Women’s Lives in a Spanish-Texas Community: San Antonio de Béxar, 1718–1821

Abstract

Women’s Lives in a Spanish-Texas Community: San Antonio de Béxar, 1718–1821 Jesús F. de la Teja (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Béxar’s women enjoyed a full social life and, under certain circumstances, a public economic life as well. The woman at the center of scene might well be operating a cantina in her home—note the crosses, toys, and household items hanging on the walls—while the young woman on the right, possibly a family member or criada (servant, but literally “raised” or “brought up”) helps with the seemingly perpetual task of making tortillas, while the woman at the lower left holds a child in her arms. General Research Division, The New York Public Library. “Trajes mexicanos, un Fandango = Costumes mexicains = Mexican dresses.” New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-16b9-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 [Accessed Aug. 24, 2022]. [End Page 332] Jane Long is not the mother of Texas, although that is how she was identified at least by the 1870s, and that is how she has been depicted in Texas history books for over a century.1 Former U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison repeated this sobriquet in her book, Unflinching Courage: Pioneering Women Who Shaped Texas, which does not include a single Tejana2 or American Indian female. One look at Hutchison’s bibliography tells the story; it does not even list Teresa Palomo Acosta and Ruthe Winegarten’s Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History, published by the University of Texas Press in 2003. Hutchison’s myopia is neither new nor surprising. She represents a vision of what it means to be Texan and sends a very particular message (although one with fewer and fewer adherents all the time): that Jane Long could be the mother of Texas because only Anglo [End Page 333] women are really Texan. While most historians in the academy long ago abandoned this myopic perspective, it remains entrenched in the state’s popular history.3 But history is also driven by the record, and traditional use of the archival record has not been kind to borderlands women generally and Indigenous and Hispanic4 women specifically. Records have been most plentiful about the actions of public men doing public things. Records of statecraft, business, and religion are dominated by the presence of men, who since the time that history became a formal part of the academy have also been its principal writers. Men are also much more abundant in government and legal records, so when historians have looked at social and cultural themes, they have been conditioned to see men first. With the professionalization of history in the nineteenth century and men dominating the academy, historical research and writing became a principally male endeavor, and women and their actions and roles, already poorly represented in many types of records, fell by the wayside. This male-dominated landscape has undergone a substantial transformation in the last half-century, particularly with regard to more recent history, but the farther back in time one looks, the more difficult it becomes to center women in historical narratives.5 Spanish Texas is a particularly good example of how unkind the historical record can be to women’s history, although the situation extends throughout the borderlands. Few local records (where women would be most likely to be found) survive for the province’s first capital, Nuestra Señora de los Adaes, now a historical site in western Louisiana. As Francis [End Page 334] Galán points out, “The women of Los Adaes evidently did not leave behind any wills during the fort’s existence.”6 Likewise, there is almost a complete dearth of local records for La Bahía del Espíritu Santo, now Goliad, and for Nacogdoches. For those places the bulk of the surviving documentation addresses government and military matters and the activities of missionaries. Only San Antonio of the original Spanish Texas communities has a fairly extensive set of local sacramental, legal, and administrative records from which colonial-era gender issues can be identified and analyzed.7 As Donald Chipman and Harriett Denise Joseph note in their one chapter...