Welcome to Season 4 of a new history of Old Texas.

I'm Brandon Seale.

On the first day of the Siege of the Alamo,

Juan Sagan helped Jim Bowie compose a letter to Santa Ana.

The substance of the letter isn't that important for now, but how they close the letter is.

At first, they signed off with the customary Dios and Federation, God and Federation,

a declaration of their commitment to the Federalist Constitution of 1824.

But then, before sending the letter, Bowie scratched out the word federation,

and with his shaking hand, wrote instead,

Dios and Texas, God, and Texas.

I've always understood this moment to be the great moment where Bowie, Sigeen, and the others symbolically realized what they were fighting for, an independent Texas.

But recently, I've come to wonder if this moment might actually be symbolic of a tragic misunderstanding.

Maybe Jim Bowie and Juan Sagan, and for that matter, many of the others fighting for Texas in 1836,

had very different things in mind when they spoke of independence.

Fortunately for us, there was another federalist war of independence in South Texas that took place just two years later.

From 1838 to 1840, the people of the states of Kuala, Nuevo Leone, and Tamolipas fought against the Mexican central government for their independence.

They fought under the battlefield leadership of one of the most remarkable men in Texas history,

and as best I can tell, the only Afro-Tegano to have a Texas county named after him.

I'm talking about Antonio Zapata, the quote-unquote mulatto son of a domestic servant and a cowboy born

on the Rio Grande. For the better part of a year, Zapata reigned supreme as the uncontested military

leader of this region and as the avatar of his people. With his army of Rio Grande Bakeros,

Carriso Indians, and Anglo-Texian volunteers, he held as many as three different Mexican-centralist armies at bay, and won the respect of his enemies and the love of his men.

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