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JOSE ANTONIO NAVARRO: The Problem of Tejano Powerlessness
- Texas A&M University Press
- Chapter
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147 J o s é A n t o n i o N ava r r o was one of the most important and most celebrated Tejanos of the nineteenth century. His list of political offices and appointments is long and impressive. He was the first alcalde of San Antonio de Béxar elected after Mexico declared its independence in 1821.1 Later in that decade he served as a Texan representative in the legislature of the combined state of Coahuila y Texas, and in the early 1830s he was appointed by that state’s government to be the land commissioner for the Anglo-American colony of Stephen F. Austin’s fellow empresario, Green Dewitt.2 In 1835, Navarro was chosen by the federalist legislators of Coahuila y Texas to represent the state as a senator in the national Mexican congress—an honor he pointedly declined to accept.3 Within a few months he was instead a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence of 1836, and in 1845 he became one of the handful of men and the only native Texan to frame both the constitution of the Texas Republic and that of the new State of Texas. He represented Bexar County in the Congress of the Republic of Texas and after American annexation in the Texas State Legislature—where he was honored by his peers with the naming of Navarro County in 1846.4 His less formal accomplishments are no less significant, but they also hint at some of the controversy surrounding Navarro’s career. He was one of the closest friends and confidants of Stephen F. Austin throughout Austin’s life in Texas, and he was a key player in passing legislation (including the protection of slavery) that guaranteed the growth of Anglo settlement in Texas.5 His most memorable service to the Texas Republic was as a reluctant representative of President Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar in the ill-conceived Texan expedition to Santa Fe in 1841—a role that brought Navarro immense suffering in the dungeons of Mexico. Yet Navarro’s perceived faithfulness to Texas during his long imprisonment—especially when contrasted at the time to the alleged treason and apostasy of his fellow Tejano Juan Seguín—gave to Navarro a moral grandeur in Texas that lasted until the end of a political career that spanned a half-century.6 Navarro used that exalted position to advocate the rights (and to urge the responsibilities) of his fellow Tejanos in the years after his JOSÉ ANTONIO NAVARRO the problem of tejano powerlessness James E. Crisp 1 4 8 · j a m e s e . c r i s p escape from Mexican custody in 1845. During the 1850s, at the height of his fame and influence, Navarro became the first Tejano, and the first native-born, historian of Texas. His historical writings were no mere academic exercise. As he looked back across four long decades to trace the earliest struggles of the Tejanos for liberty in the doomed revolts of 1811 and 1813 against Spain, Navarro was simultaneously urging Tejanos to fight again for their liberties, but this time under the new flag of the United States of America.7 In his political and historical writings of the 1850s, Navarro gave a great deal of thought to the problem of powerlessness—a condition faced repeatedly by both him and his Tejano compatriots at many times and in many forms, individually and collectively. There is a Navarro family tradition that José Antonio maintained a symbolic representation of powerlessness as a part of his most personal emblem : his cattle brand. The small “o” ring at the top of the “N” in the conjoined letters “JAN” that constituted his brand was said by a descendant in 1936 to represent “the huge ring in the prison floor to which he was chained for three and one-half years in Mexico on the orders of Santa Anna.”8 Though the story is probably apocryphal, there is no doubt that concerns about the problem of powerlessness, his own and his people ’s, were seldom far from Navarro’s mind throughout his life. His first experience with abject powerlessness came suddenly and with a vengeance in his eighteenth year, when in 1813 his community of San Antonio de Béxar suffered severe retribution for its citizens’ complicity in a bid to win independence from Spanish rule. Navarro’s life in San Antonio had begun calmly enough in 1795, as one of...