Monday, April 12, 2004 (SF Chronicle)
Remember the Alamo, sure, as long as we remember it for what it really is: a symbol, for many, of something sinister

Oscar Villalon, Chronicle Book Editor

As the guy who wrote on the billboard at 24th and Valencia sometime in the night last week phrased it, before what he wrote in orange spray paint was papered over with a new canvas, "F -- 'The Alamo.' "
To many Mexican Americans, there's no more succinct, if impolite, wording to get across how repulsed one of the biggest minority groups in the country - - and certainly the largest in California and Texas -- is by that dilapidated mission-turned-fortress-turned-tourist-attraction in San Antonio, Texas. What's intriguing, though, given the release Friday of the big-budget movie "The Alamo," is how many people apparently don't get this. (Aside to the studio's marketing department: Have you lost your minds? Putting up an advertisement for "The Alamo" the size of a boxing ring in the Mission District?)
Any discussion about the movie so far, whether in reviews or articles about its making, has been about how it's a new-and-improved version of past depictions of that battle. This time we see that there were Tejanos fighting with the Texans at the Alamo. We see that Travis and Bowie had slaves with them during the siege. We see that more likely than not, Davy Crockett didn't go down swinging. And we see that not all the troops in Gen. Santa Ana's army were craven cowards. Things were ... complex.
As important as those tweaks are to the story, and as correct as it is to discuss them, the concern at this point in our history shouldn't be so much how the actual events at the Alamo are (or have been) presented on the screen. Dress up a bunch of baby chimps in period costumes, give them spark-shooting plastic ray guns and include them in the fall of the Alamo, too, for all that verisimilitude matters.
No, the problem is that the Alamo, like the Confederate flag, is a symbol of something much greater, much more sinister than itself. It has come to stand for what's happened long after the events of March 6, 1836. It's why the words "Remember the Alamo!" can make certain barrooms go quiet and a mouth go dry before it has the chance to spit.
Despite the facts, past movie adaptations of the Alamo -- and so many other historic events involving white America and the Other -- have been little more than propaganda for the myth of "white man good, brown man bad," problematic at best because it's what a majority of our country wanted to believe for a variety of cultural and political reasons. So, that you would have John Wayne turning himself into an Aryan Roman candle in "The Alamo" (1960) isn't surprising. In the end, that battle has -- and perhaps can only -- come to be a glorification of (white) Texan sacrifice, no matter how many allowances any film, including this new one, makes for the truth. The Alamo remains a fiery cascade of bullets, blades and cannonballs that casts into shadow the struggle Mexican Americans would go through to exist with dignity in the United States -- a struggle that continues today.
With that in mind, and going on the assumption that most Americans get their history lessons from two-hour-plus prestige films, let's revisit the date of the battle, which is a key scene from "The Alamo," and see how we can get the point across another way. Imagine we could stop the picture mid-action, the actors stuck in time as if they were all tagged in a giant game of freeze tag. Then a pleasant-looking woman comes into the frame, hands clasped before her, and delivers a public service announcement, saying something like:
"Hi. Sorry to interrupt the movie. But the producers of 'The Alamo' have asked me, in the spirit of good faith, to sorta explain a little more of what you're seeing here.
"So, OK. Behind me you see these Tejanos getting ready to give up their lives for the cause of Texas independence. But you should probably know a couple of things. As soon as Texas gets its independence in 1836 and joins the United States nine years later, all the relatives and the descendants of those poor guys back there will become second-class citizens. Many Tejanos will literally be terrorized by their fellow Texans in the years to come -- over land, over opposing slavery.
"And Mexican Americans in general throughout the Southwest, in Texas and in California in particular, will also experience oppression. Segregation, for example, and of every stripe: segregated movie houses, segregated schools, segregated swimming pools. You name it. If you've ever seen 'Giant,' you know what I'm talking about. In fact, a lot of people don't know this, but the first successful case for desegregation in schools wasn't Brown vs. Board of Education, but Roberto Alvarez vs. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District. This happened down in San Diego in 1931. True story.
"OK. I see some arms starting to shake here, what with the muskets being heavy and authentic and all, so let's get back to the movie. You good people enjoy."
If only. But that's not going to happen, and it's doubtful the other side of the story will be addressed in the commentary on the DVD. What's most likely, frankly, is that outside the Mexican American community, nobody is likely to notice the head-shaking frustration these Americans have with the Alamo.
They're not likely to spot the long trickle of blood that leads from there to the Texas Rangers cruising through the streets of border towns with the bodies of Mexicans and Mexican Americans strapped to the hood and trunk of cars as though they were trophy deer. (Between 1914 and 1919, the Rangers killed about 5,000 "Hispanics"; a figure so gruesome that in 1919 legislation was passed in Texas, at the urging of Rep. Jose T. Canales, to reform the organization.)
When they see "The Alamo," audiences are unlikely to understand that through the gates of a ruined mission comes a legacy of "white" America asserting cultural superiority over the "losers" from Texas' war of independence. Or that the Alamo is in many ways like Kosovo: the site of a battle where the eventual victor took a serious defeat, a losing engagement that's been fetishized to justify treating another people as a historic threat, not to be fully trusted.
They won't see how in our ever-evolving country, there's little place for reverence toward a symbol that says more about our shortcomings than our virtues.
Like the other thing the guy who spray-painted "The Alamo" billboard wrote, "Forget 'The Alamo.' "