EARLY COLONIZATION

During the 1500s, Spaniard colonizers began scouting and mapping the lands of the Rio Grande on the South and North sides. The Spaniards entered the Rio Grande Delta on settlement ships, encountering many indigenous bands along the way. In 1519, Captain Alonso Alvarez landed in the Rio Grande, his ships landing in the Rio Grande delta and encountering several Coahuiltecan rancherias, who he described as friendly people and even bartered with them. Alvarez reported this back to the Jamaican governor, Garay, whom sent out additional ships with weapons, soldiers, and horses to colonize the land and tame the Coahuiltecan people. Upon the arrival of these ships, the men were tolerated by the Coahuiltecan people, but after some days they asked the men to leave, to which the men attacked the Coahuiltecans and attempted to burn their homes. The Coahuiltecans defended themselves and forced the ships out of the Rio Grande with their canoes and arrows. This laid the groundwork for how Coahuiltecans would treat incoming European colonizers.

In the late 1500s, Spaniards trotted into present-day Nuevo Leon with people, cattle, and a new system. The Indigenous people of the area, comprised of Chichimec and Coahuiltecan people, were attacked and driven off their lands, with some settling to the east and others being displaced to the Rio Grande Valley—the beginning of a mixing for survival. The encomienda system was put into place, resulting in the kidnapping of women and children, and enslavement of Indigenous people for labor on ranches on the South side of the Rio Grande. The Spaniards began advancing North into the Rio Grande Valley, looking to expand their settlements and missions.

Spaniard Alonso de Leon began permeating the Rio Grande delta in the 1600s, where many Coahuiltecan bands resided and who were hesitant and hostile to the Spaniards from previous colonization attempts by other nations. The indigenous people were seen on both sides of the Rio Grande, naturally moving between the North and South banks. To protect themselves from the Spaniards, they would shoot arrows and seek refuge in the thicket brushes of the Taumaulipan thornscrub. Alonso de Leon would capture two young boys and kill two Indigenous people along the Rio Grande.

In the 1700s, Jose Escandon would enact a large-scale settlement along the Rio Grande Valley, establishing Nuevo Santander. Colonizers flowed in and took over the lands of the Coahuiltecan people, displacing them further. Many of these settlements required labor for the ranches, to which many Indigenous people were used to provide the needed labor. The introduction of ranching further displaced Indigenous tribes along the Rio Grande, especially in the Rio Grande Valley as lands were snatched and repartidos among wealthy and powerful Spaniards. Mestizos from other areas of Nueva Espana were also brought and used to fight against the Coahuiltecan people, submitting them to labor or killing them. This was the beginning of a divide between our people and our natural environment, as they attempted to conquer the land and its resources.

It is important to note that our relatives fought against the colonization of the Spaniards despite many colonizers referring to our relatives as “docile and weak”. Throughout the 1700s, numerous bands of Indigenous people would work together to attack the Spaniards and protect their people, their lands, their animals, and their waters.

NUEVO SANTANDER: MISSIONS & SETTLEMENTS

The establishment of Catholic missions and Spanish settlements was one of the most impactful and effective methods of disrupting their ways of living, displacing, and colonizing the Coahuiltecan people of the Rio Grande Valley. In 1747, the Spanish King granted Jose de Escandon permission to establish the colony of Nuevo Santander, which included the lands of Seno Mexicano–present-day most of Tamaulipas. Escandon set out in 1748 to these sacred lands, which were already co-existing with at least 49 distinct bands of Indigenous people. Along the way, Escandon established several settlements and eventually made it to our great ancestor, the Rio Grande. 

Along the river, 7 settlements were established including Reynosa (1749), Camargo (1749), Dolores (1750), Revilla (1750), Mier (1752), Laredo (1755), and Refugio (1749-86). These towns were referred to as “Villas del Norte” and included 7 other towns. Settlements were places where Spaniards took the land from the Indigenous population, mostly through force, coercion, threats, or groundless promises, and established their Spaniard communities on these stolen lands. Escandon was notorious for using extremely violent tactics in his conquests and was known to have killed a large number of our Indigenous relatives. One of his famous titles was Jose de Escandon, alias “The Exterminator of the Pames of Queretaro”. Without a doubt, Escandon kidnapped, killed, and tortured many Chichimeca-Coahuiltecan people as he and his 750 soldiers colonized the lands of Tamaulipas and the waters of the Rio Grande. As these settlements were established, Escandon also established missions, which took on the role of “domesticating and civilizing” the Indians, often through force, coercion, and violence as well. 

Between 1747 and 1755, 15 missions were established within this region and served as places of labor and resources for many of the Indigenous people in the region. Missions played a crucial role in the assimilation, ethnic erasure/mixture, and colonization of the Chichimec-Coahuiltecan people. Many of the reports from Spaniards on Missions were the fact that many Indigenous groups “voluntarily” lived in Missions, and it is important to dissect and analyze the validity of this claim as well as its profound effects on our people that are still felt today. The reasons for entering the Missions varied from band to band. Some of these Indigenous groups were displaced, their resources taken from them, and their lands destroyed. Thus they found themselves in need of resources and entered the Missions because their lives and that of their community depended on it, this act invalidating the claim that it was all “voluntary”. For other groups and the following generations, there was a sense of comfortability and dependency that the Missions provided. In exchange for a stable and constant supply of water and food, protection from other Indigenous groups (during this time some Indigenous groups along the Rio Grande were fighting against Comanche people), a new religion, agricultural, ranching, and special trading skills, the Indigenous groups who came into the Missions were able to live more comfortably than through hunting and gathering. Hunting and gathering relied heavily on the nature of the environment, life, and death, and the risk of coming home with scarce resources was always a possibility, thus presenting their lives with the discomfort of the process and sometimes failure. The Missions provided them with a sense of security and stability that required less labor, which made the Indigenous people complacent and comfortable. However, the labor they performed at the Missions was still very rigorous and many died while laboring away.

This same complacency and comfortability is heavily reflected in our community, with the generation migrating from Mexico to the United States laboring for the sake of their future generations not having to labor to the extent that they did so that their lives will be more comfortable and less laborious. The ensuing generations are now seeking higher education and white-collared jobs in cities and looking down on labor-based jobs with the environment.

The Missions also provided the foundation of assimilation, to which they used humiliation, shame, violence, and force to beat the Indian out of the Coahuiltecan people. Missions had the sole purpose of transforming what they considered to be “barbarians” or sub-humans into their most “civilized” form, which is that which mimics European ways of living, thinking, eating, being. It is a form that no brown body (or any non-European) could ever transcend into (a constant reminder through the caste system and inhuman treatment of others). The methods for this often came in the form of cutting our sacred hair, putting tailored clothes onto our bodies, morphing the native tongue to make us utter a bastardized Spanish, prohibiting our sacred practices and ways of living, and humiliating and shaming us into a clouded loss of self and a gnawing hatred of ourselves. It was a place of cultural, spiritual, and physical genocide. In an attempt to purify us and permeate the Spanish into our blood, many Indigenous people in the Missions mixed with Spanish settlers, some out of survival and others by force. These Missions had Indigenous bands from Coahuila, Chihuahua, and the Rio Grande delta, which also resulted in a lot of mixing of Indigenous people with other Indigenous groups (many displaced). The mixing of one Indigenous culture into another also resulted in the loss of cultural identity for smaller bands of Indigenous groups as they adopted new names and customs. These Missions were grounds of mixing for many Indigenous people, with their new level in society being labeled as mestizo or Mexican, terms which reflected the assimilation that occurred in these places. These terms and practices are still seen today, with an ingrained sense of self that is rooted in colonialism and the division of our self from our ancestors.

SETTLERS OF NUEVO SANTANDER

Many of the 2,500 settlers who followed Escandon into the Seno Mexicano were mixed people who had also been colonized by the Spaniards. They were a mixture of Spanish half-castes and other Indigenous groups from central and southern Mexico who had been “civilized.” Some of those included were the Tlaxcala and Coahuila natives. The incentives for settling into these unknown lands were free land, and subsidies to settle down and form ranches. They would also not be required to pay taxes for the first 10 years and had all expenses for the journey paid. These incentives, especially the incentive of free land, were enticing to working-class families who had been laboring away for large landowners and had been required to pay high rents on small plots of land they worked. They had a need to gain more resources, a possibility of gaining more power and self-sufficiency, and were under exploitative conditions that they could turn a blind eye to the injustices committed upon their Coahuiltecan relatives. Although their own people had undergone the same injustices, the disconnect the colonizer’s system puts in one's heart makes it easy to put one’s injustices and one’s self first, something that is deeply reflected in our society, with many choosing ignorance to sustain their reality of comfort and illusion. The settlers also brought herds of horses, cattle, sheep, and burros, which would greatly shape the economic future and foundation of these new lands and also inject the poison of destruction to our beloved Taumaulipan thornscrub and all those who depend on it.