Alamo

The Alamo, located in the heart of the city of San Antonio, Texas, is one of the most recognized symbols and most visited historic sites in the world. Between four and five million people per year pass through the partially restored ruins of the mission of San Antonio de Valero, which was founded by Spanish Franciscans in 1718. Labeled by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas— legal caretakers of the Alamo since 1905—as the “Shrine and Cradle of Texas Liberty” (Brear, p. 1), the Alamo has also been branded as “America’s premier white identity shrine” (Gable 1995, p. 1061). Each of these descriptions derives from the complex history of the site and its relation to the evolving society in which it is embedded.

Abandoned by the Franciscans in the 1790s, the old mission acquired its current name early in the nineteenth century, after it became the headquarters of a company of Spanish soldiers from the Mexican city of Álamo de Parras. Some historians claim, however, that the name came from nearby stands of cottonwood—álamo in Spanish.

Though not designed as a fortress, the Alamo achieved lasting fame due to a thirteen-day siege, which culminated in the total annihilation of its defenders on March 6, 1836, during a Texan revolt against the government of Mexico, which had itself won independence from Spain in 1821. Among the dead was the celebrated American frontiersman David Crockett.

Although often portrayed as a stark racial and cultural clash between Mexicans and Anglo-Americans, the Texas Revolution of 1835-1836 and the Battle of the Alamo occurred amid considerably more complex circumstances. The conflict began as part of a larger Mexican civil war between the increasingly authoritarian Centralist regime of President Antonio López de Santa Anna and his Federalist opponents, who favored local autonomy and states’ rights in such matters as taxes, trade, and immigration. Prior to sending troops to Texas in 1835, Santa Anna had already dismissed state legislatures throughout Mexico and violently crushed Federalist opposition in the north Mexican state of Zacatecas.

Texas presented a special case, however. Santa Anna suspected that unrest there could lead to a secessionist movement, and even to the seizure of the province by the United States. Under Mexican rule, thousands of immigrants from the United States had come to Texas, attracted by the winning combination of generous land grants and the lax enforcement of Mexican laws against slavery and smuggling. It appeared to some concerned Mexican observers that the Anglo-Texans were already transforming Texas into an extension of the United States.

Slavery had been banned in most of Mexico, and it was theoretically under tight legal restrictions in Texas, but slaves were imported, bought, worked, and sold in the Anglo-Texan settlements with little regard for the law. By 1835 there were more than 30,000 American immigrants, including their slaves, and together they outnumbered the Spanish-speaking Texans (Tejanos) by a factor of almost ten to one. The American settlements were concentrated in eastern Texas, however, and when the revolt began Tejanos still dominated the southwestern borderlands of Texas.

Despite their residential separation and cultural differences, the Tejanos and Anglo-Texans were in general agreement with respect to both their Federalist politics (including the encouragement of further American immigration and the toleration of slavery) and their determination to resist the imposition of Santa Anna’s dictatorship. Juan N. Seguín of San Antonio, the first Texan official to call for armed resistance to the Centralists, is emblematic of Tejano participation in the revolt. Seguín led a large cavalry force and cooperated with an “Army of the People” raised by the Anglo-Texan leader Stephen F. Austin. The rebels defeated the Centralists at San Antonio, and in December 1835 they expelled all of the Mexican troops that Santa Anna had ordered to Texas.

Santa Anna, leading a large Mexican army, responded with a surprise counterstrike in February 1836. He

reoccupied San Antonio and trapped approximately two hundred rebels in the Alamo. Seguín escaped almost certain death when he was dispatched by the Alamo’s commander, William Barret Travis, to seek reinforcements. But the disorganized Texan revolutionary government could not relieve the doomed defenders. Centralist armies overwhelmed the Texan forces at the Alamo; they also captured and executed more than four hundred Texan troops who had manned a stronger fortress at Goliad, ninety miles downriver from San Antonio.

In the meantime, rebel leaders declared the independence of the Republic of Texas on March 2. The Texans also decided to place all of their remaining military forces under the command of General Sam Houston, a former governor of Tennessee. Seguín gathered a company of Tejano horsemen and joined Houston’s army, which retreated eastward across Texas for six weeks before surprising and overwhelming an incautious Santa Anna on April 21. Hundreds of Mexican soldiers were slaughtered at the Battle of San Jacinto by rebels shouting “Remember the Alamo!” and “Remember Goliad!” Santa Anna was captured, and the remaining Centralist forces withdrew from Texas.

However, not all Mexican Texans followed Seguín and the Tejano political leadership as far as endorsing separation from Mexico; some supported the Centralists, and many tried to avoid the fighting altogether. But the Anglo-Tejano alliance that prevailed was cemented when Houston, who was elected president of the new Texas Republic, appointed Seguín as commandant of the Texan army post at San Antonio. In 1841 the first monument to the fall of the Alamo was constructed—a traveling exhibit made of stones from the walls of the mission. It bore an inscription that compared the battle at San Antonio to the Spartans’ heroic stand against the Persians at Thermopylae (480 BCE). It would be several more decades, however, before the Alamo would become a stark symbol of Anglo-Saxon civilization standing against so-called Mexican depravity.

Relations between Tejanos and Anglo-Texans worsened as a result of a renewed border war with Mexico in 1842. Seguín, who had become the mayor of San Antonio, was forced into exile in Mexico by unruly Anglo-American volunteer soldiers who falsely accused him of treason. Upon reaching the Río Grande, Seguín was given the choice of life in prison or service with the Mexican army; his appearance with his former enemies in a raid on San Antonio in September 1842 confirmed the opinion of those who thought him a traitor to Texas.

But neither Seguín’s apparent apostasy nor the bitter war between Mexico and the United States (1846–1848) that followed the American annexation of Texas was sufficient to turn the Alamo into an anti-Mexican “white identity shrine.” Significantly, Seguín returned to Texas after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the conflict. Welcomed back into citizenship by many of his old comrades (including Sam Houston), Seguín wrote his memoirs of the Texas Revolution, became a Democratic Party leader in San Antonio, and was elected a county judge before retiring to Mexico in the 1870s.

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.

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.

In their late twentieth-century San Antonio fieldwork, the anthropologists Richard R. Flores and Holly Beachley Brear found the same binary logic still at work at the Alamo shrine itself, where the tacit erasure of the Tejanos and the juxtaposition of noble Anglo defenders against debased servants of Mexican tyranny continued. 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.

SEE ALSO La Raza; Mexicans; Social Psychology of Racism; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; Zoot Suit Riots.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brear, Holly Beachley. 1995. Inherit the Alamo: Myth and Ritual at an American Shrine. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Crisp, James E. 2005. Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett’s Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.

Flores, Richard R. 2002. Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Gable, Eric. 1995. “Review of Inherit the Alamo: Myth and Ritual at an American Shrine by Holly Beachley Brear.” American Ethnologist 22 (4): 1061–1062.

Graham, Don. 1985. “Remembering the Alamo: The Story of the Texas Revolution in Popular Culture.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 89 (1): 35–66.

Montejano, David. 1987. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Seguín, Juan Nepomuceno. 2002. A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of Juan N. Seguín. Edited by Jesús F. de la Teja. Fred H. and Ella Mae Moore Texas History Reprint Series. Austin: Texas State Historical Association.

James E. Crisp

ALAMO

In the late 1820s and early 1830s, hundreds of Americans and Europeans flooded into the northern province of Mexico, known as Tejas (Texas). The American-born colonists, clinging to the political beliefs they had grown up with in the United States, along with many Tejas-born Mexicans, or Tejanos, openly opposed any form of government that was not democratic in principle and application. Armed hostilities broke out in late 1835 between the people of Texas and the soldiers of the Mexican dictator, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who were stationed throughout the province. Santa Anna began to raise a massive army in Mexico City to put down the rebellion.

A ragtag army made up of Texas colonists, volunteers from the United States, and Tejanos attacked and defeated the Mexican military garrison at San Antonio de Bexar in December 1835, expelling the soldiers from both the town and the nearby San Antonio de Valero mission, popularly known as the Alamo. At the same time, Santa Anna was driving his army north from Mexico City through an unusually cold winter, intent on crushing this opposition.

The Alamo was a sprawling three-acre compound of stone and adobe whose size and shape made it unsuitable as a fort. Colonel William Barret Travis, a former lawyer, and Colonel James Bowie, known for his adventures and the knife that bore his name, shared command of the small Alamo garrison. Both were determined to defend it against all odds. Among the American volunteers who joined the garrison was David Crockett, former congressman from Tennessee. Santa Anna and advance elements of his army marched into San Antonio on February 23, 1836, and immediately began a siege and continuous

artillery bombardment of the Alamo. Bowie fell gravely ill on the first day of the siege, and sole command of the garrison rested with Travis from that day on.

The siege and bombardment of the Alamo continued for twelve days, with additional units of the Mexican army arriving to reinforce the advance troops. Some Texan reinforcements managed to sneak into the Alamo to aid the beleaguered garrison, but Travis's messages for help went largely unanswered. Santa Anna attacked the Alamo on March 6, 1836, in a predawn assault that he hoped would catch the exhausted defenders unprepared. Just before dawn, sixteen hundred Mexican soldiers attacked from all four sides. The defenders, numbering just over two hundred, beat back two attacks, but a third assault breached the north wall and Mexican soldiers poured into the Alamo. The soldiers moved through the compound killing the garrison's defenders in hand-to-hand fighting. Within ninety minutes, all the defenders were dead and the battle was over. Their bodies were burned without ceremony.

Texas won its independence from Mexico on April 21, 1836, when the army of Texas, under the command of General Sam Houston, attacked Santa Anna's camp at San Jacinto while the Mexican soldiers were resting. The Mexican army had pursued the retreating Texas army for weeks following the battle of the Alamo, and Santa Anna had moved ahead of his main body of troops with a small force of twelve hundred men in an effort to cut off Houston's escape. Houston attacked with less than eight hundred men, routing the Mexican forces and capturing Santa Anna. The Texas battle cry that day was "Remember the Alamo!" As a condition of his immediate safety and eventual release, Santa Anna ordered the entire Mexican army out of Texas and officially recognized it as a free, independent republic.

From 1836 to 1845, the Republic of Texas was the fourth country on the North American continent, along with the United States, Canada, and Mexico. But an ongoing border dispute with Mexico over ownership of lands north of the Rio Grande continued even after Texas was granted statehood in the United States in 1845. In 1846, units of the U.S. army built a fort just north of the Rio Grande, prompting a Mexican army south of the river to cross over and attack a force they considered armed invaders of their territory. A war between the United States and Mexico ensued.

The battle at the Alamo invigorated Americans' determination to achieve independence for Texas, and this ultimately led to the creation of the Republic of Texas, which in turn intensified the settlers' desire to become part of the United States and fostered a major debate over the future of Texas and those Mexican lands situated above the Rio Grande. The resulting concerns led to the Mexican War of 1846, the Compromise of 1850, and the debate over slavery in the territories—all of which contributed to the events leading to the Civil War (1861–1865).

Through the years, however, the battle of the Alamo has been remembered less for its remote link to the coming Civil War than for its battle cry. "Remember the Alamo" has come to symbolize Americans taking a stand for what they believe in and struggling against overwhelming odds for a cause or ideal. The battle cry has become a feature of American identity and the battle itself an icon of American popular culture, illustrating the mythic heroism of ordinary people.

bibliography

Chemerka, William R. Alamo Almanac and Book of Lists. Austin, TX: Eakin, 1997.

Edmondson, J. R. The Alamo Story: From Early History to Current Conflicts. Plano: Republic of Texas Press, 2000.

Timanus, Rod. An Illustrated History of Texas Forts. Plano: Republic of Texas Press, 2001.

Rod Timanus

See also:Texas, Republic of.

Alamo, Battle of the

Battle of the Alamo. On 6 March 1836, Mexican troops under General Antonio López de Santa Anna, stormed the Alamo, on the edge of San Antonio, Texas, killing or executing all of its defenders (over 180 men) and taking heavy casualties. The battle ended a thirteen-day siege of the former Franciscan mission, which had served most recently as a barracks and fortification for soldiers from the Flying Company of Alamo de Parras (1801–1825).

For Santa Anna, it had seemed essential to take the Alamo quickly, so that he could march deeper into Texas and quash an insurrection—one of several provincial rebellions against his centralized dictatorship. The defenders of the Alamo, commanded jointly by Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis and James Bowie, believed that significant reinforcements would come to their aid and they could defend the site. Their miscalculation and the disaster that followed helped rally Texans, who defeated Santa Anna at the decisive battle of San Jacinto on 21 April 1836 amid cries of "Remember the Alamo."

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.

See alsoSanta Anna, Antonio López de .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Few scholars have examined this battle, but there are many popular accounts, most of the older ones highly romantic. Jeff Long, Duel of Eagles: The Mexican and U.S. Fight for the Alamo (1990), offers a sprightly and unrelentingly unsentimental view and a guidance to sources. For the mythic Alamo, see Susan Prendergast Schoelwer, Alamo Images: Changing Perceptions of a Texas Experience (1985), a smart, handsomely illustrated work. For the often overlooked Mexican side, including Santa Anna's self-defense and criticism by his officers, see Carlos E. Castañeda, ed. and trans., The Mexican Side of the Texas Revolution (1928).

Additional Bibliography

Crisp, James E. Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett's Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Flores, Richard R. Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.

Hardin, Stephen L. Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution, 1835–1836. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

                                        David J. Weber

Alamo, Battle of the (1836).In fall 1835, a political revolution broke out among the North American settlers in Mexican Texas. After the colonists ousted the Mexican garrison from San Antonio in December, the Mexican president, Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna, led an army northward to avenge the loss. Texan commander Sam Houston recognized that San Antonio had no strategic value and ordered Texans there to evacuate to the east.

Approximately 150 men decided to stay and fortify the abandoned mission known as the Alamo. By 24 February 1836, Mexican troops initiated a siege. Texas Col. William Barrett Travis sent out messages pleading for reinforcements, but only thirty‐two men responded.

On 6 March, Santa Anna launched an overwhelming assault with about 1,800 troops. The defenders fought desperately, killing or wounding some 600 Mexicans, but by sunup, the approximately 180 defenders, including Travis and David Crockett, were dead.

Word quickly reached the American settlements of Texas, and the slogan “Remember the Alamo!” helped motivate the remainder of the Texas army. On 21 April Sam Houston led his men to victory over Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto—thus guaranteeing Texas independence.
[See also Texas War of Independence.]

Bibliography

Walter Lord , A Time to Stand, 1961.
Jeff Long , Duel of Eagles: The Mexican and U.S. Fight for the Alamo, 1990.

James M. McCaffrey

Alamo the Franciscan mission which was the site of a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful defence against Santa Ana in the Texan War of Independence; on 6 March 1836, it was captured by Mexican troops, and all the defenders were killed.

In the battle of San Jacinto, 21 April 1836, where the Texans defeated the Mexican forces and captured Santa Ana, troops used the battle-cry (attributed to Colonel Sidney Sherman) ‘Remember the Alamo!’