Editor’s note: This is another in an ongoing series of articles we call “Marking History” looking at the stories behind the hundreds of historic markers scattered about the Crossroads.
She fell in love with a dashing young captain in her father’s command, married him and helped finance their move to a frontier “drenched in blood.”
She brought “religion, schools, and an enriched social and cultural life to South Texas,” a land once thought uninhabitable, historian Teresa Paloma Acosta wrote.
She was among the first Texans, a Tejana, a wife, a mother and a pioneer. She was many things throughout the course of her life: first a devoted mother and grandmother, a patriot, an outcast, once one of the wealthiest women in the state — at another time stripped of her possessions.
She held sway over her four sons, as many Tejana mothers did, urging them not to possess firearms at a time when Texas was wrapped in a vicious uncertainty that saw military excursions of unusual cruelty.
Dona Patricia’s de Leon’s likeness will return to the plaza named for her family in April, 200 years after she and her aging captain husband founded the town of Victoria.
The statues of Martin and Patricia de Leon are nearing completion in Laredo. They will be placed in De Leon Plaza with much fanfare to mark the 200th anniversary of the founding.
Down the street, where St. Mary’s Catholic Church now stands, is where the De Leon home was located many years ago.
Across the street from the church, on the corner of Bridge and Church streets, a historic marker reads “This marker faces the site (across the street) of the home of Empresario Martin De Leon.” The home, though, was hers. Patricia, while subservient to her husband, ruled the family home.
She was nearing 50 years old when she and Martin founded Victoria. He was in his 60s. Patricia bore ten children within 20 years and had four sons and six sons-in-law and more than 20 grandchildren.
“The Tejana women like Dona Patricia made their own decisions and played an important role in family matters. Women may have remained subservient to their husbands, but they were never subservient to their sons or nephews or grandsons,” Ana Carolina Castillo Crimm wrote in “De Leon: A Tejano Family History.”
“Spanish and Mexican cultures gave their women the right to demand respect, obedience, and power within the family.”
Years earlier in 1795, 33-year-old Martin married 20-year-old Patricia de la Garza of Soto la Marina.
She was “born about 1775 on the east coast of Mexico not far from present-day Brownsville,” Acosta wrote in “Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History,” on hand at the Victoria Regional History Center.
She was born into a wealthy family, but “on the frontier, the number of appropriate suitors was slim for someone of the landed aristocracy such as the de la Garza family.”
Martin, though Spanish, was not born in Spain, and was not wealthy; however, he had risen in the army to the rank of captain, the highest rank someone not born in Spain could achieve.
“He was not wealthy, but he was hardworking, and with the potential for a successful military career, he was still a promising prospect for the twenty-year-old Patricia,” Crimm wrote. “With the family’s approval, the self-confident and dynamic captain courted and won her hand.”
From her father, Patricia received 49 animals to start a ranch, a common dowry on the frontier. But from her Godfather Don Angel Perez of Soto la Marina, she received 9,800 pesos, a rich sum.
The money would always be legally hers “although Martin could administer the dowry and invest it for profit,” Crimm wrote.
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