Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande.

Episode 17,

Because you can't do a podcast about Zapata, Texas, without an allusion to an

hintocable song.

I'm Brandon Seal.

The 20th century Mexican historical canon will tell you that the Republic of the Rio Grande never existed.

And they lead off with a pretty strong argument.

Mexicans don't call the Rio Grande the Rio Grande.

They call it the Rio Bravo.

If anything, it should be the Republic of the Rio Bravo,

shouldn't it? The great Mexican historian Josefina Vasquez, and I'm not saying that sarcastically,

by the way, she's phenomenal, wrote a paper on the subject called the supposed Republic of the Rio Grande,

in which she makes the claim that, quote, this republic was mentioned only once

in documents of the period, and this in a centralist newspaper that was reprinting an article

from a Texas newspaper, end quote.

The great Nuevo Laredo historian, Manuel Sevalios Ramirez, goes further, arguing that the

history of the Republic of the Rio Grande was, quote-unquote, invented

in order to suggest a pre-existent techanidad or Texanness of the Mexican citizens of the region

as, quote, justification for Texan and North American expansionism, end quote.

But something clearly was going on between 1838 and 1840 in the Rio Grande Bias,

something that men were willing to fight and die for.

Maybe that something wasn't specifically called the Republic of the Rio Grande,

...