Everybody's Alamo: Revolution in the Revolution, Texas Style

Randy Roberts and James S. Olson. A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory. New York: The Free Press, 2001, ix + 356 pp. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliographic essay, and index. $26.00 (cloth); $14.00 (paper).

In the fall of 2000, I did what once seemed unthinkable: I willingly began to teach a first-year seminar, "Remembering the Alamo: Myth, Memory and History." Few veteran instructors of the U.S. history survey might question my desire to take a break from that always challenging responsibility. But why would a female "Yankee" whose research involves Atlantic trades and empires settle upon such an unlikely topic? To some extent, the answer is personal, and represents my slow coming to terms with the universal symbol of the city I have called home since 1985. Yet my intensified commitment to remembering the Alamo happily coincides with a development of much wider significance. In the last few years, scholars, curators, historical reenactors and self-styled "Alamoheads" have transformed our understanding of the Texas Revolution and with it, of course, the Alamo. Some readers of this journal may be aware of the shift through Stephen Harrigan's best-selling novel, The Gates of the Alamo, published in 2000. His is a fine piece of fiction indeed. But the time was also ripe for a serious historical account of the first battle of the Alamo, along with a fresh assessment of the subsequent battles over preservation of the site and interpretation of its meaning(s). To offer both in one monograph is a formidable undertaking, but Randy Roberts and James Olson have succeeded admirably with A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory.

Thanks to Walt Disney's phenomenally popular TV series and film about Davy Crockett, most fifty-somethings, including Harrigan, Roberts and Olson, and myself, became acquainted with the Alamo rather early in life. As a kindergartener in Taunton, Massachusetts, I prowled around in a coonskin cap and, in the ultimate 1950s concession to gender, a pink vinyl fringe jacket. Years later, I would howl with laughter and recognition as I read Oscar Zanetti's recollection of his nearly contemporaneous adventures as Davy Crockett—in the environs of Havana! Fidel, it appears, was not the freedom fighter of first resort, even in revolutionary Cuba. Moreover, for our generation, the Alamo has continued to evoke a shifting set of emotions that complicate analysis. What the King of the Wild Frontier inspired, John Wayne's The Alamo helped to undermine, as many of us moved into antiwar adolescence and young adulthood. When Lyndon B. Johnson's "Alamo complex" ostensibly dug him in deeper in Vietnam, it seemed prudent to distance ourselves from that quintessentially Texan, if not American symbol. ¹

My post-childhood Alamo amnesia lasted until I moved to San Antonio on the eve of the Texas Sesquicentennial in 1986. Affirming my identity not so much as an outsider but as a "professional" historian and sensitive Mexiphile, I stayed away from the public commemorations. I laughed as a colleague remarked that the hundreds of "freaky" reenactors camped out in the Olmos Basin would have been run out of town had they not been involved in official Alamo ceremonies. When I did visit the Alamo with out-of-town guests in the late 1980s, I would nod grimly as my spouse, a Mexicanist, invariably alluded to "that stinking symbol of ethnic aggression." Following the formal and informal commentary of Josefina Vázquez, the distinguished scholar of nineteenth-century Mexico, he pointedly characterized the Texas heroes as "traitors" and even "pirates." Meanwhile, many local Hispanic activists (with the conspicuous exception of Henry Cisneros, who would never run afoul of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas [DRT]) remained deeply offended rather than inspired by the Alamo. Again, it still seemed something better to forget, or at least try to ignore.

However, the turning point for me...