Mastering New Mysteries

Before the Franciscans arrived, Texas was a vast open landscape without highways, walls, or buildings, crossed by nomadic hunters searching for food. Within a single lifetime, Coahuiltecan Indians were farming at Mission Espada and learning the complexities of laying brick and stone. The enclosed community they built, stout, orderly, and focused on the church, echoed the traditions of medieval Europe and permanently changed the structure of their world. Although the friars were Europeans, the master craftsmen for the Texas missions were mestizos from Mexico, part Indian and part European, who combined the building traditions of Mesoamerica with those of the Mediterranean. Vocational training was a cornerstone of Spanish mission work. Thinner and wider than modern bricks, eighteenth-century ladrillos closely resembled Roman bricks brought into Spain more than two millennia earlier.

San Antonio, Texas · United States