"This history explores eighteenth-century San Antonio de Bexar, a northern Spanish colonial community from which modern San Antonio, Texas developed. Its early history was one of isolation and often of neglect, but many of the settlers, veterans of frontier colonies farther south, founded San Antonio on centuries-old Spanish institutions. These colonists often competed and feuded with one another in the early years, but frontier political and economic...

San Antonio native, military veteran, merchant, and mayor pro tem José Antonio Menchaca (1800-1879) was one of only a few Tejano leaders to leave behind an extensive manuscript of recollections. Portions of the document were published in 1907, followed by a "corrected" edition in 1937, but the complete work could not be published without painstaking reconstruction. At last available in its entirety, Menchaca's book of reminiscences captures the social...