Throw Confetti To Celebrate Oppression
April 28, 2017 4:02 PM   Subscribe

What Fiesta fails to recognize is the consequential oppression and violence of Mexicans at the hands of Anglo Texans following Texas’ “independence.” Fiesta San Antonio is a ten-day festival held every spring. But as writer Denise Hernández explains, what it means to nonwhite residents of the city is darker and more complex.
posted by emjaybee (4 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
A friend of mine visited Austin, and we went to the Bullock Texas State History Museum. When we exited the section on the Anglo settlement of Texas and the War for Independence Slavery, which paints the Anglo settlers in a very positive light, she said "Wow, those guys were horrible, weren't they?" "Well," I responded, "further study does not prove you wrong."
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:39 PM on April 28, 2017 [15 favorites]


The Texians stole Texas from Mexico, and San Antonio has been there the whole time. Later, the Texas Rangers stole west Texas from the Comanche, with San Antonio as their base. A pretty brutal & rapacious lot, the original settlers were. Though seriously, Fanin was a coward and an idiot & Sam Houston was a drunkard who got lucky, also Santa Ana was no military mastermind, but he thought he'd got the best of them at The Alamo. Which is in downtown San Antonio. There was house to house fighting in the days before the Texians retreated within its walls.

If you want to read a damn good book about Hispanic culture in San Antonio, I highly recommend Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Phillip Santos.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:03 PM on April 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


This seems kind of like latching on to Fiesta--something anodyne at worst, positive and pretty universally enjoyed by San Antonians who participate in it--and trying to use that as a launch pad for your own issue. "What Fiesta fails to recognize is the consequential oppression and violence of Mexicans at the hands of Anglo Texans following Texas’ “independence.”" Well, it's kind of just a big party loosely hinging on events in Texas history and lore; the party she's describing kind of sounds miserable.

Colonial Texas wasn't pretty--which was Colonial Mexico before that--and Colonial Spain before that--which was partially an Aztec tributary before that--oh and all of which were political overlays on the territories of successive waves of indigenous people (the Apache might have described the "consequential oppression and violence of [Apache] at the hands of [Comanche]").

The resulting mishmash of cultures is why Texas--and Fiesta--is awesome. Here's another article by a solid local journalistic outfit that fits the SACurrent piece into that context.
posted by resurrexit at 12:27 AM on April 29, 2017 [7 favorites]


Ah, the Alamo. This post just gave me a weird flashback to a playset I was given when I was about ten or so, which I dutifully set up and used to reenact the events it depicted while the John Wayne movie was being broadcast on TV (this would have been the 1970s).

My father was a huge fan of this movie and explained the circumstances of the actual historical event (or, rather, the "official" version of those circumstances). It was puzzling to me at the time why this event should have achieved such legendary status, or how people could immigrate to another country, then essentially declare the land they inhabited to be their own country--after all, wouldn't it be against the law in the U.S. if Russian immigrants did that? (My father, with whom I'd watched plenty of old WWII movies, didn't have a good response to this, but he was disappointed at my apparent lack of enthusiasm for and understanding of this particular conflict. He'd had a genuine Davy Crockett coonskin cap as a child.)

I got a similar version in my Reagan-era high school American history class, and it wasn't until grad school in my mid-twenties that I finally realized how badly the events of the time had been whitewashed. Now it occurs to me that these kinds of thoroughly-ingrained cultural artifacts have pretty much made it impossible for most of my generational cohort--not to mention previous generations--to see the "battle of the Alamo" as anything other than part of the so-called "Manifest Destiny" narrative.
posted by tully_monster at 12:58 AM on April 29, 2017 [9 favorites]


« Older 11:11am until 3:10pm   |   A Dog is like an eternal Peter Pan Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments