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In Part 1 in the Empresario series from the Texas Historical Commission’s San Felipe de Austin site, learners are introduced to the empresario system which brought permanent settlers to Mexican Texas during the early 19th century. The activities explore the duties and character qualities of an empresario, and engage learners as they consider the experiences and challenges of an empresario. A ...
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Empresarios were contractors empowered by the government of Coahuila y Texas to recruit specific numbers of families to the territory. Mexican citizens were preferred as empresarios and as colonists, but the majority of the empresarios were from the United States.
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A Spotlight on a Primary Source by Stephen Austin. In order to settle Texas in the 1820s, the Mexican government allowed speculators, called empresarios, to acquire large tracts of land if they promised to bring in settlers to populate the region and make it profitable.
The old imperial law offered heads of families a league and a labor of land, 4,605 acres (1,864 ha), and other inducements. It also provided for the employment of agents, called empresarios, to promote immigration. As an empresario, Austin was to receive 67,000 acres of land for each 200 families he brought to Texas.
An empresario ( Spanish pronunciation: [em.pɾe.ˈsaɾ.jo]) was a person who had been granted the right to settle on land in exchange for recruiting and taking responsibility for settling the eastern areas of Coahuila y Tejas in the early nineteenth century.
Often his territory was spoken of as his grant. The use of the term was misleading. It led people unacquainted with the colonization laws to believe that all the land within the grant belonged to the empresario to dispose of as he desired. In reality the land was only allotted to the empresario to settle with colonists.
An empresario was someone who brought settlers to the region in exchange for generous grants of land. Moses Austin, a once-prosperous entrepreneur reduced to poverty by the Panic of 1819, requested permission to settle three hundred English-speaking American residents in Texas.
