Remembering the Alamo, Post-9/11

Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol. By Richard Flores. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2002. 192 pages. $40.00 (cloth). $17.95 (paper).

IN RECENT YEARS SCHOLARS IN VARIOUS FIELDS have shown increasing interest in historical memory. Informed by anthropology, literary criticism, psychology, linguistics, and cultural studies, recent studies of historical memory have achieved considerable theoretical and analytical sophistication. ¹ At the same time, building on the work of theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Pierre Nora, scholars in the humanities have also shown increasing interest in space and place as analytical concepts. Although scholarship on the Mexican American Southwest has always at some level been engaged with both history and place, Richard Flores's groundbreaking new study Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol is among the first in this field to incorporate recent theory from these two areas of research within a Marxist historical model. ²

Yet to categorize Flores's wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of the Alamo myth as "Mexican American," "southwestern," or "Marxist" may be misleading. This book examines both the workings of American cultural memory and the struggle of an ethnic minority community to reclaim a sense of agency by critically engaging a foundational American myth. Equally important, Flores's reading of the Alamo myth permits an understanding of how symbols in general "serve as a semiotics of place in shaping, regulating, and informing relations between social actors in history" (160). Or, as Flores points out in his conclusion, symbols like the Alamo "shape and inform a wide spectrum of social experiences and cultural meanings in ways that often go unnoticed and uncritiqued." These forms "work in tandem with other generative processes like those construed around patriotism, heroism, and the nation so as to further mark as delinquent any critique of or variation from the norm." (160) The Alamo in this sense, according to Flores, more broadly serves as a "key example of a master symbol of modernity" (157).

In an era when a horrific terrorist attack against Americans on their own soil has been exploited to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the myth of the Alamo, which propelled nineteenth-century American conquest and expansionism in the Southwest, takes on a particularly topical significance, one which I explore in my conclusion. Flores traces the formation of the Alamo as a symbol that served in the Southwest as "a critical map for the exploitation and displacement of Mexicans" (160). The Alamo, as symbol, emerged between 1880 and 1920, an era Flores calls the Texas Modern, when modern capitalism transformed the economy of the region, replacing "local" Mexican agricultural and cattle-related practices with large-scale commercial farming (3). The changes which took place during the Texas Modern, as historical research has demonstrated, were "made possible by the economic and social displacement of the Mexican worker" (5). Not surprisingly, it was during this transition to modernity, as Flores explains, "that the construction of Mexican subjectivity as 'subjugated Otherness' [was] codified" (11). The cultural memory of the Alamo contributed to this codification, providing "semantic justification for slotting Mexicans and Anglos into an emerging social order brought forth by the material and ideological forces that gripped Texas between 1880 and 1920" (xvii). In essence, "the symbolic work accomplished through 'remembering the Alamo' . . . [consisted] of signifying a radical difference between 'Anglos' and 'Mexicans' so as to cognize and codify the social relations circulating at the beginning of the twentieth century" (xvi). Flores's model helps explain the different attitudes Anglos and Mexicans today have toward the Alamo (11). Whereas for Anglos, the Alamo "serves as a sign of rebirth, the coming-of-age for a state and, eventually, a nation," for Mexicans it "reverberates with ambivalence . . . [serving] as a reminder, a memorial to a stigmatized identity" (11).

The opening chapter defines the socio-historical context encompassed by the Texas Modern. Examining the relation between memory and history...