Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth – Atencion San Miguel | English Version

By Clare Howell

Old Soviet joke: Q. What’s a historian? A. Someone who can predict the past.

As a native San Antonian, not yet into my wits in the mid-1950s, watching Fess Parker (TV’s Davy Crockett, roaming the forests of Kentucky doing good deeds), I was all in on the myth of the Alamo—the daring, selfless last stand by a scrappy band of volunteers, all giving their lives so that freedom would triumph over the tyranny of Santa Anna. No doubt those 185 who perished, along with 400 Mexican soldiers, displayed great physical courage. But another aspect of this struggle for ‘freedom over tyranny’ was freedom to own human chattel, not to mention taking Mexican land by force and declaring themselves a Republic. We call this Manifest Destiny.

“Forget the Alamo” comes from three Texans who survey the literature and movies—John Wayne’s 1960 “The Alamo!” through generations of haunted histories and hagiographies of Travis, Bowie, and Crockett in what came to be known as the Heroic Anglo Narrative; and on to new Latino, Indigenous, and Black voices adding correctives to what one young revisionist historian calls, “The gunsmoke and bullshit.”“Texas must be a slave country, circumstances and unavoidable necessity compels it. Nothing is wanted but money, and negroes are necessary to make it,” declared Stephen F. Austin in 1832.