The Year of the Founding

Hear now what was done on the bank of the river — in the seventh month of seventeen thirty-one.
Fifty-six tired souls, off five hard islands, by way of an ocean and a thousand leagues of road, did the thing they had crossed the world to do: they founded a town. They drew its square in the dirt.
They named its saint — San Fernando. They swore a council, the first town government in all of Texas; and the King’s old promise, carried folded since the islands, against every odd the sea and the road had set, was kept.
And the harness-maker’s son — who in Garachico could have risen, his whole life, no higher than maestro, a good word, an honest word, a small and borrowed one — stood in that staked-out square and was made an officer: alguacil mayor, the King’s law set into his hand; and was named — in the old and formal Spanish of a cédula — hidalgo: a son of a known house. He had built the house himself.
But a town is a square drawn on top of a country.
The river had a name before San Fernando was its saint.
The Payaya had walked these banks while Spain was a rumour; and the walls the islanders raised, the ditches they would dig, would be paid for in a labor that was given under guard, on a land that had not, by its first people, been given at all.

All of that is true, and true together, and begins here: on this riverbank, this raw square, this stubborn founded place — a town eight days old under a wide Texas sky, and in a jacal at its edge, a man, a wife, a lamp, and a child not yet born who will inherit every word of it.