You might do well educating yourself on what really happened. You might then realize that MANY Hispanics fought for the US at the Alamo. These people were landowners. After much of their blood was spilled, Americans sent them packing across the border--even though they were already citizens here. They took their houses and their land.
Knowing the history...and the fact that those brown people were American citizens at one time...how can you honestly say who is legal or illegal?
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/florem.html>>>>>>>snip
I discuss my understanding of modernity in chapter 1. Let me briefly state here that—particularly through its local inflection, what I call the Texas Modern—it references a series of economic changes, social processes, discursive articulations, and cultural forms that result in the transformation of Texas from a largely Mexican, cattle-based society into an industrial and agricultural social complex between 1880 and 1920. This transformation is at once creative and destructive, promising and debilitating, a "unity of disunity" (Berman 1982:15) that sets in motion forces of nationalism, post-Civil War politics, wage labor, bureaucratic rationalism, and the restructuring of racial and ethnic difference. It is here, in the cleavages and fissures of this transformation, that the Alamo is born. Modernity, while uneven and disparate as a social force, nonetheless serves as a periodizing frame to organize the material of this book. My focus on modernity and the Texas Modern more specifically is not undertaken in a causal manner. My thesis that the Alamo is part of the project of modernity does not in itself provide the specific ideological and practical articulations of the modern that serve as the unique or general developments from which the cultural memory of the Alamo arises. It is, in fact, the task of the pages ahead to do just that.
The Texas Modern, therefore, is both the social ground on which the Alamo enters into American cultural memory as well as the key analytic frame through which I interpret its various articulations. My decision on which expressive forms to investigate—memory, historiography, film, literature—has not been haphazard but has been influenced, in part, by the relative dearth of discussion on some forms and the vast material on others. In both cases, however, decisions on what to "include" and "exclude" emerged from the material itself. For example, that little has been written on the Alamo as a place in the built environment of San Antonio indicates how such a process seems a "natural" occurrence of everyday life. And yet, as I demonstrate in chapter 3, this process requires both the dissolution of one way of organizing space and its replacement by another. On the contrary, the vast historiographic writings on the Alamo, like the preponderance of films, indicate the continuing role the Alamo plays in the reproduction of a Texas and, more specifically, U.S. social imagination. I do not claim to have captured all facets of the Alamo; this was never my intent. Instead, my plan has been to rethink the Alamo, not as a place in history, but as a historical place made meaningful through the practices and ideologies of the Texas Modern. My objective has been to uncover the social conditions—those material and ideological practices and values—that serve as the fodder from which the very possibility of a place like the Alamo emerges in the social imagination of a people. Such a task requires that I first search the past for the various seedbeds that serve as the social "matter" for the formation of the Alamo; and second, once present, chart the various effects the Alamo, as a symbolic form, has had on the social landscape. Understanding the conditions that gave rise to the Alamo cannot ignore the equally necessary pursuit of analyzing how the emergence of this "master symbol" affected the lives of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. I conclude, therefore, that those who remember the Alamo in the early twentieth century do so not primarily to remember the events of 1836 but to re-member a social body through a specific hierarchical and class rubric endemic to the arrival of modernity in Texas. In effect, re-membering the Alamo as a site of cultural memory, as a sacred site in the pantheon of American public history, serves to hide the material social relations and conditions that require such sites in the first place. This process of re-membering has already stamped the Alamo as a naturally given icon of American cultural memory, leaving us to understand not its historical character but its "meaning." My reflections on the Alamo, as a symbolic form, follows a route directly opposite to that of its actual historical development, although I present events and actors from the past. The task of this book is to move backward from the "Alamo as given" to the historical and social conditions that serve as the necessary elements of its making and the work these elements achieve in the everyday world of social life.
Contemporary anthropological practice favors, rightly so, I believe, the portrayal of "cultural" groups as complex, historically specific entities that can no longer be discussed through reductive binaries such as those used here: "Anglo" or "Texan" and "Mexican." Such dichotomies, James Clifford (1988:23) warns, lead to the depiction of "abstract, ahistorical 'others.'" I agree. My usage of "Anglo" and "Mexican" is a necessary one, however, since what I am undertaking is a historical ethnography of the formation of "Angloness" and "Mexicanness" as categories of difference and power constructed through the making of the Alamo itself. I realize that historically specific social actors may or may not have subscribed to these terms and their particular ideologies even as the effects of their practical activity constituted the formation of historical modes of dominance and representation. Unlike contemporary ethnographic works that move from the binaries of cultural differences to the complexities of subject positions, Remembering the Alamo underscores the production of difference and the reification of identity achieved through the "making of the Alamo." My task, then, is, in the words of Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1992:16), a study of how the Alamo affected notions of cultural otherness through the "production of difference."
This book begins with a discussion of the Texas Modern, crucial to my overall argument about the Alamo as it is tied directly to this social formation. I see the "birth" of the Alamo as coterminous with the events of the Texas Modern, a begetting that provides representational and ideological fodder to this period.
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