Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas

Foreword

Foreword W. Fitzhugh Brundage During the summer of 2005, cyclist Lance Armstrong’s unprecedented effort to win his seventh consecutive Tour de France received extensive news coverage around the world. Few accounts of his performance failed to highlight that he was a Texan. Spectators along the race route honored his roots by routinely waving giant Lone Star flags when he rode past. It is hard to imagine that comparable attention would have been paid to Armstrong’s birthplace if he hailed from, say, Nebraska or Delaware. But reporters and fans alike traced his remarkable resiliency and indomitable competitive spirit to his Texas origins. The ubiquity of references to Armstrong and Texas is one example of the remarkable degree to which a mythic Lone Star identity has gained a hold on the national and international imagination. Along with California, Texas is unusual in the degree to which its recalled past is integral to its modern identity. Texas’ identity, in many regards, is an exaggeration of purported American traits. Mythic Texas is loud, brash, extravagant, and rustic, like the pint-sized, fabulously rich, and mustachioed oil barons who drive immense Cadillacs (with cattle horns on the radiator) through Bugs Bunny cartoons. This version of Texas meshed perfectly with the enthusiasms of American popular culture during the twentieth century. To take one example, almost every decade of the last century seemed to warrant another film rendition of the battle for the Alamo. Indeed, the battle on the Texas frontier has been represented in more movies than the fight over Ft. Sumter, a siege of arguably much greater historical significance. The enduring interest in Texas’ mythic past warrants close scrutiny because it is suggestive of the confluence of history, memory, power, and identity that vexes our postmodern age. Scholars have adopted the conceit of “historical memory” to describe the amorphous and varied activities that groups have employed to recall the past. Recently, older notions of memory xiv w. fitzhugh brundage as a passive process of storing and retrieving objective recollections of lived experiences have given way to an understanding of memory as an active, ongoing process of ordering the past. Similarly, collective or historical memory is not simply the articulation of some shared subconscious but rather the product of intentional creation. Collective remembering forges identity, justi fies privilege, and sustains cultural norms. Although the impulse to compile collective memory is universal, it is manifest in ways that are specific to time and place. Different groups, as this collection demonstrates, have different resources and opportunities to fashion and perpetuate their version of the past. Elites typically enjoy a clear advantage in imposing their preferred past on their community, but, as several essays in this volume reveal, even the most disadvantaged communities often harbor alternative memories. By charting the persistence and shifting influence of both African American and Tejano counter-memories in Texas this collection draws welcome attention to the diversity of communities that harbor historical memories and their struggles to secure broader recognition of their recalled past. The ambitions of architects of historical memory are never as simple as they appear at first glance. The Texas chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which are deftly treated in this collection, had an unambiguous goal: to commemorate Confederate valor and sacrifice. Yet the UDC simultaneously was a vehicle for women to accumulate power and exercise cultural custodianship, two goals that were seldom openly acknowledged . Similarly, the curious history of the exhumation and reburial of Stephen F. Austin’s remains is a case study of struggles to weld memory to statebuilding and conventional politics. In both of these instances, campaigns to fashion history addressed, if sometimes obliquely, pressing political and cultural preoccupations. Another fascinating dimension of the recalled past is the tenacity of some narratives and the evanescence of others. No enduring social memory can be entirely static. Each time a tradition is articulated, it must be given a meaning appropriate to the historical context in which it is invoked. For a historical memory to retain its capacity to speak to and mobilize its intended audience , it must address contemporary concerns about the past. Consequently, although the crafters of historical memory often resolve to create a version of the past that is impervious to change, their very success is dependent on its ongoing evolution. Here again, these essays clarify when and how each layer was added to the “Texas myth.” Indeed, this collection offers numerous examples of...