Writers of Revolution

P. W. Grayson, Vice Unmasked, an Essay: Being a Consideration of the Influence of Law Upon the Moral Essence of Man, with Other Reflections (New York: George H. Evans, 1830), i.

Often, when telling the narratives of Texas and Northern Mexico during the early 19th century, the narrative is reduced to the story of Manifest Destiny or romanticized images of cowboys and the Southwest. However, Texas itself, which was a politically diverse landscape, taking differing approaches to a wide range of political issues. For example, the Texas Revolutionaries expressed views ranging from anarchist positions advocating the abolition of law, such as those of the Texas Attorney General P. W. Grayson in Vice Unmasked, to the explicitly anti-Black and anti-Indigenous policies of the Mirabeau B. Lamar administration. Despite this diversity of belief, the dominant Anglo-American narrative of the period reigns supreme in the public imagination. However, the political writer central to our understanding of the cultural place of Latin@ women in the Borderlands is the French-American Catholic missionary priest Fr. Anthony Ganilh, and his ethnographic novel allows for a hidden and alternative history to be told, a history of resistance and community. 

Anthony Ganilh, Southern Liberty, A Satire and other Poems (New York: s.p., 1834), i.

Ganilh, prior to his travels to Texas, had already published multiple works, including a novel and multiple works of poetry, including his 1834 work Southern Liberty, A Satire, but he showed specific attention to the experiences of enslaved women and the violence ennacted against them in the American South and advocated vocally against slavery, justifying the possibility of a revolt of enslaved people, arguing that the conditions of slavery should be resisted by any means possible. However, the work that will be primarily focused on is Ganilh’s 1838 work, Mexico Versus Texas, which was later republished in an expanded edition in 1842 as Ambrosio de Letinez, named after the novel's protagonist. The novel itself falls into a genre that is often unfamiliar to the modern scholar or public, as it presents an ethnography through representative fictional and real characters to depict the region's cultural, political, and religious situation. It has often been a point of contention whether Ganilh ever ventured to Texas to write his novel during the Texas Revolution or Republic period; however, recently reexamined epistolary evidence has provided proof of Ganilh’s experiences in the region. The letter below from Fr. Anthony Ganilh to Fr. José María Luis Mora, a prolific Mexican ideologist and a leader of the opposition to Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna, describes the planned departure of Ganilh to Mexico and Texas, whilst also mentioning his admiration of Harriet Martineau, a prominent sociologist of the period, who for the time was revolutionary, as not only was she was a woman writer, but one who supported herself. Ganilh stayed in the Borderlands until 1838, when he returned to the United States to escape the outbreak of the Pastry War and to publish his descriptive work on the region. 

The next two parts of this section will then explore the influences of Indigenous women in the early 19th-century Borderlands as described in Ganilh’s accounts, and the second will examine how Tejana women (Texan women of Mexican descent) lived in Texas and navigated the political changes of the period. The first will tell us how Indigenous women not only continued but also publicly practiced elements of their ancestral religion and held positions of respect in the Borderlands, and the second will demonstrate women's legal and religious presence in Spanish and Mexican Texas society.