San Antonio Mission Indian Descendants

10/19/2026

🧬 The DNA Challenge Is Heating Up in San Antonio! 🎉
Remember when we shared the video on October 9th of District 3 Councilwoman Phyllis Viagran taking her DNA test? Well, the story doesn’t end there!

Councilwoman Viagran believes her DNA results may reveal connections to the residents of the San Antonio Missions during the Mission period. She should be receiving her results any day now, and we’re keeping our fingers crossed that she’ll share them with us! 🤞🧬

But here’s where things get interesting! After taking her test, Councilwoman Viagran challenged Texas State Representative John Lujan to take his own DNA test. And guess what? We recently had the opportunity to visit with Representative Lujan, and he gladly accepted the challenge! 🙌

Both Councilwoman Viagran and Representative Lujan had also submitted their responses through the QR code when it first launched in June, so they’ve been part of this journey from the beginning.

Now, we can’t wait to see what Representative Lujan’s DNA results reveal as well! 🔍

But wait… there’s more! 😎

Representative Lujan has passed the DNA challenge along to candidate Carlos de la Cruz!

So, Carlos… are you ready to take the test? 🧬👀

Will he accept the challenge? Who will be next? And what stories will their DNA reveal about San Antonio’s rich history?
Stay tuned, San Antonio! This DNA journey is getting more exciting by the day! 🎉

10/18/2026

✨ Calling All Handcrafters and Vendors! ✨

The San Antonio Mission Indian Descendants group is excited to host our 5th Annual Kristela Cortez-King Fry Bread Social & Holiday Market on November 14th, and we’re still looking for a few more talented handcrafters to join us!

If you create handmade crafts and would like to share your beautiful work with our community, we’d love to have you as a vendor! We still have a few vendor spots available.

To apply, simply scan the QR code on the flyer below to access the vendor application. Once completed, please email your application to:

📧 [email protected]

We look forward to welcoming new vendors and making this year’s event a wonderful celebration of community, culture, and creativity! ❤️

Thank you for your interest and support. We can’t wait to hear from you!

09/19/2026

A New Chapter in Reclaiming Our Story!
We are excited to announce the first training session for the “Find Your Roots, Claim Your Story” – Phase I Initiative, bringing together representatives from six of the nine universities who will be collaborating with us in this important work.

As a first step, these universities will assist us in identifying individuals who are descendants of the San Antonio Mission Indians who lived in the missions prior to their secularization. Together, we are beginning the important work of tracing ancestral connections, uncovering family histories, and bringing greater visibility to the descendants and communities whose stories are an essential part of San Antonio’s history.

This initiative represents more than research—it is an opportunity to reconnect families with their ancestral roots, reclaim stories that deserve to be remembered, and preserve this history for generations to come.

We are grateful to the universities and everyone contributing their knowledge, expertise, time, and commitment to this collaborative effort. This is just the beginning—and together, we are helping our community find its roots and claim its story.

07/24/2026

Standing as one!

We’re looking for 4–5 volunteers to help us prepare for an upcoming community event. Support is needed with:
• Cutting the grass
• Setting up canopies
• Arranging and preparing the inside of the food trailer
• Assisting with tipi setup

Volunteers would need to arrive by 7:00 AM on Thursday or Friday. Even a few hours of your time would make a meaningful difference and help us get everything ready for the community.

Interested in lending a hand?
Please send us a message for additional details or reach out to Alice at [email protected] (210) 823-9618.

We would be grateful for your support!

07/20/2026

Thanks to Jo Ann Rodriguez Betancourt for sharing this with us.

The Lipan Apache occupied the Texas Hill Country, the Edwards Plateau, and the South Texas brush country for centuries before European contact — a wide-ranging, highly mobile people who mastered one of the most geographically varied and ecologically demanding territories in North America with a thoroughness that successive waves of Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-Texan expansion spent generations failing to fully dislodge. 🌵⭐ The Lipan were the easternmost of the Apache peoples, separated from their western relatives by distance and distinct cultural adaptations, developing a way of life finely tuned to the specific limestone canyon country of the Texas Hill Country and the open brush of South Texas — terrain that rewarded exactly the combination of mobility, resourcefulness, and landscape knowledge that the Lipan had accumulated over centuries of living on it.

The Lipan Apache's relationship with the Spanish colonial presence in Texas was one of the most complex and shifting diplomatic relationships in the history of the region. 🔥 Facing pressure from the expanding Comanche Nation from the north — who pushed the Lipan steadily southward and eastward beginning in the early eighteenth century — the Lipan Apache sought alliance with Spanish Texas as a counterbalance to their more powerful rivals, a pragmatic calculation that produced a series of missions established specifically for the Lipan in the mid-eighteenth century. Mission San Saba, established in 1757 in present-day Menard County, was the most ambitious of these attempts — and its destruction by a massive Comanche and Wichita raiding force in 1758, which killed two Franciscan priests and drove the Spanish from the region, demonstrated the limits of what a Spanish-Lipan alliance could accomplish against Comanche military power.

The Lipan Apache were pushed steadily south and east across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the combined pressure of Comanche expansion, Spanish and Mexican military campaigns, and eventually Anglo-Texan settlement. 🌟 Small bands sought refuge in the Big Bend region and across the Rio Grande into Mexico, maintaining a presence in the border country long after their Hill Country homeland was beyond reach. The Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas — a state-recognized tribal organization working toward federal recognition — carries the cultural identity and historical memory of a people who held some of the most beautiful and most contested ground in Texas for centuries before the forces of the nineteenth century reduced them to a remnant. The limestone canyons of the Hill Country that the Lipan knew as home still look much as they did in the centuries of their occupation — beautiful, sheltered, and entirely capable of sustaining a people who know how to read them.

07/18/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Ft9eQjtYS/

07/04/2026

Happy 250th Birthday, America!
As we celebrate 250 years of our nation's history, we honor not only those who fought for independence, but also the many people whose support helped make that victory possible.

The San Antonio Mission Indians were among those who contributed to the American cause. Though they were not soldiers in the Revolutionary War, they supported the war effort. Their generosity, labor, and sacrifice are an often overlooked part of the story of American independence.

On this historic anniversary, we remember that the foundation of our nation was built through the efforts of many different communities. May we continue to honor their legacy and work together to build an even stronger future.

Happy 250th Birthday, America!