'I forgot to remember to forget' -- country & western song
Forget
The Alamo
18th-century Franciscan mission in San Antonio, Texas, U.S., that was the site of a historic resistance effort by a small group of determined fighters for Texan independence (1836) from Mexico. The building was originally the chapel of the Mission San Antonio de Valero, which had been founded between 1716 and 1718 by Franciscans. Before the end of the century the mission was abandoned and the buildings had fallen into partial ruin. After 1801 the chapel was occupied sporadically by Spanish troops. Apparently it was during this period that the old chapel became popularly known as "the Alamo" from the grove of cottonwood trees in which it stood.
In December 1835, at the opening of
the Texas war for independence, a detachment of Texas volunteers drove
a Mexican force from San Antonio and occupied the Alamo. Some Texan leaders,
including Sam Houston, counselled the abandonment of San Antonio as impossible
to defend with the small body of troops available, but the volunteers at
the Alamo refused to retire from their exposed position. On Feb. 23, 1836,
a Mexican army, variously estimated at 1,800 to 6,000 men and commanded
by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, arrived from south of the Rio Grande
and immediately began a siege of the Alamo. The small Texan defending force
was supplemented by some later arrivals and amounted to about 184 men.
This force was commanded by Colonel James Bowie and Colonel William B.
Travis and included the renowned Davy Crockett. For 13 days the Alamo's
defenders held out, but on the morning of March 6 the Mexicans stormed
through a breach in the outer wall of the courtyard and overwhelmed the
Texans. Santa Anna had ordered that no prisoners be taken, and 183 of the
defenders were slain (only about 15 persons, mostly women and children,
were spared). The Mexicans suffered heavy casualties, with credible estimates
of their killed and wounded ranging from 600 to 1,600. These casualties
and the time lost in reducing the Alamo dislocated Santa Anna's campaign
long enough to permit Houston to perfect plans for the defence of Texas.
The Alamo became for Texans a symbol of heroic resistance, hence the phrase:
'Remember the Alamo.'
1. 'A lot of imagery in the movie was taken from The Alamo. The bartender, for example, says, "This bar here is the last stand, Buddy." When Sam goes down to Mexico, the Mexican guy draws a line in the sand, which refers to a famous moment from the history of the Alamo, when Travis drew a line. Of course, the Mexican draws the line with a Coca Cola bottle, but it is still a line drawn in the sand.' (John Sayles, "Borders and Boundaries").
2. "[W]hen the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
officially settled the conflict over territory between Mexico and the United
States, a very well defined geographic feature, the Rio Grande itself,
became the international line. But it was a line that cut right through
the middle of what had once been the Mexican province of Nuevo Santander.
Friends and relatives who had been near neighbors -- within shouting distance
across a few hundred feet of water--now were legally in different countries."
(Americo Peredes,
from Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border, 1993)
Some of the BORDERS the film considers:
between countries: US and Mexico[Remember previous discussions of the binary structures set up in discourses about Westward expansion and the way these binaries legitimate the privileging on one term over the other. The border is the dividing line between these terms].
between races: Anglo, Hispanic, African American, Native American
between past and present
between versions of history and events: the 'official' version of the victors; ; the dissenting versions of marginalized groups; the remembered versions of survivors; the distorted views of those with something to hide
between right and wrong
between generations: fathers and sons; mothers and daughters
between men and women
between teachers and students / colonels and privates / the law and illegal immigrants: i.e., between those in authority and those at the mercy of that authority
3. The Barman: "We are in a state of crisis, the lines of demarcation are getting fuzzier and to run a successful civilization, you have to have your lines of demarcation between right and wrong, between this-un and that-un, your daddy understood that [...] people don't want their salt and sugar in the same jar [...] you're the last white sheriff this town's gonna see [...] this is it right here, Sam, this bar is the last stand, se abla American godammit."
4. America is "not increasingly multicultural, it's always been so. If you go back and turn over a rock, you find out, for example, that maybe a third or more of African-Americans are also Native Americans and a much higher percentage of African-Americans are also white Americans. You know, as they used to do in New Orleans, if you're 1/64th black, you're black, and it doesn't matter what you look like." (Sayles, "Borders and Boundaries").
5. "In a personal sense, a border is where you draw a line and say 'This is where I end and somebody else begins.' In a metaphorical sense, it can be any of the symbols that we erect between one another - sex, class, race, age. [...] Within the movie there are lines between people that they choose either to honor or not to honor." (Sayles, "Borders and Boundaries").
6. "Cineaste: History is a central theme
of Lone Star, and your seamless transitions in some scenes between past
and present seem to represent the continuing weight of the past.
Sayles: It is kind of an obvious conclusion
because there's not even the separation of a dissolve, which is a soft
cut. The purpose of a cut or a dissolve is to say this is a border, and
the things on opposite sides of the border are meant to be different in
some way, and I wanted to erase that border and show that these people
are still reacting to things in the past. There is a preoccupation with
history in the film, whether it's Sam Deeds wanting to find out the personal
history of his father, or the grandfather looking back into the roots of
the black Seminoles. Pilar is a history teacher for a purpose, including
that meeting about how they're going to teach history in the textbooks.
Even Joe Morton's character is dealing with the history of black and white
relationships." (Sayles, "Borders and Boundaries").
7. "The other is in you, the other is in me. This white culture has been internalized in my head. I have a white man and woman in here, and they have me in their heads, even if it's just a guilty little nudge sometimes. [...] Both traditions are within me. I can't disown the white tradition, the Euro-American tradition, any more than I can the Mexican, the Latino, or the Native, because they're all in me. [...] We all of us find ourselves in the position of being simultaneously insider / outsider. [...] We're becoming a geography of hybrid selves -- of different cities or countries who stand at the threshold of numerous mundos. Forced to negotiate the cracks between realities, we learn to navigate the switchback roads between assimilation / acquiescence to the dominant culture and isolation / preservation of our ethnic cultural integrity. [...] Navigating the cracks between the worlds is difficult and painful, like going through the process of reconstructing a new life, a new identity." (Gloria Anzaldua, Interviews / Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating [London: Routledge, 2000], pp. 254-255).
8. "What they're left with is the realization that, 'OK, we have this chance to do something that is going to be seen as enormously antisocial but it's good for us,' and they choose to cross that border of moral opinion. [...] But it is only an individual accommodation, and that was a lot of my point with the ending, it's not going to change society. They're going to have to leave the society they're in, they can't stay in that town." (Sayles, "Borders and Boundaries").
9. "Hybridity to me is the 'third space' which enables other positions to emerge. The third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom [...] The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation" (Bhabha, quoted in Campbell, p. 97).
Further Reading
Campbell, Neil, The Cultures of the American New West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 94-97.
Links
Borders and Boundaries: An Interview with John Sayles
Tomás Sandoval, The Burden Of History and John Sayles' Lone Star
BORDER STUDIES: Texas - Mexico Border Useful site that includes history, images, maps, etc.
The Borderlands Encyclopedia
Extensive list of online resources relating to all aspects of life on the border.
United States-Mexico Borderlands/Frontera
Very useful and concise introduction to regions, people and history of the border.