Tejano Origins in Mexican Texas — 11

By the time their state constitution was promulgated in 1827, the Tejanos and other liberal Coahuiltejanos had committed themselves to achieving economic prosperity through their state colonization program. Tejanos collaborated with a liberal group of thinkers who were the statesmen from Parras and Monclova. José María Viesca and his brother Agustín led the group in political ideology and power. Both served in national positions as well as state. They were intellectuals who promoted liberal political and scientific thought, and their family was known in Mexico as very liberal. Their family was described as "rich, large, respectable, learned, sensible, and honorable."¹ One of the strongest motives which Coahuiltejanos had in supporting economic enterprise, self-interest, is most evident in their efforts to sponsor the cotton industry and to attract U.S. cotton planters to Texas. In this effort, the Tejanos sponsored pro-slavery measures to induce Anglo-American immigration, and similarly established a program of land laws as a foundation for settlement and prosperity. Some, such as the homestead protection, were developed explicitly to attract southern U.S. debtors. Many of their laws were based upon ancient Hispanic tradition; others were imaginative answers to frontier imperative. Almost all of them were continued under different titles by Anglo-Americans in Texas and the United States after 1836 as the Headright Land Grants of the Republic of Texas and the Pre-Emption Land Law. Another Coahuiltejano law, issued as Decree No. 95 on July 3, 1829, granted the state the right to establish its own territorial limits. This law became particularly important to Texas when oil was discovered in the Gulf of Mexico near the Texas coast. Thus through the implementation and development of ancient Hispanic land policies, Coahuiltejanos provided a major impetus in drawing the Anglo-American tide southward to Texas.

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