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San Antonio
San Antonio is a city in south central Texas and the seat of Bexar County. The cultural and commercial center for the Río Grande Valley, San Antonio is famous for its Spanish heritage and its unique mix of Mexican, Anglo, and German cultures.
The city is located in an area of rolling hills on the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek, which issue from springs in the city. The streams bubble forth from the huge Edwards Aquifer, San Antonio's only source of water, which collects rainwater from the Texas Hill Country to the northwest and channels it underground through porous limestone. San Antonio has a tropical climate, with very hot summers and mild winters. Temperatures in July average a high of 35° C (95° F) and a low of 24° C (75° F); January averages a high of 16° C (61° F) and a low of 3° C (38° F). Precipitation is plentiful, with about 790 mm (about 31 in) falling annually, much of it in summer.
In 1691 Spanish explorers named the San Antonio River for Saint Anthony of Padua because they first encountered it on the saint's feast day. The city itself grew out of the Royal Presidio of San António de Béjar, a fortified settlement founded in 1718. It was built to protect the Mission San António de Valero established at the same time. The mission soon became nicknamed the Alamo, and because of the role it played in the Texas Revolution (1835-1836) has become San Antonio's premier landmark and a shrine to Texas independence.
The site of San Antonio was long inhabited by the Coahuiltec Native American people and would later be a transition zone for the Plains peoples, including the Apache and the Comanche. Permanent European settlement began in 1718. In that year, Spaniards established the mission of San António de Valero and the presidio (a fortified community) of San António de Béjar on opposite banks of the upper San Antonio River. The mission of San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, now often referred to as Mission San José, was established nearby in 1720. By 1731 three other missions were operating in the river valley south of Mission San José. In that same year a group from the Canary Islands arrived, persuaded by the Spanish to move to the frontier, and established a community named Villa de San Fernando. Later this community was consolidated with the presidio and with the small settlement that had developed around the earliest mission to form the community of San Antonio.
During much of the 18th century, the San Antonio area was dominated by Mission San José, which flourished as one of the most prosperous and influential missions in Texas. Then, in 1793, nearly all the missions in Texas were secularized and most of the mission buildings in the San Antonio area were abandoned. However, the community of San Antonio remained the principal settlement in Texas during the years that Texas was under Spanish, and then Mexican, rule.
San Antonio was incorporated as a city in 1809. In 1813 during the Mexican War for Independence the city was briefly freed from Spanish rule, but was quickly reconquered by Royalist forces. It remained a center of Spanish Texas until Mexican independence in 1821, and then was the center for Mexican Texas. During the Texas Revolution, Texas troops captured the town in December 1835, but General Antonio López de Santa Anna recaptured the city with the fall of the Alamo on March 6, 1836 (see Texas: Texas Revolution). Reclaimed with the end of the revolution in April, San Antonio was chartered in 1837 as the seat of Bexar County.
After Texas entered the Union in 1845, the city enjoyed rapid growth as the servicing and distribution center for the western movement of settlers. In 1860 its population was the largest in Texas, with German immigrants outnumbering both the Anglo and Hispanic populations. The city served as a Confederate depot during the American Civil War (1861-1865). But lacking a port or complex transportation network, the city's economic importance was limited until the coming of the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railroad in 1877. Thereafter it emerged quickly as the shipping and manufacturing center of southern and western Texas.
Until 1910 most of the new immigrants to the area were Anglos from southern states, and the city grew to about 70,000 inhabitants. The pattern changed with the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), which initiated an influx of new settlers from Mexico into the Río Grande Valley. The ambiance of the city began to change from one of a Spanish setting to one of Texas-Mexican culture. San Antonio prospered during the world wars of the first half of the 20th century through the concentration of major military bases in the area.
The advent of the automobile allowed San Antonio citizens to migrate toward the north and away from the downtown. The migrations heightened tensions in the 1920s and 1930s between a growing Hispanic population, located mostly on the west side of the city, and the more affluent Anglo suburbs. The lack of high paying manufacturing jobs and the reliance on government and tourist industries kept San Antonio in the bottom tier income compared to other cities in the state, and the difference in Anglo and Hispanic incomes heightened the ethic tensions. One result was a reluctance on the part of Anglo leadership to undertake urban renewal and flood control projects for the downtown areas. Floods in 1921 killed an estimated 50 people, and lesser but important ones in the latter part of the decade also caused damage. In response, the federal government, as part of jobs-creating programs during the Great Depression of the 1930s, paid for the construction of the Paseo del Rio (which aided flood control), refurbished the missions, and started other urban renewal projects.
Renewal projects were expanded in the 1960s, as Hispanics began the domination of San Antonio politics and as tourism became the most important segment of the area's economic well-being. Two important events in this ongoing process were the receiving of federal funds for HemisFair, a world's fair that highlighted San Antonio and its downtown area and culture, and the election in 1981 of Henry Cisneros, the first Hispanic mayor of a major American city. These events demonstrated the importance of cleaning up and rebuilding the downtown and signified the political accommodation of Anglo and Hispanic politicians.
San Antonio still faces complicated economic problems. In 1995 a federal commission voted to close Kelly Air Force Base, site of the economically important Air Logistics Center, as part of a nationwide consolidation program. A more far-reaching problem is the fragility of the city's water supply. The Edwards Aquifer, the principal source of water for the metropolitan area, is being depleted through overuse and periodic spells in which rainfall is insufficient to recharge it. Meeting the various residential, industrial, and agricultural demands on the water source may do much to shape the future of San Antonio in terms of both population growth and manufacturing expansion in surrounding areas.
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