Forget The Alamo Quotes

Let us pause for a moment to consider the irony of a Mexican government determined to stop the flow of illegal American immigrants. You just have to relish it. The only thing missing is a Mexican president promising to build a wall.

I know the name of your seventh-grade Texas History teacher.” When the Texan expresses skepticism that this could be possible, you smile and say, “Coach.

His day is done. Is done. The news came on the wings of a wind, reluctant to carry its burden. Nelson Mandela’s day is done. The news, expected and still unwelcome, reached us in the United States, and suddenly our world became somber. Our skies were leadened. His day is done. We see you, South African people standing speechless at the slamming of that final door through which no traveller returns. Our spirits reach out to you Bantu, Zulu, Xhosa, Boer. We think of you and your son of Africa, your father, your one more wonder of the world. We send our souls to you as you reflect upon your David armed with a mere stone, facing down the mighty Goliath. Your man of strength, Gideon, emerging triumphant. Although born into the brutal embrace of Apartheid, scarred by the savage atmosphere of racism, unjustly imprisoned in the bloody maws of South African dungeons. Would the man survive? Could the man survive? His answer strengthened men and women around the world. In the Alamo, in San Antonio, Texas, on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, in Chicago’s Loop, in New Orleans Mardi Gras, in New York City’s Times Square, we watched as the hope of Africa sprang through the prison’s doors. His stupendous heart intact, his gargantuan will hale and hearty. He had not been crippled by brutes, nor was his passion for the rights of human beings diminished by twenty-seven years of imprisonment. Even here in America, we felt the cool, refreshing breeze of freedom. When Nelson Mandela took the seat of Presidency in his country where formerly he was not even allowed to vote we were enlarged by tears of pride, as we saw Nelson Mandela’s former prison guards invited, courteously, by him to watch from the front rows his inauguration. We saw him accept the world’s award in Norway with the grace and gratitude of the Solon in Ancient Roman Courts, and the confidence of African Chiefs from ancient royal stools. No sun outlasts its sunset, but it will rise again and bring the dawn. Yes, Mandela’s day is done, yet we, his inheritors, will open the gates wider for reconciliation, and we will respond generously to the cries of Blacks and Whites, Asians, Hispanics, the poor who live piteously on the floor of our planet. He has offered us understanding. We will not withhold forgiveness even from those who do not ask. Nelson Mandela’s day is done, we confess it in tearful voices, yet we lift our own to say thank you. Thank you our Gideon, thank you our David, our great courageous man. We will not forget you, we will not dishonor you, we will remember and be glad that you lived among us, that you taught us, and that you loved us all.

pause for a moment to consider the irony of a Mexican government determined to stop the flow of illegal American immigrants. You just have to relish it. The only thing missing is a Mexican president promising to build a wall.

It is one of the Texas Revolt’s dark little secrets that, even after the Mexican “invasion”—or perhaps because of it—the great mass of Texians and Tejanos wanted nothing to do with Travis or the Alamo or fighting Mexican soldiers. Most had never wanted to revolt in the first place.

From the beginning, the prospect of American settlements in Texas was entirely dependent on slavery. It was no secret. Everyone knew it. Austin would say it over and over and over: The only reason Americans would come to Texas was to farm cotton, and they would not do that without slaves. They really didn’t know any other way.

Everyone has the seventh-grade story where, you know, they make the field trip and then all the white kids start treating them differently,” says Ruben Cordova, a San Antonio art historian. “Davy Crockett’s [death], it’s sort of like a Chicano version of the Jewish Christ killers. If you’re looking at the Alamo as a kind of state religion, this is the original sin. We killed Davy Crockett.

For the first few weeks in Santa Fe, Oppenheimer and his key staff worked out of the office at 109 East Palace Avenue in the early mornings and made daily trips up to Los Alamos to inspect the progress of the construction. "The laboratories at the site were in a sketchy state, but that did not deter the workers," Dorothy wrote of those hectic early days. "In the morning buses, consisting of station wagons, sedans, or trucks, would leave 109 and pick up the men at the ranches and take them up the Hill. Occasionally, a driver would forget to stop at one or another of the ranches and the stranded and frustrated scientists would call in a white heat.

You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.

Forget the Alamo. The Yucatán provides a more useful lesson. It was early spring, 1519. Hernán Cortés and his men had just arrived off the coast of the Mexican mainland. The conquistador ordered his men to bring one of the natives to the deck of the ship, where Cortés asked him the name of this exotic place they’d found. The man responded, “Ma c’ubah than,” which the Spanish heard as Yucatán. Close enough. Cortés proclaimed that from that day onward, Yucatán and any gold it contained belonged to Spain, and so on. Four and a half centuries later, in the 1970s, linguists researching archaic Mayan dialects concluded that Ma c’ubah than meant “I do not understand you.”1 Each spring, thousands of American university students celebrate with wet T-shirt contests, foam parties, and Jell-O wrestling on the beautiful beaches of the I Do Not Understand You Peninsula.

The history of the land is a history of blood. In this history, someone wins and someone loses. There are patriots and enemies. Folk heroes who save the day. Vanquished foes who had it coming. It’s all in the telling. The conquered have no voice. Ask the thirty-eight Santee Sioux singing the death song with the nooses around their necks, the treaty signed fair and square, then nullified with a snap of the rope. Ask the slave women forced to bear their masters’ children, to raise and love them and see them sold. Ask the miners slaughtered by the militia in Ludlow. Names are erased. The conqueror tells the story. The colonizer writes the history, winning twice: A theft of land. A theft of witness. Oh, but let’s not speak of such things! Look: Here is an eagle whipping above the vast grasslands where the buffalo once thundered bold as gods. (The buffalo are here among the dead. So many buffalo.) There is the Declaration in sepia. (Signed by slave owners. Shhh, hush up about that, now!) See how the sun shines down upon the homesteaders’ wagons racing toward a precious claim in the nation’s future, the pursuit of happiness pursued without rest, destiny made manifest? (Never mind about those same homesteaders eating the flesh of neighbors. Winters are harsh in this country. Pack a snack.) The history is a hungry history. Its mouth opens wide to consume. It must be fed. Bring me what you would forget, it cries, and I will swallow it whole and pull out the bones bleached of truth upon which you will hang the myths of yourselves. Feed me your pain and I will give you dreams and denial, a balm in Gilead. The land remembers everything, though. It knows the steps of this nation’s ballet of violence and forgetting. The land receives our dead, and the dead sing softly the song of us: blood. Blood on the plains. In the rivers. On the trees where the ropes swing. Blood on the leaves. Blood under the flowers of Gettysburg, of Antioch. Blood on the auction blocks. Blood of the Lenape, the Cherokee, the Cheyenne. Blood of the Alamo. Blood of the Chinese railroad workers. Blood of the midwives hung for witchcraft, for the crime of being women who bleed. Blood of the immigrants fleeing the hopeless, running toward the open arms of the nation’s seductive hope, its greatest export. Blood of the first removed to make way for the cities, the factories, the people and their unbridled dreams: The chugging of the railways. The tapping of the telegram. The humming of industry. Sound burbling along telephone wires. Printing presses whirring with the day’s news. And the next day’s. And the day after that’s. Endless cycles of information. Cities brimming with ambitions used and discarded. The dead hold what the people throw away. The stories sink the tendrils of their hope and sorrow down into the graves and coil around the dead buried there, deep in its womb. All passes away, the dead whisper. Except for us. We, the eternal. Always here. Always listening. Always seeing. One nation, under the earth. E Pluribus unum mortuis. Oh, how we wish we could reach you! You dreamers and schemers! Oh, you children of optimism! You pioneers! You stars and stripes, forever! Sometimes, the dreamers wake as if they have heard. They take to the streets. They pick up the plow, the pen, the banner, the promise. They reach out to neighbors. They reach out to strangers. Backs stooped from a hard day’s labor, two men, one black, one white, share water from a well. They are thirsty and, in this one moment, thirst and work make them brothers. They drink of shared trust, that all men are created equal. They wipe their brows and smile up at a faithful sun.

Settling in New York, de Zavala spent the next two years authoring a pair of well-received books, including a U.S. travelogue, Journey to the United States of North America, that’s sometimes compared to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

His arrival at the Alamo is one of history's great juxtapositional flukes, as if Teddy Roosevelt or Mark Twain had darted onto the Titanic at the last minute. The man and the place had almost nothing to do with each other, yet their stories would now be forever intertwined.

The Alamo is a story we've learned to tell ourselves to justify violence, both real and imagined, first against Mexicans, then Tejanos, then Mexican-Americans, and eventually the Vietcong and al-Qaeda. "Remember the Alamo" was the battle cry that we recycle long past the fight's utility. How Mexican-Americans were shamed in Texas History classes, how politicians and bureaucrats have changed that history over the years, and any number of other episodes that make up the back half of this book tell us more about who we are now than what we thought we knew about what happened over thirteen days in 1836. That is the history that we need to learn, because we are repeating it ceaselessly. Maybe it's time to forget the Alamo, or at least the whitewashed story, and start telling the history that includes everyone. Problems arise when there's an official version of events. Texas is big enough to tell an expansive, inclusive story about the Alamo, what really happened before, how it really went down, how we wrestled over who had the right to tell the story, and why we're still fighting about it today. We do not and will not agree completely on the events. It'd be a strange place if we did and one we're sure we wouldn't like. From a practical perspective, we must do something with Alamo Plaza. It desperately needs a refresh. But spending $450 million to build a monument to white supremacy as personified by Bowie, Travis, and Crockett would be a grave injustice to a city that desperately needs better schools, jobs, and services. If Phil Collins wants to "Remember the Alamo," he is welcom to do so in the privacy of this own home. The rest of us need to forget what we learned about the Alamo, embrace the truth, and celebrate all Texans.

Of the 1,800 people living in Austin’s colony in 1825, one in four was enslaved.7

Nothing is wanted but money, and negros are necessary to make it. —Stephen F. Austin, 1832

Austin was not some pro-slavery zealot.

No, history doesn’t really change. But the way we view it does. In Texas, 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.

Yet few remember today that before Santa Anna was Texas’s enemy, he was its friend. He is a singular figure in Mexican history, a man who held the presidency eleven times in twenty-two years.

As for what is left of the Alamo, the structure itself? Well, it's a Spanish mission, a Coahuiltecan burial ground, a segregated lunch counter, as well as a site of a dozen battles, including one in March of 1836. When we focus only on thirteen days and leave out the other three hundred years, we forget a history that is equally important, if not more so.

Bowie was a seasoned swindler, always on the make, a man who fled to Texas rather than face the consequences of a series of land frauds he had attempted back in Arkansas and Louisiana.

The most notable book to support this hypothesis, Andrew J. Torget’s groundbreaking 2015 Seeds of Empire, proved enormously influential

We stand on the shoulders of revisionist authors such as Andrew Torget, Andrés Tijerina, Jesús F. de la Teja, Jeff Long, and Paul D. Lack, whose work is an antidote to the “Heroic Anglo Narrative” that’s held sway in Texas for going on two hundred years.

The Alamo, long used in a myth that demonized and gaslit Mexican-Americans and Indigenous people, might as well be a Confederate monument in the minds of conservative adherents to the Heroic Anglo Narrative.