Ysleta Mission: The Oldest Parish in Texas

The white-washed walls and silver dome of Ysleta Mission have stood in what is now far east El Paso since sixteen eighty-two, making it the oldest continuously operating parish in the state of Texas. But the story of how this mission got here begins not with its founding, but with a catastrophe.

In sixteen eighty, the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico rose in a coordinated revolt against Spanish colonial rule, killing about four hundred people, including twenty-one Franciscan friars and driving the survivors south down the Rio Grande. Among those who fled were the Tigua, a Tiwa-speaking people from Isleta Pueblo south of present-day Albuquerque. They walked hundreds of miles south with the retreating Spanish and settled at this location near El Paso del Norte.

Two years later, in sixteen eighty-two, the Tigua and the Spanish together built a mission church here, dedicating it to Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things. A figure of Saint Anthony still stands atop the entrance today. The choice of patron seems almost too fitting: a people displaced from their home, asking the saint of lost things to watch over what they had built in exile.

The original adobe structure was destroyed and rebuilt multiple times over the centuries, most recently after a fire in nineteen oh seven, with rebuilding finished in nineteen oh eight. The church you can see today reflects that early twentieth-century reconstruction. Through every rebuild, the Tigua community maintained their presence and their traditions on this land.

Federal recognition came late. The United States had terminated its relationship with the Tigua during the mid-twentieth century, treating them as ordinary Texas citizens. Congress restored their federal status in nineteen eighty-seven under the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo and Alabama-Coushatta Indian Tribes of Texas Restoration Act, finally acknowledging a community that had endured here for over three hundred years.