She.

There's nowhere a Texan feels more like a Texan than on the Rio Grande.

Maybe a long way from the Alamo or.

But it's always felt to me like a birthplace of Texas identity.

In me.

Incidentally, this is where Santa Anna's army retreated to after his defeat at the so-called BS del Norte, a string of towns founded in the 1750s along the banks of the Rio Grande, including Laredo, Texas.

I thought I saw.

Gracias Por.

In theory, the remnants of the now captured Santa Anna's army would wait in the Rio Grande Mayas for orders to reinvent Texas, but those orders never came.

Instead, they spent most of their time taxing, requisitioning, and generally oppressing the residents of the Rio Grande to the point that by 1838, those Rio grandees two would rise up in revolt against the Mexican central government.

Mistreatment by their central government was nothing new for these Rio Grande frontiersmen, but this wasn't supposed to still be happening.

In 1838, after the hard fought war of independence from Spain a generation prior and the optimism surrounding the Constitution of 1824, the Rio Grande BSL Norte, as they were known, had had good reason to hope that things were headed in the right direction.

But as this new Mexican nation struggled to recover from decades of warfare and economic stagnation, the Mexican government increasingly fell back on the types of taxes and tariffs that hit Rio Grande frontiersmen particularly hard.

And so most interesting became.

Contraband.

Which is to say, free traders with the native peoples of the American plains and with international markets in New Orleans specifically complained in the 1813 Texas Declaration of Independence how under the Spanish system, all trade is labeled contraband.

They were decrying a system that made honest men into criminals, and now it seemed the same thing was happening in independent Mexico.

I. In fact, a lot of things about Mexican independence were proving to be deeply unsatisfying.

Recall Mexican independence was only truly won in 1821 when Mexican royalists, centralist as we should start to call them, came over to the side of independence and promptly embarked on a far more ambitious project to centralize power than the Spanish kings had ever imagined.

To begin with, the idea of unifying all of Spain's North American provinces into a single Mexican nation wasn't self-evident by any means.

Mexico wasn't just some kind of logical successor state to New Spain.

New Spain, remember, wasn't even technically a colony of Spain.

It was a kingdom in its own right, like Castile or Leonor Aragon that reported directly to the king and just one kingdom of many.

There was also Nueva Galicia, Nuevo Leon.

Not to mention the self-governing Captaincy General of Yucatan and 12 or so military and tendencies, including the so-called interior provinces of the northeast, made up of Tamaulipas, Nolan and Texas.

The idea that a dozen of these co-equal political subdivisions would submit themselves to the rule of one of the other subdivisions was not nearly so self-evident to the dozen other political subdivisions, as it apparently was to the old Royalists, now centralis in Mexico City.

Almost from the beginning, several provinces, like Waitemata in Central America, pulled out of the Mexican centralist project that they had never actually consented to in the first place, and others, like the Yucatan in the northeastern states of Tamaulipas, Nolan, and Texas were anything but quiet about their objections to being part of some other regions nation building project, particularly when those nation builders were the same folks who had most violently opposed the independence of that nation in the first place.

We have to be careful here, too, because there's always a natural bias toward believing that everything that happened in the past was, or should have been toward the greater goal of bringing about the present.

And in that framework, all of Mexican history should be interpreted through the lens of how effectively historical events helped bring about the current nation state of Mexico, which makes the centralist nation building project somehow seem natural, and the Federalists opposition to it seem obstructionist or even selfish.

But if you step back a little, I think it's a little perverse the way that 19th century nation builders used the language of sovereignty, self-determination and autonomy to remove sovereignty, self-determination and autonomy from local communities that had been very often ministering themselves quite effectively for decades or even centuries beforehand.

And in the case of Mexico, it wasn't even really consistent with the Spanish political tradition in the Hispanic tradition.

Quote.

Political power was based on the privileges of cities, pueblos, and the Spanish Empire itself was essentially a confederation of provinces or kingdoms.

And the proof of the prevalence of this view, not just among teens and Rio Grande, was the Constitution produced at a convention in 1823, presided over by this guy, future first Vice President of Texas.

Lorenzo de Falla.

The document.

That.

In the convention produced the Mexican Constitution of 1824 is really a remarkable one.

So much so that supposedly the Alamo defenders would die for a Mexican flag with 1824 in the center a dozen years later.

Most importantly, though, the document preserves significant autonomy and sovereignty to the individual states, and the states, in turn, would establish as the basis for territorial division and political organization.

End quote.

The municipality, which was the modern incarnation of the pueblo in the older Hispanic tradition.

On October 4th, 1824, the state and Pueblo friendly Federal Constitution of 1824 was enacted to much acclaim, at least in those parts of the country, not full of ex-royal and centralis in the Rio Grande bas in particular, and indeed the northern states generally prospered during the years following the Constitution of 1824, their government was finally working for them.

It created a dynamic and to some degree economically mobile society, as best exemplified by men like Antonio Zapata.

Born in 1797 to a cowhand and a domestic servant.

Antonio was like 20% or so of the residents of the Rio Grande villas, a. Mulatto.

Which is to say a person of mixed but predominantly African ancestry.

He may have also been part indigenous.

Throughout his life, he maintained a special and close relationship with the carrizo crudo nearby.

Only 13 years old when Father Hidalgo unleashed his grito.

Sabato was too young to ride off to San Antonio with the other Patriots in 1813, but the disastrous Battle of Medina created opportunity for the young Zapata.

The leading men from the Rio Grande.

Vias were not only in exile for most of the decade following the Battle of Medina.

Most of them were on prescription lists prohibiting them from engaging in any kind of trade.

Men like this guy.

Please tell me you remember this guy cozy?

Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara Gutierrez de Lara was at the center of the entire first video we did.

He was Father Miguel appointed emissary to the United States, where he he goes to Louisiana, raises the Republican Army of the North, invades, captures Nacogdoches, Goliad, San Antonio and declares Texas independent and forms its first government.

Of course, this all came crashing down at the Battle of Medina on August 18th, 1813, but Gutierrez de Lara wasn't at the Battle of Medina.

He'd been removed from command by his own ruling junta, after which he fled to Louisiana, where he spent most of the next decade in exile, waging a proxy war against Spanish rule through Tejanos Native American allies.

A decade later, he would be rewarded for his service with the first governorship of the new state of Tamaulipas, but in the meantime, he had to earn a living.

He couldn't openly conduct business under his name because he was persona non grata in Spanish Texas.

So he, like many other exiled veterans of the fight for Texas independence, used proxies and partners and one of Gutierrez de la as main proxies during his years of exile seems to have been Antonio Sparta.

By the 1830s, Gutierrez de Lara and were in several livestock partnerships, buying and selling cattle and sheep and horses.

Of course, in those days you didn't buy and sell cattle sitting at a desk, you had to drive it yourself to your end markets, typically in Louisiana.

But this is where Antonio, that truly distinguished himself.

He became a legend in his own time for his exploits on plains amongst his people, but also amongst his native rivals.

On one occasion, after being captured by a Comanche raiding party, a girl from the Rio Grande, Diaz told her captors that she was Antonio daughter.

The girl, however, was noticeably light skinned.

Even the Comanches knew that Zapata was dark skinned, so they challenged the girl on her claim, but she didn't back down, and the Comanches decided not to bet their lives on the matter.

They let her go.

We want nothing to do with Sabata, her captors told her.

Sombrero de Manteca.

They called him Old Greasy Hat.

Literally.

But really, the better rendering in English is probably old sweat of his brow.

On the ranch, when you see someone with a greasy sweat stain bleeding through their hat band, you say they have a coso, the mark of a hard worker.

During the second half of the 1820s, Sabata accumulated a fortune in livestock and land from that hard work.

By the 1830s, he had bought a house on the central plaza of his hometown of, later renamed Guerrero, and was elected a reader or city councilman.

All of which is to say that the Federalist Constitution of 1824 seemed to be working well for men like Antonio Santa in the citizens of the Rio Grande Vias.

Yet it wasn't going so well for the rest of Mexico, and the Mexican presidential election of 1828 gave everyone a chance to express their dissatisfaction, to the horror of federalists.

The centralist candidate won the 1828 election, and Federalists responded poorly.

They mobilized a mob and forcibly overturned the results.

Just a year later, in 1829, the Federalist president was now overthrown and executed, and the centralist once again assumed control.

But a terrible precedent had been set.

Now that centralist had returned to power, they felt justified in all manner of retribution against their federalist rivals.

And yet the Mexican electorate once again pushed back, and in 1833 voted the centralist out of power in favor of a new Federalist administration led by this guy.

That's right.

Santa Anna came to power in 1833 as a vocal Federalist.

We Texas history buffs all know or think we know Santa Ana as a centralist.

But first and foremost, Santa Ana was whatever he thought.

The moment required in 1833 called for a Federalist.

After seven total presidential changes over the previous five years, however, it was unclear that that consensus would hold, and so after winning the election of 1833, Santa Ana retreated offstage and left the actual governing to his vice president.

Public sentiment swung again back against the Federalists, and Santa Ana sentiment duly followed.

In 1834, he publicly denounced his vice president, dissolved the Federalist Congress, and called for new elections, which the centralist handily one.

And you can guess how gracefully centralis handled their return to power.

One of their first acts was to disarm the local state militias, which they viewed as bastions of caudillo power and federalist sympathy.

Then they suspended the Constitution of 1824 outright, dissolved the state legislatures, converted the sovereign states into federal departments, and replaced elected caudillo governors with appointed lackeys.

It set off an uproar.

From Texas to Puebla to San Luis Potosi, to the Yucatan, Queretaro, Michoacan and of course in Texas, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas.

Federalists across Mexico revolted.

Santa Ana took the field to put them down after violently quashing the Federalist revolt in Santa Ana.

Turned his focus on the discontent brewing in nearby Quilla, which was of course, joined to Texas at the time as the state of Texas.

Santa Ana sent General Martin Perfecto de cos to arbitrate the schism that had broken out between the centralist state legislature in South and the Federalist state legislature in Monclova.

And you can guess which side General Cross came down on.

General cross issued arrest orders for the most prominent Federalist Tejanos, including the Federalist governor, the former president of the Federalist Constitutional Convention of 1824, Lorenzo de Zavala, who had fled to his land grant in Texas.

A dashing young Tirano named once again a brash debt dodger named William Barret Travis, and a loud mouthed little transplant to the Rio Grande villas named Jose Maria Carbajal.

Jose Maria Carbajal was born in 1809, in San Antonio.

His father had fought in the Battle of Medina and then died later in exile, and it seems that little four year old Carbajal and his mother were among those imprisoned in La Quinta with the other wives and daughters of the defeated rebels in San Antonio in 1813.

If you remember the atrocities of La Quinta from our first video, you'll understand why Carvajal later became so radically anti royalist and anti.

And so his federalist Mexico broke into open revolt in late 1835.

Carvajal rounded up as many cattle as he could, drove them to New Orleans, sold them for $35,000, and used the proceeds to buy arms for the coming Texas Federalist fight.

But when a Mexican government schooner ambushed him as he was starting to unload in Lavaca Bay, Carbajal lost everything for which he would never be reimbursed, by the way.

And he was captured as well and carted off to prison in Matamoros.

He managed to escape, however, and was soon after elected to the Texas Independence Convention at Washington on the Brazos.

But he didn't go by that February of 1836.

Carbajal had begun to sense that there was something fundamentally different between what the hands and Anglos were fighting for.

Which isn't to say that Jose Maria Carbajal was anti Angelo.

On the contrary, Carbajal was maybe the most anglicized Diano in the state as a youth.

The childless Stephen F Austin had more or less adopted the fatherless Carbajal at the age of 15.

Austin sent Carbajal to Kentucky for schooling and then Virginia for seminary.

During these years in the United States, Carbajal acquired a native fluency of English, a radical Protestantism that would become a political liability for the rest of his life in Catholic Mexico, and an intense admiration for Anglo-American political ideals.

And yet, for all that, he admired the Anglo-American system.

It wasn't what he wanted for himself or his people.

Carvajal was still attached to the 1813 the dream, and so too were the rest of the residents of the Rio Grande.

By, as in 1836, they were attached to a dream of intensely local autonomy, with power vested in the pueblo or the municipality, where they could be sure that that political power would be used to secure for them their individual rights and the rights that their cultural tradition guaranteed them.

It was increasingly unclear to the light, Carbajal, that any distant government could be trusted to do that.

And yet, despite Carbajal and the Rio Grande Vayas sitting out the 1836 Texas fight, they were the ones who would have to bear the brunt of a two year centralist army occupation of their pueblos.

Following that centralist army's defeat at Sonia.

Which is where we started this episode, with the remnants of Santa Anna's army retreating from Texas, taking up quarters in the Rio Grande MIAs and awaiting orders to reconquer Texas, orders which never came.

And so instead, over the course of the next two years, the centralist army dedicated themselves mostly to taxing and requisitioning away the Rio Grande Via's prosperity from the previous decade.

And worse, that army refused to actually protect the population of the Rio Grande bias that they were impoverishing, claiming that their priority was the upcoming Texas campaign not protecting civilians from Comanche raids or Anglo Texian cattle rustlers.

As the security situation in the Rio Grande Be is deteriorated further.

The central government's solution was to just order the inhabitants of the bees to evacuate them, and then they went further and forbade the Rio Grande from even crossing to their ranches on the north side of the Rio Grande.

By 1838, the population of Laredo was maybe half of what it had been in 1824, and the ranches north of the Rio Grande had been all but abandoned.

Then, to pay back the war debts that they'd incurred in the failed Texas campaign, among others, the centralist government implemented a string of new taxes that hit the impoverished Rio Grande.

Be as particularly hard and to add to their misfortune.

In 1838, the government implemented a slew of new tariffs that favored well-connected monopolists and friends of the government and cut off the Rio Grande from their principal livelihoods as foreign traders.

All of this to fund the same government that was not only refusing to protect their homes, but actively telling them to abandon them.

It was too much.

On November 3rd, 1838, a charismatic lawyer and former Federalist legislator named Antonio Canales from Camargo called a convention of his fellow residents of the Rio Grande Villas.

He named Fiery Maria Carbajal as his chief of staff and secretary in the next week.

The convention met and issued a statement resolving, quote to perish first before continuing to be a toy for the army.

In the quote, they continued, vowing to sustain their opposition to the centralist government until they should shed quote, the last drop of blood, end quote, which became the title of J.J.

Gallegos excellent master's thesis on this episode.

Afterwards, 500 some odd men from the Rio Grande vias flocked to Canada's banners, but the centralist two were gathering men, and when they needed local talent to help quell the uprising, they turned to the most accomplished and renowned fighter in the region, Antonio Sparta.

But Sparta was nursing a grievance.

Something had happened in 1838 that had brought into the centralist government's crosshairs.

We don't know exactly what it was.

Maybe he got caught smuggling.

Maybe a customs collector just didn't like him.

But whatever it was, the government took everything from him.

One estimate placed the value of the property confiscated from Sabata at nearly $70,000, which would be a staggering some and might be exaggerated.

But the clear fact is that in 1838, old sweat of his brow had to sit by as debt holders auctioned off his land, his livestock, and all his earthly possessions.

End quote.

All of this, too, came in the wake of family tragedy as well.

In 1836, his wife Asuncion died in a cruel final touch.

Sparta was forced to sell his dead wife's jewelry to settle his debts.

The great self-made stockman and protector of the Rio Grande Villas was at the age of 41 broke, widowed, and left to raise his four daughters by himself.

He was only saved from total ruin by the generosity of his old mentor and partner, Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara.

Apparently, Gutierrez was Antonio Zapata's largest debt holder, and in 1838 Gutierrez de Lara forgave Zapata his debts.

An act of incredible generosity and presumably friendship.

But of course, this background does make it all the more absurd that after bankrupting the man.

The centralist government thought that they could count on Sparta's help.

November of 1838 saw these two men on a collision course.

Antonio Canales, at the head of 500 armed and angry local citizens, marching straight toward Antonio Sparta's hastily assembled centralist militia.

But what the centralist commanders may not have appreciated was the personal relationship between Antonio Canals and Antonio Sabata.

In addition to being a charismatic mouthpiece for the grievances of the Rio Grande, Vias Canales was personal lawyer and occasional surveyor.

They'd worked together for more than a decade now, and probably even served together in the local ranging units.

The outcome was probably predetermined.

As soon as their forces met, Sabata came over to Canada's federalist cause and brought with him the hearts and minds of the Rio Grande vias as well.

Canales gave Sabata a commission as a lieutenant colonel and the command of all the mounted forces of the new Northeastern Federalist revolt.

Sparta's Federalist army, if we can start to call it that, soon grew from 500 men to over 1000 supporters.

Army actually lost its first two skirmishes with centralist outside of Matamoros.

And yet it was the centralist who retreated back into the city, which is when Sabata realized that he effectively had the centralist pin down.

And that left the great northern capital of Monterrey unguarded.

Sabata turned and marched on Monterrey with a smaller strike force and caught a centralist major general napping.

Literally, he captured him during a daring night raid and then stampeded the centralist horse herd so they couldn't follow him.

The leaderless, centralist army was so confused that Sparta had enough time to deposit his prisoner of war back in Kamado, and then returned to the outskirts of Monterrey, more than 100 miles away, this time with his entire army, where he now defeated the centralist in open battle, which is when Zapata learned of a third army now coming for him from Tampico.

He wasted no time in rushing to meet them on the road, where he surprised and routed them as well.

In just the first three months of 1839, Antonio had defeated three centralist armies under cover of his success Sparta's hometown of and then Laredo and then Reynosa.

All joined Camargo in pronouncing for the full restoration of the Constitution of 1824 and in full defiance of the centralist government.

But others two picked up on absence 500 or so Lipan Apaches attacked in March, killing, wounding or capturing 50 from throughout the northeastern Mexican states without regard to their federalist or centralist sympathies, which sets up an incredible scene even as it was an open rebellion against the centralist government in defeating centralist armies all over the map.

Centralist administrators in the northeastern states still had no one else to turn to when it came to defense of the settlements.

In the wake of the 1839 Lipan Apache raids, it was to the rebel Sabata that centralist administrators wrote begging him to help defend the pueblos, that they had frankly been unwilling and unable to protect themselves, and Sparta, in contrast to the centralist army, answered the call.

Politics be damned, his people were in need of protection.

By March 29th, 1839, Sabata caught up with the Lipan band, 75 miles northwest of Laredo.

He surrounded them, defeated them, liberated 17 of his countrymen, and in the process notched his fourth victory over four armies in four months across almost 400 miles of territory.

And he wasn't done now.

Word reached the party that the Mexican centralist president himself was personally marching an army from Mexico City to Tampico to put down this revolt.

Sabata decided not to wait for him.

On May 9th, Sabata surprised the president and his army.

On the march just south of Tampico, 300 miles away from where he'd last been spotted again.

He stampeded the centralist horse herd, then ordered a strategic retreat, and then proceeded to capture the commander of the unit that the president sent to capture him.

The centralist president reconsidered his campaign.

He returned to Mexico City and split his forces amongst the big cities of Tampico, Matamoros and Monterrey, and everything in between became the Kingdom of Sparta.

But importantly, it wasn't just a kingdom of conquest.

Sabata and Canals and Carbajal were doing all the little unglamorous things too, that people actually wanted their government to do.

We already saw them providing defense against Indian raids, but they also, for example, set up a reliable postal service, something that centralist had never done.

And most important of all, under the umbrella of Sparta's protection, the people of the Rio Grande vias were able to return to their homes, their ranches into their livelihoods, boosted by Sparta's battlefield successes.

In January of 1840, Canales and Carbajal called a convention of northeastern federalists, made up of representatives from the three northeastern Mexican states Nolan and Tamaulipas.

They met near modern day Corpus Christi at a spot known as Casablanca, where they did something that remains confusing as hell, at least to those of us coming from the Anglo-American tradition.

The Articles of Convention produced by this Casablanca convention have only recently come to light, thanks to Professor Stan Greene, who found them in the Mexican Defense Archives years ago.

Remember that we finished our Battle of Medina video by noting that despite their initial alignment in 1836, it's hard not to feel like Anglos and ultimately were fighting for very different notions of independence.

We haven't really been able to articulate what that difference was, however.

But here in the Rio Grande bias in 1840, we have a Mexican Federalist movement protagonist and led by local Texas Mexican frontiersmen, offering us a potentially undiluted view into what they and Rio Grande were willing to fight and die for.

Is this.

The cuatro, Inc.?

El public and notorious is the fact that in the ill fated year of 1834, General Santana, by means of his proclamations most despotic and offensive to the sovereignty of the nation, destroyed the principle of representation and savage the principle that the government exists because of the pueblos.

The pueblos don't exist because of the government.

Sounds familiar right?

Okay, watch what comes next.

Yes.

Indispensable.

Para la mayor.

Regular.

As such, it has now become indispensable to give proper form and structure to our actions by the establishment of a provisional government, duly empowered to provide for the security and defense of all the pueblos who have revolted.

Article one.

The pueblos of the northern frontier do not recognize the legitimacy of the current government of Mexico.

Article two.

Until such time as a national convention freely elected by the pueblos, declares a form of government that better suits the Republic.

A provisional government will be established in these states.

So let's summarize this document in the context of what's happened in the Rio Grande Bas by January of 1840.

First, Rio Grande Federalists have established military control over the Rio Grande Valley and significant portions of La Nueva Leone and Tamaulipas.

Second, they've started providing critical government services like postal service, and they've eliminated undesirable policies like tariffs.

Third, they've declared the existing government of Mexico illegitimate and declared all actions by that government null and void.

And fourth, they've established in its place a provisional government and called for a convention to form a new national government.

But have they actually declared independence?

I would argue that they have, at least to the same extent that in 1813 and 1836 and elsewhere, were declaring independence.

But with the Rio Grande may not have been doing was declaring an independent Republic of the Rio Grande in the same way that the Republic of Texas had just done.

You see, in the Hispanic tradition, as JJ Gallegos points out, declaring an existing government illegitimate doesn't automatically mean that you're creating a new nation.

In the Hispanic tradition, when you declare a government illegitimate.

Each pueblo or municipality reverts to a sort of temporary autonomy.

You become a sort of political free agent, free now to negotiate the terms of your return to Confederation or not, with others in your geographic, cultural or political tradition.

And Jose Maria Carbajal understood this nuance, perhaps better than anyone else at the time.

As early as 1836, he had seen that for all the ways in which Anglo and Tejano conceptions of autonomy were similar, they differed in important ways as well.

The Anglo dominated Republic of Texas, for example, at first preserved the 23 Mexican municipios as their first counties led by judges with unified executive, legislative and judicial powers.

But pretty quickly, those Republic of Texas counties started to look like English counties, which is to say like administrative subdivisions of the state government, meaning that sovereignty was no longer invested in those pueblos.

It was centralized above them.

And think about that for a second.

The dream of a mixed society in Texas probably seemed pretty appealing to you, as it taken, when you assumed that each municipality or pueblo would have substantial autonomy over itself.

But when the centralizing authority based in Mexico City has simply been replaced by one in Austin, well, that dream has been frustrated, hasn't it?

So here in 1840, when Carvajal finally has the chance to write his own constitutional framework, he makes sure to preserve the foundational role of the pueblos as the basic and sovereign constitutive unit of his new government.

His new provisional Government of the Pueblo of the Northern Frontier was only intended to exist until May 28th, 1840, or earlier, though when the Casablanca Articles called for a subsequent convention freely elected by the pueblos.

Of course, of all the states this time, though, the form of government that better suits the republic of those portions of the Republic anyway, not under centralist sway.

And you'd also, because he so deeply understood the Anglo political tradition, part of the confusion amongst later historians as to what was happening on the Rio Grande in 1840 comes from the ways in which this Secretary of State, Jose Maria Carbajal, talked about his movement to Anglo Texian audiences in an effort to secure Texas aid for the uprising.

Carbajal played up the Rio Grande revolt in terms of an independence that Texians would understand and that would give them cover to support.

And so Carvajal appeals worked to both Takano and Anglo Texian audiences once again, and José Antonio Navarro, for example, quickly signed on as Canales and Carvajal most effective recruiters.

Within a few months, Seguin would personally lead several hundred to Cano and Texian volunteers down to join the Rio Grande Federalist Army.

And what I find fascinating about what happens once they get there is that even the Anglo Texians come to a door.

Antonio, and let's not ignore the fact that the Anglo Texian caste system at this time wasn't necessarily inclined to find heroes in Afro mestizo indigenous form, but that was just something undeniable.

He was fearless, he was charismatic, and he was complete in a way that most of us want our leaders to be soon.

The problem for Carbajal and Canales in Sapperton and the rest of the Rio Grande was that there were too many Anglos in the Rio Grande Federalist ranks.

Though Anglos never came to play a role in the political or ideological leadership of the revolt, their mere presence in the army so soon after the loss of Texas played into the hands of centralist propaganda.

Instead of a movement rooted in the Hispanic political tradition, increasingly the Rio Grande Federalist movement came to look like yet another threat to Mexican national unity.

And the greatest proof, perhaps, that Rio Grande Federalists were losing the PR war was who had turned against them.

For a brief moment toward the end of 1839, Rio Grande Federalists lost control of hometown Guerrero.

Sabata marched quickly to retake it, and when he got there in command of centralist forces, he found none other than close bet de Lara Gutierrez de Lara, the man who had declared Texas's first independence in 1813, who had been the first Federalist governor of Tamaulipas.

The man who had actually given the order to execute the failed First Mexican Emperor.

Another hometown boy from Guerrero, just like Zapata Gutierrez de Lara, had more Republican Federalist bonafides than anyone in Mexico, and moreover, was the man who seems to have given his start, made him rich and personally forgiven an enormous loan that threatened to ruin him just two years prior.

It was Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara who now stood in the way of his protégé, Antonio, in the Rio Grande federalist movement at large.

And we don't have to wonder why.

We have an incredibly poignant letter written by Gutierrez Lara to Sparta, and army is encircling him.

Amigo, my always beloved friend.

Gutierrez de Lara begins his letter to me.

Siempre querida amigo, ano esta yo la revolucion a sistema federal.

I'll grant that you may control now the fates of three northeastern states and sit poised to form a new republic.

But what do you hope to gain from your new republic?

You've already lost your fight by accepting foreign aid, the aid of the Texans.

And this isn't just some centralist propaganda telling you this, either, man.

This is me.

You know how well I know them, how much time I lived amongst them, and that even, yes, I use them to lay the first and most difficult stones of our Mexican liberty with their aid.

But ask the who stayed behind how their dream of independence has played out for them in Texas.

Whether they have achieved the autonomy or preserved the traditions that they fought for.

You're a child in these matters, friend.

Destructive agents are manipulating your love of country and your desire to be useful.

I, amigo.

My friend.

Open your eyes.

Don't erase all the good deeds you've rendered to our unfortunate pueblos.

Pueblos?

All of your friends only want to give you a reconciliatory embrace.

We all only want to see you in your home, with your daughters, with your friends, and with your compatriots.

You don't have to respond right now.

Think about it.

Your compatriot and best friend who kisses your hand.

Amigo.

Jose Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara.

God almighty.

There may be no more beautiful exposition of revolutionary techno disillusionment than Gutierrez de Lara.

Letter to Sabata, unfulfilled now in their ambition in Texas, abandoned by their own central government in the Rio Grande villas.

There really were no good options for or Rio Grande at this point.

Sabata did.

Botta knew how to do.

He soldiered on.

He went ahead and took his hometown and captured his friend Gutierrez de Lara, but set him free.

It was the end of Gutierrez de la his political and military career.

Though he would die two years later, Sparta's days were numbered two.

Howard.

Set a trap for him that they knew he couldn't resist.

They had a town send out a false cry for help, that they were under attack by Comanches.

Sabata and a few select men dutifully road to the rescue.

No sooner had Zapata and his men dismounted in the plaza of the town in the centralist sprung their ambush.

Sabata fought back, but after a daylong shootout, he and his men were surrounded, badly injured and out of ammunition.

The great, the legendary Antonio Sabata, was taken prisoner and placed on trial in a kangaroo court charged with treason.

The jury was all centralist officers.

The verdict a foregone conclusion.

The centralist commandant at the time in future President of Mexico Mariano Arista, was terrified, however, at the prospect of a martyred Sabata.

And so Arista pulled him aside while the jury was out for deliberations and made Zapata an offer.

He would pardon Sabata, give him his life, let him return to his four daughters and Guerrero if he would just lay down his arms and renounce federalism.

Shoot me!

Set out there, responded.

I'll never lay down my arms until the rights of my people are addressed.

And to make sure that the centralist commander Arista had understood him, Sabata continued, clarifying that he would never lay down his arms as long as he was at liberty end.

Quote.

Antonio was executed the next day, when a centralist detachment brought his severed head to his hometown of Guerrero and displayed it in the plaza.

The townsfolk grew so enraged that they attacked and killed several members of the centralist troop, and the memory of Sabata would live on in the region, to be commemorated with a county or a municipal in the Old Spanish system.

Fittingly enough, on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, where many of his ranches had been.

As far as I can tell, Sabata County remains the only county in Texas named after someone of African descent.

The Rio Grande Federalist National Convention in May of 1840 never came to pass.

After his execution on March 29th, 1840, the movement lost momentum.

Antonio Canals sued for peace, and though he may have lost the war, he and his family would win control of a family back in politics for a generation.

Jose Maria Carbajal went to ground momentarily, but together he and canals would play hell on U.S.

troops in northern Mexico during the 1846 47 Mexican-American War.

Carbajal reemerged a decade later to lead another northern separatist movement hold the Republic of the Sierra Madre.

Yet another confusing chapter in northern Mexican borderlands attempts to win their independence.

Whatever that word may mean.

The 20th century Mexican historical canon will tell you that the Republic of the Rio Grande never existed, but something clearly was going on between 1838 and 1840, in the Rio Grande Bas, something that men were willing to fight and die for.

In many ways, the great federalist centralist struggle in 19th century Mexico was just the opening round of an ongoing power struggle between northern and central Mexicans.

Nueva Laredo historian Manuel Cevallos Ramirez makes a pretty compelling argument that even the Mexican Revolution of 1910 was actually just another northeastern federalist Mexican revolt, set off by a man from goodwill in the name of long festering regional frustrations with an autocratic, centralist government in the center and launching his movement from reliable old federalist bases like San Antonio and Laredo.

And here's an even more recent data point.

In December of 2020, fed up with the highly centralizing impulses of the then Mexican president, ten of Mexico's governors, principally from the northern states, formed an alliance to oppose the president's economic policies.

Do you know what they called themselves?

The Federalist Alliance?

Federalists.

And do you know which three states were the original ones to organize that alliance?

If you said Guadalupe and Tamaulipas, then you've been paying attention, to be perfectly fair.

However, Texas historians have long overplayed the 1838 Mexican Federalist revolt to suggest a sort of preexistent terrain, or texanus, to the Mexican citizens of the Rio Grande villas, and using it sometimes as a quote, justification for Texan and North American expansionism, end quote.

Quoting again.

Or for that matter, to deflect from claims that Texas had been stolen from Mexico.

Still, I don't think we can separate critics views of the Republic of the Rio Grande from the fact that, in the end, it was centralis who won the political, ideological and historiographical battle for Mexico in mainstream Mexican history largely lays the blame for the instability of the first decades of Mexican independence squarely on the doorstep of Federalists.

The unspoken assumption being that centralization was always the more natural arrangement which it obviously wasn't, at least not for the people of the Rio Grande Bas or the province of Texas, or most of the northern frontier generally.

But centralist couldn't, and to this day still won't countenance the idea that the revolts of provincial northerners like Gutierrez de Lara or Antonio Sabata were just as legitimate and patriotic as the revolts of Vidal, Allende and Morelos, or even Benito Juarez for that matter.

Northern Mexico, particularly the border states, remains as much of an enigma to Mexico City elites as Texas is to American coastal elites.

I remember clearly back when I was building a pipeline to Monterrey years ago, I had to go to Mexico City to update our bankers on construction progress, and about an hour into the presentation, I could see that some kind of strange realization was dawning on them.

And finally, one of the Mexico City bankers asked in disbelief.

Wait, you've actually been out there on the border?

Even in 2017, the idea of setting foot on the northern Mexican border was enough to dumbfounded somebody from the center.

And there's something to this reaction that I, as a Texan, and probably most of you watching this, can relate to from when you talk to people from elsewhere in the United States.

As soon as Texas entered the United States, it was similarly an object of reflexive, confused contempt.

The critique of Texas at the time was sometimes expressed in anti-slavery terms, sometimes in anti-American terms, sometimes both.

But mostly it was just a thinly veiled expression of fear, of something that people living very far away couldn't understand and certainly couldn't control.

The frontier has always threatened the center, whether it's the northern Mexican frontier or the South Texas one.

The center is stagnant and decadent.

It only creates by making copies of copies of the things that came before, until the whole thing degenerates into some self-loathing, metaphysical nonsense.

Even the word frontier and all the theoretical ink spilled about it back in the centers of power is a form of exotic sizing it and delegitimizing it.

And yet, if the frontier is charismatic and creative enough, eventually the only remedy that the center has left to neutralize it is to appropriate it.

And so cosmopolitan Mexico adopts the noble charro riding along the Sierra Morena as its symbol.

Just as urbane, Hollywood adopts the Texas cowboy as the ultimate caricature of American identity.

Which is funny to me, how these two wildly dissimilar countries with a thousand years of English Spanish cultural rivalry behind them, end up settling on such similar avatars for their culture.

Frontiersmen in Texas.

Need a Spanish or Mexican or Anglo or indigenous or mulatto for that matter, consistently ended up more like each other than those back at the centers of power would ever like them to be.

And this was what always made Texas so unsettling to postal, American and Mexico City elites.

Texas identity doesn't flow from Plymouth Rock or Jamestown or Mexico City.

It wasn't carrying across the ocean from Mary, Old England, or from Castile-Leon.

Its defining characteristics were formed here from Texans lived in hard won experience on the frontier.

This is why there's nothing that makes a Texan feel more Texan than being on the frontier, on the frontier, on the border.

But there's something that's always bothered me about the frontier thesis.

As normally articulated, it's premised on the emptiness of the frontier.

The idea being that the emptiness of the frontier was the blank canvas that inspired people in societies to invent themselves anew.

The only problem with that is that the frontier in Texas, anyway, was never empty.

The experience of the Texas frontier is the experience of cultures colliding.

The freedom of the frontier comes not from emptiness, but from the variety of human experience and forms of social organization.

On full display here, free of the constraints and conformity of the center.

Proof for that, too, comes from Texas history and the travelog of Alvar Vaca.

For next time.