State acknowledging Pajalate language’s role in Bexar’s history

Historical markers, like history books, don’t acknowledge the whole of history.

So much that’s important gets left out. Too much.

Bexar County will chip away at that when a new Texas historical marker is erected in Padre Park near Mission San José.

It may be installed in 2023, earlier if work progresses quickly, though a spot for it hasn’t been decided. The exact wording has yet to be approved.

The marker will acknowledge a Native American language spoken in this area thousands of years before the Spanish arrived. Pajalate, pronounced pa-ha-lat, was the common language of the Coahuiltecan peoples.

The Old River Heritage Group, a loosely knit group of neighbors near the mission, did the legwork to get an application in front of the Texas Historical Commission last November.

At its last meeting in February, the commission approved the marker along with 14 others statewide in its Undertold Markers Program. It looks for historical gaps and underrepresented people, places and stories.

Documents submitted to the THC say Pajalate is considered the “only surviving language of what once were dozens and possibly hundreds of languages and dialects spoken by the indigenous Coahuiltecan and other peoples in the region that today includes San Antonio and Bexar County.”

Groups of Coahuiltecans lived in an expansive area encompassing northeastern Mexico and South Texas.

Their descendants, perhaps more than 100,000, remain among us. Some know of their ancestral heritage and others are unaware of it, said Mickey Killian, a founder and elder of the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation, who’s on the

Bexar County Historical Commission and advised the Old River Heritage Group.

Pajalate wasn’t a written language but was considered the lingua franca, or common language, used by Coahuiltecan groups.

It’s being studied in San Antonio. Tap Pilam’s language preservation project has been teaching Pajalate for years, especially to children, and using it in ceremonial songs and prayers. Tap Pilam translates to “people of the earth” in Pajalate.

Its language director Miguel Acosta has studied at the University of Arizona under linguist Rudolph Troike, a Brownsville native considered a leading expert of Pajalate, said Ramón Vásquez, executive director of Tap Pilam’s nonprofit advocacy agency American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions.

“It’s a fascinating language,” Vásquez said, noting that it’s considered a “language isolate,” thus unrelated to any other known language.

The THC application made note of this as well. “This means Pajalate is an ancient language, developed and spoken for probably thousands of years before the Spanish arrived.”

That it was the lingua franca also means Coahuiltecans were at least bilingual, engaging in multiple dialects, especially in trade and commerce, Vásquez said.

Recognizing a language in a visual manner can be difficult. Historical markers, by nature, point to architectural structures, or a specific site or event.

Virginia Rutledge, a member of the Old River Heritage Group, said “our pitch included the fact that we don’t have or need any particular place, because the Coahuiltecans inhabited all of this place.”

The Spanish used the language for about 50 years to evangelize, printing bilingual documents about Catholic sacraments in Spanish and Pajalate in Mexico City in 1760, she said. But shortly thereafter, “historical records show the church administration ordering suppression of indigenous languages.”

In 1732, another document handwritten by Fray Gabriel de Vergara contained a Spanishpajalate glossary.

When the historical marker project came before the Bexar County Historical Commission last fall, it got a unanimous endorsement.

In a prepared statement, Chairman Tim Draves celebrated the news, saying Bexar County will have the state’s only marker about a language.

He said, “No community in Texas has a more fascinating cultural heritage than Bexar County.” Agreed.

But a city that uses cultural heritage and diversity to sell itself to tourists hasn’t done enough, not nearly.

It has yet to properly acknowledge it’s on indigenous land.

The city’s 10-day Fiesta showed us that in more than 100 years, San Antonio has failed to desegregate and extricate itself from an anti-mexican past.

This historical marker is one more step toward harder, loftier goals.

Big leaps are critical, but so are smaller ones, as is supporting Tap Pilam’s ongoing work, which is funded in part by its annual Cactus Blossom Mission Heritage Dinner on May 21.