Inherit the Alamo is a highly readable and completely accessible contribution to the genre of studies in the representation and commemoration of “the past,” an approach that has been gaining popularity among historians, anthropologists, museologists, art historians, literary scholars, and other cultural critics of Europe and the United States. Holly Beachley Brear, an Americanist who, unfortunately, utilizes no Spanish-language materials, analyzes current contests over ordering “the past,” particularly the 1836 battle between Mexican and Texan forces at the Alamo, and consequently over the meaning of that “past” for the present inhabitants of San Antonio, Texas.
Brear claims that her criticism “extends to all who use the Alamo for declaring identity” (p. 152). Her brief discussions of the agendas of groups such as the San Antonio Living Historians Association (SALHA) and of individuals such as archaeologists Anne Fox and Waynne Cox, however, do not equal her sustained indictment of the (normally Anglo) Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT). This is the group whose longstanding control of the site is currently under attack from several (often Hispanic) quarters on the grounds that the DRT propagates a (presumably Anglocentric) version of Southwestern history that is beneficial to itself and detrimental to “others.” In San Antonio’s present cultural climate—Brear’s primary concern, as an anthropologist—the DRT’s control of the Alamo is unjustified.
In the eyes of this historian, however, Brear utilizes a flawed methodology in her quest to delegitimate the DRT’s inheritance claims to the Alamo. She treats, ahistorically, the development of “the” Texan foundation myth of sacrifice and rebirth at the Alamo as an eternally prepresent whole, in which specific chronological phases are completely obliterated. She thereby obscures the process of construction of the Alamo shrine as much as she illuminates the controversies around representing the 1836 events. The DRT’s nineteenth-century educational and historic preservation activities to create the Alamo qua shrine are minimized (pp. 84-94), and then only after Brear has explicated the foundation myth, so that the myth appears ontologically before the DRT’s activities. As Brear chronologically disorders the past, there would seem to be no rationale for the DRT’s current control of the site.
There was a time when the Alamo was not meaningful. DRT members made it so. The greatest measure of their success in elevating the Alamo to world historical status is the number of other people who now wish to appropriate their shrine to the Texan “martyrs” and redefine the cultic site. Such redefinition (or “translation”) has been the fate of nearly every relic, hero, heroine, saint, or shrine. Indeed, to recognize that present circumstances inevitably dictate re-visions and re-presentations of the past obviates the temptation to deny the DRT’s originating role. The DRT’s inheritance claims at the Alamo are, in 1996, “historically” unimpeachable yet absolutely irrelevant.
