Indigenous Sovereignty in the San Antonio Missions, 1750–1823

“Indigenous Agency in the San Antonio Missions, 1750-1821” explores the ways in which Indigenous people strategically navigated the Spanish colonial order in eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century San Antonio, Texas. By critically unpacking Spanish colonial-era records of the San Antonio missions, including birth, marriage, baptismal, and census records of its Indigenous residents, this paper shows how Indigenous people used the missions not only to ensure their own survival in the face of drastic population decline and massive displacement, but, in some cases, towards upward social mobility. Following the Diaz family across several San Antonio missions for decades, this paper argues that Indigenous people in the San Antonio missions, particularly the Indigenous civil and military leaders of the missions, created new mission-centered identities, consolidated power through strategic marriage alliances, and took advantage of the relaxed casta (racialized caste system) laws in the northern borderlands of New Spain as they negotiated incorporation into the Spanish polity on their own terms. Further, this paper highlights that although Indigenous mission residents were literally written out of the historical record in the late Spanish colonial era as they became gente de razón (people of reason), erasing their identity as Indigenous people would prove to be far more difficult.