The Alamo

by Philip Gambone

Three books—each one concerned with the Mexican-American War—caught my attention this year. Each one of these studies took a different, but equally compelling, approach to this thorny and ultimately tragic chapter in U.S. history. The differences made going three times over the same material well worth my time. Moreover, the triple whammy helped me to see what a shabby, morally bankrupt enterprise the U.S. invasion of Mexico was.

The most recently written of the three books is Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth (Penguin, 2021) by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford, a trio of writer friends, all Texans, who conceived the idea for the book over a Sunday breakfast in Austin one morning. "Everything you think you know about the Alamo is flat-out wrong," Tomlinson, who has written a column about the Alamo in the Houston Chronicle, told his buddies. The others were intrigued. Their team effort was hatched.

The authors point out that there are essentially two schools of thought about the Alamo and what it means. One is the traditionalist, "true-believer" school in which the old Spanish colonial church, where two hundred men were killed by Mexican troops in 1836, is a shrine to heroic American patriotism. The Alamo was a confrontation between good (the U.S.) and evil (Mexico). Simple as that. It kicked off the fight for the creation of the breakaway Texas Republic, which was eventually incorporated into the United States and paved the way for the Mexican-American War.

Battle of the Alamo
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The other interpretation is expressed in the revisionist school, which teaches that the Texas Revolt, epitomized by the battle at the Alamo, was about Anglo-American settlers—cotton growers for the most part—intent on bringing slavery into the new, slave-free country of Mexico. Having been invited into Mexican territory as guest farmers, the American settlers, eager to maximize their profits, were not going to abide by Mexican laws.

"As hard as it may be to accept, Texas as we know it exists only because of slave labor," the authors write. "For Mexicans, newly freed from Spanish oppression, abolishing slavery was a moral issue. For the American colonists, it was an issue of wealth creation." When Mexico tried to forbid these American immigrants from bringing in their slaves, the settlers "put away their suitcases and took out their guns."

Texas Forever leaflet
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Forget the Alamo is a page turner. And an eye-opener. In chapter after chapter, the authors expose the dark underbelly of American exceptionalism, a mentality that can be traced back to the belief in "Manifest Destiny," the notion that it was the God-given right of the United States to occupy most of North America. (Canadians, your western lands were another enticing morsel the U.S. had its eye on.) It's a nasty story about unfettered expansionism, greed, racism, xenophobia, and white supremacy. And the nastiness persists. Latter-day Texan traditionists are anti-woke racists, the authors say. They quote Chicano studies professor Rodolfo Acuña, who calls the Alamo "the single most important source of racism toward Mexicans in this country."

Vision of American Exceptionalism
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Though the authors employ a casual, somewhat breezy style, the story they unfold is a deeply troubling one. They portray the Texas settlers as arrogant, cocky and condescending, a bunch of drunken, swindling, law-scoffing yahoos. (Even Davy Crockett of Walt Disney fame.) And they take the implications further. As they see it, "The Alamo is a story we've learned to tell ourselves to justify violence, both real and threatened, first against Mexicans, then Tejanos, then Mexican-Americans."

"History doesn't really change," the authors write. "But the way we view it does…. The history written by generations of white people is now being challenged by those who see the same events very differently. And man oh man, does that piss a lot of people off."

Pro-traditionalist protesters
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There will be readers who will definitely be pissed off by Forget the Alamo. This book may only further drive a wedge between the traditionalists and the revisionists. The authors hope otherwise. "Maybe it's time to forget the Alamo," they suggest, "or at least the whitewashed story, and start telling the history that includes everyone. Texas is big enough to tell an expansive, inclusive story about the Alamo."

That more expansive story is told in two other books that grapple with the Mexican-American events of the 1840s Those books will be the subject of the next two columns in my on-going series The Writer in Mexico.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. For over a decade, his book reviews appeared regularly in The New York Times. Phil is the author of seven books. His memoir, As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, was published last year by Rattling Good Yarns Press. His books are available through Amazon and at "Tesoros," the bookshop at the Biblioteca.

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