Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol

by Richard R. Flores

Overview

"Remember the Alamo!" reverberates through Texas history and culture, but what exactly are we remembering? Over nearly two centuries, the Mexican victory over an outnumbered band of Alamo defenders has been transformed into an American victory for the love of liberty. Why did the historical battle of 1836 undergo this metamorphosis in memory and mythology to become such a potent master symbol in Texan and American culture?

In this probing book, Richard Flores seeks to answer that question by examining how the Alamo's transformation into an American cultural icon helped to shape social, economic, and political relations between Anglo and Mexican Texans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. In the first part of the book, he looks at how the attempts of heritage society members and political leaders to define the Alamo as a place have reflected struggles within Texas society over the place and status of Anglos and Mexicans. In the second part, he explores how Alamo movies and the transformation of Davy Crockett into an Alamo hero/martyr have advanced deeply racialized, ambiguous, and even invented understandings of the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292725409
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	06/01/2002
Series:	CMAS History, Culture, and Society Series
Edition description:	1ST
Pages:	216
Sales rank:	739,583
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Richard R. Flores is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also directs the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies.

Table of Contents

• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Texas Modern
• Part One. The Alamo as Place, 1836-1905
  • 2. History, Memory-Place, and Silence: The Public Construction of the Past
  • 3. From San Fernando de Béxar to the Alamo City: The Political Unconscious of Plaza Space
  • 4. From Private Visions to Public Culture: The Making of the Alamo
• Part Two. The Alamo as Project, 1890-1960
  • 5. Cinematic Images: Frontiers, Nationalism, and the Mexican Question
  • 6. Why Does Davy Live? Modernity and Its Heroics
• Conclusion: The Alamo as Tex(Mex) Master Symbol of Modernity
• Notes
• References
• Index

What People are Saying About This

Olga Nájera-Ramírez

Drawing on a broad range of theorists in various fields (geography, social history, semiotics, cultural studies, and anthropology), Flores provides a compelling and quite forceful analysis of various historically produced forms of documenting, recalling, and interpreting the Alamo.
— Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz

Olga Nájera-Ramírez

Drawing on a broad range of theorists in various fields (geography, social history, semiotics, cultural studies, and anthropology), Flores provides a compelling and quite forceful analysis of various historically produced forms of documenting, recalling, and interpreting the Alamo.