Death of a Dream

Art by Jia Sung.

Read more of our new series on American mythology, Rewriting the West.

You were born into a dream. This dream was not of your making, but it assigned your place in the world. The quality of your education and healthcare, your wages, and even where you live are the workings of this dream. This dream will exist as long as you believe it to be true. It is the common paradigm, accepted by everyone, including you. It defines the way things ought to be.

Dream-makers wield the power, but freedom comes to those who wake.

***

The parade in San Antonio glides along the river that snakes through downtown, the floats propelled by the spirit of warfare. Families and young couples crowd along the parade route, where kids and more kids laugh and play. And there are flowers everywhere. Flowers braided into long dark hair, crowns of pastel blooms festooned with long ribbons framing perfectly made-up faces. Flowers that honor the men who fought Mexicans at the Alamo, and defeated them at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. The women who adorn themselves with the flowers are Latinas, daughters to great-great-great-great-granddaughters of Mexicans.

The river parade is a feature in the 11-day city-wide extravaganza in April, known as Fiesta, which dates back to 1891. To witness Fiesta erupt in the nation’s seventh largest city is to behold a force that is uniquely local and unifying. It is beer and gorditas and big sombreros. It’s Christmas in springtime meets New Orleans Mardi Gras, with more modesty and less glam.

I turn to my uncle, a longtime San Antonio resident, who holds a drink in one hand while he dances around. I ask why Latinos celebrate the battles that have been used to demonize Mexicans. The 1835 insurgency against the ruling Mexican government resulted in the short-lived Republic of Texas. But, in its mythological retelling—which is still woven into public-school history lessons and popular culture—the Mexican victory at the Alamo represented cruelty and savagery, while Mexico’s ultimate defeat at San Jacinto cemented an image of inferiority. Without missing a beat, my elderly uncle says matter-of-factly, “The Anglos are celebrating they won. The Mexicans are celebrating that we’re still here.”

***

The lynchings were so severe, so widespread, that the New York Times reported in 1922 that “the killing of Mexicans without provocation is so common as to pass almost unnoticed.” With the arrival of the Anglos in South Texas in the late 19th century came violence, Jim Crow laws, and repression of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Local law enforcement officials, Texas Rangers, and vigilantes—Anglo men—were known to shoot Mexican American men dead without provocation. The killings numbered in the thousands. To the outside world, much of the violence was justified in the name of border security and fighting “bandits.” Criminality on the newly formed borderlands did exist, but this campaign of violence was integral to the efforts by newcomers to seize land and impose a new power structure.

The insurgency against Mexico ended in 1838, and a treaty was reached in the U.S.-Mexico War in 1848. But, in the years that followed, a Texas genesis story—promoted by the wealthy elite—took root, shaping the state’s culture and the very notion of Texan identity. The Alamo became a “master symbol,” writes Richard Flores in Remembering the Alamo. Its cultural memory “slotted Mexicans and Anglos into an emerging social order.”

From that social order, based on a distortion of history that defines the present and determines the future, a dream was born. This dream transformed racial violence