Copyright 1996: Christopher K. Egan

(First presented at the 1996 Rio Bravo Conference on Texas/Mexico relations.)

Walking around San Antonio's San Fernando Cathedral, we discover a building with two very different characters, two different architectures. To the east we find an ashlar stone building reminiscent of French Gothic architecture. To the west we find a stuccoed stone apse reminiscent of the adobe churches of Sonora or New Mexico. San Fernando is only one building, but it raises questions which resonate across the region we call la frontera. Why isn't all architecture the same? Why would two buildings be different if they are built in the same place? Why would two parts of the same building be built so differently? These questions can be consolidated into one question: what forces are at work which give form to what we build?

Such questions are usually addressed by focusing on the physical characteristics of a particular region. It is obvious, for instance, that climate affects the form of architecture, so that a building designed for New England winters must be different from one designed for South Texas summers. Availability of building materials also shapes architecture, so that builders surrounded by the tall straight trees of New England would produce different forms than the builder surrounded by the scrub oak, mesquite, and caliches of South Texas. However, if physical forces of materiality and environment were the primary determinants of architectural form, then all the buildings of a particular region would be similar in form. San Fernando reminds us that, when we consider how people actually build, we find there is another force at work, a force whose influence over architectural form is much more profound than the merely physical influence of climate or materiality.

This paper suggests that the fundamental determinant of architectural form is cultural memory.¹ The focus is southern Texas and northern Mexico, a region divided and united by a river called Rio Grande by Texans and Rio Bravo del Norte by Mexicans. We will see that architecture in the Rio Bravo region is shaped by its cultural character as frontera, a word with double meanings as both "frontier" and "border". La frontera is a place on the edge of other cultures, a frontier distant from the centers of culture, but also a border where cultures meet. La frontera is a place where different cultures have brought with them different memories of place and architecture.

Culture: Memory of Human Past and Context for Human Future

What is culture and why does it play such a formative role in the making of architecture? In his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures, anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote, "Believing...that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs."² Psychologist Jerome Bruner expanded on this in his 1989 Harvard-Jerusalem lectures: "...culture and the quest for meaning within culture are the proper causes of human action. The biological substrate, the so-called universals of human nature, is not a cause of action but, at most, a constraint upon it or a condition for it."³ Geertz and Bruner dispel a central myth of the Enlightenment, that there is a single human nature rooted in biological uniformity, and that culture is simply a localized overlay. Both Geertz and Bruner make it clear that culture shapes humans. Culture is one aspect of the human species' complex evolutionary mechanisms for survival and development, and is closely rooted to our essential character. At birth, the human is incapable of survival without the care and nurturing of fellow humans. Even the physiological form of the human brain is unfinished at birth. We are born with the potential for thought patterns, as the brain contains a rich multitude of possible neural pathways. During childhood, those neural pathways which we use regularly are strengthened and developed, while those pathways not used atrophy. The experiences which form our minds are experiences of culture: interpersonal relationships, values, patterns of behavior, and most importantly, language.⁴ Anthropologists Ernest Schusky and Patrick Culbert describe the process in this way: "As we come naked and squalling into the world, we do so without culture. But we have a very important capacity to learn culture that has been built into our species by the process of evolution, and we have a need for culture for our very survival. The process of enculturation, being taught a culture, begins instantly."⁵ Geertz and Bruner have argued that there is no human nature outside of culture. The cultural tool of language, which is the ground for thought, enables others of our species to share with us the information and insights which they have learned, and the cultural tools of family structure and division of labor provide the foundation for our sense of self. In his description of human evolution, Geertz observed, "What this means is that culture, rather than being added on, so to speak, to a finished or virtually finished animal, was ingredient, and centrally ingredient, in the production of the animal itself."⁶ He concluded that, "We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture - and not through culture in general but through highly particular forms of it."⁷ Through culture we define ourselves as human; through culture we preserve and add to memory; through culture we shape our minds and create the armature for thought in language.

Culture and Architecture in South Texas

How does culture shape architecture? Architecture is the shaping and ordering of physical space, the spaces in which we enact life. If culture shapes the patterns of human interaction, then the spaces we build to house those patterns must also be the product of culture. Culture is closely tied to memory, as the repository of shared experience and the established context for new thought. As a product of culture, architecture is equally tied to memory. Venetian architect Aldo Rossi has written: "One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory...."⁸

Culture plays a profound role in architecture, but this role is often misunderstood. The confusion can be traced to the assumption held by many that architecture is primarily a technical field, related to engineering and construction technology. In fact the technical aspects of architecture are relatively simple. In 1979 Cesar Pelli, a leading practitioner and former dean of the Yale School of Architecture, observed that, although contemporary buildings often look high-tech, the process of building is surprisingly low-tech, being an on-site arrangement of elements, assembled in the mud by workers using tools.⁹ Robert Maxwell reminds us that no more than ten percent of the discourse of architectural experiment can be addressed through technology, and that the most important questions of architecture are those of character, social patterns, and values, all of which are cultural in nature.¹⁰ Culture determines the allocation of land, the decision of what, how and where to build. Culture determines the arrangement and use of public space, or the absence of public space. Culture determines the forms we honor, those we reject, and those we wish to emulate. The role of cultural memory is obvious when architects borrow remembered forms, but cultural memory also shapes innovation, by establishing through language and precedent the theoretical framework for critique and experimentation.

If cultural memory shapes architecture, what cultures have shaped the architecture of northern Mexico and southern Texas? Our shared cultural legacies are too complex to discuss in one paper, but two fragments may prove useful.¹¹ The first fragment comes from Sandra Cisneros' short story "Woman Hollering Creek," which tells the story of a young woman from Monclova, Coahuila, who has married a Tejano, and moved to his home in Seguin, Texas, on the banks of Arroyo La Gritona, Woman Hollering Creek.

"Sometimes she thinks of her father's house [in Monclova]....The town of gossips. The town of dust and despair. Which she had traded for this town of gossips. This town of dust and despair. Houses farther apart perhaps, but no more privacy because of it. No leafy zocalo in the center of the town, though the murmur of talk is clear enough all the same. No huddled whispering on the church steps each Sunday. Because here the whispering begins at sunset at the icehouse instead."¹²

The second fragment comes from an article by anthropologist Michaele Thurgood Haynes, as she describes the coronation of queens of Fiesta San Antonio:

"In 1909 John Carrington gathered a small group of his friends to form the nucleus of the Order of the Alamo, a private men's social club whose sole purpose was to elect a queen crowned in an elaborate coronation and to sponsor accompanying social events. A romantic and would-be writer, Carrington was apparently influenced by his family's English ancestry and landed-gentry Virginia background in creating the Order of the Alamo, and the Coronations are modeled on the English court and its aristocracy."¹³

In each of these fragments, someone is clinging wistfully to a memory brought to South Texas from another place, whether that place is English Virginia or Mexican Monclova. In each case, culture in la region frontera has been imported as memory from many places. More significantly, culture in la frontera has been carried like a precious heirloom, a carefully treasured reminder of a more civilized life far from this frontier on the edge of the settled world. Unlike the central plateau of Mexico, or the Anasazi homelands farther west, or the Mississippian cultures farther east, the Rio Bravo region had no indigenous formal architecture, no cultural memory of building beyond the barest shelter. Describing the cultures of pre-contact South Texas and Northern Mexico, anthropologist W. W. Newcomb wrote: "This region has been traditionally thought of by anthropologists as a 'cultural sink', apparently because so little was known about its original residents and because the cultures of the area were backward and 'low' (meaning nonagricultural) as compared to relatively 'high' (agricultural)."¹⁴ Historian Lino Gomez Canedo wrote that, in the 1690s Texas was "a land so bad that nobody would want it."¹⁵ And yet Spain needed settlements to deter French incursions, and to establish them it drew from many sources. In eighteenth century San Antonio alone we find immigrants from Corsica, Castile, the Canary Islands, Monclova, as well as Franciscans from Queretaro and Zacatecas, and mission Indians from many tribes throughout Texas and Mexico. Later laws encouraged immigration by Anglo-Americans, primarily southern slave-owners, an immigration which produced the breakaway of Texas from Mexico. By the 1850s la frontera attracted immigration from Europe and the United States, with a significant portion of Germans escaping political turmoil at home.¹⁶ There is however, one unifying characteristic in the cultural memories of all these immigrants, a sense of distance, isolation, and detachment from the source culture, a condition to be expected of a region called in every language "the frontier, la frontera." Because this was a frontier, because there was no local culture of building, those who have built here have built according to the patterns of their homelands, the sources of their own cultural memory.

In a region characterized by many cultures we would expect to find many architectures. An example may be found in Kingsville, Texas. Kingsville lies just southwest of Corpus Christi, in the grazing lands which cover ambos lados de la frontera, both sides of the border. South of the Rio Nueces, it is deep in the most traditionally Hispanic region of Texas. Kingsville exists because of the nearby King Ranch, assembled during the 19th century by Protestant Anglo settlers.¹⁷ On the west side of town, not far from the ranch gate, is a neighborhood of modest homes on suburban lots. What makes these houses interesting to us is the cultural memories they suggest. Here in the hot landscape south of the Nueces, in the home of los vaqueros, we might expect to find variations of the jacal, or perhaps caliche-block houses like those spread across Coahuila, Tamaulipas, and Nuevo Leon. In this neighborhood, however, we find bungalows which seem to have been transplanted from England, a place as unlike South Texas as one can find. When the builders borrowed English house forms, it was not because these forms somehow responded to the climate or materiality of life in South Texas, but because they were building for inhabitants whose memories were of an anglophile culture. Demands of cultural memory were even stronger than the extreme demands of place. The King family had set the pattern, of an Anglo-American culture whose memory was rooted in the former English colonies of the United States east coast. The Kings maintained homes in St. Louis, then the farthest outpost of Anglo-American culture, and sent their children east for education in that culture.¹⁸ While the ranch hands shared a Hispanic cultural memory deeply rooted in the landscape, the newly dominant culture of Anglo ranch managers built homes in the image of the cultures they had left behind.

Culture and Materials: San Antonio

In 1918 Chicago architect Louis Sullivan wrote that, "...the materials of a building are but the elements of the earth removed from the matrix of nature, and reorganized and reshaped by force; by force mechanical, muscular, mental, emotional, moral, and spiritual."¹⁹ If Sullivan had included "force cultural," his statement might have been complete. Culture determines not only the form of buildings and public space, but also the materials employed in building, and how those materials are used.

In 1857, New York landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead described his journeys in Texas. His description of entering San Antonio from the north reveals the complex cultural memories in the region we call la frontera:

"The singular composite character of the town is palpable at the entrance. For five minutes the houses were evidently German, of fresh square-cut blocks of creamy-white limestone, mostly of a single story and humble proportions, but neat, and thoroughly roofed and finished....

From these we enter the square of the Alamo. This is all Mexican. Windowless cabins of stakes, plastered with mud and roofed with river-grass, or 'tula;' or low, windowless, but better thatched, houses of adobes (gray, unburnt bricks)....

From the bridge we enter Commerce street, the narrow principal thoroughfare, and here are American houses, and the triple nationalities break out into the most amusing display, till we reach the main plaza.... The signs are German by all odds, and perhaps the houses, trim-built, with pink window-blinds. The American dwellings stand back, with galleries and jalousies and a garden picket-fence against the walk, or rise, next door, in three-story brick to respectable city fronts. The Mexican buildings are stronger than those we saw before, but still of all sorts,....They are all low, of adobe or stone, washed blue and yellow, with flat roofs close down upon their single story.... Around the plaza are American hotels, and new glass-fronted stores, alternating with sturdy battlemented Spanish walls, and confronted by the dirty, grim, old stuccoed stone cathedral...."²⁰

Local materials present possibilities for building, but it is culture that shapes what we build with those materials. In and around San Antonio, there is an abundance of easily shaped limestone, a vast supply of clay for making bricks, but a limited supply of timber. The Spanish who first built in San Antonio dreamed of cities in Spain and Mexico, where stone buildings signified importance and grandeur. For them the abundance of stone was culturally desirable; but skilled masons were rare at the frontier edge of Texas. In a 1778 report to the Spanish Viceroy in Mexico City, Fr. Morfi complained that San Antonio "consists of fifty-nine houses of stone and mud and seventy-nine of wood, but all poorly built...the whole resembles more a poor village than a villa."²¹ Although the Franciscans and the local colonists envisioned a grand stone city like those of Queretaro and Zacatecas, distance and royal disinterest prevented major investment. Stone carving was typically limited to door and window surrounds because, as UTSA art historian Jacinto Quirarte wrote, "The expense of having architectural sculpture as well as the lack of capable craftsmen made it difficult if not impossible to have such sculpture in the mission fields."²²

Nineteenth century immigrants brought new cultural memories. Like the Spanish, French and German settlers arrived from lands in which stone buildings signified public importance; but most Anglo-American settlers arrived from heavily forested regions where the carpenter or the bricklayer were more common than the stonemason. The new settlers built with stone only because it was available; rather than considering stone a symbol of refinement the Anglo-Americans considered it rough and native. Instead they aspired to the wood and brick homes of their cultural memory. UTSA archaeologist Anne Fox noted that they used stone during the 1840s "since timber had to be hauled by wagon from East Texas or the coast and was too expensive to use other than as roof framing and flooring."²³ After 1877, when the first railroad connected San Antonio to heavily timbered East Texas, stone was set aside in favor of wood and brick. "Shipments of lumber could now be economically obtained. Lumber yards opened and frame houses became fashionable."²⁴ UT-Austin architect and historian Blake Alexander writes that, after the railroad, San Antonians "...could employ the same architectural styles as those current in New York, Memphis, St. Louis, and New Orleans."²⁵ It is significant that after 1877, the cultural construct of the railroad provided the means by which local materials ceased to be a determinant of architectural form. Realities of place no longer prevented builders from reconstructing distant cultural memories.

Some non-Hispanic builders used the same stone as their Spanish predecessors, but they used it to evoke a new set of cultural memories. American-born but French-trained architect Francis Giraud used stone to evoke the French Gothic.²⁶ Prussian-trained John Kampmann used stone to evoke "fine Teutonic craftsmanship";²⁷ and around 1900, "The appearance of Beaux-Arts Classicism was matched by examples of styles labeled Colonial, California, English Tudor, Modified Gothic, Sullivanesque."²⁸

This brings us back to the question which began this paper, the question of San Antonio’s San Fernando Cathedral. In the eighteenth century a church was built in the Villa de San Fernando de Bejar, a settlement of Canary Islanders transplanted by the King of Spain. It was built in a manner typical of churches on the mission frontier of New Spain: simple bold forms, dominated by a round dome, made from stuccoed stone with limited ornamental carvings where conditions might allow. In the nineteenth century the nave of this old Spanish church burned down. When it was rebuilt, however, a new set of cultural memories were brought to the task. Political and Episcopal ties to Mexico had been broken by war; priests were no longer sent from Zacatecas to serve the local Catholic population; now they arrived from France or French-inspired St. Louis and New Orleans, so that the new nave was built by Giraud in a frontier image of Alsatian French Gothic. Carefully cut stones replaced rougher stone walls, because in the French style stones were not meant to be stuccoed. Where the Spanish had built a round barrel vault with small high windows, we find ribbed pointed arches and large stained glass openings. Where the Spanish had used simple austere massing, designed to receive painted ornament, we find the buttresses, quoins, and string courses of a French country church. There is a deep historical irony in the fact that San Antonio, a city built by Spain to resist French incursion, would later find its center dominated by a church built in the image of France, not of Spain. The architectural heart of the city had been changed, not through changes of climate or materiality, but through changes in cultural memory.

Conclusion: Culture, Memory, and Architecture of la frontera

We have seen that the memory of culture gives form to what we build, and that different cultures will build differently in the same locale. However, it would be misleading to impose simplistic distinctions among the many layers of cultural memory found in la frontera. Clifford Geertz reminds us that, while culture exists in the complex and shifting realm of human behavior, the systematic classifications so beloved of scholars exist only, "...in the book, the article, the lecture, the museum display."²⁹ He further cautions that we must, "...descend into detail, past the misleading tags, past the metaphysical types, past the empty similarities to grasp firmly the essential character of not only the various cultures but the various sorts of individuals within each culture, if we wish to encounter humanity face to face."³⁰ It is important to remember that, as a tool of evolution, "culture is cumulative...culture is diverse...culture is constantly changing."³¹

The term la frontera has been used throughout this paper, because it is the key for understanding architecture in the South Texas/Northern Mexico region. The frontier condition creates two characteristics which affect how we build: absence of a pre-existing local building tradition, and the resultant necessity for all those who settled here to evoke memories of building from their source cultures. Because of this frontier condition and the response it necessitated, a diversity of building traditions has evolved in the same locale. The geography of place has left its mark, as the archetypal forms of each cultural memory have been transformed by scarcity of materials and an extreme climate. Because of the frontier condition, the memories built in la frontera are diluted memories, not necessarily impoverished, but changed by distance into abstractions of distant place. Because culture is adaptive, each built tradition has borrowed from the others, so that frontier variations from the cultural prototype form seeds of a new architecture of place. Today we find that a region which was once a "cultural sink" has for that very reason become a place rich with interwoven cultures. In la frontera we use the word conjunto for a music of interwoven cultural memories. Perhaps the word conjunto suggests an attitude which might give form to our cities and buildings. For on this frontier, each of our many cultures has carried with it a thread of human memory from its homeland. Now, by interweaving these many threads we can weave a new built fabric, an architecture of many voices, a cultural carpet rich and deep.