Spain was the first country to colonize the present-day American Southwest including Texas. In 1821, Mexico won independence from Spain, and its northern provinces also included Texas, New Mexico, and California. At the time, Texas had a very low population, so Mexico allowed Americans to settle there in order to bring the population up. As a result, many settlers from the U.S. especially from the American Southwest moved into Mexican Texas. Among them was Stephen Austin, whom Austin, Texas, is named after. He sold his fellow American settlers plots of land from a large land grant that his father received from the Mexican government.

        By 1830, there were about 7,000 American settlers in Texas, and they soon even outnumbered the amount of resident Mexicans. This worried the Mexican government, and so they tried to halt American immigration. This did not work in the Mexicans' favor as it did little but increase tensions. Tensions also grew as settlers started to revolt against Mexican legal codes, or regulatory laws, that required all those living in Mexican territory to convert to Roman Catholicism, end the practice of slavery, write all legal documents in Spanish, and become Mexican. 

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