Tuesday, August 15, 2000

Padre Ballí's mother was the first cattle queen

The first cattle queen of Texas was none other than Rosa María Hinojosa de Ballí, mother of Padre José Nicolás Ballí, the secular priest who owned the island that today honors his memory - Padre Island.
   Rosa María's accomplishments and legacy contradict a stereotype that has overshadowed the role women played in shaping Nuevo Santander, the area from the Nueces River to northern Mexico, says Andrés Tijerina, associate professor of history at Austin Community College.
   "Rosa María was no brainless señorita dancing with a mantilla," Tijerina notes. "The Spanish and Mexican system was the politics of family lands, and she knew how to play that very well."
   But Rosa María was not the exception.
   "It was common for the largest landowning ranchers to be women," said Tijerina, explaining that many women outlived their husbands and went on to oversee the vaqueros' running of the ranchos. These same women were also the driving force behind the first churches and schools built in New Spain.
   Rosa María, born in 1752 in Tamaulipas, Mexico, was the daughter of Juan José de Hinojosa and María Antonia Inés Ballí de Benavides. As pobladores primitivos, or first pioneers, Rosa María's parents, along with soldiers who staked out the region, were among the families given the largest land grants from the Spanish crown.
   From her father, a military captain from Reynosa, and her late husband, a Nuevo Santander pioneer, Rosa María inherited land along the Rio Grande. As was the custom in Spain, Rosa María encouraged her children and family members to use strategic marriages to accumulate land in the New World.
   "She was the brains behind the consolidation of several land grants and families, which included Hinojosa, Cavazos, Ballí, Villarreal and Fernandez," Tijerina said. "That was the common practice in Spain."
   The land accommodated the family's growing herds of cattle and mules, driven south to markets in northern Mexico that fed into the bustling silver economy of the time. Rosa María's shrewd business venture proved groundbreaking, for it was the foundation of a ranching economy that fueled the growth of ranchos. From these came the cattle drives that decades later would go north.
   As was the custom of her Mediterranean ancestors, Rosa María, had several homes in the country or ranchos. Rosa María, however, spent the bulk of her time in her homestead in Reynosa "taking care of business, cementing the family" and keeping abreast of Nuevo Santander politics, Tijerina said.
   At the time of her death in 1803, Rosa María's family owned more than a million acres of South Texas country, which extended over present-day Kenedy, Hidalgo, Starr, Willacy and Cameron counties, according to Dr. Clotilde P. Garcia, founder of the Spanish American Genealogical Society.