Sometime ago I was invited to participate in a panel in an international conference of world English that purported to address the issues facing the English language in the 21^st century. While working on the presentation my mind kept racing back to my own very personal introduction to issues of power, of voice, of determination and agency, enveloped in the classic coming of age story, in which language awareness serves as the primary catalyst for notions of self.¹  For discovering the English language as a thirteen-year-old immigrant entailed also discovering accompanying hierarchies. It is in this primal moment when the colonial condition teaches people to either cry uncle, or become subject to borderline psychosis. The semantic space of my reflections took me back to a barrio school appropriately named David Crockett, located in the middle of the San Antonio, Texas neighborhood that provides the local color to Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek. This neighborhood lived in the shadow of the Alamo, a constant colonial reminder to both tourists and families like my own who lived within walking distance of the old San Antonio de Valero mission. There was a thirteen-year-old avid reader at the David Crockett Elementary school, who mixed in the same bundle such books as Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, War and Peace, and Los bandidos de Río Frío, a bright child who had graduated at the top of his class in a Mexican elementary school but whose teachers nonetheless, forced him to start elementary school over in the first grade because of his inability to speak English. In this school, the crossing guards were fittingly named Davy Crocketts. In a ceremony to celebrate the opening of Fiesta Week, on April 22, 1968, the organizers invited the participation of the crossings guards, dressed in their Davy Crockett buckskins and raccoon caps. A San Antonio Express photographer took a picture. On a recent visit I discovered the photo on one of the pamphlets that circulate throughout the tourist venues of the city (See Fig. 1). The photographer must have been behind all the Davy Crockett look-alikes who faced the entrance to the building, with their backs towards the photographer. The reader will not be able to identify any one child individually, since clearly the Alamo itself centers this photograph. The caption reads:

Pilgrimage to the Alamo, April 22, 1968, with Crockett Elementary School students clad in Davy Crockett buckskins and raccoon caps. Officially opening a week of Fiesta, students, organizations and clubs from throughout the State march quietly through the streets of San Antonio to lay flower wreaths at the Alamo in memory of the heroes who died there in 1836. (Noonan Guerra np.)

Remember the Alamo? I was surprised to see this picture taken more than 30 years ago, and am surprised that I cannot tell where I am in the photo. It is a hazy memory, of walking from the West side of town towards the mission. As a scholar of U.S. Latina/o culture with a focus on Mexico and Mexico-U.S. interactions and a professor in one of the Big Ten universities it is difficult to be in the position of subject and object of the critical eye. As much as I tried to distance myself from my own personal knowledge of the Alamo, these memories kept providing the filter that allowed for the critical introspection of my memory. For I think that it was not coincidental that the school teachers made an immigrant child from Mexico, unable to speak English, stand in front of a building that was then projecting two different memories: one national, that has served the Anglo-American as the creation myth of the Texas Republic (See Fig. 2), the other a personal one, albeit one that mirrored the acculturation process through education in the very site of the battle that gestated the U.S. plunder of Mexico.  The battle of the Alamo led to the battle of San Jacinto in which the U.S. army took Santa Anna prisoner. Santa Anna negotiated his release with the recognition of Texas independence. The U.S. annexation of Texas ten years later led to the U.S.-Mexican War, initiated with the pretext of the invasion of the U.S. by Mexico.²  The popular press recast the cry of "Remember the Alamo" in the Spanish-American War of 1898 as "Remember the Maine." U.S. hegemony over the peoples of Caribbean and Mexican descent in fact started over the battle of the Alamo.

The type of colonial education to which I was exposed became obvious to me when reviewing a series of "humorous" comic strips that J. F. Kimball, the superintendent of the schools in Dallas, entitled "Texas History Movies," and that appeared in the Dallas News beginning in 1926. F. B. Doran, the business manager of the Dallas News and the Dallas Journal is credited with the original idea of the comic strip. Under Doran’s supervision, Jack Patton "superbly"³ illustrated the strip (See Fig. 3), for which John Rosenfield wrote the captions (See Fig. 4). The P.L. Turner Company published and distributed the collected comic strips in a book entitled Texas History Movies: "For three decades this cartoon paperback taught Texas history to thousands of schoolchildren" "The Socony-Mobil Oil Co., Inc., successors to Magnolia Petroleum [original holders of the copyright], discontinued Texas History Movies in [the late 1950s]. Mobil realized the historical value of the publication, however, and in 1961 assigned the copyright for Texas History Movies to the Texas State Historical Association" (Ward). The Texas Historical Society reissued a "cleaner" version of the book in 1974. The December 1999 issue of Texas Monthly voted Texas History Movies as runner up in Book of the Century, with the winner being Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. George B. Ward writes in the introduction:

For several generations of Texans, some of the most vivid and memorable history of the state was found in Texas History Movies. This oddly titled work told the stories of Coronado, LaSalle, Austin, Crockett, and Houston in cartoon form. The Alamo, San Jacinto, and the Civil War came to life in a comic book. Texas History Movies is history in an unconventional form, but for more than three decades — from the late 1920s to the late 1950s — it was how many Texans learned about their past. By the 1960s, Texas History Movies was discontinued, but not forgotten. Its cartoon images lived on in copies in used bookstores and in attic trunks. They also lived on in many Texans' minds — indelible images of their ancestors’ lives.

Finally, the American army in fierce hand-to-hand combat, gained the heights. A stream of blue uniforms swept through the military college which was housed in the castle and a handful of Mexican cadets, teenage boys who would be known in history as Los Niños Heroes [sic], threw themselves from the walls to their deaths rather than be captured by the Yankees. (Hogan 186)

I jumped from the tower of Chapultepec

Into the sea of fame—

My country’s flag

My burial shroud—

With Los Niños

Whose pride and courage

Could not surrender

With indignity

Their country’s flag

To strangers… in their land (Gonzales 56)

La patria adolorida se ve cubierta por las alas del águila, teniendo a los lados nopales, mientras el todo descansa sobre la serpiente enroscada. En el gran pedestal cuatro figuras de adolescentes simbolizan el sacrificio supremo, la desesperación en la defensa, la lucha desigual y la epopeya. (Tibol 82)

(The wings of the eagle cover the wounded motherland, flanked by some cacti, while everything rests on the coiled serpent. In the great pedestal, four adolescent figures symbolize supreme sacrifice, desperation in defense, the uneven battle and the epic).

In his effort to portray the Texas conflicts of the 19^th century through the eyes of the protagonist, Juan Seguín, Treviño not only simplifies a historical period but also attempts to vindicate Seguín. The conflicts of the period are reduced to racism and the economic interests of the elite Tejano class are made to represent the interests of the entire Tejano population, seemingly homogeneous interests. Class conflicts are excluded. The film is critical, not of the economic structure that became the basis of human exploitation, but of the ideological force (i.e., racism) that excluded Tejano landowners from partaking in the nascent transformation of economic relations in Texas. For when Seguín says, "land I fought to defend," he means "my land" in the realistic rather than the metaphoric sense. (Fregoso 148)

The Texas nationalist discourse surrounding the Alamo claims this was a battle between Texans and Mexicans. This is not correct . . . . The portrayal of the Battle of the Alamo as a clearly demarcated zone of interests between Texans and Mexicans is clearly unwarranted. Prominent Mexican citizens fought on both sides, dividing their allegiance along lines of political and ideological interests, and not along the ethnically or nationally circumscribed positions that have been fabricated by the custodians of the Alamo and popularized at various levels through collective memory. (x)

Adina de Zavala’s text on the Alamo, recently published by the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project of Arte Público Press, best exemplifies this "me-too" strategy. Though Flores’s reading attempts to circumscribe the production of the narrative within the general historical and sociological events of the beginning of the century—best textualized by Américo Paredes’s With a Pistol in His Hand—the fact remains that Adina de Zavala was interested in preserving the memory of her grandfather Lorenzo de Zavala, the first vice president of the Republic of Texas. Flores attempts to read Adina de Zavala’s narratives against the grain, akin to the reading of Rosaura Sánchez and Beatriz Pita of Amparo Ruiz de Burton.⁶  Adina de Zavala will in fact construct a historical memory that is not only based on the Anglo-American presence in the area, in which the Mexicano serves as the abject for the construction of the state. Her narratives not only include the details of the battle, and details of the layout of the mission grounds, but also include details of the first arrivals and colonization of the area by the original settlers from the Islas Canarias. These narratives and accounts, that de Zavala quotes at length, are really not at all dissimilar to other accounts ideologically designed to convert the Native Americans of the region to Catholicism. From the Pastorelas to other accounts of miracles happening at the area, it is hard not to be critical of the hidden agenda of the stories told by the Franciscans to the native populations.

One such story is that of the apparition of María de Jesús Coronel, Sor María de Agreda. Fray Damián Manzanet had specifically been given instructions to look for the tribes that Sor María de Agreda had visited in her religious ecstasy. The Franciscan found the tribes in Texas, and

. . . Manzanet and his companions were joyfully and kindly received and shown every consideration. The Governor, or Chief, of the Tejas Indians one day asked Manzanet for some blue baize in which to bury his grandmother when she died.

Manzanet asked him why he desired it blue. The Chief replied that it was because a beautiful woman who had come often to visit their tribe and whom they reverenced wore blue, and they wished to be like her on passing to the other world … she had promised them teachers, and now that Manzanet and his companions had come, the "high priest" or medicine man of the tribe had told them that these were the true teachers who had been expected.

The strange part of the story is that Mary de Agreda had never really been in Texas or the New World in person, but during her state of intense longing and continued prayer, she must have dreamt or visited them in ecstasy…. She conversed with these dream people and promised them teachers which she finally caused to be sent as we have seen. Numerous were her writings descriptive of these people, their country, customs, and names of tribes, and it was afterwards found to be correct and true. (de Zavala 101-102)

Ironically de Zavala’s zeal to preserve the Mexicano/Chicano memory of the Alamo may in fact be responsible for the dominant narrative to which every tourist is exposed. Adina de Zavala formed an organization called the De Zavala Daughters, "a group of women dedicated to the preservation of Texas history and historical sites" (Flores xii). The organization changed its status to a chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas in 1893. The Alamo at the time belonged to commercial interests, and Adina de Zavala, through her chapter, initiated the negotiations that would lead to the building’s purchase and preservation. When the building was finally purchased, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas attempted to take control of the building. This second "battle of the Alamo" was a fight for the "final historical portrait of the Alamo" (Flores xv), since the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, not knowing enough about the building and its history, wanted to demolish the commercial building constructed on the original Alamo structure in order to build a park and a monument. De Zavala argued that the walls of the commercial building were the original walls of the mission and should not be destroyed. Taking possession of the keys, de Zavala barricaded herself in the building while trying to negotiate with the authorities. She was dubbed as a "defender of the Alamo," no doubt facetiously, by contemporary newspaper accounts. The myopic vision of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas prevailed. Richard Flores has argued that the de facto original downtown of San Antonio—which, like that of most Hispanic cities consists of the Plaza, the Church, and the seat of Government—has been literally transferred to the Alamo grounds, now surrounded by a hotel complex, a Mall, the Plaza Wax Museum, and the Ripley’s Believe It or Not. The river, which by orders of Santa Anna carried the corpses of the Mexican soldiers killed in the battle, now carries the barges with tourists dining on Mexican food.⁷  The myopic vision of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas explains the gigantic size of the Imax Theater’s screen in which "Alamo: The Price of Freedom" shows at the mall.

The publication of the Diary of José Enrique de la Peña recently put to the test dominant fifties narrative on the myth, epitomized in John Wayne’s The Alamo. De la Peña gives a first person witness account of the battle. The passage that created much controversy follows:

Shortly before Santa Anna’s speech, an unpleasant episode had taken place, which, since it occurred after the end of the skirmish, was looked upon as base murder and which contributed greatly to the coolness that was noted. Some seven men had survived the general carnage and, under the protection of General Castrillón, they were brought before Santa Anna. Among them was one of great stature, well proportioned, with regular features, in whose face there was the imprint of adversity, but in whom one also noticed a degree of resignation and nobility that did him honor. He was the naturalist David Crockett, well known in North America for his unusual adventures, who had undertaken to explore the country and who, finding himself in Béjar at the very moment of surprise, had taken refuge in the Alamo, fearing that his status as a foreigner might not be respected. Santa Anna answered Castrillón’s intervention in Crockett’s behalf with a gesture of indignation and, addressing himself to the sappers, the troops closest to him, ordered his execution. The commanders and officers were outraged at this action and did not support the order, hoping that once the fury of the moment had blown over these men would be spared, but several officers who were around the president and who, perhaps, had not been present during the moment of danger, became noteworthy by an infamous deed, surpassing the soldiers in cruelty. They thrust themselves forward, in order to flatter the commander, and with swords in hand, fell upon these unfortunate, defenseless men just as a tiger leaps upon his prey. Though tortured before they were killed, these unfortunates died without complaining and without humiliating themselves before their torturers. (de la Peña 53)

… in an effort to curb the growing immigration from the United States, they [the Mexican government] passed an emancipation proclamation in 1829 forbidding slavery. While slavery was not a practice in Mexico, this law was aimed at the growing number of U.S. citizens holding slaves in the Mexican province of Texas. (viii-ix)

This view on slavery circulated in the Mexican analyses, for example in José María Roa Bárcena’s Recuerdos de la invasion norteamericana (1883), the author states that "Tejas quedó de hecho rebelada por la influencia de los colonos norte-americanos, de antemano disgustados á [sic] causa la abolición de la esclavitud . . ." (Texas rebelled because of the north-American settlers, angry over the cause of abolition of slavery) [12], though conservatively, Roa Bárcena also states that the North used the issue of slavery as an excuse to crush the South. The author also believes that the annexation of the northern Mexican territory increased the hope for a slave nation, and thus it was inevitable that the increase in territory would lead to the Civil War. Recent accounts state very directly that Texas was not annexed immediately after its independence from Mexico because "Texas would become a slave state and, with its entrance into the Union, the slave states would outnumber the free states" (Hogan 30). It was no coincidence that abolitionists, such as the New England Non-Resistance Society, and people such as William Lloyd Garrison and Abraham Lincoln "associated the occupation of Mexico with the concept of expansion of slavery" through the addition of more slave states to the Union (Hogan 65).

Henry David Thoreau’s "Resistance to Civil Government" widely circulated also under the title "Civil Disobedience" expressed just these views. Thoreau had written the essay, according to Philip Van Doren Stern, "to protest against taxes levied to support slavery and to finance the war with Mexico that many Northerners felt was being waged to benefit the slave states and extend their territory" (453). Thoreau wrote in "Resistance to Civil Government":

Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure (455).

Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. (459)

There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advice from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. (460)

It is there [in prison] that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them, on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,—the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. (465)

Griswold del Castillo also reports that when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was presented for ratification in the U.S., "The opposition party, the Whigs, were against the treaty … [because] it would annex too much territory, which eventually would increase the slavocracy’s power in Congress." People like Daniel Webster opposed the growth of the south and of slavery, and even attempted unsuccessfully to include a clause that would restrict slavery (44-45). The issue had been debated through the Wilmot Proviso, an attachment to the appropriations Bill of 1846, which attempted to prohibit slavery in any territories acquired from Mexico. The proviso was eventually written out of the bill, though the discussion on slavery in the new territories entrenched positions that would not be resolved until after the Civil War.

Recent accounts have less trouble in making the connection between slavery, the Texas Rebellion, and the war with Mexico. Carlos Fuentes for example, echoes these concerns in his La frontera de cristal ("No crucen el río grande, dicen los enemigos de la guerra de Polk, ésta es una guerra esclavista, para aumentar los territorios sureños..." [Don’t cross the Río Grande, state the enemies of Polk’s war, this slave war is meant to increase the southern territories]), and John Sayles’s Lone Star ("The men who founded this state broke from Mexico because they needed slavery to be legal to make a fortune in the cotton business").⁸  Cecilia Holland, in her "Two Dreams of California" recently published to celebrate the sesquicentennial of Harper’s Magazine writes:

The free states resented the power of the southern slave states in Congress and saw each new slave state admitted as an expansion of that power; many suspected the South of instigating the Mexican War to add vast new territories to its control. (122)

Not only did Emily’s dalliance with Santa Anna at San Jacinto keep him occupied and cement the victory of the sixteenth decisive battle of the world, it validated an empire—the Republic of Texas—that flourished for a decade. Moreover, the victory at San Jacinto not only brought Texas into the United States but also added the future states of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma—a million square miles of territory that more than doubled the size of the American nation at the time. Even for a most generous ladies’ man, this real estate, in terms of intrinsic nineteenth-century values, had to be an all-time record as a fee for the companionship of Emily for a period of less than two days and nights. As payment by the hour for that brief time, the fee approximated a world-shattering record. The fortunes paid by the crowned heads of Europe for the favors of Madame de Pompadour and her successor, the Comtesse Du Barry, became paltry sums by comparison. (39)

Forget the Alamo. John Sayles’s Lone Star ends with the conversation between the two protagonists, Sam Deeds and Pilar. Finding out that Buddy Deeds is their father, Pilar suggests they continue their "irresistible romance" because she cannot get pregnant ("if that’s what the rule is about"). Poignantly, she avoids the mention of the incest taboo.¹⁰  The film ends with Pilar’s statement: "All that other stuff, and all that history. The hell with it, right? Forget the Alamo." Since Pilar works as a high school teacher, Sayles assigns crucial weight to the statement. In fact, the film calls for a mythic reconciliation of the racial groups as represented by the edenic couple (the decrepitude of the drive-in theater will no doubt remind readers of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude) and the necessary violence that must ensue if great races and peoples are to be forged. Sayles assigns to Pilar (pillar of the community, history teacher, daughter of the city council woman, daughter of the sheriff who rids the community of the prejudiced Charley Wade in order for the new society to emerge, symbolic tie to the undocumented workers through the person she believed to be her father, present partner of the new sheriff) the role of mediator. Possessing qualities everybody in the community shares, the director assigns her the "motherly" conciliatory qualities needed by the new cosmic race. "Forget the Alamo" carries multiple significations, but mainly, as she herself states, it means, "We’ll start from scratch." Historical conciliation emanates from the natural bonds of siblinghood, of heart and soul, of patriarchs and laughter.

Tish Hinojosa’s Homeland in a song entitled "West Side of Town" details the saga of a San Antonio West Side family, headed by Felipe and María, who arrive from Mexico and toil through the hardships and the wars to make ends meet. The writer equates the couple to "pilgrims that made/a good life the hard way" (Hinojosa 9). In fact, the characterization of the undocumented worker in Hinojosa’s songs as mythic heroes of classical quests is striking.

Sandra Cisneros’s "Remember the Alamo" focuses on Rudy, a transvestite who performs at a club: "Every Thursday night at the Travisty. Behind the Alamo, you can’t miss it. One-man show, girl. Flamenco, salsa, tango, fandango, merengue, cumbia, cha-cha-chá. Don’t forget. The travisty. Remember the Alamo" (63). Cisneros’s narrator intersperses names of people with no explanation as to who they are. Since "Tristán dances with La Calaca Flaca [Death]," and the fact that the Alamo has been associated with death (of the Texian and Mexican soldiers during the Texas Rebellion), the reader will assume that the names belong to people who have died. The narrator calls Death "the fag hag," further implying that its presence does not leave Tristán’s side. The apparent subversion of "Remember the Alamo" proposes another history, one which cannot be addressed directly. The reader will get the impression that death already circles Rudy. But it is not called upon directly; the reader feels that Rudy’s body is already deteriorating (ulcers, hospital halls, bloody sheets, etc.), though it will be up to the reader to put the pieces of information together. Is History here the real travesty? Is its emplotment pushing us to not name the unnamable?

A recent film One Man’s Hero, though not concentrating on the Alamo directly, brings another issue to the forefront in the quest for a different narrative surrounding the war with Mexico. The film focuses on the San Patricio Batallion (Saint Patrick’s Batallion) in the Mexican Army of the time, purportedly a group of deserters from the U.S. Army who defected to Mexico in sympathy with the country’s cause (the defense of its territory). A recent book on the batallion, Michael Hogan’s The Irish Soldiers of Mexico puts together all the different interpretations of the event, and in fact, the author chooses to not characterize the battalion as mere defectors, but makes the point that some of the soldiers were in fact Mexican citizens who had immigrated directly to Mexico. The unfair treatment of the soldiers, and the harsh punishment inflicted upon them for their desertion (some of them were lashed and then branded with a "D" [for desertion] on their cheeks, and others were hanged just as the American soldiers storming into Chapultepec Castle [of Halls of Montezuma fame]) makes a cause for a more multicultural reading of the U.S.-Mexico War. Michael Hogan argues that the discrimination against the Irish in the 19^th century allowed for the cruel and unusual punishment (torture really) to take place, especially since Anglo-American soldiers, who sometimes committed worst atrocities were not tried by their commanders. The title of the film is taken from a line in a dialogue: "One man’s hero is another man’s traitor." Mexico in fact honors the soldiers as heroes. Hogan includes Sam Chamberlain’s painting entitled "The Hanging of the San Patricios" (1848) in which the reader will be able to see the bodies dangling by the ropes, and the Castle of Chapultepec in the background.

As American troops stormed the ramparts, the deserters watched the eagle and snake banner of Mexico lowered from its staff on Chapultepec Castle and the Stars and Sripes rise in its place. Just before the traps were spung, with their last breath in a shout that was heard across the valley, they cheered the flag they had betrayed. (Farifax Downey, qtd. in Hogan 187)

Surprisingly the 1956 film Giant — which starred Elizabeth Taylor (Leslie Lyntonn Benedict), Rock Hudson (Jordan "Bic" Benedict), James Dean (Jett Rink), Elsa Cárdenas (Juana Benedict) and Dennis Hopper (Jordan Benedict III) — may hold the most layered memory of the Alamo, if only because it reflects the Anglo-American anxiety (to use one of Marjorie Garber’s terms) towards the Mexican/Chicano population. The film allegorizes the King Ranch in Texas owned by the Kleberg family. Richard Flores believes that "Mrs. R.J. Kleberg and her family at the King Ranch were, according to the Mexican folklore of the day, responsible for the social and economic demise of Mexicans in Texas" (xxviii). George Stevens, the director, characterizes Leslie Lyntonn’s independence and strong will—which make her attractive to Bic Benedict — through the character’s opinion that the Alamo served as the trigger to steal the lands from Mexico. From this initial scene, Mexican culture moves from the background to center stage in several episodes of the film, until it becomes crucial to the movie’s development as racial mixing and ideas of racial purity textualize the decadence and decline of the Benedict family in a new order brought about by the discovery of oil. This new order will neither accommodate the old Mexican ranch hands nor the old landed gentry the Benedicts represent.

One of the crucial scenes in the film depicts the fistfight between Bic Benedict and Sergeant, the racist owner of the diner. Tempers start festering when Juana, Benedict’s daughter-in-law, tells Bic that her son wants ice cream. Sergeant remarks sarcastically the he thinks Benedict’s grandchild would want a "tamale." Perhaps too stunned to react immediately, Bic’s position and social stature allows for his Mexican family to be served.

However, when a Mexican/Chicano family walks into the diner, the owner refuses to serve them, flustered by the infusion of Mexicans into his diner, and tries to literally throw the group out. Benedict tries to mediate, to no avail, and the fistfight ensues. While the fight takes place, in the background, the jukebox plays the song "The Yellow Rose of Texas" (considered the Texas National anthem, purportedly standing for the old order of White supremacy).¹¹  The viewer does not hear the lyrics, but in the final unintended irony of the film, the racist sergeant does not know that in the 1835 original lyrics, it is a Black lover singing to her Black beloved. She is a "sweetest rose of color," with bright-moist eyes more beautiful than any southern belle. His sweetheart walks along the Río Grande, waiting for her beloved, who has promised to return:

There’s a yellow rose in Texas

That I am going to see

No other darky knows her

No one only me

…

Where the Río Grande is flowing

And the starry skies are bright

She walks along the river

In the quite [sic] summer night. (Qtd. in Turner)

Notes

¹. See for example Tino Villanueva’s Scene from the Movie Giant, Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy, Richard Rodríguez’s Hunger of Memory, Esmeralda Santiago’s When I was Puerto Rican, Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Line of the Sun, etc. 

².  Mexico recognized the Nueces River as the southern border of Texas. After the annexation, the U.S. claimed the Río Bravo/Río Grande, farther south than the Nueces River, divided Texas from Mexico. When the Mexican Army stationed troops between the Nueces and the Río Bravo/Río Grande, the U.S. claimed Mexico had invaded its territory. The U.S. used this pretext to declare the war with Mexico.

^3.  The “superb” label is that of Gorge B. Ward.

⁴.  For an excellent introduction to Juan Nepomuceno Seguín see Jesús F. de la Teja’s “The Making of a Tejano.”  De la Teja reports that Sam Houston, the very same person who objected to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo because the U.S. did not extend its grab all the way to the state of Veracruz, spoke highly of Seguín.  “Houston stated: ‘The Colonel commanded the only Mexican company who fought in the cause of Texas in the Battle of San Jacinto.  His chivalrous and estimable conduct in the battle won for him my warmest regard and esteem.’  Writing to Juan’s father some years later, Houston extended his compliments to the company in general, citing Juan’s conduct and that of “his brave company in the army of 1836, and his brave and gallant bearing in the battle of San Jacinto, with that of his men” (Seguín 27).

^5.  Santa Anna ordered that the people killed at the Alamo be cremated in a funeral pyre.  He ordered one of his soldiers to dispose of the Mexican bodies.  Since so many people had been killed, the order was not strictly carried out, many of the bodies were simply dumped in the San Antonio River.

⁶.  See her introduction to Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don.

⁷.  See for example The Getaway with Steve McQueen.

^8.  Unfortunately Sayles has Pilar (Elizabeth Peña), the history teacher, sound the conciliatory note by stating that the reading is too simplistic, thus casting the teacher who makes this statement as radical.

⁹.   In John Wayne’s The Alamo the only slave in the film is given his freedom after his master dies.  The slave opts for not leaving the Alamo and staying with his Master.  The scene suggests that slavery only encumbered the relationship, since in its absence, a natural bond would still tie a master to his and slave.

¹⁰. For an analysis of the implications culture-romance, see Doris Sommer’s “Irresistible Romance.”

¹¹.  Tino Villanueva’s book of poetry Scene from the Movie Giant focuses on a young man who remembers the showing of the film Giant in South Texas.  In the book, the boy remembers the fight between Rock Hudson’s character and Sergent, as a battle between good and evil, a foundational moment for the construction of a boy’s identity.

Works Cited

Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek. New York: Random House, 1991.

Holland, Cecilia. "Two Dreams of California." Harper’s Magazine (June 2000): 122-126.