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!