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Nepantla: Views from South 1.1 (2000) 197-228



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Interview

Interview with Américo Paredes *

Héctor Calderón and José Rósbel López-Morín


In 1579, Luis de Carvajal, a Portuguese of Sephardic background and former corregidor of Tampico from 1575 to 1577, left his home for Spain to receive a capitulación from Philip II enabling him to return to New Spain with friends and relatives to form a new gobierno, el Nuevo Reino de León, of which he was to be governor and captain general. In 1580 Carvajal returned to New Spain with a new set of colonists. Américo Paredes’s ancestors arrived in Tampico in 1580 with Carvajal.

To check the westward advance of French colonists into Texas from Louisiana, the province of Nuevo Santander, or la Colonia del Seno Mexicano, was established in 1748. It extended from the Pánuco River near Tampico in the south to the Nueces River in what is now Corpus Christi, Texas, in the north, with the Sierra Madre Oriental, or Sierra Gorda, on the west and the Gulf of Mexico on the east as natural boundaries. The province was supplied generously with water from five river systems of which the Río Bravo, or Río del Norte, was the largest in volume and the longest, providing water for Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the north before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico in the present cities of Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Tamaulipas. This waterway had been explored as early as 1519 and named Río de las Palmas by Alfonso Alvarez de Piñeda. However, in the eighteenth century the Sierra Gorda and the Huasteca, inhabited by descendants of the Olmecs, were still little known. Don José de Escandón, born in Laredo, Spain, but who had lived in New Spain since the age of fifteen, was chosen as the leader of the Nuevo Santander expedition. He set out from Querétaro in January 1747, reaching the south bank of the Río Bravo near its mouth in February. This was the first Spanish incursion into the practically unknown region of el Seno Mexicano. [End Page 197]

On 1 December 1748, Escandón and a group of settlers set out from Querétaro to begin the new province of Nuevo Santander. Américo Paredes’s ancestors arrived with Escandón on the south bank of the Río Bravo in 1749. That year Camargo and Reynosa were established, followed by Mier in 1752. Laredo, the first nonmissionary, nonmilitary Spanish settlement in North America, was established on the north bank in 1755. Settlers who accompanied Escandón were mostly from northern Mexico—from Coahuila, Guanajuato, Querétaro, Nuevo León, San Luis Potosí, and the Huastecas. A diverse group of farmhands, shepherds, and laborers composed of different castes—españoles, criollos, mestizos, indios, pardos—came lured by the promise of land. Escandón established the empresario system, creating settlements that were tax exempt and incurred few expenses against the royal treasury. Escandón offered land grants to individual colonists rather than creating settlements entirely around the failing mission and presidio system. By 1755, the native tribal populations had been conquered and pacified. The original twenty settlements of el Seno Mexicano developed both economically and culturally. In his 1760 informe to the viceroy of New Spain, Escandón wrote of ceremonial events—staged skirmishes between Christians and Moors—and dramatic presentations—comedias, loas, entremeses—in celebration of the coronation of Charles III.

In succeeding generations, Native Americans, African Americans and non-Spanish Europeans were absorbed into the already Mexican mestizo population. With more settlements north of the Río Bravo through the late eighteenth century, this area of Nuevo Santander became the cradle of cattle ranching in North America, the ranching culture that produced the Texas Mexican vaquero and later the American cowboy. As Américo Paredes has stated, the only Anglo-Texan contributions to ranching culture were the revolver, barbed wire, and lawyers. The name Nuevo Santander held through Mexican independence but...

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