5fish
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The Alamo was not part on the American lore until 1890's when preserving American past was in vouge. The Daughters of the Texas Republic made an effort to turn the Alamo into a shrine of Texas white heroism... The true story is being updated over the last 30 years...
snip...
The Alamo itself was essentially neglected for more than a generation following the famous battle. Most of the walls and buildings were gobbled up by the growing city of San Antonio, until all that remained was the mission’s chapel and a portion of the barracks known as the convento. The Catholic Church had leased the property to the American forces during the Mexican War, and it was the U.S. Army that put a roof on the chapel, and thus gave it its famous “hump.” The State of Texas purchased the chapel in 1883, but even in 1886, the year of the battle’s fiftieth anniversary, there was no memorial service at the site, and in that same year the convento passed into the ownership of a grocer who used it to store onions and potatoes.
Only in the 1890s, with the organization of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT), did a serious effort to create an Alamo shrine begin. This campaign was led by two women—the ranching heiress Clara Driscoll and Adina De Zavala, the granddaughter of Lorenzo de Zavala, a Mexican Federalist who had signed the Texan Declaration of Independence and become the Texas Republic’s first vice president. Their efforts resulted in a state law purchasing the convento and transferring control of the entire Alamo property to the DRT in 1905.
A prolonged dispute, much ballyhooed as the “second battle of the Alamo,” ensued within the DRT between Driscoll, De Zavala, and their respective followers over the technical and aesthetic details of historic preservation of the site, but all factions of the DRT were in essential agreement that the preserved Alamo should serve as a sacred monument to the heroism of its Texan defenders.
The labors of the DRT coincided with national trends of historic preservation and ancestor worship that exalted the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the United States, but deeper and more troubling developments were afoot in Texas. This was a time when the arrival of railroads and commercial agriculture created a great demand for cheap, transient, and docile Mexican labor in South Texas. The Jim Crow laws of segregation and disfranchisement were being applied to Mexicans as well as African-Americans in Texas between 1890 and 1920, and the historian David Montejano has argued that a simplified and mythicized version of the Texan past was employed to rationalize and to justify the degraded social position of Mexicans.
Snip...
In the early twentieth century, Tejanos such as Seguín were purged from the collective Texan memory of the Revolution. In the blatantly racist 1915 film Birth of Texas, or Martyrs of the Alamo (made in the same D. W. Griffith studio that produced Birth of a Nation that same year), the revolt is portrayed as one of outraged whites rising up against a drunken and lecherous Mexican soldiery. The literary critic Don Graham has shown that an emphasis on Mexican racial depravity suffused the early twentieth-century novels about the Texas Revolution, in contrast to earlier works by Texan authors who blamed Mexico’s backwardness on the benighted heritage of Spanish Catholicism. At the same time, Texan painters Robert Jenkins Onderdonk (The Fall of the Alamo, 1903) and Henry Arthur McArdle (Dawn at the Alamo, 1905), whose iconic works have been enormously influential in Texas, depicted a Manichean struggle at the Alamo between the forces of light and dark—of civilization and savagery—in a clear departure from earlier Texan artists who portrayed Santa Anna’s Mexican troops as a classic, European-style Napoleonic army. Thus, in print and picture, the Alamo story was rewritten as a war between two hostile races.
snip...
During the 1990s, however, the caretakers of the Alamo took several conscientious steps to remove the implicit denigration of Mexicans that had once permeated the shrine’s narrative, symbols, and rituals. The Mexican flag was introduced into the “Hall of Honor” to represent the Tejano defenders of the Alamo; an illustrated “Wall of History” was created by a professional historical staff to contextualize both the Spanish mission and the Alamo battle in the broader history of the city and the state; and the Alamo Defenders’ Descendants Association—with many Tejanos among the membership—began holding yearly memorial services for their ancestors in the Alamo chapel. Even as the racist aspects of the Alamo’s symbolism were being diminished, however, many Mexicans, and some Mexican-Americans, still saw the Alamo as a symbol not of courage and sacrifice, but of greedy North American land pirates determined to rob Mexico of its patrimony.
Snip... Davie Crockett survived the battle????
Of little military significance, the battle for the Alamo has remained important for its symbolic dimensions. Wartime propaganda and Texas enthusiasts turned the Alamo's Anglo-American defenders, including David ("Davy") Crockett, into heroic martyrs, celebrated in prose, poetry, and cinema, and the battle site itself into a national shrine. At least seven Texas Mexicans also fought to the death alongside the Anglos, but memory of their role was obliterated by the anti-Mexican passions of the battle's aftermath and largely forgotten until Mexican Americans began to become a prominent political and intellectual force in American life in the 1970s. Discovered by a Mexican coin collector in 1955, the diary of José Enrique de la Peña, a soldier in Santa Anna's army, generated controversy because it stated that Davy Crockett survived the battle and was executed afterward. While scholars still debate the diary's authenticity, the polemic surrounding the diary has led to studies on the relationship among culture, politics, and the memory of the Alamo
Alamo | Encyclopedia.com
the Alamo (ăl´əmō´) [Span.,=cottonwood], building in San Antonio [1], Tex., "the cradle of Texas liberty." Built as a chapel after 1744, it is all that remains of the mission of San Antonio [2] de Valero, which was founded in 1718 by Franciscans and later converted into a fortress.
www.encyclopedia.com
snip...
The Alamo itself was essentially neglected for more than a generation following the famous battle. Most of the walls and buildings were gobbled up by the growing city of San Antonio, until all that remained was the mission’s chapel and a portion of the barracks known as the convento. The Catholic Church had leased the property to the American forces during the Mexican War, and it was the U.S. Army that put a roof on the chapel, and thus gave it its famous “hump.” The State of Texas purchased the chapel in 1883, but even in 1886, the year of the battle’s fiftieth anniversary, there was no memorial service at the site, and in that same year the convento passed into the ownership of a grocer who used it to store onions and potatoes.
Only in the 1890s, with the organization of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT), did a serious effort to create an Alamo shrine begin. This campaign was led by two women—the ranching heiress Clara Driscoll and Adina De Zavala, the granddaughter of Lorenzo de Zavala, a Mexican Federalist who had signed the Texan Declaration of Independence and become the Texas Republic’s first vice president. Their efforts resulted in a state law purchasing the convento and transferring control of the entire Alamo property to the DRT in 1905.
A prolonged dispute, much ballyhooed as the “second battle of the Alamo,” ensued within the DRT between Driscoll, De Zavala, and their respective followers over the technical and aesthetic details of historic preservation of the site, but all factions of the DRT were in essential agreement that the preserved Alamo should serve as a sacred monument to the heroism of its Texan defenders.
The labors of the DRT coincided with national trends of historic preservation and ancestor worship that exalted the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the United States, but deeper and more troubling developments were afoot in Texas. This was a time when the arrival of railroads and commercial agriculture created a great demand for cheap, transient, and docile Mexican labor in South Texas. The Jim Crow laws of segregation and disfranchisement were being applied to Mexicans as well as African-Americans in Texas between 1890 and 1920, and the historian David Montejano has argued that a simplified and mythicized version of the Texan past was employed to rationalize and to justify the degraded social position of Mexicans.
Snip...
In the early twentieth century, Tejanos such as Seguín were purged from the collective Texan memory of the Revolution. In the blatantly racist 1915 film Birth of Texas, or Martyrs of the Alamo (made in the same D. W. Griffith studio that produced Birth of a Nation that same year), the revolt is portrayed as one of outraged whites rising up against a drunken and lecherous Mexican soldiery. The literary critic Don Graham has shown that an emphasis on Mexican racial depravity suffused the early twentieth-century novels about the Texas Revolution, in contrast to earlier works by Texan authors who blamed Mexico’s backwardness on the benighted heritage of Spanish Catholicism. At the same time, Texan painters Robert Jenkins Onderdonk (The Fall of the Alamo, 1903) and Henry Arthur McArdle (Dawn at the Alamo, 1905), whose iconic works have been enormously influential in Texas, depicted a Manichean struggle at the Alamo between the forces of light and dark—of civilization and savagery—in a clear departure from earlier Texan artists who portrayed Santa Anna’s Mexican troops as a classic, European-style Napoleonic army. Thus, in print and picture, the Alamo story was rewritten as a war between two hostile races.
snip...
During the 1990s, however, the caretakers of the Alamo took several conscientious steps to remove the implicit denigration of Mexicans that had once permeated the shrine’s narrative, symbols, and rituals. The Mexican flag was introduced into the “Hall of Honor” to represent the Tejano defenders of the Alamo; an illustrated “Wall of History” was created by a professional historical staff to contextualize both the Spanish mission and the Alamo battle in the broader history of the city and the state; and the Alamo Defenders’ Descendants Association—with many Tejanos among the membership—began holding yearly memorial services for their ancestors in the Alamo chapel. Even as the racist aspects of the Alamo’s symbolism were being diminished, however, many Mexicans, and some Mexican-Americans, still saw the Alamo as a symbol not of courage and sacrifice, but of greedy North American land pirates determined to rob Mexico of its patrimony.
Snip... Davie Crockett survived the battle????
Of little military significance, the battle for the Alamo has remained important for its symbolic dimensions. Wartime propaganda and Texas enthusiasts turned the Alamo's Anglo-American defenders, including David ("Davy") Crockett, into heroic martyrs, celebrated in prose, poetry, and cinema, and the battle site itself into a national shrine. At least seven Texas Mexicans also fought to the death alongside the Anglos, but memory of their role was obliterated by the anti-Mexican passions of the battle's aftermath and largely forgotten until Mexican Americans began to become a prominent political and intellectual force in American life in the 1970s. Discovered by a Mexican coin collector in 1955, the diary of José Enrique de la Peña, a soldier in Santa Anna's army, generated controversy because it stated that Davy Crockett survived the battle and was executed afterward. While scholars still debate the diary's authenticity, the polemic surrounding the diary has led to studies on the relationship among culture, politics, and the memory of the Alamo