"Forget the Alamo" & John WAYNE. It was about slavery and suppressing Latinos. [View all]

[UTUSN]

New book, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, by Bryan Burrough, Jason Stanford, Chris Tomlinson.

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https://news.yahoo.com/weve-telling-alamo-story-wrong-214354374.html

We've Been Telling the Alamo Story Wrong for Nearly 200 Years. Now It's Time to Correct the Record

Bryan Burrough

.... Start with the Alamo. So much of what we “know” about the battle is provably wrong. William Travis never drew any line in the sand; this was a tale concocted by an amateur historian in the late 1800s. There is no evidence Davy Crockett went down fighting, as John Wayne famously did in his 1960 movie The Alamo, a font of misinformation; there is ample testimony from Mexican soldiers that Crockett surrendered and was executed. The battle, in fact, should never have been fought. Travis ignored multiple warnings of Santa Anna’s approach and was simply trapped in the Alamo when the Mexican army arrived. He wrote some dramatic letters during the ensuing siege, it’s true, but how anyone could attest to the defenders’ “bravery” is beyond us. The men at the Alamo fought and died because they had no choice. Even the notion they “fought to the last man” turns out to be untrue. Mexican accounts make clear that, as the battle was being lost, as many as half the “Texian” defenders fled the mission and were run down and killed by Mexican lancers. ....

Census data indicates that Latinos are poised to become a majority of the Texas population any year now, and for them, the Alamo has long been viewed as a symbol of Anglo oppression. The fact that many Tejanos — Texas Latinos— allied with the Americans, and fought and died alongside them at the Alamo, has generally been lost to popular history. The Tejanos’ key contributions to early Texas were written out of almost all early Anglo-authored histories, much as Anglo Texans ran Tejanos out of San Antonio and much of South Texas after the revolt. For too long, the revolt has been viewed by many as a war fought by all Anglos against all of Mexican descent. ....

It’s a lesson many Latinos in the state don’t learn until mandatory Texas history classes taught in seventh grade. “The way I explain it,” says Andres Tijerina, a retired history professor in Austin, “is Mexican-Americans [in Texas] are brought up, even in the first grade, singing the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance and all that, and it’s not until the seventh grade that they single us out as Mexicans. And from that point on, you realize you’re not an American. You’re a Mexican, and always will be. The Alamo story takes good, solid, loyal little American kids and it converts them into Mexicans.”

And Mexican-American history isn’t the only piece of the past that’s distorted by the Alamo myth. Academic researchers long tiptoed around the issue of slavery in Texas; active research didn’t really begin until the 1980s. Since then, scholars such as Randolph Campbell and Andrew Torget have demonstrated that slavery was the single issue that regularly drove a wedge between early Mexican governments—dedicated abolitionists all—and their American colonists in Texas, many of whom had immigrated to farm cotton, the province’s only cash crop at the time. ....

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