Necro-Settler Coloniality in Texan Mythology and Identity: Forgetting the Alamo

Like many Americans I spent much of 2020 in quarantine reading about, watching, and in some cases participating in Black Lives Matter protests. On May 30 of that year, I monitored social media from my Houston apartment as protesters gathered in San Antonio—a city I consider home— to march against police brutality. The protesters marched from Travis Park to the San Antonio Police Department, passing by the Alamo Plaza, the Alamo, and the Alamo Cenotaph on their way. These protesters were met by an armed group of men intent on (re)defending the Alamo Cenotaph, which is settled in a prominent location near the Alamo. The defense of the Alamo was being reenacted by a group of right-wing militiamen set on protecting the Alamo Cenotaph from Black Lives Matter protesters at the Alamo Plaza. I was, at first, confused. What did the Alamo have to do with the Black Lives Matter protesters? Initially the connection between the Alamo Plaza, which has been criticized for its perpetuation of anti-Mexican sentiments and ideologies, and Black life seems tenuous. However, on further inspection the connection between the Alamo, the Alamo Cenotaph, and the mistreatment of and violence against Black and Brown people becomes painfully apparent.

Following the 2017 announcement by the Texas General Land Office (GLO) regarding their plans to relocate the Alamo Cenotaph, the debate about whether the Alamo should maintain its mythologic designation as the “cradle of Texas liberty” and white herohood, or engage its sordid past, which perpetuated white supremacist and settler colonial ideologies, has gained renewed attention (Barger). The Alamo Plaza renovation plan revealed that the Cenotaph would be relocated to make room for a more accurate historical representation of the battle of the Alamo: including an account of the site’s Indigenous history as a burial ground, a more fair representation of the role Tejanos played in the revolt and an explanation of the importance of slavery to white Texian rebels (Barger). In the wake of this renewed attention Texas’s GOP leadership and some conservative groups, such as the This Is Texas Freedom Force (TITFF)— the same group who redefended the Alamo in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests—resist any change that might diminish the Alamo as the “most revered battle site in Texas history” (Webner). These groups actively resist acknowledging motivations for the Texas Revolution that countermand what was directly cited in the Texas Declaration of Independence. Although legalizing slavery is notably absent from the Declaration, historians have routinely cited slavery as one of the major reasons Texians sought secession from Mexico, who outlawed it in 1821 (Webner).¹ GOP leaders and conservative groups also routinely obfuscate the uncomfortable reality that the Texas Constitution of 1836 directly championed: “All persons of color who were slaves for life previous to their emigration to Texas, and who are now held in bondage, shall remain in the like state of servitude,” that at no point in the future would Congress have the power to emancipate enslaved people, and that Indigenous people and Black people were not considered citizens of the new Republic (“Constitution of the Republic of Texas” 19–21). The Texas Constitution of 1836 housed some of the most stringent anti-Black and anti-Indigenous laws of any concurrent constitution, and yet these facts are overshadowed by the mythology of Texas’s heroic founding.

The Alamo, as its mythology perpetuates, is a site that reifies a national imaginary grounded in Anglo-settler claims to land, governance, and empire. Even though the Alamo defenders lost the battle, their deaths were the ground upon which the Republic of Texas was founded. This myth selected as its heroes the white settlers of Texas, many of whom moved to Texas from the Southern United States, and its antagonists as the “villain[ous]” Mexican government, led by Santa Anna (Thompson 236). However, as the recent media attention surrounding the Alamo and the Alamo Renovation plan has made visible, the story of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution also includes the displacement and genocide of Indigenous people, the economic dependence...