Results tagged “mexico”

Tonight Rothko Chapel opens it's 2009-2010 season with a discussion with Emmy-award winning journalist Ruben Martinez. True to the chapel's mission to serve as a forum for people to discuss human problems of worldwide interest, the four part lecture series "Truth and Consequences on the Mexico-United States Border" kicks off with an overview from Martinez. His work covers topics on immigration, the culture and politics of Mexico, and the civil wars of the 80s in Central America. Maybe we'll dump the season premiere of Survivor in favor of some larnin'.

  173 years ago, George C. Childress hurriedly composed a document at Washington-on-the-Brazos while only 150 miles away, the Alamo was under a brutal and ultimately fatal attack by the Mexican army. The document, which was written overnight at a hastily formed convention of Texas leaders, accused the Mexican goverment of ceasing to protect the lives, liberty, and property of the people of Texas.  It became the Texas Declaration of Independence. 

…the people of Texas do now constitute a free, Sovereign, and independent republic, and are fully invested with all the rights and attributes which properly belong to independent nations; and, conscious of the rectitude of our intentions, we fearlessly and confidently commit the issue to the decision of the Supreme arbiter of the destinies of nations.

And with those words, the people of the Republic of Texas declared independence from Mexico on this day, March 2, 1836. The Texas War of Independence had begun half a year earlier, on October 5, 1835, with the defeat of the Mexican army at the Battle of Gonzales by armed Texians who refused to surrender a cannon — the famous “Come and Take It” cannon — to the Mexican government, as it was their only means of protection against Indian attacks on the settlement. General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the recently-elected president of Mexico, had just the year before abolished the Constitution of 1824 — which very loosely governed Mexican territories, including Texas — and enacted a harsh, anti-federalist constitution in its place.  The new constitution took away liberties to which most Texian settlers had become accustomed, required that they convert to Catholicism, tithe 10% of their earnings to the Roman Catholic church and created the state of Coahuila y Tejas out of the former territory, with its new capital hundreds of miles away from the former capital of San Antonio.  Texian settlers were furious.