WAS NAVARRO A TRUE-BLUE TEXAN, OR A DUPE OF ANGLO FILIBUSTERS?

Lonestar Receipts

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

Fifty-nine men signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. Only two of them were actually born in Texas.

José Antonio Navarro was one of them.

Born in San Antonio on February 27, 1795, Navarro came into a world where his city had already changed hands multiple times and would keep changing. During his lifetime, Texas lived under six different governments — a Spanish colony, a Mexican state, an independent republic, an American state, a Confederate state, and then an American state again. Through every single one of them, Navarro stayed. He was Texas. Texas was him. 

He taught himself law. Built himself into a successful merchant and rancher. Became a trusted ally of Stephen F. Austin. And when the moment came to choose between safety and principle, he walked to Washington-on-the-Brazos and put his name on a document that was, if the Revolution failed, a death warrant.

Of all 59 signers of the Declaration of Independence, Navarro and his uncle José Francisco Ruiz were the only men born in Texas. They had the deepest roots, the most to lose, and nowhere to run. Surviving Anglos could potentially return to the United States if the war was lost. For Navarro and the other Tejano signers, there was nowhere to go.

He signed anyway.

He was the only man to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the Republic of Texas, and the Constitution of the State of Texas. Three founding documents. One Tejano from San Antonio who was there for all of it. 

But the story doesn't stop at independence. In 1841, Navarro joined the ill-fated Santa Fe Expedition. It was a disaster. He was captured, put on trial, sentenced to death, and imprisoned for years in the most dreaded prison in Veracruz — a place known as a prison of living death. 

His captors gave him a way out. Denounce Texas. Swear loyalty to Mexico. Walk free.

He refused. He told them: "I have sworn to be a free Texan, and I shall never forswear." 

Those words are carved into the entrance wall of the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin today.

He eventually escaped, made his way back to Texas, and was received as a hero. He served in the Texas Congress. He was the sole Tejano delegate to the Convention of 1845 that brought Texas into the United States. He spent the rest of his life fighting for the rights of Tejanos in a Republic and then a State that didn't always want to honor them.

When he died, the editor of a local newspaper wrote: "To none of her greatest statesmen nor to her many eminent patriots is Texas more indebted for her existence than to José Antonio Navarro." 

Navarro County bears his name. So does a street in downtown San Antonio, a school, and a state historic site at the home where he lived and died. His descendants still gather every year to celebrate his birthday.

He was born Texan before Texas existed. He signed it into existence. He bled for it in a Mexican prison. And he never once considered being anything else.