San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Canary Islanders tied to heart of San Antonio
Before the pandemic, this was the time you’d be seeing photographs of people in colorful striped skirts or knee pants gathered in front of San Fernando Cathedral. For health and safety reasons, the Canary Islanders Descendants Association will forgo the Annual Arrival Mass again this year, but their ancestors’ contributions are built into the church and the city that grew up
PAULA ALLEN
around it.
The original 15 families, plus a few unmarried men who formed another group, were the first permanent European settlers here. They had made an incredible journey to get to the barely there community of San Antonio de Bejar.
Recruited for a chance at land and a better life, the 56 Isleños, as they would be called in New Spain, made the decision to leave behind the drought, famine and volcanic eruption that had plagued their home on the rocky archipelago southwest of Spain.
They left Tenerife on March
27, 1730, for a voyage with stops in Cuba and Veracruz, Mexico, then an arduous overland journey to their final destination. Some died along the way; others took a leap of faith and got married, forming new households for the new land.
They arrived March 9, 1731, nearly a year after they had started, and presented themselves at the presidio, where the young, single men would strengthen the Spanish forces against incursions by the French and hostile tribes. They joined a shifting population of Spanish soldiers and their families at the presidio or fort, missionaries, Native Americans and frontier adventurers.
The islanders would be given some big assignments — to form the first civilian government, plan a town, the Villa de San Fernando, and plant crops with an eye to becoming a self-sustaining community. In exchange, they were given seeds, oxen, a small basic income for the first year and most importantly, the promised land, along with a minor noble title, “hidalgo ,” proclaiming their status as landowners.
The immigrants got their jobs done, planning a Spanish-style town of 12 streets around the open square that would become Main Plaza. With land grants in hand, they built houses — progressing from “jacals,” or thatched huts, to substantial
stone houses — and establishing farms along the river.
For civic leaders, they chose male heads of household who had taken on those roles on the long trip from the Old World to the new. The first mayor was Juan Leal Goras (also spelled Goraz), and Juan Curbelo (whose homestead was covered here March 28, 2010, and April 4, 2010) was his second-in-command. With the help of several other men from their group, these officials acted as city planners, law enforcement and arbiters of dispute among the settlers.
Although a site was set aside on the west side of the plaza for a church, building one wasn’t in their original remit, and it took them longer to get there.
Islander families, all Catholics as far as is known, first attended Mass in the chapel at the presidio, an uninspiring room “without a tabernacle (for safe storage of Communion elements) and (baptismal) font and (where) for an altar, clods of earth were used,” says Frederick Chabot in “San Antonio and Its Beginnings, 1691-1731.”
The settlers moved on to use the church at Mission San Antonio de Valero (now the Alamo), established in 1718 and intended for the conversion of Native Americans. The islanders were assigned a parish priest by the Diocese of Guadalajara, but without a parish church, Father Jose de la Garza had to grant
permission to a mission friar to perform the community’s first baptism Aug. 31, 1731.
The locals and the Spanish government were in a standoff, each hoping the other would come up with the funds for a church for the village of San Fernando.
The Governor General of
Texas issued a proclamation Feb. 17, 1738, citing the crumminess (“no ornaments requisite for decorum in the administration of the sacraments”) of the military chapel, resolved that a parish church should be erected, dedicated to the Virgin of Candelaria and Guadalupe, patroness of the Canary Islands.
The governor got the ball rolling with the largest cash donation on the list, which would include gifts in kind, such as yearling bulls, cartloads of stones and quantities of corn. Even with help from the presidio, it wasn’t enough to buy all the materials, and a sizable contribution finally was made from the royal treasury.
The cornerstone was laid May 11, and it would take another 11 years, more government funding and an exasperated work order to everyone in the village to help finish the church — all stone, with a dome — before it was completed. By far the grandest building in the area, the church was named San Fernando after the Spanish King Ferdinand III and was blessed Nov. 6, 1749.
San Fernando was at first the
only church — and for decades the only Catholic church — in what became San Antonio. It’s still the oldest standing church in Texas and has seen a lot of history.
Mexican Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna used it as a lookout during the 1835 Siege of Bexar, the first major battle of the Texas Revolution, and flew a red flag that meant “no mercy” to the Texians. Well-known couples got married there, including Alamo defender James Bowie and Ursula Veramendi as well as Judge Roy Bean and Virginia Chaves. The church founded a cemetery, San Fernando No. 1, in 1840, where two signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence — Jose Antonio Navarro and Jose Francisco Ruiz — were buried. San Fernando installed the first pipe organ in the city in 1884, and was visited in 1987 by Pope John Paul II.
The church became a cathedral in 1874 when the Diocese of San Antonio was formed. It has been renovated several times, most notably in 1868 by architect/Mayor Francois Giraud, whose design enlarged it and made its façade the Gothic Revival landmark it is today, with the walls of the sanctuary denoting the original worship space. An award-winning 2003 renovation helped stabilize the building and added a community center to extend the cathedral’s services to parishioners and visitors.
Distances in or around San
Antonio are traditionally counted from the dome of San Fernando. The Zero Milestone Marker, a 5-ton boulder marking the approximate midpoint of the Old Spanish Trail on the grounds of City Hall, still pays tribute to San Antonio’s Spanish Colonial origins and to its historic center. Texas Gov. Pat Neff, who presided over the March 24, 1924, dedication of the 5-ton granite “measuring marker,” describes it as “within the shadow of the ageold San Fernando Cathedral, whose uplifted iron cross has always been used as the beginning point for land surveys and … represents the geographical center of the Alamo City.”
The Canary Islanders, soon joined in San Antonio by other Spaniards, Anglo Americans, Mexicans, Germans and people from all the world, assimilated quickly. San Fernando doesn’t keep records of descendants who are current parishioners, and many probably don’t even know of their connection to this tough little group of city builders.
One who does is Stewart
Skloss of Fredericksburg, who calls himself “fortunate to trace my family history back” to the Goras and Curbelo families. Juan Curbelo and his wife, Gracia Umpierres, were his ninth greatgrandparents. Working with a professional genealogist, he discovered he was also descended from John W. Smith, another Curbelo descendant who was mayor of San Antonio during the Republic of Texas and after statehood.
After Skloss and his wife, Kaitlyn Skloss, welcomed their second child, Mae, on Aug. 9, 2021, they made the decision to return to those deep roots for her baptism. (Elder daughter Ella was baptized in Houston.)
For the Rev. Carlos Velazquez, rector of the cathedral since last summer, performing the sacrament for a young descendant of a long-ago founder was a first. For baby Mae, it could be the start of a lifelong tie to the church at the heart of the city that grew up around it.
For those who would like to explore their heritage, the Canary Islands Descendants Association is a lineage society whose members trace their family history to the original Canary Islands families in San Antonio. For information about activities and membership, visit https://cida-sa.org.