University Star

I recently had the chance to visit the “Tejanos in Texas” exhibit. As a hobby student of Texas history, I found the story of scout, preacher and gunslinger Jose Policarpio Rodriguez fascinating in the way it dispelled some of our national origin myths.

Rodriguez was born in 1829 Coahuila y Tejas, a constituent state in the new country of Mexico. Rodriguez headed into Texas and settled with his family in San Antonio in 1840 as the Alamo was still in ruins. He worked as a simple hunter, tracking animals for local markets and later made a name for himself as a scout and guide for federal troops surveying yet-to-be Western roads. Much of this scouting was in a setting of tit-for-tat warfare with Indian tribes as the exhibition illustrated.

I was struck by how strange then-Texas seems from the present. Only 5,000 people lived in San Antonio in 1840, and that was considered a big city. The sheer remoteness of the region, much of it relatively unknown, the violence and rough attitude of its inhabitants made it seem like a different country.

And it’s often the case that many in the Anglo population, of which I come from, seem ignorant Tejanos even exist. I remember staring in shock at the Dawn of the Alamo in the chamber of the Texas House of Representatives, with the image of William Barret Travis standing superhuman-tall as a squat and grimacing Mexican prepares to plunge a bayonet into his back. I pointed this out to my guide, who stopped romanticizing Texas history briefly enough for a hushed “ethnocentrism” to cross his lips. There were no images of the Tejanos who fought and died there.

So the brutality of the image defines the overall picture. It’s all we could notice even while concurring that, perhaps, resisting Gen. Santa Anna with our brothers and sisters in Texas and Coahuila was still the right thing to do.

Rodriguez converted to Methodism in 1877 and became a preacher. He was admitted to the Methodist Episcopal Church in San Marcos that year. Leaving the Catholic faith for a Protestant strain from the British Isles shocked his family and distanced him from the wider Tejano community. Affiliating himself with the Confederacy shocked scholars. Rodriguez declined a commission when the American Civil War began, though he did serve briefly under Robert E. Lee, and instead joined with the virulently prejudiced Rangers, another head-scratcher for historians.

A good friend characterized to me the Texan identity is essentially Latin American. The history is distinct from the Eastern United States, from the mapping of the state by Cabeza de Vaca to the insurgency against the Spanish crown by Fr. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in 1811, to the predominant use of Spanish as a social and business language in much of the state. Through Rodriguez, we see the blending of that world with the Protestant and with the Southern — what gives Texas its unique identity.

If there was one thing that would have improved the exhibit, it would be exploring the reasons why Rodriguez joined the Rangers and why he converted to Methodism. I think that would go toward exploring these unknowns and difficult questions. His life is presented as a matter of facts, which is fine, and space is limited, but I left unsatisfied. Nonetheless I’d recommend visiting while there is still time. The exhibit runs until Oct. 15 at the LBJ Museum of San Marcos.

—Robert Beckhusen is a mass communication sophomore