Mexican history is not an easy read, bewildering in fact. Indeed one of the main complaints of the Texians at the start of hostilities in '35 was the frequent change of Mexican governments even when the Constitution of 1824 was still officially in effect.
When Santa Anna came to power he at first had substantial support among the Texians because of his promises, but things quickly went downhill when Santa Anna and those around him abolished the constitution, sparking widespread revolution across the Mexican States, that of Texas being only one of these.
Among these Mexican States, Texas alone was victorious,this due to the influx of American manpower and the financial support of the war by mercantile interests in the United States.
Where Jose Cosme de Urrea (1797-1849) fits in all of this is more than just an easy google away. Most of the Mexican Generals of that era had been born in the last decade of the Eighteenth Century and, like Santa Anna, had first seen military service under the Spanish Empire. The Urreas were of Basque origin, Urrea himself having been born in Tuscon in present-day Arizona.
(The role of the Basques in Spanish Arizona I'll leave to the Arizona crowd if they care to.)
Urrea was a military cadet at just eleven years of age and by nineteen was an officer. He was twenty-four when Mexico achieved independence.
https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fur02Much of Urrea's subsequent career was spent in the wide open, sparsely populated areas of Northern Mexico. Prior to his involvement under Santa Anna in suppressing the Federalist Revolt in Zazatecas in 1835, he had been sent to oppose Comanche raids in Durango. Given that background, it is no wonder that he worked so well with Tejano vaqueros and practiced such a mobile form of warfare here in Texas.
Against the backdrop of his whole career, so far as I can determine, his role in Zazatecas was an anomaly based upon a misguided loyalty to Santa Anna, an allegiance that would be repudiated in the years immediately following.
Not claiming here to be by any means a student of Mexican history, as far as I can gather the theme of it throughout most of the Nineteenth Century was an ongoing struggle between more egalitarian rights in the form of Federalism versus the ruling oligarchy of a Centralist government. Santa Anna himself expressed the sentiment that the people simply were not educated enough for a Federal Republic, and that the country functioned better under a benevolent Dictator (meaning himself of course).
Not every Centralist was necessarily a bad guy, Col. Juan Almonte acquitted himself well under Santa Anna in Texas and is generally favorably viewed in Texas history, notably for refusing to fire upon a rowboat that interim Texas President Burnett was escaping on because Burnett's family was in the boat. Almonte was so pro-Centralist that in the 1860's he would actually serve under the French and their short-lived Mexican monarch Maximilian, this in the interest of National order.
Smothering all of this however was the ongoing culture of corruption and inequality of wealth that renders Mexican politics opaque to outsiders like ourselves to this very day.
Where exactly Urrea fit in all of this and what his exact motives were I dunno, if his role in fighting our Second Texas Revolution wasn't actually his finest hour as a military commander, it is certainly his most easily-accessed one on the internet.
There is mention of a 1985 book
The Life and Times of Jose Cosme Urrea by a local Tuscon Historian but it appears to be out of print, I cannot find it for sale else I would buy it.
We do know that he was generally pro-Federalist throughout his career, to the extent of fighting and losing two significant battles against superior Centralist forces in the decades following his Texas campaign and enduring a spell of imprisonment in the notorious Perote prison. He may well have been an honest idealist and a genuine hero.
The US invasion during the Mexican War was a unifying event across Mexico and we are told in the link that Urrea led a unit of Sonoran cavalry. What successes he may have had in that role I cannot tell.
Cholera killed him in 1849, but in 1836 he was easily Mexico's best military commander in Texas, probably the best commander on either side.
Birdwatcher
