Discovering the Tejano Community in "Early" Texas

Abstract

Most Anglo-American writers refer to the Texas of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s as early Texas, and in one sense they are right. The transformation of Texas into a member state of the American Union began in those years. Most of the country that the Anglo-American colonies and later the republic occupied was wilderness, as that term was defined by Euro-American concepts of wilderness and civilization. Unquestionably, however, there was an even earlier Texas-a Texas that existed within a Hispanic historical context and responded to Spanish-Mexican social, economic, political, and religious norms. Before that, there had been no Texas. To the Indian peoples who inhabited the coastal prairies, the piney woods, the high plains, and the mountains and basins of the extreme southern Rockies, there were very different economic and political geographies, most of which remain a mystery to us today. 1 Nevertheless,