Mission San Jose, San Antonio

Photo credit: PhotoDisc

No matter if you call it the Fiesta City or the Alamo City, each of San Antonio's nicknames reveals a different truth. Visitors come here to kick back and party, but they also come to seek Texas's history -- some would say its soul. They come to sit on the banks of a glittering river and sip cactus margaritas, but also to view Franciscan missions that rose along the same river more than 2 1/2 centuries ago.

Multiculturalism isn't just an academic buzzword in San Antonio, the only major Texan city founded before Texas won its independence from Mexico. During its early days, it was populated by diverse groups with distinct goals: Spanish missionaries and militiamen, German merchants, Southern plantation owners, Western cattle ranchers, and Eastern architects. All have left their mark, both tangibly on San Antonio's downtown and subtly on the city's culture and cuisine.

With its German, Southern, Western, and, above all, Hispanic influences -- at the 2000 census, the city was nearly 60% Mexican-American -- San Antonio's cultural life is rich and complex. At the New Orleans-like Fiesta, for example, San Antonians might break confetti eggs called cascarones, listen to oompah bands, and cheer rodeo bull riders. Countless country-and-western ballads twang on about "San Antone" -- no doubt because the name rhymes with "alone" -- which is also America's capital for Tejano music, a unique blend of Mexican and German sounds. And no self-respecting San Antonio festival would be complete without Mexican tamales and tacos, Texan chili and barbecue, Southern hush puppies and glazed ham, and German beer and bratwurst.

The city's architecture also reflects its multiethnic history. After the Texas revolution, Spanish viga beams began to be replaced by southern Greek revival columns, German fachwerk (half-wooden) pitched roofs, and East Coast Victorian gingerbread facades. San Antonio, like the rest of the Southwest, has now returned to its Hispanic architectural roots -- even chain hotels in the area have red-clay roofs, Saltillo tile floors, and central patios -- but updated versions of other indigenous building styles are also popular. The rustic yet elegant Hill Country look, for example, might use native limestone in structures that combine sprawling Texas ranch features with more intricate German details.

These days, San Antonio is simultaneously moving backward and forward. The city is succumbing to the proliferation of highways, faceless housing developments, and homogeneous restaurant and lodging chains that so many Southwestern cities seem to equate with progress; in fact, early in the 20th century it almost paved over the river on which the city was founded. But it's also making a concerted effort to preserve its past, and for economic, and not sentimental, reasons: Cultural tourism sells, after all. Amid San Antonio's sprawl, it's the winding downtown streets that most visitors recall, and that once-endangered river. Few who come here leave without a memory of a moment, quiet or heart quickening, sunlit or sparkling with tiny tree-draped lights, when the river somehow worked its magic on them.