Stories From Texas

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Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-15-2026

Abstract

t has been nearly 200 years since the Goliad Massacre. It was on Palm Sunday, of all days, when about 400 prisoners, Texans and some Tejanos, were marched out of Fort Defiance and executed.

Making it even more horrifying is that some were told they were being taken to a ship and would be released for safe passage to New Orleans. Others were told they would be escorted to Matamoros where they would be released.

In this moment of elation, the Mexican soldiers opened fire and killed almost all of them.

Some of them escaped to the rivers and the woods in the chaos. Some feigned death beneath the bodies of their comrades and slipped away later. Several of those who escaped went on to write fascinating, bestselling adventure stories of their harrowing, often weeks-long treks to safety.

Herman Ehrenberg was one such chronicler. And it is through his accounts, and those of others, that we learned of a mysterious young Mexican woman who came among the prisoners in their last days and tended to their needs.

I love this story because it has a biblical aura.

She came into the story without introduction and left it without a formal farewell. In the days following the surrender at Coleto, as prisoners waited in uncertainty under Mexican guard to be taken to Goliad, a woman appeared among them — unarmed, unafraid, and moved by a compassion that crossed the lines of war. She went with them to Goliad.

The men did not, at first, know her name. They would remember instead what she did.

She brought food where there was hunger, clothing where there was exposure and, more dangerous than either, she carried petitions for mercy to the Mexican commanders who held power over life and death.

Some men, marked already for execution, would later say they owed their lives to her voice. She asked for the Texans’ bindings to be loosened so they wouldn’t suffer so. She even managed to sneak a few prisoners to safety the night before the massacre.

When the killings came at Goliad, they came with finality. And yet not for all. A few were set aside – doctors, laborers, men deemed useful or fortunate. Among the reasons given, quietly and afterward, was the intervention of a woman the prisoners would come to call their benefactor.

We have no way of knowing how many men she saved, but likely more than 30. Only much later would history learn that her name was Francita Alavez, but even that is not certain. It may have been “Alvarez.”

As suddenly as she had entered their lives, she was gone. No record traces her path with certainty beyond that moment. There is no grave we can point to. No letter. No diary. No monument was raised in her lifetime.

What remains is only this: In the recollections of men who survived one of the darkest episodes of the Texas Revolution, there appears, briefly but unmistakably, the figure of a woman who chose mercy when cruelty ruled the day.

She had no rank and no authority. She had only moral courage. They would later give her a name: The Angel of Goliad.

Today, there is a statue dedicated to her near the Presidio La Bahía in what is now the city of Goliad. It is good to know that on such a bloody Palm Sunday, there was a beautiful soul doing all she could to free those she could and comfort those she couldn’t.

Format

.MP3, 192 kbps

Length

00:04:10

Language

English

Notes

https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/commentary-the-angel-of-goliad/

Comments

© 2025 William F. Strong. Uploaded with permission of copyright holder.

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