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Your Mission, If You Accept It: “Texan” Culture and the Performance of the Alamo1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
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On 21 April 1836, members of the Texian army under the leadership of General Sam Houston overwhelmed and routed the pursuing forces of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, President of Mexico, in a bloody, twenty-minute conflict on the plain of San Jacinto. The Texian army and terrified settlers, who had heard that Santa Anna promised death to all Americans still living in Texas, had been retreating towards the Sabine River and the relative safety of the United States, when they suddenly turned and attacked. The Mexican army, camping on an open plain surrounded by three rivers and in the middle of siesta, were taken completely by surprise. As Houston's forces stormed the camp, shouts went up from the men—the battle cry of retribution: “Remember the Alamo!! Remember Goliad!”
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References
2. “Texians” was the name chosen by American immigrants fighting in 1836 against Santa Anna to separate themselves from those immigrants who did not fight, since all were technically Mexican citizens. “Tejanos” were those Texan-bom persons of Mexican heritage living in Texas in 1836, some of whom sided with the Texians in the Revolution. “Texans” was the name given to inhabitants of the state of Texas after 1845, and has come over time to be identified not only with those born in the Lone Star State, but certain modes of behavior and appearance grounded in the racial binary which formed after the revolution. Today, most people who call themselves “Texans” are Anglo, while those who would have been known as “Tejanos” in 1836 identify themselves as “Mexican-American.” These are by no means hard-and-fast rules, however, and the instability of identifying terms is a further indication of the complexity of relations within the state.
3. Tinkle, Lon, 13 Days to Glory: The Siege of the Alamo (1958; reprint, College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1985), 230–231Google Scholar.
4. For accounts of the events of the Texas Revolution, both historic and contemporary, see Tinkle, ; Fehrenbach, T.R., Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (New York: Collier, 1968Google Scholar) chapters 10–14; Hardin, Stephen L., Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Nofi, Albert A., The Alamo and the Texas War for Independence (New York: DaCapo, 1994)Google Scholar; Long, Jeff, Duel of Eagles: The Mexican and U.S. Fight for the Alamo (New York: Quill, 1990)Google Scholar; Lord, Walter, A Time to Stand: The Epic of the Alamo (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1961)Google Scholar; and Filisola, Vicente, Memoirs for the History of the War in Texas, Volume One, trans. Woolsey, Wallace (Austin: Eakin Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
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6. Michal Kobialka prefaces his examination of representation in the early Middle Ages with a question which reflects these shifts in knowledge: “While dealing with the notions of archival research, performance, and the social, gendered, or sexed body, should we not consider the challenges posed by Michel deCerteau, who argues that history is a discourse of facts shaped from conflicting imaginations, at once past and present; by Michel Foucault, who sees history in terms of monumentalizing the past; by Stanley Aronowitz, who observes that facts are not discovered but produced; [and] by Pierre Bordieu, who defines academics and their activity in terms of the externalizations of a set of dispositions accepted and acceptable in their field Kobialka, Michal, This is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Arm Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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10. In fact, most of the “historical accounts” of the Alamo siege were written long after the fact, as in the case of Ruben M. Potter's “The Fall of the Alamo,” which first appeared in the Texas Almanac of 1868, or some which suddenly appeared from the ruins, such as Col Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas (1836), which claims to be diary of the mountain man and chronicles the events within the Alamo walls up to the final battle. Both of these pieces can be found in Rios, John F., Readings on the Alamo (New York: Vantage 1987)Google Scholar, chapter 4. For another version of Potter's essay, and other accounts of the Alamo the Revolution, also see Baker, D.W.C, A Texas Scrapbook: Made Up of the History, Biography, and Miscellany of Texas and Its People (1874; reprint, Austin: Texas State Historical Assoc., 1991)Google Scholar, section 1.
11. Procter, Ben H., The Battle of the Alamo (Austin, Texas: Texas State Historical Assoc., 1986), 7Google Scholar. According to Wallace O. Chariton, however, the order to abandon the Alamo did not originally come from General Sam Houston, even though he later took credit for it. In addition, Houston made no effort to insure that the order was carried out, even though he was Commander-in-Chief of the Texian Army. For more on Houston's relationship to the Alamo both in the aftermath of the battle and in later years, see Chariton, Wallace O., Exploring the Alamo Legends (Plano, Texas: Wordware, 1992), 6–7Google Scholar. He has satirically dubbed the controversy over Houston's responsibility for stranding the men inside the Alamo without reinforcements “Alamogate.”
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16. To this day, Travis' letter is performed yearly by school children in Texas History classes, committed to memory along with the alphabet, multiplication tables, and the Preamble to the US Constitution. It is also central to the plots of both Alamo: The Price of Freedom and The Texas Adventure, both of which quote from it liberally (these two performance venues will be discussed later in this essay).
17. This attitude is not limited to the construction of the Alamo at the time of the Revolution, but has pervaded recent representations of the Alamo's history as well. Yelvington's, RamseyCloud of Witnesses: The Drama of the Alamo (1958)Google Scholar, a popular outdoor drama written for and performed at the Mission San Jose Outdoor Theater in the late 1950s and early 1960s, is another example of the way in which the struggle for Texas' freedom at the Alamo has been codified in monolithic heroism, with overreaching racial overtones. The character of Moses Rose is actually Satan in disguise, and Rose himself is discredited as a “mythical” figure in the midst of the historic ones on stage, because no Texian would really have abandoned the fight for freedom. Also, Bowie charges that Travis maligned the men under Bowie's command, many of whom were Tejanos, claiming that they were “born corrupt.” Travis does not deny this charge, claiming that he “spoke of birth; irrefutable birth, destined birth. They were born Mexican…these were not born on edge to be free.” (Unpublished manuscript, Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo, 1958, 30–31.) It is attitudes such as these that lead to the performative conflicts surrounding the narration of the Alamo illustrated in part three of this paper.
18. In addition to the documents from the period around the revolution mentioned earlier, Rios also includes in his book a number of the poems, lyrics and ghost stores which comprise the literature on the Alamo.
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20. The Texas Adventure theatre, San Antonio, Texas.
21. Bob Greene, “Remember the Alamo? It's Still Deep in the Heart of Texas, Across from Woolworth's,” Esquire (April 1984): 12+.
22. The stone was donated to the DRT in 1914 by Shigetaka Shiga. In 1989, it was the focal point of a commemorative ceremony which applauded not only the spirit of goodwill which accompanied the original gift, but also the desire for recognition of the heroic traits the former enemies had in common, and as an important aspect of the remembrance of World War II tragedies like Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima.
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25. American Heritage presents The Alamo, produced/directed by Arthur Drooker, narrated by Tom Berenger (History Channel Video, 1996).
26. Alamo Visitors Guide (San Antonio: R. Jay Cassell, 1981), np.
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30. James Lehrer, quoted in Thompson 85. Lehrer was the author of the book upon which the film was based.
31. Scarborough, quoted in Thompson 85. For more about the Viva Max! controversy, including its resolution, see Thompson, 85–90.
32. Ustinov, quoted in Thompson, 88.
33. de León, Amoldo, “Tejanos and the Texas War for Independence,” New Mexico Historical Review 61 (April 1986), 139–140Google Scholar; also see Miller, Thomas Lloyd, “Mexican Texans at the Alamo,” The Journal of Mexican American History 2 (Fall 1971): 33–41Google Scholar.
34. Rudolfo Acuña, quoted in De León, 143–44.
35. For two more detailed accounts of the controversy caused by Alamo: The Price of Freedom, see Linenthal 75–78, and Thompson, 100–109. Also, the Gregory Curtis Papers at the DRT Library at the Alamo are a collection of newspaper articles from the dispute, including Curtis' eventual sidebar on the situation for Texas Monthly.
36. Recent reports of this tension inside and outside the state include a brief note in The Chronicle of Higher Education discussing a recent archeological dig on Alamo Plaza which had recovered Indian relics and raised speculation about the presence of a burial ground within the original Alamo compound (“Artifacts Beneath the Alamo,” 10 March 1995, A4); an article in a small-town weekly Texas paper written by a member of the DRT lambasting the Texas Legislature for its recent attempts to bring the Alamo under the jurisdiction of the state parks administration (Parsons, Marjorie, “Chipping Away at the Alamo,” Gonzales Inquirer, 21 March 1995Google Scholar, 9; and an article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune concerning the early Republic of Texas movement as well as recent literary challenges to all elements of the Revolution's narrative (Ryerson, Alan, “They Remember the Alamo Differently,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 30 Mar. 1994, 4A+Google Scholar.
37. For more information on the efforts of these individuals and others to determine the narrative performance of the Alamo, see Alamo (History Channel).
38. Barthes, Roland, “The Discourse of History,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Howard, Richard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 139Google Scholar.
39. Hillinger, Charles, “Is the New ‘Alamo’ Film History or is It an Insult to Latinos?” Los Angeles Times, 19 December 1987Google Scholar, sec. VI: 10. Gregory Curtis Papers, DRT Library at the Alamo.
40. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 149Google Scholar.
41. Roach, Joseph, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 14Google Scholar.
42. In a recent video on the Alamo produced for the History Channel, both Stephen Hardin and Kevin Young (prominent Alamo historians and re-enactors) claim that the ability to validate many of the stories surrounding the Alamo, like the death of Davy Crockett, was not important to the overall understanding of the Alamo's significance to Texas history (The Alamo, History Channel).
43. Roach, 28.