Postcard from the Coker Settlement: Book-birthing Celebration

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Photos accompanying September 8, 2019, book review by Ed Conroy, San Antonio Express-News

Spencer has done a masterful job of sifting through a mass of cemetery and other records, finding the threads of family stories, which she has woven together with great care. They reflect the triumphs and travails of the early settlers and their descendants in what was without doubt, at first, a very tough territory….

What makes this book of exceptional interest for anyone with a deep love for and interest in Texas history is the way Spencer relates the family sagas of the early settlers within the larger dynamics of settlement and colonization in early Mexican Texas and after the Texas Revolution.

We learn in detail of the great challenges faced by empresarios Stephen F. Austin, Henri Castro, Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels and John O. Meusebach. We learn as well of the settlers who were Mormons and their challenges in the face of intense prejudice in much of what was then the United States.

Most of all, we learn of the interrelatedness of all the families who made up the Coker Settlement, who overcame their cultural and national differences to become, in their own way, Texans and, in time, San Antonians. Spencer deserves considerable credit for the extraordinary amount of detail she provides about the lives of so many settlers, whom she lists at the end of each chapter.

Theirs is a very poignant history, for in time the Great Depression and new sanitation regulations did much to decimate the local dairy industry. Land that was once dotted with dairy farms and their hardworking owners was sold and cleared for tract home developments, schools, the new San Antonio International Airport and malls — and the early settlers were forgotten.

Thanks to Spencer, though, their stories are now well recovered and hopefully will live on for generations to come.

Ed Conroy, San Antonio Express-News, September 8, 2019

Thanks to Ed Conroy for making time to review Haunting the Graveyard: Unearthing the Story of the Coker Settlement.

Please try to join us for the celebration of the publication from 5 to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, September 10, 2019, at The Twig Book Shop at Pearl.

Postcard from Cordoba, Spain: Strolling through 80 years of photographs on the way to lunch

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images from “50 Fotografias con Historia,” XVI Bienal de Fotografia de Cordoba

Fifty images providing a glimpse of the past 80 years of the history of photography in Spain stretched out along Paseo de la Victoria earlier this year, flavorful tapas for us on the way to Mercado Victoria.

The large photographs were assembled for the XVI Bienal de Fotografia de Cordoba. Rather than try to show you snapshots of photographers’ famous works, I grabbed a few details caught in passing between panels. There are a few whole images on the website, including my favorite of the flying seminarian playing soccer taken by Ramon Masats in Madrid in 1959.

Mil Sabores, Mercado Victoria
Right: detail of “Guardias de asalto en el carrer de la Ciputacio,” Agusti Centelles, 1936
pastries, Bocasito Andalusi, Mercado Victoria
falafel, Bocaito Andalusi, Mercado Victoria
padron chiles, O’Pulpino, Mercado Victoria
tosta de cecina with brie and tosta de salmon with goat cheese, La Queseria, Mercado Victoria
smoked tuna tost and matrimonial tost pairing an anchovy and a sardine, Mercado Victoria
Left: detail of “Fidel Castro,” Enrique Meneses, 1958. Right: detail of “La Nina Blanca,” Carlos Perez Siquier, 1958.
olives, Mercado Victoria
Left: detail of “Wannabe,” Elisa Gonzalez Miralles, 2017
tortillitas de camarones, La Pescadoteca, Mercado Victoria
Mercado Victoria
Right: detail of “The Beatles,” Joana Biarnes
tablas, Mercado Victoria
lamb and vegetable couscous, Bocaito Andulusi, Mercado Victoria
tempura battered queso de cabra with tomato marmelade, La Queseria, Mercado Victoria

We wandered among the photographs twice as we made our way to pick out lunch from among the 30 stalls housed in Mercado Victoria. Cordobese delicacies and international dishes are found in the culinary market that opened in 2013 in a wrought-iron and glass zinc-roofed pavilion dating from 1877.

Normally we tend to find food halls of this type too touristy, but Mercado Victoria has the advantage of being removed from the main tourist zone around La Mezquita. Most customers were locals on their lunch hours, and tables were abundant. And with real plates and wine glasses, lunch there was pretty civilized.

Apologies for scrambling up culinary and photographic art, but for us they were a shared experience.

Postcard from Cordoba, Spain: Mezquita Catedral

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The Cathedral of Cordoba is dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption, yet even the city’s Catholics tend to refer to it simply as La Mezquita, the Mosque.

A Roman temple once stood on this site, but it was torn down with its building materials recycled for construction of a Visigoth church. The Moorish conquest in the 8th century resulted in another teardown and recycling of materials, particularly columns.

Cordoba became the headquarters of the independent Caliphate in Spain, and a golden age of construction burst forth to create a capital to rival the splendor of Damascus and Constantinople. This meant the mosque must be enormous.

The interior boasts approximately 850 granite jasper and marble columns. As the handsome columns were too short to attain the desired height, the arches they supported were topped with a second tier of arches, all in a striking pattern alternating red brick and white stone. A shell-shaped ceiling carved from one block of marble crowns the gilded Mihrab, the original center for prayer, at the heart of the Mezquita.

King Ferdinand III (1199-1252) reclaimed Cordoba from the Moorish rulers in 1236, and the mosque immediately was consecrated as a Christian place of worship. The original Gothic altar inserted in the middle of the former mosque was expanded and modified to reflect later and Renaissance and Baroque styles. The architectural encasement of the original minaret masks its origins. A full Renaissance nave popped up above the existing roofline during the reign of King Charles V (1500-1558). Some say the king was displeased with the resulting intrusive architectural assault upon the stunning structure.

Lawrence Boheme offers a tale involving a 1,000-mile round trip for the bells of Santiago de Compostela to symbolize the historical rivalry between the Spain’s Christians and Muslims at this site:

At the height of Muslim power, during the Omega Caliphate at the end of the 10th century, the fearsome warlord Al-Mansur led a bloody raid through northern Spain, going as far into Christian territory as Santiago de Compostela. On the loose in the great pilgrims’ city, the Moor had the audacity of riding his horse into the cathedral and letting it drink from the font of holy water, outraging the Christian townsfolk; then, even more insultingly, he had the church’s bells carried 500 miles south to Cordoba, where they were melted down to make lamps to illuminate the Great Mosque.

When, two and a half centuries later, in 1236, the Castillian King Ferdinand the Third (“The Saint”) reconquered Cordoba, his first action, to avenge the humiliation caused by Al-Mansur, was to have the lamps carried back to the shrine of Saint James, where they were melted down to make a new set of bells.