San Antonio, Texas
If you want a glimpse of the tensions and opportunities that have forged 21st century Texas, you could do better than watch the recent Disney release The Alamo and worse than watch the 1956 film Giant.
Help openDemocracy celebrate the publication of Siva Vaidhyanathans new book The Anarchist in the Library at New York University on Wed 28 April, 2004. For more info click here.
By the end of The Alamo, it seems as if Texas is headed toward a future rich with freedom (although freedom from whom or what is not entirely clear). At the end of Giant, its clear that the Texas myth of a proud state populated by strong, brave, rural, oil-enriched, self-made white men would not hold up in the face of rapid economic and social change.
With more than 21 million people, Texas is the second most populous state in the United States. Despite its rural cowboy image, Texas is remarkably urban and diverse and getting more so.
Texas has three of the ten most populous cities in the United States. Almost one out of every three Texans is Latino. More than 11% of Texas is of African descent. And almost 3% are of Asian descent, with Vietnamese, Indian, and Chinese communities undergoing rapid growth. This morning I had breakfast in a restaurant in which not a word of English flew among patrons. There is strong reason to believe that by the next national census in 2010 Texas will not have an ethno-racial majority.
Yet as they lose their grip on the state, white Texans are still investing in their ahistorical mythologies. And as the rest of the nation becomes more like Texas, more people seem ready to share in the collective imagination of Texas legends. The myths and legends of Texas are getting farther from the reality of Texas every day.
Texans recently witnessed with much trepidation the release of the major Hollywood production of The Alamo. This film, starring Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett, purports to tell the story of great courage shown by a handful of white pro-slavery English speakers who hoped to steal this huge mass of land away from anti-slavery Mexican forces who had governed the area and its Spanish-speaking majority citizenry. Those who lost the 13-day siege in February 1836 have been canonised. Their names grace schools, parks, and counties. Their records as racist, pro-slavery, anti-Catholic terrorists have been washed from the official stories.
The films trailer, which makes no mention of the issue of slavery or racism, claims: In one of the greatest battles in history, one side will fight without soldiers. They were bankers, farmers, lawyers, husbands, brothers, fathers, outcasts, dreamers, legends. The Mexican army is portrayed as wealthy, lazy, and corrupt, yet somehow one of the greatest armies ever assembled. The Texan militia that lost the battle for the tiny mission in San Antonio (which sits less than a mile from where I type this) is a ragged band of volunteers for whom a devotion to some undefined claim of freedom (although not for African slaves) is enough to justify a war for independence from the Republic of Mexico. Imagine how different this world would be if Mexico had prevailed in that war.
While echoing the themes of good vs. evil and the lost cause that made The Lord of the Rings such a powerful cinematic allegory for the Age of Terror, the myth of the Alamo resonates in the pending political climate. The Texas Republican Party, dominated by white, middle- and upper-class suburbanites, is defending its political mission against the surging onslaught of Texans of colour.
The films embrace of the empty signifier freedom should give us pause. It is, after all, what Texan George Bush says the United States is fighting for, and what radical Islamists and Iraqi nationalists are allegedly fighting against. Yet Bush never allows deeper examination of what freedom might mean for Iraqis or anyone else. Freedom, in America, stands for all things good, all things chosen by those who support actions to spread freedom. Such a claim for freedom is a closed system, a syllogism, one that inoculates itself against interrogation. How could you be against freedom?
Interestingly, the film of The Alamo, while echoing the empty rhetoric of freedom, undermines its own intentions in a naked attempt to expand its audience beyond patriotic white Texans. The film overemphasizes the role of a handful of Tejanos (Texans of Mexican heritage) in the cause, yet gives them no voice to explain their role in the war. Unlike so many Texan institutions, Disneys Alamo acknowledges that leaders such as Jim Bowie and William Travis were drunks, debtors, and slave owners. And Davy Crockett contrary to legend does not die bravely in battle. Those who go to the movie expecting to have their patriotic passions inflamed will instead emerge confused, unsatisfied, and perhaps irate.
The film is not complex enough to explain the tangled interests in 19th century post-colonial Mexican politics, nor the exodus of criminals and debtors to Texas to escape the law in more established jurisdictions. The real history is fascinating, culminating in the de facto enslavement of Tejanos and the de jure enslavement of Africans, as well as the proud and painful emergence of Mexican republican nationalism. Those who see the film in hope of understanding a conflict that resonates today will leave underwhelmed by missed opportunities.
As a result, the film already appears to be a financial disaster for Disney, a company experiencing turmoil over poor management and bad decisions during the past five years. Disney has lost its ability to move its audience, yet retains its power to spend millions on its failures. Disney was, after all, the institution most responsible for perpetuating the American frontier myth and the legend of Davy Crockett. Now its about as successful as the short-lived Republic of Texas was debilitated by financial failures and incompetent leaders.
Perhaps passionate Texanness does not sell any more. The elements of Texana are more kitsch than kulture, increasingly divorced from history and ideology. The film that captures this best is Pee Wees Big Adventure, in which our young protagonist finds himself knocked unconscious after visiting the Alamo in search of his stolen bicycle. When local Texans revive Pee Wee one asks: Whats your name? I dont remember. Where are you from? I dont remember. Do you remember anything? I remember the Alamo.
