San Antonio Missions
Four frontier outposts show the Spanish influence in Texas
The cultural story of the states along the southwestern border of the United States is worthy of special consideration. There’s a big difference between the well-known 19th-century narrative of European/American emigrants from the East Coast displacing the surviving Native American populations in a westward movement and the 18th-century story of northward expansion by Spain through a strategy of conversion and encul-turation.
In the late 1600s Spain began sending out Franciscan missionaries to establish mission-based communities and presidios in Texas and populating them largely with the Native peoples who already lived there. In the 21st century, perhaps one of the best places to experience this story is the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, which consists of a trail of four missions along the San Antonio River. The property surrounding the missions is managed by the National Park Service, while the missions themselves are owned and operated by the Catholic Church and continue in service to Catholic parishes. This is a much different model from the northernmost San Antonio River mission, the Alamo (San Antonio de Valero), which is owned and managed by the State of Texas as a shrine to the Texas Revolution. Visiting the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park is much more than touring a series of quaint old buildings filled with religious icons. A good place to begin a visit is at the Mission San José Visitor Center. Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo was founded by Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús in 1720.
HOLY RELIC Established in 1690 near present-day Augusta, Mission San Francisco del Los Tejas was moved to San Antonio in 1931 and renamed San Francisco de la Espada.
The introductory movie at the Visitor Center tells the story of Tejano culture, that hybrid of Spanish and Native American culture for which Texas is best known. From these roots Texas ranches, farms, Mexican cuisine and the other components of Hispanic cultural heritage emanate. The Coahuiltecan people who lived in Texas for thousands of years before the Spanish arrived were actually many small clusters of diverse peoples. The movie explores the factors that motivated them to give up their traditional nomadic, subsistence lifestyle from their point of view. The missions offered them a new lifestyle based on raising farm crops, herding domesticated livestock, taking up European trades and, more important, providing relative safety from raids of horse-mounted Lipan Apaches — all with an overlay of a new religion.
Today, the missions are surrounded by neighborhoods that might seem to intrude on the historical nature of the park. But it’s the other way around. Those neighborhoods grew out of the missions as Native people were acculturated through an ambitious and ultimately effective process designed to grow the Spanish empire.
The descendants of those same people who were recruited by the missionaries and adapted to the Catholic religion live in these neighborhoods and continue to attend the churches built by their ancestors.
Visitors can take a variety of guided tours that include the National Historical Park; drive the Mission Trail from downtown San Antonio; walk along the San Antonio Riverwalk from downtown; or follow a bike route along city streets (20.1 miles out and back).
