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For most of the twentieth century San Antonio has been nationally known as the Alamo city. The site and the 1836 battle cast an enduring shadow on accounts of the city’s past and present. In the decades following the Texas Revolution and U.S. annexation, the call to “remember the Alamo” became a justi¤cation for Anglo hegemony and the subjection of the former citizens of the Mexican province.1 In the context of the Confederacy and later the Jim Crow South, the Alamo reminded Americans of Mexican and African descent of their subordinate status in the region’s public memory. Recently many anthropologists, historians, and ¤lmmakers have suggested that we forget the Alamo.2 The story of Anglo martyrdom, they argue, is not ®exible enough to accommodate alternative imaginings of interethnic social relations.3 But the process of forgetting has already begun, right outside the chapel’s walls. Fiesta San Antonio , a ten-day festival that occurs every April, began in 1891 as a commemoration of independence from Mexico. To this day, the festival occurs around the week of April 21, the anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto, the battle that won Texan independence. Over the next century, though, the theme of Texan independence became less important. If remembering the Alamo served as an important metaphor for Anglo hegemony at the turn of the twentieth century, forgetting the Alamo is more important for San Antonio at the turn of the twenty-¤rst century. By this time the festival has generated over one hundred events, including three parades, large street fairs, and beer bashes. Most of these events have very little to do with Jim Bowie or Davy Crockett; in fact, most of the new events display a carnivalesque forgetfulness.4 In these more contemporary events, the city’s Mexican culture, once despised for its “backwardness,” becomes the center of the city’s multicultural celebration. Ironically, 8 / Forget the Alamo Fiesta and San Antonio’s Public Memory Laura Ehrisman Fiesta is now even more closely associated with the people who were “defeated” in the battles for Texan independence. If commemorations and the public forms of remembering that they condone are created within a ¤eld of power relationships, public forgetfulness is an equally important phenomenon to consider. Commemorations offer simpli¤ed, truncated historical narratives that create and edit the public meanings attached to the celebrated events. The communities that choose to forget the Alamo, for various reasons, seek a realm of memory outside this circumscribed tale and perform this desire in their yearly participation in festival. Fiesta offers a stage for demonstrating power in performance.5 Fiesta involves reversals and inversions, and offers moments of communitas (Bakhtin 1981; Babcock 1977). As anthropologist Sylvia Rodriguez writes of a similar festival, “this dual or contradictory character of [Taos] ¤esta is a major source of its sheer experiential power” (1998, 40). My story of Fiesta is both history and ethnography, both diachronic and synchronic in approach. Communicating the complexity of Fiesta involves its historical context, but this history retains its power because of its traces in the present. The festival has accumulated the residue of many different historical moments. Fiesta San Antonio, in particular, has continually included new events but has resisted discarding the old. Contemporary Fiesta is a fragmented hodgepodge of elite private parties, middle-class street fairs, and working-class carnivals. Anglos and Mexicanos often experience different Fiestas depending on the events they attend. My story moves between past and present but focuses on the city during the two decades after World War II, the period when Fiesta began to resemble the event it is today. At this historical moment Anglo middle-class interests took over the festival. In the process, they rede¤ned the event as a citywide celebration, expanding both the number and type of events during the week. To understand this transformation, though, I will also describe some of Fiesta’s oldest practices, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Fiesta San Antonio sits at the boundary between southern and western memory. Historian Neil Foley accurately describes the fusion of cultural practices that situates Texas as in both the South and the West. The Anglo families who settled much of nineteenthcentury Texas were from the U.S. South. As they migrated westward, they brought their southern culture and worldviews with them. During the 1890s Fiesta’s “¤rst families” constructed southern heriFiesta and San Antonio’s Public Memory / 195 tage around the Alamo. The Alamo became a symbol of...

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