Welcome to a new history of Old San Antonio.

Episode 13, Sons of Libertad.

I'm Brandon Seal.

I'm my city of San Antonio.

Tonight I'm looking at your lovely life.

Alexis de Tocqueville's democracy in America stands as the canonical outsider's perspective of the early American Republic in the age of Andrew Jackson.

De Tocqueville was enchanted by what he saw in the United

States as the closest realization yet of the ideals of Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, Bentham, and Rousseau.

It's a great read and a great reminder of how radically different the American political experiment

was from anything that had preceded it. But much more relevant to me than the account of a French

aristocrat who came and went from the American continent in less than nine months is the account written one year before to Tocqueville

by another keen observer of human nature, and a man who would have a much more direct impact

on the course of events on the North American continent. Lorenzo De Zavala was born in the Yucatan

Peninsula to a Spanish family in 1788, and like many bookish men of his age, went to and graduated from

seminary. Dezavalas' time at seminary only radicalized him, introducing him to all the works of the

French Enlightenment and the new contributions to political thought being made across the Gulf of Mexico

by men like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Upon graduating from seminary, he founded a series of

newspapers in which he gave voice to the political arguments of republicanism and classical liberalism and how they might be applied to Mexico.

By 1814, however, these were dangerous positions to espouse, and he was imprisoned for three years by royalists to shut him up.

Imprisonment did nothing to moderate his zeal, however, and he picked up right where he left off upon his release.

Luckily for Dezavala, the times were catching up to him,

and when the former opponents of Mexican independence flip-flopped,

...