BEXAR ARCHIVES

BEXAR ARCHIVES. The Bexar Archives are the Spanish and Mexican records of Texas, assembled in San Antonio during its long history as the capital and principal community of Texas. Both in their volume and breadth of subject matter the Bexar Archives are the single most important source for the history of Hispanic Texas up to 1836. The Archives, housed at the University of Texas since 1899, constitute more than eighty linear feet of materials, in a quarter million pages. The documents are rich in sources about the administrative, legal, military, religious, economic, and social life of Texas and surrounding areas from the founding of the presidio of San Antonio de Béxar in 1718 to the independence of Texas from Mexico in 1836.

The Bexar Archives reflect the growth and development of Spanish Texas and Mexican Texas.^qqv Earlier documents deal with the affairs of settlers from the Canary Islands, and relations between the military, civil, and missionary communities that constituted San Antonio. Major topics during the eighteenth century include Indian policy and relations, military affairs, cattle raising, trade, legal proceedings, and exploration and communications. After 1803, the documentation also reflects a growing Anglo-American presence in the area, the development of trade and colonization, and currents of political unrest and revolution. As the affairs of Texas and the region grew in complexity, so does the volume of documentation in the Bexar Archives. Fully half of the collection represents the Mexican period (1821 to 1836).

The University of Texas received the Bexar Archives in 1899 through the efforts of university history professor Lester G. Bugbee. By agreement with the Bexar County Commissioners Court, the university undertook to house, organize, calendar, and translate the collection. Certain land and legal documents were retained in San Antonio for use in county business. Since much of the original order of the Bexar Archives had been disturbed over the years, University of Texas librarians and historians arranged all the documents–whether provincial, municipal, military, or private–into chronological order in the following series:

1. Coahuila y Texas Official Publications, 1826–1835

2. General Governmental Publications, 1730–1836

3. Non-governmental Publications, 1778, 1811–1836

4. General Manuscript Series, 1717–1836

5. Undated and Undated Fragments

The physical arrangement and a corresponding calendar provided easy access to the Bexar Archives for such scholars as Eugene C. Barker and Carlos E. Castañeda,^qqv who began to make ample use of the Bexar Archives in their research. By the 1930s a systematic translation program had also begun. By the mid-1990s, translations existed for the following portions of the archives:

Series I: 1717–1790 (162 volumes)

Series II: 1804–1808 (38 volumes)

Series III: Printed Decrees, 1803–1812 (4 volumes)

The University of Texas greatly expanded access to the Bexar Archives when it microfilmed the entire collection between 1967 and 1971. That project produced 172 reels of film and a corresponding set of published guides. Copies of the microfilm are now available at major educational institutions nationwide. Translations done to date are also available on microfilm. More recently, scholar Adán Benavides has compiled a comprehensive name guide to the Bexar Archives, based on all substantive documents as they are entered in the microfilm edition.