Review of Tejano Patriot: Western Historical quarterly
Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 52, Issue 2, Summer 2021, Page 222
Tejano Patriot: The Revolutionary Life of José Francisco Ruiz, 1783–1840. By Art Martínez de Vara. Foreword by Jesús F. de la Teja. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2020. xvi + 270 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00, paper.)
Art Martínez de Vara’s 2020 Tejano Patriot: The Revolutionary Life of José Francisco Ruiz, 1783–1840 begins with an important reflection on Texas historiography: Tejanx histories have been largely obscured due to the “Anglo-focused narrative of Texas” (p. 3). Therefore, Martínez de Vara recovers for scholars how necessary the life of Tejano José Francisco Ruiz is to understanding borderlands, Mexican, and U.S. pasts, as Ruiz was only one of two Texas Mexicans (Tejanos) who signed Texas’s Declaration of Independence. Although there are few published works on the historical figure of Ruiz, Martínez de Vara’s Tejano Patriot unveils how truly different Tejano society was to Texian/Anglo American Texas through assessing the life and circumstances under which Ruiz emerged as a veteran of borderlands independence movements. Through different examinations of political and cultural exchanges from Béxar to northern Mexico, the author shows how Ruiz was indeed a product of his time: a veteran of different independence movements who grappled with the shifting tectonic plates around state-building projects from New Spain to Tejas, and from the Republic of Texas to Texas as an American state.
Spanning sixteen chapters and derived from Mexican, Texas, and Louisiana archival repositories, the well-researched Tejano Patriot utilizes the life of Ruiz as a springboard to discuss Mexico’s Independence from Spain, the Fredonian Rebellion, the Texas Revolution, and ultimately, Texas’s legacy as a U.S. state. Tejano Patriot contends how Ruiz was, as Martínez de Vara describes, a “cultural broker,” due to his ability of traversing “Spanish, Mexican, indigenous and Anglo American” social and political spheres (p. 1). What makes this monograph so compelling is how Martínez de Vara is able to weave Ruiz in to critical moments in Texas history. Fluent in Comanche and other Native languages, the author problematizes how Ruiz and other Texas Mexican elites had to grapple with immigration tensions following Mexico’s independence, such as with the Native-Anglo Fredonian Rebellion. By doing so, he shows how Tejanos had to negotiate competing political alliances in the decades between Mexican Independence and Texas statehood, revealing how Tejanx identity was indeed in-flux with Indigenous, local, and national polities.
Martínez de Vara’s nuanced analysis of Ruiz’s life reveals a need for historians to further recover the lives of more Tejanos who were instrumental in forging Texas’s past. While Tejano Patriot adds to a small, albeit rich historiography on elite Tejanos such as Juan Seguín or José Antonio Navarro, I hope to see further inclusion of Tejanas who also were instrumental in Texas political history.
Kris Klein Hernández
