Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature

Epilogue: From Centennial to Sesquicentennial

Epilogue: From Centennial to Sesquicentennial History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its “ruses” turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. Fredric jameson, the PoLitiCAL UnConsCioUs In the Southwest Review for summer 1942, the renowned University of Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie published “The Alamo’s Immortalization of Words” in an implicit response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the previous December. Examining the discursive aftermath of the Battle of the Alamo in March 1836, Dobie maintained that that defeat had generated the “two sentences originated so far by Texas . . . destined for immortality : ‘Remember the Alamo’ and ‘Thermopylae had her messenger of defeat—the Alamo had none’” (“Immortalization” 402). Taken together, the battle cry and the learned epitaph had the power “to make men defend liberty and fight like tigers against tyrants” (410). For Dobie, Texas was created through an act of remembrance, and the continuous invocation of that remembrance ensured that contemporary Texans would not so much commemorate the actions of heroic forebears as relive them. Even as the United States experienced stinging setbacks from Japan’s military might throughout the Pacific theater, Dobie suggested that the traumatic defeat of a white nation by a nonwhite one was but a temporary setback that would immediately spur the defeated to invent the cultural resources to vanquish the victor. Although not explicitly mentioning “Remember Pearl Harbor” or President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “A day that will live in infamy” as contemporary manifestations of this phenomenon, Dobie nonetheless implied that new patriotic slogans would emerge to 194 Border Renaissance help win the new war by stirring the most profound sentiments of nationalist fervor. Tracing the origins of the two Texan aphorisms, Dobie emphasized the depths of racial conflict that spurred their creation. At the Battle of San Jacinto, which avenged the loss at the Alamo, Dobie wrote, “the Texians seemed to have kept on yelling as long as they kept on killing” (404). So completely did the battle cry become a battlefield weapon that Dobie proclaimed he could not “recall any other battle in history in which a cry seems so much a part of the substance of the battle itself and to so sum up causes for revenge” (405). He related how one Anglo-Texan combatant , a future Texas Ranger particularly fond of the commemoration of the Alamo, went so far as to refuse General Sam Houston’s orders to “slow down” the one-sided slaughter of Mexican soldiers. Instead, “in his healthy way Captain Billingsley went on remembering the Alamo” (404). In Dobie’s formulation, the discursive commemoration of the Alamo was self-legitimating and self-actuating. But even this uniquely Anglo-Texan commemoration needed its Mexican Other to achieve full intelligibility. Since “it takes both the cry and the anti-cry to make the full drama, the wild music and the epic poetry of San Jacinto,” Dobie gave what he asserted was the response of the hapless, inarticulate Mexicans: “Me no Alamo! Me no Goliad!” (406). Reaffirming Gayatri Spivak’s maxim that the subaltern cannot speak (even while speaking) but is always spoken for within colonial discourse, Dobie’s article extended the racial triumphalism of Texas Centennial discourses to the new war overseas. Anglo-Texans of the 1940s continued to “remember the Alamo” in much the same way, Américo Paredes suggested in a short typewritten note titled “Alamism” that referenced Dobie’s article. Whereas Dobie concerned himself with rallying U.S. troops for upcoming Second World War battles, Paredes placed himself on the frontline of the racial war still being waged in Texas. In “Alamism,” Paredes analyzed how the AngloTexan discourse of the Alamo had transformed a discrete political conflict over a century old into an endless race war. Like other Texas-Mexican intellectuals of the era, Paredes identified Alamism as a key component of the legitimation of Anglo-Texan violence against Texas Mexicans; under the color of Alamism, “murder ceased to be murder, and theft was no longer theft.” Alamism authorized not only the self-interested economic goal of the seizure of Texas-Mexican land, but also a racialized campaign of terror against Texas Mexicans designed to police social interactions. Whether “driving some Mexican ranchero off his land or stringing up a Mexican sheepherder by the testicles for the mere fun of it,” Paredes Epilogue 195 argued...