Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande.

Episode two, Young Zapata.

I'm Brandon Seal.

The parish priest asked the 22-year-old Maria Antonia Rocha de Sapata for the name of the baby

boy that she clutched in her arms.

Antonio, she answered him, the name echoing through the red sandstone church where she'd said

farewell to her murdered father seven years prior, the same church where she'd married her husband,

Ignacio, a year and a half before.

Ignacio was about 26 years old now, the illegitimate child of a more prosperous resident of their town, Rivilla.

Ignacio was also, like Maria Antonia, a mulatto, a person of mixed but predominantly African descent,

which meant that their newly baptized first son, Antonio Zapata, was also recorded

as a mulatto in the baptismal register. The date was January 29, 1797. And that's pretty much all

that the historical record tells us about the early life of Antonio Zapata.

But that doesn't mean that we can't fill in some blanks.

First off, the fact that Maria Antonia, Ignacio, and little Antonio were mulattoes

didn't make them exceptional in the frontier town of Rivia.

By 1797, the year that Zapata was born, the population of Ria was more than 30% mulatto.

The role of Afro-Mexicanos and Afro-Techanos is badly undercovered in the academic literature in both Texas and Mexican history,

and hopefully someone will do something about it.

But I think part of the reason that it doesn't get more coverage is because the presence of men and women of African descent along the North American Spanish frontier didn't seem to merit much mention in the accounts of the time.

Which isn't to say that race didn't matter, just that the shared hardships of the frontier were far more defining for people at the time

than the color of their neighbor's skin.

...