TEXAS UNDER SPAIN FLAGSpain established the first European claim to what is now Texas in 1519 when Cortez came to Mexico, and Alonzo Alvarez de Pineda mapped the Texas coastline. A few shipwrecked Spaniards, like Alvar Nunez, Cabeza de Vaca, and explorers such as Coronado, occasionally probed the vast wilderness, but the first Spanish settlement in Texas the Ysleta Mission near present day El Paso was not established until 1681. Until Mexican independence in 1821, other