Reclaiming Tribal Identity in the Land of the Spirit Waters: The Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan Nation

Abstract

Abstract“Reclaiming Tribal Identity in the Land of the Spirit Waters: The Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan Nation” brings together American Indian, Chicana/o/x, and U.S./Mexico borderlands history, demonstrating how the ambiguities of Chicana/o/x and American Indian categories paradoxically both made it difficult for Native communities to be recognized for what they were, and simultaneously created spaces in which to survive settler colonialism. A case study of a resurgent tribal nation in San Antonio, Texas, my dissertation uses new lenses of historical analysis to understand Coahuiltecan survivance through the longue durée, pushing back against narratives of Coahuiltecan extinction in the academic literature. By untangling issues of mestizaje, tribal resurgence, and the politics of recognition of an Indian tribe, this dissertation explores how a San Antonio Mission Indian descendant community transformed into a tribal community in the U.S./Mexico borderlands seeking state recognition as an Indian tribe. Historical Background: One of the most understudied American Indian groups, the Coahuiltecan people of South Texas and Northeast Mexico continuously inhabited the region for approximately 11,000 years before the arrival of the Spanish in the seventeenth century. With their population in drastic decline from Spanish settler encroachment from the south, and facing continued attacks from Lipan Apache and Comanche bands from the north, approximately one hundred bands of Coahuiltecan Indians strategically took up residence in San Antonio’s five Spanish colonial-era missions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to ensure their own survival— Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña, San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, San Juan Capistrano, San Francisco de la Espada, and San Antonio de Valero, more commonly known as the Alamo. Scholars most often use mission secularization in the early nineteenth century to mark the beginning of “Indian disapperance” in San Antonio, arguing that through increasing intermarriage with the (mostly mestizo, or mixed race) population, and Canary Islander peninsulares (pure-blooded Spaniards, as imagined in the casta system), the Coahuiltecan people simply went extinct. Pushing back against narratives of Coahuiltecan extinction in the academic literature, I argue that a Tejano ethnogenesis more readily explains “what happened” to the San Antonio Mission Indians. The dissertation how Mission Indians and their descendants would continue to live on mission grounds and in the neighborhoods that would form immediately around them through the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth century, albeit not without significant cultural change. In the late 1960s, Mission Indian descendants protested the exhumation of approximately 125 eighteenth century (mostly Coahuiltecan) mission residents from Mission San Juan Capistrano, marking the beginning of what archaeologist Alston Thoms labeled a “readily visible” Coahuiltecan resurgence. I argue that Coahuiltecan ethnic identity also visibly reemerged alongside intertribal urban Indian activism in the city, and a renewed interest in the old Spanish missions themselves. As part of the on-going struggle for the repatriation of the Mission San Juan Capistrano remains, the Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan Nation was established in 1994 by thirteen families claiming lineal descent from the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century San Antonio Mission Indians. The tribal community would serve as a vehicle for Coahuiltecan cultural revitalization, including the establishment of an elected tribal council, a Coahuiltecan language program, and continued activism and advocacy for the protection of Indian remains at all five San Antonio missions. Although the State of Texas currently has no mechanism for the recognition of an Indian tribe that affords a government-to-government relationship, the tribal community has recently taken up efforts to achieve state recognition in a way that would afford such a relationship.