Davy Crockett Surrendered?! Jim Bowie, a Slave Trader?! Sam Houston, a Coke Addict?!
In the early 1980s, revisionists were shrouded in searing denunciations - from the right, but also from the left. A case in point was Seguín from 1982 by Chicano director Jesús Treviño, a public service biopic about Juan Seguín. "I was interested in telling the Chicano side of American history that both John Wayne and American textbooks ignored," said Treviño. "In Wayne's version, Mexicans are portrayed either as bandidos, dancing senoritas, sleeping drunks or fiery seductresses." Meanwhile, on the left, Acuña, who acted as the film's advisor, actually resigned because of Seguín's portrayal, calling him a traitor to Mexican Americans, and comparing his alliance with the Texans to that of the French Vichy government with the Nazis.
Then came the big bang of Alamo revisionism. Released in 1990, the well-researched Duel of Eagles by Jeff Long was a screaming banzai indictment against everything John Wayne cared about. The tone was haunting and almost angry, a cheeky young author shook his fists at his ignorant elders. In Duel, the defenders of the Alamo are “mercenaries”, “pirates” and “fanatics”, “Manifest Destiny”. . . Killers with dirt under their fingernails, lice in their hair ”and“ the stench of ignorant, pressing white rubbish ”. Ordinary Texans at the time, the book says, made money on weekends by prostituting their wives.
Crockett, Long said, was "an aging, semi-educated squatter of average talent," "an arrogant mercenary," who surrendered and then begged for his life. He thought Sam Houston was a drunk cocaine addict and - wait a minute - a budding transvestite who liked to wear corsets and belts. For Long, Bowie was completely unfounded, a "border shadow creature", a thug who escaped "fraud and hoax" for a "lifetime". Travis, well, Travis, he got it right. But then nobody likes Travis.
Sam Houston.
From MPI / Getty Images.Duel's cannonade was followed by a rush of works that quickly transformed the 1990s into the golden age of Alamo re-evaluation. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone just wanted to talk about the history of Texas. Panels and symposia sprouted like blue hoods. Suddenly the Alamo was under ideological siege, which sparked such controversial misunderstandings that by the beginning of this century the revisionist view of the Alamo story had established itself as a legitimate alternative to the heroic Anglo tale.
The Alamo is more than a Texas symbol, of course. It is also an American touchstone, an emblem of national determination that emerged in the 1950s as the embodiment of US determination to stop the spread of communism. During the 1960s, Texas-raised President Lyndon Johnson invoked it repeatedly to seek support for the war in Vietnam. Over time, it was welcomed by "patriots" and right-wingers who viewed Santa Anna's Mexican Army as a substitute for all kinds of threats, including the immigrants who poured over the southern border.
And many Texans protect him vehemently. Over the years the state has made extraordinary efforts to protect the traditionalist legend from revisionist questioning. The State Board of Education actually has by-laws that school children must be taught a "heroic" version of the Alamo story. In 2018, when a teachers' committee suggested this was a bit much, Governor Greg Abbott led a wave of online outrage that further outraged the revisionists. Alamo “heroism” literally remains the law of the country.
The tension between traditionalism and revisionism has never been more alive than it is today, at a time when Latinos are about to become the majority of Texan's citizens. At a time when the United States is undergoing an unprecedented reassessment of its racial history, the Alamo and its heroes have essentially received permits from the state's largely Anglo-American writers, politicians, and educators. Given that their defenders fought to form the most militant slave nation in history, that men like Bowie and Travis traded slaves, and that the "Father of Texas" Stephen F. Austin fought for years to keep slavery alive in the face of the Attacks by Mexican abolitionists would suggest that the post-George Floyd era brought Texas a long overdue re-evaluation of its history. By and large, that didn't happen.
Traditionalists, who tend to be older, conservative, and white, however, aren't particularly interested in reconsidering the history of the Alamo or its symbolism, which has fueled an intermittent debate that has been building in intensity for a good 30 years. What began as a series of literary and scholarly discussions in the 1990s turned into a battle for education and textbooks in the 2000s and has now taken hold of the Alamo site itself. This is partly due to Phil Collins: He made the donation of his collection dependent on the building of a “world-class museum”, which made the state government think, what drove the traditionalists into their arms. Literally. As state planners began to consider relocating this sacred memorial, groups of angry traditionalists clad in Kevlar vests and armed with assault rifles began symbolic occupations of the Alamo Plaza.
Aside from the presence of weekend soldiers, changes in the Alamo itself seem inevitable. The aging shrine has long been a disappointment for visitors - a gritty church, tiny museum, and walled park in downtown San Antonio, surrounded by the cheesiest tourist attractions: a wax museum, a Ripley's Haunted Adventure, that sort of thing. Texans have been debating how to spice things up for 50 years. Now that it could happen, sometimes it can seem like everyone in the state has an opinion on what to do. It's not just Anglo-Americans and Mexican-Americans. Native American groups want land in honor of the ancestors buried under the Alamo Plaza during the Spanish era. One plan would include demolishing an old Woolworth department store across the street; African Americans protest, stating that the lunch counter there was one of the first public places in San Antonio where blacks were allowed to dine with whites. In the middle is George P. Bush, son of Jeb, a troubled state bureaucrat with good political ancestry. Hardly anyone in Texas envies poor George P these days.
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