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Early RepublicCivil War

Alejo de la Encarnacion Perez

San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas

Marker Inscription

(March 23, 1835 - October 10, 1918) Alejo de la Encarnacio Perez, infant son of Maria Juana Navarro Perez, was the youngest known survivor of the 1836 Battle of the Alamo. From 1861 to 1864 Alejo served in the Confederate Army. After the Civil War he served the city of San Antonio in a number of offices, including those of police officer and city marshal. Alejo's marriages, to Maria Antonia Rodriguez and Florencia Sappo Valdez, produced 11 children. At the time of his death he was the last known Alamo survivor. Recorded - 1998

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Born in 1835, Alejo de la Encarnación Pérez was carried into the Alamo as an infant during the 1836 siege and lived to become its last known survivor. His long life bridged two Texas eras: he fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, then spent decades serving San Antonio as a police officer and city marshal. When he died in 1918 at 83, the living memory of the Alamo's defenders died with him.

Why it matters

He was the human thread connecting the founding myth of the Texas Republic to the modern city, a reminder that the Alamo's story ran through Tejano families who stayed to build San Antonio.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

To understand this marker, picture San Antonio de Béxar in the 1830s: a dusty, sun-baked town at the edge of a young Mexican republic, its life organized around a cluster of old Spanish missions and the families who had farmed, traded, and worshiped there for generations. Among those families were the Tejanos — Texans of Mexican descent — whose roots in the region ran deeper than almost anyone's. The Navarro name was one of the storied ones in that community.

Into this world Alejo de la Encarnación Pérez was born in the spring of 1835, just as the ground beneath Texas began to shift. Within a year, the tensions between Mexican authorities and Texas settlers erupted into open revolution, and San Antonio — home to the old mission-fortress the locals called the Alamo — sat squarely in the path of the coming storm.

The conflict that swept up this infant did not end with Texas independence. Alejo's long life carried him through the years of the Republic of Texas, into American statehood, and then into the divisions of the Civil War, before closing in the modern city of the early twentieth century. Few lives stretched across so many chapters of one place's history.

People & events

In late February 1836, a Mexican army laid siege to the Alamo, where a small garrison of Texan defenders had dug in. For thirteen days the fort held; on March 6 it fell, and its defenders died. But not everyone inside was a soldier. A number of women and children who had sheltered within the walls were spared and allowed to leave — and among them was a mother named María Juana Navarro Pérez, carrying her infant son.

That child was Alejo. Barely a year old, he could have understood nothing of what he lived through, yet he carried the experience with him for the next eight decades as the youngest known survivor of the battle.

The boy who survived the Alamo grew into a man of his own turbulent century. From 1861 to 1864 he served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Afterward he came home to San Antonio and gave much of his life to the city — wearing a badge as a police officer and later serving as city marshal. He married twice, to Maria Antonia Rodriguez and later to Florencia Sappo Valdez, and raised eleven children. When he died in the autumn of 1918, at eighty-three, he was the last living person known to have been inside the Alamo when it fell.

Its place in the American story

The Alamo occupies a singular place in American memory — a story of a doomed stand that became a rallying cry and, eventually, a national shrine. But that story is usually told through its fighters. Alejo Pérez is a reminder that the fortress also held families, and that the siege was lived not only by the men who died but by the mothers and children who walked out and kept going.

His life also tells a truth that popular versions of the Alamo often blur: the deep, continuous presence of Tejano families in Texas. Carried out of the Alamo as a baby, Alejo grew up to serve the very city built around it — a Mexican-American San Antonian who policed its streets and helped run its government for decades. The founding drama of the Texas Republic and the daily work of the modern city ran through the same family.

Because he lived so long, Alejo became a living link across an enormous span of the nation's history — from the Texas Revolution, through the Civil War, and into an era of automobiles and world war. When he died in 1918, the last direct, personal memory of the Alamo's fall passed out of the world with him.

If you visit

This is a memorial marker, so come to it the way you'd come to a good gravestone or a quiet plaque: not for spectacle, but to stand for a moment with one remarkable life. Read the dates slowly — 1835 to 1918 — and let the sheer length of that span sink in. Almost everything you know about frontier Texas, the Republic, the Civil War, and the birth of the modern city happened between those two years, and this one man lived through all of it.

San Antonio makes an ideal base for a history-minded road trip, and Alejo's story pairs naturally with a visit to the Alamo itself. As you walk that famous site, try holding two pictures in your mind at once: the battle everyone remembers, and the infant who was carried out of it alive. It changes how the place feels.

Let this marker nudge you toward the parts of the story that don't make the movies — the Tejano families who were here before the revolution and stayed long after, building the city you're standing in. Alejo Pérez served San Antonio as a lawman and a family man for a lifetime after the smoke cleared. Looking him up is a fine reminder that history's most human threads often run straight through the people who simply stayed, and lived, and carried on.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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Related people

  • · Alejo de la Encarnacion Perez
  • · Maria Juana Navarro Perez

Related events

  • · Battle of the Alamo

Themes & tags

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