The Spanish and Mexican Northern Frontier (1810–1848)

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering political shifts, key figures, institutions, and rebellions on the Spanish and Mexican Northern Frontier between 1810 and 1848.

Pobladores

Frontierspeople and settlers residing on the northern rim of New Spain and Mexico who exercised local self-governance through presidios, cabildos, and rural village communities.

Criollos

Native-born people of Spanish descent in New Spain who questioned their subservient status to the mother country and were inspired by Enlightenment ideals as well as the American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions.

Repartimiento

A colonial Spanish system requiring the forced labor of indigenous people for the benefit of regional strongmen, which was abolished under the Bourbon reforms.

Bourbon reforms

Late eighteenth-century Spanish measures that encouraged trade, ranching, and farming, but alienated colonists through increased economic regulation, church restrictions, and the abolition of forced native labor.

Secularization of the missions

The process of ending the missionary work of regular clergy and transferring authority over indigenous neophytes to parish priests in Texas, New Mexico, and Pimería Alta.

Tejanos

Spanish/Mexican residents of frontier Texas who resisted Spanish crown policies such as cattle industry administration, new taxes, and intrusions into local cabildos.

Cabildo

A local municipal council or town governing body in Spanish and Mexican frontier settlements.

Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla

A parish priest from Dolores, Guanajuato, who launched the Mexican rebellion against Spanish rule on September 16, 1810, leading an army of the oppressed lower classes before his capture and execution in 1811.

Grito de Dolores

The cry of revolt issued by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in Dolores, Guanajuato, on September 16, 1810, initiating the struggle for Mexican independence.

Diez y Seis de Septiembre

The national Mexican holiday commemorating September 16, 1810, the date Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla raised the banner of independence against Spanish rule.

Juan Bautista de las Casas

A former military officer who led an early 1811 revolt in San Antonio, Texas, against royal authority in support of Miguel Hidalgo's movement.

Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara

Rebel leader who advanced from Louisiana at the head of the Republican Army of the North to proclaim Texas independent from Spain in early 1813.

Republican Army of the North

An insurgent military force led by Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara from Louisiana into Texas in early 1813 that briefly ousted royalist authorities.

José Joaquín Arredondo

The Spanish royalist commandant general sent to Texas whose forces defeated and expelled the republican rebels by late summer 1813.

Agustín de Iturbide

Leader of independent Mexico in 1821 who declared himself emperor in 1822, was deposed and banished under penalty of death in 1823, and was executed upon returning.

Constitution of 1824

Mexico's first liberal federal constitution, shaped by Enlightenment principles, the Spanish Constitution of 1812, and the U.S. Constitution of 1787, which established a federal republic.

La muerte

A ceremonial carved figure depicting death holding a bow, used during New Mexican religious processions to remind pobladores of their mortality.

Santeros

Traditional New Mexican folk craftspeople who carved hundreds of wooden images of Catholic saints for use in regional churches and homes.

Antonio López de Santa Anna

The Mexican military and political leader whose 1835 coup d'état dismantled the federal Constitution of 1824 and imposed Centralist rule.

Centralists

A conservative political faction in Mexico that took power in 1835, seeking to diminish state and territorial autonomy in favor of concentrated national authority in Mexico City.

Moses Austin

A Missouri promoter who negotiated the initial colonization contract with the Spanish government in 1820 to introduce Anglo American families into Texas.

Stephen Austin

The son of Moses Austin who fulfilled his father's colonization contract by founding the eastern Texas settlement of San Felipe de Austin in 1821.

San Felipe de Austin

The early Anglo American colonial settlement founded in eastern Texas in 1821 by Stephen Austin.

Martín de León

A Mexican empresario from Nuevo Santander who received a colonization grant to found the settlement of Victoria, Texas, in 1824.

Empresario

A land colonizing agent contracted by the Spanish or Mexican government to settle families in frontier provinces like Texas.

Texas Revolution

The 1836 armed conflict in which Anglo American settlers and their allies broke away from Mexico, triggered partly by resistance to Santa Anna's Centralist regime.