Remembering the Alamo

Memory, Modernity, & the Master Symbol

Richard R. Flores

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780292781962
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storiografia

This study examines the American mythology surrounding the Alamo and its influence on cultural identity, historical memory, and ethnic relations. Over nearly two centuries, the Mexican victory over an outnumbered band of Alamo defenders has been transformed into an American victory for the love of liberty. Through a metamorphosis of memory and mythology, the Alamo became a master symbol in Texan and American culture. In Remembering the Alamo, Richard Flores examines how this transformation helped to shape social, economic, and political relations between Anglo and Mexican Texans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Flores looks at how heritage society members and political leaders sought to define the Alamo, and how their attempts reflected struggles within Texas society over the place and status of Anglos and Mexicans. Flores also explores how Alamo movies and the transformation of Davy Crockett into a hero-martyr have advanced deeply racialized, ambiguous, and even invented understandings of the past.

1

THE TEXAS MODERN

The nineteenth century was a time of war, of maneuver, position, and outright violence. The seeds of war were scattered alongside the ashes of those killed in the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, and local and regional conflicts emerged soon after, but it was not until the early twentieth century that the seeds of conflict would fully germinate. The story of how the Alamo emerged as a major site of American cultural memory does not begin in 1836 but in the latter part of the nineteenth century as Texas was undergoing a vast social transformation. It is then that efforts were initiated to preserve the remaining physical structures of the old mission of the Alamo and to claim Davy Crockett as an American hero. But why some sixty years after the battle? There is no single answer; we can only look to the numerous events and forces that began to shape the social face of Texas at this time.

Several critical changes affected the Texas economy between 1880 and 1900: the closing of the range, the introduction of the railroad, and the beginning of commercial farming. Between 1900 and 1920 the rate of these changes accelerated, leading to increased social pressure and conflict. Overall, the period between 1880 and 1920 was marked by the working out of new relationships, habits, and practices, resulting in the establishment of a social order segmented into various ethnic and class divisions.

By 1915, however, these struggles for position—struggles Antonio Gramsci (1971:108) identifies as passive or nonviolent forms of negotiation—had erupted into violent conflict. The various social and class contradictions of this period could no longer be restrained by earlier social and ideological arrangements, like those between elite ranchers and their workers, revealing the depth and magnitude of social change. These eruptions are markers of a “cultural revolution”—that unsettling and transitional period in which new practices and customs, forged from new relations of material and ideological production, ascend to a position of dominance (Jameson 1981:85). I refer to the emerging and newly established social forms and the numerous responses they engendered, both for and against, as the Texas Modern.

While modernity had its beginning far from the Texas-Mexican border, events there provide an important perspective on how global processes and forces are both constitutive of and repositioned by local practices and concerns. The project of modernity resulted from the attempts of writers, philosophers, intellectuals, and others to free the world from the confines of “tradition,” to establish scientific rationalism in place of “magic” and “superstition,” to understand and control “nature,” and to organize society through rationalized bureaucratic institutions. While it is clear that these achievements developed in uneven stages and, by some accounts, are still in process, it is also clear that they brought both promise and tragedy. Modernity, therefore, references a complex, uneven, and multifaceted process of transformation through which earlier social and cultural complexes are dislodged from the habitats of their making and reconstituted, under the weight of rationalized, technocratic forces, into distinct and qualitatively new forms.¹ One of the effects of this process is the redefinition and reinvention of society and self as earlier social rubrics are stretched beyond their capacity to recognize, organize, and map emerging relations. A primary engine of modernity is capitalism, with its incessant drive to create new markets and its incorporation of earlier productive practices and relations into its guiding principles of wage labor, surplus value, and commodity fetishism. While pointing to capitalism as an “essential” ingredient of the modern, I want also to clarify that modernity refuses linear or causal explanation and is better understood as a “complex structure” of multiple and uneven events, forces, practices, and ideologies that emerge in their own time and place and through the rhythm of their own development (Althusser and Balibar 1979:312).²

Modernity can be seen directly through changes in the various articulations of its complex structure. Such changes grow out of historically specific conditions that, while interacting with larger social networks, are rooted in the concrete conditions of the local. It is this conjuncture of material relations and their articulation though a meaning-making system of signs that constitutes my discussion of the Texas Modern and the Alamo. To speak of the Texas Modern and its various inflections serves, not to define all social relations of this period, but to rethink its social and expressive features in terms of a conceptual unity, or as Louis Althusser (Althusser and Balibar 1970:186) suggests, “a structural causality.” Periodizing concepts allow us to place in relation events and practices that all too often are disjointed by the rationalizing forces of Western, modern thought.

The changes associated with the Texas Modern are evident in the rapid transition to commercial farming and the erosion of local agricultural and cattle-related practices. In deep South Texas farmers from Kansas and Illinois played a principal role in this transformation, influenced by developers promising cheap land worked by even cheaper Mexican labor (Zamora 1993). Between 1910 and 1920 these midwestern transplants were responsible for doubling the number of farms in Cameron County and increasing the number sevenfold in neighboring Hidalgo County. The influx into South Texas of outsiders—or fuereños—resulted in a population boom: from 79,974 inhabitants in 1900 to more than 159,000 in 1920 (Montejano 1987:109). Although these events affected all sectors of the population, the displacement of Mexican skilled workers, landowners, and vaqueros was disproportionate to their overall numbers.

Urban areas were equally affected. San Antonio’s West Side developed as an enclave of Mexican social and cultural life whose population mushroomed by the early 1900s. Although they were founders of the city and early civic and business leaders, by 1915 Mexicans were primarily poor, and stayed poor because of their “forced social and economic segregation” (R. García 1991:27–28). William Knox, remembering his boyhood in the 1870s, speaks of

[a] proud class of Mexicans who owned the center of town, living in the best houses, and also owning the hundreds of irrigated acres lying in this well-watered valley. … That was old San Antonio, where the educated Mexican gentlemen of Spanish blood lived in ease and splendor. (1927:3–4)

Such a site, he claims, rapidly changed with the arrival of the Southern Pacific in 1875. “Old San Antonio,” he continues, “of brilliant court and docile peasant was no more” (Knox 1927:4).

The forces of capital and economic change, responsible for the demise of the Mexican worker in Texas, were augmented by political bossism and racism. Granted, these were not new experiences in Texas, but racism worked in tandem with capitalism to accelerate the transition to industrialization and commercialism that started several decades earlier. David Montejano states,

By 1920 the Texas Mexican people had generally been reduced, except in a few border counties, to the status of landless and dependent wage laborers. … The result everywhere was the same: where commercial agriculture made significant headway, the previous understanding [peace structure] between Mexican and Anglo was undermined. Mexicans now found themselves treated as an inferior race, segregated into their own town quarter and refused admittance at restaurants, picture shows, bathing beaches, and so on. (1987:114)

In an influential, although now heavily criticized work, Mario Barrera (1979:103) describes the emerging class divisions of the Southwest as an “internal colony.” While Tomás Almaguer (1987), among others, has taken issue with this model—primarily because of the ways in which the Southwest differs from many international colonialisms at this time but also because of Barrera’s inherently essentializing discussion—several features of this model are salient here. Without buying, whole cloth, the notion of the internal colony and in terms specifically of the Texas Modern, I am persuaded by Barrera’s (1979:212) discussion of an “ascriptive class segment.” Building on labor market segmentation theory—the notion that labor markets are structured into primary, well-paying jobs with good benefits and secondary, low-paying jobs with few benefits—Barrera develops further divisions based on race, ethnicity, and gender. Accordingly, an ascriptive class segment is one divided not only by the structural occupation of the workers but also by their ascribed racial, ethnic, and gender identities. For Barrera, elements of race, ethnicity, and gender play a key role in understanding the participation and displacement of Mexican workers. This dynamic was not unique to Texas but was reproduced throughout the American side of Greater Mexico as Mexican workers were structured into the U.S. capitalist economy through dual labor market practices or as reserve, unskilled workers in spite of their craft and labor specialties (Vélez-Ibáñez 1996). The imprints of these labor practices continue into the present. As recently as 1993, Gilberto Cardenas, Jorge Chapa, and Susan Burek could write:

Although the relative importance of agriculture in South Texas has diminished in the past 30 years, it continues to exert a strong influence in the southern part of the region along the Texas-Mexico border. Historically, a complex system of racial discrimination governed the insertion and devaluation of Mexican labor in San Antonio and throughout the Southwest. This system has had an extraordinarily harsh impact throughout the area. (P. 162)

My intent is not to explore the various economic models that help to explain the displacement of Mexican workers but to indicate that at the turn of the twentieth century in Texas, as in Greater Mexico and the American South, a complex system of labor segregation existed that was circumscribed by class, race, and gender.³ In short, the social and economic transition I am calling the Texas Modern is made possible by the economic and social displacement of the Mexican worker. As Emilio Zamora (1993:53) claims, “Mexican workers played a central role in this transformation by shouldering a major portion of the unwelcome cost of economic change as laborers.” The effects of the Texas Modern on the lives of the local Mexican population were severe: most experienced underemployment that ensured poverty; little access to public institutions, enforced by practices and policies of segregation; and loss of political power, guaranteed through gerrymandering and the institutionalization of poll taxes. These practices, reproduced through the political and social apparatuses of the state, served to assure a differential social body (Kearney 1991:55).

OF WAR …

In all social upheavals there are nodes of resistance—both cultural and political. The same is true in Texas. A key example is the corrido, the well-known tradition of Mexican balladry of border conflict. Américo Paredes (1958), the preeminent scholar of this aesthetic form, has documented this rich corpus and demonstrated its critical stance toward the dominant Anglo-Texan community. That the Texas-Mexican corrido articulates, in aesthetically inflected forms, a deep suspicion of and critical perspective on the forces of the Texas Modern is not coincidence. Indeed, it is through direct engagement with the upheavals of the moment that we can describe the corrido as a counternarrative of the Texas Modern, one whose aesthetic shape and narrative content descends directly from the historical conditions being discussed.

In terms of social and political mediation, I want to briefly discuss two critical events from this period. The first is the 1911 primer congreso mexicanista (First Mexican Congress) and the second is a violent uprising occasioned by the Plan de San Diego and its subsequent narrativization in the corrido “Los Sediciosos.”

The primer congreso mexicanista took place in Laredo, Texas, and was organized by Nicasio Idar, editor and publisher of La Crónica, a local Spanish-language newspaper. Concerned by the rise of violence against Mexicans, La Crónica, staffed by several of Idar’s children, ran a series of articles in 1910 concerning the harsh treatment and disturbing socioeconomic conditions experienced by Texas Mexicans. One example was the lynching of Antonio Rodríguez on November 2, 1910. Within hours of being arrested near Rocksprings, Texas, for allegedly killing an Anglo woman, a mob formed and Rodríguez was tied to a tree and burned. Other issues that concerned Idar were the already perceptible loss of Mexican culture and the Spanish language and discrimination in education (Limón 1974:87–88).

In an effort to bring these issues into the public realm, Idar and his family organized a statewide congress through the Orden Caballeros de Honor, a Texas-Mexican and Mexican lodge, as well as Masonic organizations, mutual aid societies, and other associations. Two delegates from each order were to attend the congress along with invited guests. The congress opened on September 14, 1911, and drew a large, but unknown, number of representatives. The activities of the congress were widely reported in Spanish-language newspapers throughout South Texas, including San Antonio, while English-language papers generally ignored it or downplayed its significance.

One outcome of the meetings was the founding of a statewide organization, La Gran Liga Mexicanista de Beneficencia y Protección. Although the association did not survive, its agenda was unprecedented in terms of the objectives it set and the issues it raised. Noted as an important “precursor” to later Chicano and Chicana political activism (Limón 1974), the congress debated the importance of Mexican culture and history, Mexican unity against oppressors, the cohesion of the working classes, the role of language and culture, including bilingual education, the lack of criminal justice, the education of women, and social and educational discrimination (Limón 1974).

The efforts of the primer congreso remind us that the displacing and brutal facts of the Texas Modern, the local practices of lynching, land stealing, discrimination, and racism, did not go uncontested. I would even argue that it serves as an example of the strategic wars of position enacted by the local Mexican population that developed in tandem with more confrontational political maneuvers.

In 1915 a group of Mexicans and Texas Mexicans known as Los Sediciosos (the Seditionists) instigated a series of skirmishes and raids against elements of the new dominant class. These men were associated with the Plan de San Diego and were led by Aniceto Pizaña and Luis de la Rosa, who waged open warfare in South Texas. In their effort to wreak havoc on the emerging modern economic infrastructure, Los Sediciosos sabotaged bridges, attacked post offices and trains, and raided several large ranches, only to spur the wrath of the Texas Rangers and the U.S. military.

Although the circumstances surrounding the writing of the Plan are debated by historians, it is believed to have been partially written by six or seven Mexicans imprisoned in Monterrey, Mexico, in January 1915 and finalized in San Diego, Texas, from which it receives its name (Cumberland 1954; Gómez-Quiñones 1970; Richmond 1980). Texas authorities found a copy of the Plan on one of its authors, Basilio Ramos, when he was arrested in McAllen, Texas, later that month. Ramos was charged with treason for possession of the revolutionary document, but when the revolt, as outlined in the Plan, failed to materialize, the charges were dismissed. Ramos was released on May 13, 1915 (Longoria 1982:214).

The Plan called for a general uprising of all Texas Mexicans living on the border at 2:00 P.M. on February 20, 1915. The objective was to retake the territories lost to the United States in the wars of 1836 and 1848. This territory, consisting of the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California, was to become a new independent Mexican republic from which land would be granted to blacks, Indians, and Asians to form their own autonomous states (Gómez-Quiñones 1970; Hager 1963).

With the incarceration of Ramos, February 20 passed uneventfully. However, in late May and continuing until late fall of that year, border raids led by Pizaña and de la Rosa were carried out almost weekly against the Anglo-Texan community. Special aggression was directed at the Texas Rangers, who served as the strongmen for many of the new elite power brokers in the area. Pizaña and de la Rosa carried out these attacks with no more than a hundred men, often fewer, and they raided as far north as the King Ranch in Kleberg County. The U.S. government responded by increasing its military force on the border with troops from the U.S. Army and the Texas Rangers (Cumberland 1954; Hager 1963). On October 21, 1915, the last raid by the Seditionists took place at Ojo de Agua, putting an end to the revolutionary effort connected with the Plan de San Diego.

While the actual warfare engaged in by Los Sediciosos ended by fall 1915, their exploits were remembered for years to come through the c...