Will Eléa remember the Alamo? : concerning the reconstruction of Texan identity in a foreign land

Eléa during an evening stroll in the precincts of the Alamo

If you head due south from Austin, curve to the right in the vicinity of Lockhart or Maxwell, and are sure to cross the Guadalupe River somewhere between Canyon Lake and Seguin, you will eventually come to a place called San Antonio.  Situated in the heart of this now sprawling city is the most popular tourist attraction in Texas: the Alamo.  Now, for those of you who hail from the Lone Star State, "Remember the Alamo" is a phrase familiar to your ears, even if you generally had other things on your mind during 7th and 11th grade Texas History class.  But let's be honest: how many of us actually remember the Alamo, or even know the most basic facts about the mission-turned-battle-ground?

That the Alamo was not foremost in my own mind during my formative years is not surprising: the three-day siege and 90 minute battle that occurred there between about 1,500 Mexican troops and roughly 180 Texan soldiers in 1836 seemed to have no bearing on life in Austin during the 1980s and 90s.  Initially the battle cry "Remember the Alamo" was of course precisely that: a cry to battle.  As such, it was a call to remember the motivation for fighting.  And as with all entreaties to remember, once the function of a memory passes away, so too does the memory.

Besides this very practical facet, it seems that one of the primary cultural functions of memory, or at least uses to which it is put, is the construction and, more importantly, maintenance of group identity.  And this function often becomes particularly important when an individual or group is severed from his/her/its geographical homeland.  Growing up in Texas, and with no apparent threat to my home state on the horizon, there was no need to solidify my Texan identity or idealize and fetishize the Lone Star; I was situated smack dab in the middle of the state and had to drive about 8 hours just to get out of the darn thing.  Texarkana was located somewhere just off the backside of Pluto as far as my central Texan perspective was concerned.

But now we have the case of Eléa: a Texan who has been born into the culturally alien world of Manhattan, where bagels and subways rule supreme, and bluebonnets and cypress-shaded canoe jaunts are no more real than the referents of the caricatural stuffed tropical animals in which she will soon take interest.

A real Texan among us

This is, to my mind, the perfect opportunity to re-member the Alamo.  Perhaps our generation lost its way in the rush of Reganomics and the divine right of capitalistic pursuit.  But Eléa will reclaim the past.  The Alamo will mean something to her and she will thereby become a true Texan, that is, a self-consciously Texan Texan.  Only beyond the mental (and in this case physical) borders of the former Republic does one actually have a chance to make "Texas" monolithic, to carve an essence out of arbitrariness.  (After all, can you name an attribute that is both common and unique to all Texans, thus allowing us to speak of Texas as an unit characterized by internal uniformity?)

With this in mind, we shall—taking liberties with the standard usage of certain verbs—re-member the Alamo to Eléa, or remember Eléa the Alamo.  It shall be the underpinning of her cultural identity as she wanders the boulevards and allies of this hostile land where good barbecue exists only in the world of her ancestors.  She is in Egypt, Paterson and Bloomburg are the pharaohs, and she yearns for the Levant lying beyond the far shore of the Hudson.

Not that she'll have to know anything about the Alamo that we might call factual or historical.  After all, what did the early nineteenth-century Scottish intelligentsia really know of life in the Highlands?  But that doesn't matter, for the Alamo will be alive to her in a way that it was not to her culturally disoriented parents who failed to sink any imagined roots into the cracks and crevices of the Alamo's limestone walls.  And when we do bring Eléa back to visit her imagined homeland, I will have the pleasure of introducing my friends to a truly self-made Texan.