Texas Identities: Moving Beyond Myth, Memory, and Fallacy in Texas History ed. by Light Townsend Cummins and Mary L. Scheer (review)

In this volume's foreword, the distinguished historian of Spanish/Mexican Texas Jesús F. de la Teja asserts that by rethinking the concepts of "identity, myth, and collective memory," previous scholars have offered "a healthy reassessment of accepted truth" about the history of Texas that this volume aims to continue (pp. ix, x). For the most part, however, this volume does not. Principally, it does not fully engage the central issue up for reassessment, what de la Teja notes as the "overwhelmingly Hispanic" identity of nearly half of the state's 28 million residents and their history (p. ix). But its commentary on non-Hispanics also disappoints to some degree.

Drawing largely on previous scholarship, the editors' introduction rehearses the argument that correcting myths, memories, and fallacies is necessary for reassessing this history. They note, for example, that the intellectuals J. Frank Dobie, Roy Bedichek, and Walter Prescott Webb offer "the epitome of written expression rooted in Anglo-American conceptualization of Texas identity" (p. 9). But the editors overlook the most astute critic of Texas identity, myth, and memory, the Mexican American intellectual Américo Paredes, who engaged Webb on his mythic Texas and his racism toward Mexicans in 1958, initiating the historical revision that this volume purports to continue. Missing also is Larry McMurtry's 1968 critique of Webb.

Stephen L. Hardin's essay remembers the Alamo, reminding us of its myths and historical fallacies, but his revisions seem repetitious for close students of this subject. He also elides a more fundamental fallacy. He very briefly cites in an endnote the necessary work of Richard R. Flores, but that discussion might have been expanded and made part of the essay. According to Flores, the Alamo was not remembered for a long time after the battle, and it was used as a U.S. Army quartermaster's depot, as a supply store, and as a saloon. Only beginning in the 1890s was it really "remembered" in its mythic sense and then not only largely as part of the capitalist redevelopment of downtown San Antonio but also as a symbolic cudgel to control Mexican Americans (Flores, Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol [Austin, 2002]).

Chapter 2 by coeditor Mary L. Scheer focuses on an anomaly in the Texas constitution of 1836. Written exclusively by men, the constitution excluded women from full citizenship in the new republic. But the document occasionally used gender-neutral language like persons, suggesting that citizenship rights, including voting, were extended to women. Yet, Scheer notes, this lapse was occasioned perhaps by the "'harried deliberations'" of the moment (p. 71). Thus, women were granted such momentary rights "inadvertently," and no known woman took advantage of them, instead conforming to the prevailing patriarchy of the day (p. 79). Other than this momentary error, we mostly learn that women were unequal citizens in Texas until the twentieth century. More interesting is Scheer's undeveloped statement that the one constitutional provision granting women some property rights grew "out of the existing Spanish and Mexican law" before 1836 (p. 78).

Against Jim Hightower's sage advice, Jody Edward Ginn takes the middle of the road in treating the controversial history of the Texas Rangers, including their treatment of Mexicans. Walter Prescott Webb was the foundational creator of the heroic Rangers myth, a 1936 creation, says Ginn, "that remained unchallenged for nearly forty years" (p.95).Aswith the editors, Ginn also misses Paredes's and McMurtry's first challenges to Webb. The central Ranger controversy concerns their conduct in the border troubles of 1915–1916. Ginn's short assessment of this critical moment overlooks Benjamin Heber Johnson's authoritative book, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into...