Thinly time I visited the Alamo I was at first appalled to find it just across a busy city street from some commercial stores and enterprises. This seemed almost a desecration. But then I noticed that someone had placed a single yellow rose at the base of a tree just outside the entrance to the Alamo. I thought that this must indeed be a sacred and holy place. I still think that.
Sunday March 6th, after participating in the memorial dawn volley I was sitting out on the Alamo Plaza with some friends. Two college students from a local (and expensive) private university approached me, a guy and a girl, the guy running the camera the girl asking the questions. Plainly they were the scions of "White privilege" as they would have probably put it, and plainly by appearance were of a "progressive" political slant, the guy even sporting them fake, glued-together dreadlocks such White kids sometimes do.
So she approaches a middle-aged White reenactor (me) and sort of with a smirk asks me why I am there, obviously already having drawn her own conclusions. To her credit she was a little taken aback when I replied that I was there because 180 years ago that very morning, in the space of just ninety minutes 800 people had died or were mortally wounded in the same area where we were sitting, all of them fighting for their respective countries and, in the case of the Alamo defenders, also fighting for their freedom.
Over the next few hours they made the rounds of the reenactors, Anglo, Hispanic and the one Black reenactor present. Plainly they didn't get the answers they had been looking for, since the local reenactor crowd of all shades here is overwhelmingly Conservative by politics.
Some time later she came back by me again, again to her credit apparently starting to look at things in a different light. But still this time the questions were along the lines of wasn't Santa Anna looking to drive the American (ie. White) settlers out of what was then Mexico?
I pointed out that Mexican society itself was highly stratified at the time (and still is) with a small, wealthy elite of mostly European extraction (ie. White folks) running the show. I then referred her to the First Texas Rebellion of 1813 wherein Arredondo (and a young Santa Anna) had committed atrocities upon the local Tejano population on a scale far eclipsing anything the Texians ever did.
At this point dreadlocks guy with the camera became irritated and told her they had to leave.
Ha! I'll bet right there I coulda quoted more Bob Marley at him, word for word, then even he knew. I just wish I woulda thought to do that at that moment
Birdwatcher
