OF SIEGES, MYTHOLOGY AND TEXAS HISTORY

By Juan Montoya
In case no one has noticed, the year marks the 175th anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo.
Or perhaps more appropriately, it should be called the Massacre of the Alamo.
Historians (most of them from the losers' side) say it pitted 2,400 Mexican soldiers under the leadership of Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna against 189 defenders (a 12-1 disadvantage), with at least nine of 10 of them Tejanos with Hispanic surnames.
The battle, which culminated in the complete destruction of the defenders March 6, is the stuff of mythology and legend that is the foundation of the State of Texas. The stuff of epics, it pits a small number of defenders against a mighty horde led by a dictator fighting for freedom.
We know now, of course, that most of this is nonsense.
I once interviewed Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach while I was working in San Antonio and asked him whether the overglorification of the defenders of the Alamo and the demonizing of Mexican soldiers defending their country from foreign invasion tended to cast them as the bad guys in the fable and created a negative self-image in Mexican-American school children.
After all, I said, the only reason the battle even took place was because of the unchecked expansion of U.S. settlers from across the Sabine River into Mexican territory without government approval. In short, the first illegal alien hordes that came into Texas.
Then there was the refusal of Texans to pay taxes to the central Mexican government, their rejection of their agreement to adopt the Catholic religion, their reluctance to go along with the 1924 Mexican law that outlawed slavery and their rejection of the authority of a distant central government.
Fehrenbach (who by the way was born in San Benito), stated that if celebrating the Alamo and the events of that March 175 years ago made Mexican-American children feel bad, than "By God we should tear down the Alamo."
The statement made good copy back then. But in thinking over his answer, I can see the sense in it. After all, in the eyes of the Mexicans, "it was a complete and utter massacre" of a besieged and isolated fortress in the middle of a plain and impossible to defend.
Few history books mention it, but during the Texas war for independence, Army Commander Sam Houston ordered the Alamo abandoned and destroyed.

Feeling that the outpost was far too isolated, he sent Colonel James Bowie with 30 men to carry out his orders. After arriving in San Antonio, somehow Bowie couldn't bring himself to destroy the old mission. Hearing that Santa Anna was marching toward The Alamo, he became even more determined to save the Alamo.

John Wayne, Hollywood, the line in the sand, David Crockett swinging his rifle against cruel Mexican soldiers, Bowie fighting from his sick bed: All these are the images that we have been led to believe.

But the reality is that people who knew theirs was a losing battle remained of their own free will to fight the inevitable with predictable results. Somehow this has been twisted by injecting myth into the mix and passing it off as fact.

The rest, as we say, is history.