Five Myths about Corpus Christi

What U.S. state has the most tall tales and great American legends? Of course Texans would say Texas, with our colorful history full of personalities like Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie at the Alamo, but often myths and legends need the tempering of history to get to the truth. We asked Professor Alan Lessoff to draw from his new book Where Texas Meets the Sea: Corpus Christi and Its History to dispel some of the myths about Corpus Christi.

Five Myths about Corpus Christi
by Alan Lessoff, author of Where Texas Meets the Sea: Corpus Christi and Its History

I subtitled my book Corpus Christi and Its History because I was less interested in recounting the city in a narrative and detached way than I was in understanding the many

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ways that Corpus Christians write, talk, and argue about their history and how those varied perspectives shape the city now. Sophisticated historians know that their job is not merely to use facts to disprove myths, though one has to do that sometimes. Myths are themselves historical forces that require study, since they serve as vehicles through which people express their identity, values, and goals. Anyone who has taken a halfway decent sophomore humanities class knows that true stories take on mythic qualities when people wrap them in epic grandeur. Much of Corpus Christi’s significance to Texas history starts from its having been a place where Texas’s two largest true myths came against one another: the south-to-north Hispanic Texan epic of explorers and empresarios and the east-to-west Anglo Texan lore of the frontier, ranchers, rangers, and town boosters. Within the context of those two epics, numerous other stories have appeared, some of which veered into myths in the sense of misconceptions that need clearing up. Where Texas Meets the Sea treats each of these misconceptions respectfully, because they meant a lot to the people who adhered to them and revealed much about them and their city:

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Explorer Alonso Álvarez de Pineda named Corpus Christi Bay on Corpus Christi Day in 1519. This story, which one still sometimes finds in tourist publications, is believable only if one discards all normal rules of historical evidence. No written record of the Álvarez de Pineda expedition has survived. The first Spanish document that refers to the bay by name dates from the 1740s, and that document assigns it another name. The earliest documented use of “Corpus Christi Bay” dates from 1766, in connection to the colonizing expedition that finally set up a continuous Spanish presence in the vicinity. In a 2011 article, the Corpus Christi librarian and historian Herb Canales summarized the evidence pointing to the reasonable conclusion that someone in that 1760s expedition named the bay. On top of all that, before the 1920s, local accounts sometimes claimed that members of France’s ill-fated LaSalle expedition named the bay on Corpus Christi Day in 1685, a provenance only slightly more plausible than Álvarez de Pineda. As my book recounts, Anglo promoters, in keeping with the early twentieth-century fashion for Spanish colonial romance, spread the Álvarez de Pineda story in the 1920s and 1930s. Decades later, Hispanic heritage activists became the story’s guardians, in part as a vehicle for expressing ethnic pride and dramatizing Hispanics’ prior claim upon the region. In print—and on the Pineda monument in Westside Corpus Christi—supporters have usually been careful to label the story a “legend,” but through the 1990s, people would tell one in conversation that they believed it.