show the Lipan Apache’s will to fight, while the burnt edges symbolize the erasure of their history.
1724 Michele Monseau
The Coahuiltecan were the nomadic indigenous people living in San Antonio and surrounding areas in 1724. That year, a severe storm, possibly a hurricane, destroyed the original Alamo (Mission San Antonio de Valero) at San Pedro Springs, which was simply a series of huts that had been used by the Spanish missionaries to indoctrinate the Coahuiltecan into Christianity. That same year after the storm, construction began on the “new” Alamo at the location where it now sits, and where this process of indoctrination continued. This piece foregrounds the Coahuiltecan wickiup-the impermanent, portable dwellings they constructed out of brush and branches-in a black and white, somewhat removed image that is in the process of being airbrushed/disintegrated into the landscape. Behind the wickiup and bleeding through it is an image of the Alamo on its current site shortly after it was reduced to ruins. The layered structures sit high in a harsh landscape with gathering clouds-a coming storm. A page of text used in the missionaries’ enculturation/indoctrination process entitled “Fallacías del Demonio Que Destruyen lá Caridad (Fallacies of the Demon That Destroys Charity)” hovers over and intrudes on the landscape. The Coahuiltecan hunted javelina and wore coyote skins in winter, thus the appearance of these animals in the motif.
1725 Paul Soupiset
This piece employs the style of 17th century colonial primers-simple, childlike, didactic verses-paired with a visual process that attempts to step humbly into the tradition of papel picado. I explore/appropriate both the colonialist’s catechistic style as well as the indigenous Pueblo-Huixcolotlan cut-paper artform. I explore the top-down-versus-grassroots ambivalences therein that echo the tensions among Catholic missionaries vis-à-vis Spanish officers (and between the larger institutions each represented), and among the Lipan Apaches who had inhabited parts of Texas for hundreds of years prior.
Little is recorded about local life in 1725 Viceregal San Antonio. One inhabitant at Mission San Antonio de Valero in 1725, Father José González, argued with the captain of the Presidio of San Antonio de Bejár over the treatment of the Apaches. “…overcome by his desires of peace with the Apaches1”, González was recalled to Querétaro, but never made it; reports say he “perished on the road.2” Another inhabitant, Father Francisco Hidalgo “grieved to see the repeated slaughter which resulted from the war with the Apaches3” and sought permission to evangelize the Apaches. His request denied, he left San Antonio dejected only to die a year later, heartbroken.
1. Weddle, Robert S. San Juan Bautista; Gateway to Spanish Texas. University of Texas Press, 1968, 156-157.
2. Castañeda, Carlos Eduardo. The Mission Era …: by Carlos E. Castañeda, .. Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1936, 253.
3. Weddle, Robert S. The San Sabá Mission: Spanish Pivot in Texas. Texas A&M University Press College Station, 1999, 3.
1726 Cody Vance
Deep bas relief depicting the story of forced interaction between the indigenous tribes of the area, Spaniard explorers and the beginning construction of the Catholic mission settlements.
1727 Mira Hnatyshyn
The year 1727 represented a lull in fighting between Native Americans and Spanish colonialists as they began construction of a 2 ½-mile irrigation canal that would one day feed San Antonio. The King of Spain offered free land to subjects willing to live in this harsh new world and several hundred answered the call, including a contingent of Canary Islanders. Once here, they either converted or enslaved Native Americans from several tribes, but were disappointed with both the quality and effort of their labors. Death and starvation were common, and some Islanders literally went native, “marrying” into the tribes and gradually forging a new identity. So, the circle of life repeated itself, with the unspoken struggles of women forming the beginning of an enduring community, which de