Misión San Francisco de los Tejas

Texas highway 21 follows the route of the old San Antonio Road, also called El Camino Real de los Tejas. This road connected places like Natchitoches, Nacogdoches, and San Antonio with the road systems in Mexico.  If you follow it west from Nacogdoches, there are a number sites of interest along the way, including the Caddo Mounds near Alto, and Mission Tejas State Park, near Weches.

The justification for this park is the supposition that the first Spanish mission in East Texas, San Francisco de los Tejas, was located in this general area. 

It is not surprising that the precise location is unknown, since the mission was little more than a few log structures. We don't know exactly what any of these structures would have looked like, but there is a small log chapel there to help us imagine:

As you can see, the natural setting is rather stunning, especially in autumn. 

If the building is not really Spanish colonial, it's at least interesting. Notice the hatchet-style door handle:

The interior is charmingly rustic. 

As, you can see, there is space for worship services and other meetings. I imagine that it would be hard to fall asleep on those log benches! I'd like to someday convince some of my students to come out here and put on short plays from the Spanish Golden Age for campers. Since the original mission was established during the seventeenth century, I think it would be appropriate to give people a little taste of the entertainment of the period.

The builders of this replica obviously had some fun with it. Notice the image of a dove that appears in the masonry of the mantel:

No park in Texas is complete without a "lone star." This one is on the floor at the entrance to the log chapel:

There is at least one authentic Spanish construction in the park: a stretch of the original Camino Real that you can walk on.

For those who would rather fish, there is a little pond full of bream:

Finally, there is also a bit of authentic nineteenth-century Anglo-Texas history in this park. 

This is the Rice family home. Apparently they were involved in logging. The home was moved here at some point from its original location.

Even if the original site of San Francisco de los Tejas is unknown, Mission Tejas State Park is a fantastic place to imagine what it would have been like for the Spanish friars to try to establish a mission in an endless forest. I can't think of a better reason to visit a park. 

Los Ojos de Padre Margil

It has been quite a busy month since I last had time to post something! I presented a conference paper on Sor Juana at SFA's Latin American Studies conference, then another on Cervantes at the South Central MLA convention in Fort Worth. Not to mention all of the grading. My reward for enduring so many twelve-hour workdays was to make return trips to some of the interesting sites nearby. Today I'll write about Los Ojos de Padre Margil here in Nacogdoches, and next time I'll share some pictures of Mission Tejas State Park.

Padre Margil was quite a dynamic figure who founded several missions in Texas, including Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Nacogdoches in 1716. Apparently, there was a drought going on that dried up the two creeks that frame Nacogdoches, Banita and La Nana. The story goes that Padre Margil, Moses-like, struck the bank of La Nana creek with a staff twice and water started to flow from those two spots. These new springs came to be known as Los Ojos de Padre Margil (The Eyes of Father Margil).

I of course wanted to go visit the site of this miracle that saved the first European settlement in the place where I now live. This proved a little trickier than I had anticipated. I found the registry of historical markers online, which indicated that it was located at the bridge over La Nana creek on Park Street. The marker was indeed there, next to an old African American cemetery. Down on the creek, however, I couldn't see anything that appeared to be a spring. I assumed that much had changed in the last 300 years and left it at that.

Months later I decided to take the kids to El Camino Real park on Main Street, where Liberty Hall is located.

I discovered that, behind that park, there is another park called Margil Park.

This was a surprise, since we were several blocks from the historical marker at Park St. Then I found another historical marker.

This location proved to be a lot more convincing. It's not actually on the creek, but it is easy to see that it once ran through there. There is a small pond fed by two springs on a small bluff next to it.

The city has built a pleasant walkway that goes over the springs.

Unfortunately, this walkway partially obscures the springs themselves!

Here are some views of the springs from the other side of the pond:

As I've mentioned before, I am not a trained archaeologist or historian, so I really don't if the real site of the Ojos is at Margil park or on Park St.  Please comment if you know more about it. But I do know that Margil park is one of the loveliest places to visit in Nacogdoches.

San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 2009

I choose to begin with an entry on San Juan for two reasons. First, there are some spectacular examples of Spanish colonial architecture there that are well maintained by the National Park Service. Second, these were the first pictures I came to when I started looking through old albums.

I was in San Juan last fall for the annual convention of the American Society for Theatre Research. I was part of a working group to promote the study and performance of Spanish Golden Age plays. The convention was held in an extremely expensive hotel on the beach, so I stayed at the Comfort Inn down the road. It was still easy walking distance to the beach, and this is one my first views:

It's a little hard to see, but that is the Fortín de San Gerónimo del Boquerón jutting out beneath the Hilton. I naturally needed a closer look, so I dragged my roommate along for a walk.

Unfortunately the fort was closed that day. I managed to get my camera through the bars and snap a few pictures, but it was already getting dark. Here is a close-up from the side:

I was of course sorely disappointed that I wasn't able to go in and explore the fort, but my tour of Old San Juan a few days later more than made up for it. Our session at the convention was on Friday afternoon, so I was free to spend all of Saturday exploring. There is a city bus that runs regularly from Condado to Old San Juan, so my roommate and I jumped on it first thing that morning. It was easy to know when to get off; all we had to do was follow the rest of the tourists. From the bus stop it is a short walk to the entrance of Old San Juan, which is abundantly marked.

I had the the not-so-bright idea of walking down the path that runs around the base of Fort San Felipe del Morro. It's not that it wasn't a pleasant place to walk, it's just that it wasn't a pleasant place to walk at 10:00-11:00 in the morning. That's when the Caribbean sun beats down upon it mercilessly. What's more, the path comes to a dead end, so you have to do it all again in reverse. It was not the best day to forget water.

As you can see, though, the views were pretty spectacular, as long as you don't mind all the cats.

The most frustrating thing about starting the day on the pathway was that there was no way to get into the fort itself to explore.

We did eventually make it back to the entrance to Old San Juan, located at the beginning of the pathway. It is a charming and touristy area, but I preferred to head straight to the fort entrance. I was not disappointed. It was the kind of place that made me feel like a ten-year-old boy again. After all, there were cannons.

El Morro is full of stairs. The views are fantastic in every direction, although it is a little crowded. There is an air conditioned theater that shows a 15-minute documentary on the fort's history. It sort of glosses over the part about the American conquest of the island during the Spanish American War, but was otherwise informative. One of the most exciting parts of El Morro is that it gives such a sense of every-day life for the soldiers stationed there throughout its long colonial history. It's a little hard to see, but there are laundry basins inside of the tunnels pictured below.

Near El Morro can be found the San José Church, which dates back to the sixteenth century. I guess we sort of stumbled upon it by accident, because it is not particularly imposing from the outside.

Exploring the inside of this church was both exciting and heart-wrenching at the same time. There are marvelous works of art from the Renaissance and Baroque, such as this sculpture from 14th-century Aragón.

But, on the other hand, the church is in the middle of undergoing a restoration process that seems to be moving at a snail's pace.

All of the scaffolding and lack of lighting makes the church a little unattractive for now. I hope to go back when it is finished. Perhaps there would be more impetus to complete the work if Ponce de León were still buried here, but apparently his remains have been moved, leaving only this monument:

El Morro is actually just one part in a system of San Juan's colonial defenses. On the other side of Old San Juan is Fort San Cristóbal. While El Morro protected the entrance to the harbor from pirate ships, San Cristóbal protected El Morro from land attacks. The Park Service leads a fascinating tour in which they explain the never-penetrated Spanish defense systems. Here is what land invaders would have seen (if they had somehow gotten past Fort San Gerónimo back at Condado and the fan of cannons immediately behind the camera).

As you can see, any poor fool running across this open plain would have been an easy target for the fort's defenders. Even if they did manage to get across, the only entrance from this side would have been through underground tunnels, which were pre-rigged with explosives so that the defenders could collapse individual sections.

The Spaniards were not the only ones who used San Cristóbal for defense. Here is a picture of a lookout tower built onto the original fortifications by the U.S. Army during World War II.

The inside of San Cristóbal has lots of museum exhibits showing typical uniforms and weapons used by soldiers from various time periods:

I suppose another reason to start my blog with an entry on Puerto Rico is that it was very much the gateway to all of the other Spanish colonies. Charles V considered it the key to the New World's treasure chest. I consider its historic sites to be the true treasure.

Introduction

This morning I felt a burning desire to leave the house. It's not that I don't like being at home on a Saturday morning, but September has brought a Texas "cold front" bringing the temperature down to a bearable 83 degrees. Yet somehow my wife's suggestion that we go to the park didn't strike me as what I was looking for.

I spend my weekdays teaching classes on Spanish language and literature. I also try to squeeze in time to research and write about my specialization, Hispanic theater of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I love my job. I guess I'm a little quixotic, but probably what draws me to read archaic texts in another language is my sense of adventure. I don't entirely approve of Spain's imperial exploitation of the Americas, but I envy the explorers and conquerors who got to see these lands before they were marred by asphalt and shopping centers. I don't agree with the neo-medieval thinking that permeated Counter-Reformation society, but I'm enamored with the wit and adornment of Baroque poetry.

But sometimes, valuable as it is, reading just doesn't cut it. Sometimes I want to walk in the places where conquistadors walked. I want to see and touch the solid walls and sinuous columns of Baroque churches. Sometimes I need a concrete connection with the people who wrote such enthralling literary works.

That's the real desire that I felt this morning, and have felt on many previous Saturday mornings. I have the good fortune to live in Texas's self-proclaimed "Oldest Town," Nacogdoches. It's located on the old Camino Real that connected the colonial power center in Mexico with the various missions established in East Texas as a buffer against French encroachment. A replica of these, Misión San Francisco de los Tejas, is located 40 minutes west of here. The site of another, Misión Nuestra Señora de los Ais, is located 30 minutes east of here. We visited both last spring. I was itching to go see the site of another one that I read about, called San José de los Nazonis. The best information that I could find about it was that it was located near present-day Cushing. One website said that there is a historical marker with information about it about 2 miles north of Cushing, so I loaded up the wife and kids and made the half-hour drive to that little town in the pines. Fortunately, there is only one major road leading north from Cushing. Unfortunately, we found no historical marker for San José de los Nazonis.

I guess it's a little inauspicious to begin a blog by recounting a failure. I can't say that it has discouraged me in the slightest, however. Over the next few weeks, I plan to post pictures and descriptions from previous trips to the nearby missions mentioned above. I also have numerous photographs from trips that I have made to Guatemala and Puerto Rico. If I can get a scanner, I will be able to share some pictures from Córdoba, Argentina. Mostly, though, I'm looking forward to sharing the adventures that I will yet have. We're planning a trip to San Antonio sometimes this winter, and another to Matagorda Bay and Goliad in the spring. I hope to visit some areas around El Paso the next time I am there for an academic conference. Please feel free to recommend other Spanish colonial sites for me to see!