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande,” 75. ↩
Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 93; Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande,” 75. ↩
Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 102. ↩
Ibid., 93. ↩
Ibid., 56, 104, 97 ↩
Ibid., 111. ↩
Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande,” 65n.52; Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 87, 116. ↩
“A Continent Divided: the U.S.-Mexico War,” Center for the Greater Southwestern Studies, University of Texas at Arlington Special Collections, accessed June 6, 2025, https://library.uta.edu/usmexicowar/item?bio_id=50&nation=Mexico&topic_id=11&format_id=10&ofst=9&ni=11; Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande,” 49-50; Justin H. Smith, “La República de Rio Grande” The American Historical Review 25 (July 1920), 665. ↩
Ceballos Ramírez, “La conformación del noreste historico Mexicano,” 23. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 107, 154; Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal, 66, 71. ↩
“Plan del Campo de la Loba, 1678,” accessed January 1, 2021, http://www.biblioteca.tv/artman2/publish/1851_154/Plan_del_Campo_de_la_Loba_1678.shtml. ↩
Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal, 93, 102, 161 ↩
González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 100. ↩
Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal, 18, 112. ↩
Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal, 26, 121; Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder,” 184. ↩
González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Fronter, 102; Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal words, 141. ↩
Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal, 168, 198. ↩
Anna, Forging Mexico, 28. ↩
Ibid., xi, 182. ↩
Ibid., 102. In a way, the principles for which Federalists in Mexico were fighting for most of the nineteenth century contained within them the seeds of their own destruction. We’ve described the primacy of the “pueblo” in their worldview, which moreso than the “people” means the township, an entire region full of people represented in and by the governments of the largest “municipios” in that region. Even to this day, Article 115 of the Mexican constitution declares that the “municipio” is the basic building block of political and administrative organization of the country. In the Mexican tradition, if a municipio or pueblo was large enough, rich enough, powerful enough, it might be elevated to the dignity of a “city,” a capital with a larger collection of regions – a province – entrusted to its care. In such a tradition, then, where the sovereignty of the city was primary, why shouldn’t the largest, wealthiest, and most populous city be the center of power? The city, no less, that gave its name to the entire nation. ↩
Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande,” 49-50. ↩
Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande,” 65n.52; Drummond debt instrument; Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 192. ↩
Art Martinez de Vara, conversations with the author, 2021. ↩
Lorenzo de Zavala, Journey to the United States of America (Arte Publico Press, 2005), Kindle, Loc 4742 of 4764. ↩
Lott and Martinez, Kingdom of Zapata, 42. ↩
Ibid., 59. ↩
Ibid., 24, 59. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 378. ↩
Gallegos, “Last Drop of My Blood,” 2. ↩

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