La Teja Research Articles

A Spanish Borderlands Community: San Antonio

Journal Article A Spanish Borderlands Community: San Antonio Get access Jesús F. de la Teja Jesús F. de la Teja Jesús F. de la Teja is an associate professor of history at Southwest Texas State University. He is the author of a number of studies on Spanish colonial and Mexican Texas, including San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain's Northern Frontier (1995). He is also the book review editor for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and managing editor for Catholic Southwest: A Journal of History and Culture. His current projects include a socioeconomic history of the annual Saltillo trade fair and a popular history of Texas during the age of Mexican independence. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar OAH Magazine of History, Volume 14, Issue 4, Summer 2000, Pages 25–28, https://doi.org/10.1093/maghis/14.4.25 Published: 01 June 2000

New Views of Borderlands History

These seven original essays offer the first ethnohistorical interpretation of Spanish-Indian interaction from Florida to California. The indigenous peoples in the borderlands were hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists whose lives differed substantially from the lives of Indians in large-scale hierarchical societies of central Mexico. As a result, Spain's entry and expansion varied throughout the borderlands. How did indigenous peoples fare under Spanish rule from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries? The contributors to this book discuss the social, demographic, and economic impacts of Spanish colonization on Indians. Relations among settlers, soldiers, priests, and indigenous peoples throughout the borderlands are examined, bringing immediacy and human interest to the interpretation. Contributors are Susan M. Deeds, Jesus F. de la Teja, Ross Frank, Robert H. Jackson, Peter Stern, and Patricia Wickman. Their essays offer a new and engaging synthesis that will reinvigorate teaching and research in borderlands history.

Other Countries, Other Maps

Of all the images available to represent the historian's task, one of the most attractive is the picture of a traveler mapping a complex landscape. The country of the past is filled with terrain features. Historians as travelers and cartographers make sense by selecting and interpreting certain landforms and their relationships one to the other. And like any exploring party, it is the planning and expectations before the journey that will make some hills and valleys bulk larger and mean more than others. Not many years ago scholars who mapped the terrain of the early Republic had what seemed a straightforward task. The country they surveyed appeared bounded by the Atlantic and the Mississippi, Canada and the Caribbean. Country meant nation; the boundaries were at once political and geographic. The most important reference points were urban centers like Boston, New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Charleston. Maps-whether on the page or by way of classroom lectures-offered a cartographic and narrative angle of vision that located every place in relation to Washington or perhaps Monticello. That view from the Federal City put Santa Fe in a remote region called the Southwest while St. Augustine was situated on the edge of the Southeast. This perspective dictated not only where scholars looked to map but also what was mapped. The most important terrain features were public, political, male, and white. Congressional speeches, corporate charters, and the acts of state legislatures-these seemed the most natural and therefore the most mappable aspects of the landscape. These mental maps both reflected and advanced the definition of a period in North American history synonymous with the founding and expansion of one particular nation. Like explorers, scholars go in search of the expected, the already defined. And perhaps more important, both kinds of travelers find what they expect. In too many ways charting the early Republic means unrolling a map of the political United States. The three essays that precede this brief note represent another way to imagine the period and its varied landscapes. What Frank de la Teja, Charles Cutter, and Jane Landers offer are pieces of a larger map, pieces that by themselves reveal the presence of a wider and more complex country. And if there is more

Jesús F. de la Teja. <italic>San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain's Northern Frontier</italic>. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1995. Pp. xv, 224. $37.50

Jesús F. de la Teja. San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain's Northern Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1995. Pp. xv, 224. $37.50 Get access Teja Jesús F. de la. San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain's Northern Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1995. Pp. xv, 224. $37.50. Donald E. Chipman Donald E. Chipman University of North Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 101, Issue 5, December 1996, Page 1610, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/101.5.1610 Published: 01 December 1996

Spanish Texas, 1519-1821

Journal Article Spanish Texas, 1519–1821 Get access Spanish Texas, 1519–1821. By Chipman Donald E.. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. xiii + 343 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $30.00, cloth; $14.95, paper.) Jesús F. de la Teja Jesús F. de la Teja Southwest Texas State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 24, Issue 4, November 1993, Pages 561–562, https://doi.org/10.2307/970718 Published: 01 November 1993

Tejano Origins in Eighteenth-Century San Antonio

Acknowledgments Introduction I. Bexar: Profile of a Tejano Community, 1820-1832, by Jesus F. de la Teja and John Wheat II. Forgotten Founders: The Military Settlers of Eighteenth-Century San Antonio de Bexar, by Jesus F. de la Teja III. The Canary Islands Immigrants of San Antonio: From Ethnic Exclusivity to Community in Eighteenth-Century Bexar, by Gerald E. Poyo IV. The Religious-Indian Communities: The Goals of the Friars, by Gilberto M. Hinojosa V. Immigrants and Integration in Late Eighteenth-Century Bexar, by Gerald E. Poyo VI. Indians and Their Culture in San Fernando de Bexar, by Gilberto M. Hinojosa and Anne A. Fox VII. Independent Indians and the San Antonio Community, by Elizabeth A.H. John Conclusion: The Emergence of a Tejano Community Notes Selective Bibliography on Spanish Texas, 1685-1821 Index