The Real Story of the Alamo

A police officer walks outside of the closed Alamo on April 1, 2020 in downtown San Antonio, Texas. [AFP/Mark Felix]

By Samantha Grasso

Do you “remember the Alamo”? If so, you might want to consider forgetting it. Or, at least, the version of the story that you think you know.

The battle of the Alamo – which took place during the Texas Revolution, when the Mexican army laid siege on a mission for 13 days and hundreds of Texians (as Texas settlers were called) and Tejanos fought them to their deaths – has become a metaphor for American liberty and honor.

The story, though, is rooted in myth. Some Texas historians have tried to correct it, but conservatives have championed the tale in middle school history books, and even used it to prop up a multi-million dollar Alamo renovation project. GOP leaders detest the so-called “revisionist” narrative so much that they’ve gone so far as to get a virtual event for a new book on the topic canceled.

That new book, appropriately called Forget the Alamo, lays bare the uncomfortable facts at the heart of the story. I recently spoke to journalist and communications consultant Jason Stanford, who co-authored the book along with Bryan Burrough and Chris Tomlinson, about the importance of dispelling these myths. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Why did you and your co-authors write this book?

There are wide misconceptions about what is essentially the creation myth of Texas. It's a myth on par with the Civil War being about states' rights or George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. It's just not true … and that has had pretty, pretty dark consequences for generations.

What’s commonly taught in Texas about the Alamo?

That a bunch of freedom-loving settlers in Texas defeated the dastardly dictator Santa Anna to win liberty for the Republic of Texas, knowing that they were going to die. It was a story of self-sacrifice in the service of liberty for their fellow man.

But largely, the freedom that [the settlers] were fighting for was the freedom to enslave people. And Santa Anna, far from just being a dictator for being a dictator’s sake, was a pragmatic politician. And Mexico was an abolitionist country that had unfortunately made an accommodation with the Anglo settlers on slavery, because they needed people to live in Texas to protect them from Comanche raids.

Texas wanted to think of itself as “different” than the rest of the South after the Civil War. So they told this story of liberty and not slavery. The University of Texas taught … history professors for generations [who] taught the myth as the real history of Texas until after World War II.

Now, when historians, both Hispanic and Anglo, start talking about how “that's not really the way it happened,” it’s attacked and suppressed and ignored.

Why does the myth persist?

Well, part of it is politics – that the people in charge like the story, the heroic Anglo myth. And so anything that contradicts that story, regardless of its historical accuracy, is considered disloyal to Texas, an insult to who we are as Texans. That's actually how a lot of Anglo Texans feel about this stuff.

On the other side, the Hispanic historians and academics are more interested in what has been left out. Not just the Tejano defenders at the Alamo who were killed and who were part of the revolution, and then subsequently run out of Texas in a kind of ethnic cleansing, but the fact that this was Mexico, and that Hispanics were instantly turned into second-class citizens in their own country, and many of them had no interest in starting their own country, and that their stories have not been taught part of the history of Texas for a long time.

So a lot of them said, “Yeah, no, we haven't been studying the Alamo because it's not our history.” So the Alamo became white people’s history. And it's this academic and intellectual segregation that kept it out of mainstream culture and understanding for a long time. We’re not writing anything new. We're just writing it for a new audience.

What’s behind people’s unwillingness to acknowledge slavery’s role in the Texas Revolution?

This is about identity. One of the [laws passed against] critical race theory [states] that schools are not allowed to teach issues in a way that makes anyone feel bad about their race. And what they mean without saying so explicitly there is you can't make white people feel guilty by teaching them about slavery, or about Jim Crow, even though that's been happening to Black and brown people for a hundred years.

It’s like what my wife said after the 2020 elections: White people don't want to be told that they're wrong. They don't want to be made to feel bad. And this is largely about a white power structure feeling personally invested in a positive version of history. And that they think by learning more about history that they're being told not just that Jim Bowie was bad, but that they are bad.

Is there anything else you want people to know about the overlooked history of the Alamo?

Going into it, we thought we were writing a book about how there was never a line in the sand, and people were fighting for slavery. What we discovered was how punishing this myth has been for Texas Hispanics for generations.

They were pointed to by teachers and told that people that looked like them killed Davy Crockett. The way Texas teaches its history makes bad guys [out] of what is soon to be its dominant population. We heard many anecdotes of field trips, where little seventh graders would walk in [to the Alamo] as Texans, and walk out as Texans and Mexicans.

And it never occurs to the white people in Texas that that's what's happening, but every Hispanic I know knows it. And I'm just glad that this book found a popular audience so that white Texans go, “Huh, didn't know that.” And now they're having conversations with their Hispanic friends that they never had before. That’s how I think change happens – we tell a story that includes everyone.

---

You might also enjoy