Abstract
This thesis centers the lived experiences and oral histories of San Antonio Mission descendants, focusing on how identity is understood, negotiated, and carried across generations. Through interviews and community engagement, this project examines how descendants understand themselves in relation to missionization, Mexican and Mexican American identity, federal recognition, and narratives that have framed Coahuiltecan peoples as extinct. It also considers how whiteness operates as a racial structure that shapes how descendants are taught to understand themselves, their ancestry, and their place in Texas history. Rather than treating identity as fixed, this thesis approaches it as something shaped by memory, lived experience, inherited stories, and colonial systems that continue to define Indigenous communities from the outside.
Although rooted in oral history, this project is guided by Intergenerational Identity Theory, first theorized by Rudy De la Cruz of AITSCM and further developed in this thesis. This framework helps explain how identity is passed down not only through explicit cultural knowledge but also through silence, survival strategies, family memory, and everyday understandings of the self. This thesis argues that San Antonio Mission descendant identity is not simply inherited or imposed, but continually worked through across generations. By centering descendant voices, this project shows how the lasting effects of colonialism remain present while also highlighting healing, reclamation, and self-definition as ongoing forms of Indigenous survival.