[On March 6th, 1836
the Alamo, a San Antonio fort and part of the newly independent Texan
Republic, fell to Mexican forces. That battle became a rallying cry for the
remainder of the war between Texas and Mexico, and so this week I’ll
AmericanStudy a handful of the ways the Alamo
has been remembered. Leading up to a special weekend post on Tejano culture
and legacies!]
On two
significant problems with an understandable mission statement.
It seems that
the Alamo historic site has had a difficult last few years, and that there are
plans underway (or at least in proposal form) to change things for the better.
I learned about those proposed plans from this Save the Alamo mission
statement linked on the Alamo’s official
website; because the Alamo is held and preserved by Texas’s General Land
Office (in conjunction with the city of San Antonio), that statement was
written by the state’s current Land Commissioner, none other than Jeb Bush’s
oldest son George Prescott Bush. Bush makes a compelling case for why the Alamo’s
current situation and environs aren’t suitable to its historic significance
(seriously, check out the photo
montage in the middle of the statement depicting the “carnival atmosphere that
has become commonplace at the Alamo plaza”), and for what might be possible if
folks come together to support, help fund, and contribute in other ways to the Save the Alamo campaign.
Hard to argue with such historical, conservationist perspectives, goals, and
missions.
Hard but not
impossible, I should say, because I’m here to quibble with a couple of
troubling and not at all minor aspects of Bush’s statement. One is captured in
a single short paragraph: “No, the United Nations will never have any say in
what we do or say at the Alamo. Ever.” Bush is responding to conspiracy
theories about the UN “taking over” the historic site, theories that in
part play into larger, decades-old
conservative fears of UN takeovers of the US. And that’s the problem with
this thread within Bush’s statement, which begins in the second paragraph (“You
may have heard or read stories about the Alamo recently”) and continues
throughout. It’s one thing to argue that local organizations and voices should
direct the future for a site like the Alamo; that’s an understandable and
sympathetic position to be sure. But the frame here is instead one of an
outside (and overtly “foreign”) threat, thus implicitly (and even at times in
the statement explicitly) aligning Bush et al with the Alamo’s besieged “Defenders”
(capitalization Bush’s throughout the statement) and turning the Save the Alamo
campaign into a battle within a war (and not just in the culture wars sense,
although that too). That’s both an ironic and a gross frame for preserving a
historic site like the Alamo.
My other main
problem with Bush’s statement is less dramatic, and more a reflection of
tendencies I’ve highlighted in most of my posts this week. Throughout the
statement, Bush associates the Alamo’s Texas Republic soldiers with all of
Texas history and identity, as when he writes in the opening paragraph, “Who we
are as Texans started there and who we can be as Texans and Americans still
lives there.” In the concluding paragraph he goes even further, adding, “The
Alamo defines Texas. There is no greater honor than to reinforce this place and
tell its story. Its story is the story of Texas.” Since this was the first
battle in Texas’s move toward independence from Mexico, I get part of what Bush
is arguing in such moments, although of course the Texas Republic only last for
9 years before Texas became part of another nation, the U.S. Moreover, in each
of these stages—as a Mexican territory, as the Texas Republic, and as a state
within the expanding U.S.—Texas included at least as many Mexican American
inhabitants as Anglo ones, and that remains the case to this day (in South
Texas most especially). So the Alamo’s story is only “the story of Texas”
if we make sure to include the attackers alongside the defenders, something
that Bush’s statement certainly does not suggest. Which is to say, the contest
over collective memories of the Alamo continues to this day.
Special post this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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