Welcome to a new history of old San Antonio.

Episode 15, Santa Ana.

I'm Brandon Seale.

I'm a city, San Antonio. Tonight I'm looking at your love. If Santa Ana had been born God,

Tonight I'm looking at your lovely life

If Santa Ana had been born God, he is alleged to have said, he would have wished to be more.

Alas, Antonio de Padua Maria Severino Lopez de Santana and Perez de Lebron was only the son of an upper middle class Spanish bureaucrat, born in Halapa Veracruz in 17 and commissioned a lieutenant in the Spanish army at the age of 16.

Santa Ana found his calling in the army, however, rising rapidly through the ranks, and will be repeatedly cited for bravery, including at the Battle of Medina in 1813, from which he emerged with the singular contempt and distrust of the little town on the San Antonio

River. In 1820, like many other leading Spanish royalists, he flip-flopped and came over to the side

of Mexican independence when the government back in Spain became too Republican for his taste,

eventually helping to raise the Mexican flag and crown a new Mexican monarch.

By December 1822, sensing an opportunity, he flip-flopped again, rising in revolt against the Mexican monarch,

and helping set off the events that would lead to the Mexican Constitutional Convention of 1824.

Cold, self-interested, and opportunistic. Santa Ana would marry twice in his life, though he didn't bother to attend either wedding, using the marriages only as a means of acquiring wealth, which he repeatedly frittered away. Still, he would become the foremost military man of his age, the man to whom his nation repeatedly turned in times of trouble. In 1829, he would successfully lead Mexican forces against the failed Spanish invasion of

Tampico. In 1838, he would lead a hastily assembled defense of Veracruz against a

French invasion, in which he famously lost his leg and had it buried with full military honors.

He was always just successful enough in moments of minor crisis to cause people to forget

the magnitude of the major national crises that he himself

provoked.

Physically, Santa Ana was comparatively tall, commanding and handsome, even as he had to instruct

his portraitist to obscure his rather bulbous nose.

He was a consummate collector of Napoleonic artifacts and began to refer to himself as the

...