Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century

19. The Alamo, Slavery, and the Politics of Memory

THE ALAMO, SLAVERY, AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY 19 Rolando J. Romero The Alamo serves as the most salient and ambiguous symbol of Texas. Its semantic imprint dominates the social landscape between Texans and Mexicans, even as its full disclosure reveals deep racial and class ¤ssures between the two. —Richard Flores (1996) Sisters, brothers, know too well what memories can do. Climbin’ up when you’re down from the West Side of Town. —Tish Hinojosa, “West Side of Town” I want to allow her [Adina de Zavala’s] embedded critical discourse to remind us that keeping Mexicans in line has been a central plot of the Alamo all along. —Richard Flores (1996) SOME TIME ago I was invited to participate in a panel in an international conference of world English that purported to address the issues facing the English language in the twenty-¤rst century. While working on the presentation , my mind kept racing back to my own very personal introduction to issues of power, of voice, of determination and agency, enveloped in the classic coming-of-age story, in which language awareness serves as the primary catalyst for notions of self. For discovering the English language as a thirteen-year-old immigrant entailed also discovering accompanying hierarchies. It is in this primal moment that the colonial condition teaches people to either cry uncle or become subject to borderline psychosis . The semantic space of my re®ections took me back to a barrio school appropriately named David Crockett, situated in the middle of the San Antonio , Texas, neighborhood that provides the local color to Sandra Cisneros ’s Woman Hollering Creek. This neighborhood lived in the shadow of the Alamo, a constant reminder to tourists of a colonial condition of families like my own who lived within walking distance of the old San Antonio de Valero mission. There was a thirteen-year-old avid reader at the David Crockett Elementary School, who mixed in the same bundle such books as Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, War and Peace, and Los bandidos 366 de Río Frío, a bright child who had graduated at the top of his class in a Mexican elementary school but who nonetheless had to start elementary school over in the ¤rst grade in Texas because of an inability to speak English . In this school, the crossing guards were ¤ttingly named Davy Crocketts . In a ceremony to celebrate the opening of Fiesta Week, on April 22, 1968, the organizers invited the crossing guards, dressed in their Davy Crockett buckskins and raccoon caps, to participate. A San Antonio Express photographer took a picture. On a recent visit, I discovered the photo on one of the pamphlets that circulate throughout the tourist venues of the city (see ¤g. 19.1). The photographer must have been behind all the Davy Crockett look-alikes, who faced the entrance to the building, with their backs toward the photographer. The reader will not be able to identify any one child individually, since clearly the Alamo itself is the central image in this photograph. The caption reads: Pilgrimage to the Alamo, April 22, 1968, with Crockett Elementary School students clad in Davy Crockett buckskins and raccoon caps. Of¤cially opening a week of Fiesta, students, organizations and clubs from throughout the State march quietly through the streets of San Antonio to lay ®ower wreaths at the Alamo in memory of the heroes who died there in 1836. (Noonan Guerra: n.p.) Figure 19.1. Pilgrimage to the Alamo, April 22, 1968. Copyright © San Antonio ExpressNews . Used with permission. The Alamo, Slavery, and the Politics of Memory 367 I was surprised to see this picture that was taken more than thirty years ago. As a U.S. Latino scholar with a focus on Mexico and MexicoU .S. interactions and a professor in one of the top ten universities of the Midwest, I felt that I had placed myself as subject and object of the critical eye. As much as I tried to distance myself from my own personal knowledge of the Alamo, these memories kept providing the ¤lter that allowed for the critical introspection of my memory. For I think that it was not coincidental that the school teachers made an immigrant child from Mexico, unable to speak English, stand in front of a building that was then projecting two different memories: one national, which has served the AngloAmerican as the creation myth of...