Remembering the Alamo

Title of Book: Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol Author: Richard R. Flores of the University of TexasPublication date: 2002

My original post, somehow was lost is cyberspace, so I am re-posting on the basic summary of Flores "Remembering the Alamo."

Flores guides readers in "Remembering the Alamo" through the contested realm of cultural memory of the Alamo. He is interested in the imaginative significance of the Alamo on a local and national scale and the historic retelling of the Alamo as a historical place, circulated through “multiple locations and sites of public culture” and meaningful through practices and ideologies of the Texas modern. In his desire to understand the effects of that retelling, Flores uses his text to examine how stories of the past can be traced into the present, through our lives and identities and prospects of the future. Flores's research contention is, "...that both breadth of the Alamo story—its reproduction in film, literature, and folklore, and more generally its presence in the repertoire of American cultural memory—and the divergent understandings of it—the competing, even at times silent interpretations—are the result of its transformation from a site of defeat in 1836 into a powerfully rendered and racially produced icon of American cultural memory” (xiv) From this contention, Flores' general thesis is that this inflection—the symbolic work accomplished through “remembering the Alamo”—consists of signifying racial difference between Anglos and Mexicans so as to cognize and codify the social relations circulating at the beginning of the twentieth century” xvi.


As a text that is primary concerned with the effects of "historical" retellings of the Alamo, "Remembering the Alamo," Flores makes it clear early within his writing that he is not interested in doing the "historical work" of a historian. In line with Flores desire to not be a historian in the text, Flores uses the Marita Sturken term "cultural memory" which refers to the components of memory existing and thriving outside of an official historical discourse; yet remain intertwined within that discourse. In unpacking the building of the Alamo as a site of public history, Flores' text builds from this construct of cultural memory as physically embedded and fixed geographic "...sites of public history and culture" (18). Cultural memory in its status as a form of identified memory, builds upon a construction of remembering as a deeply embedded and selective social practice emanating from a contemporary active process of forgetting. As Flores argues, "The ubiquity of the Alamo narrative stems in part from the multiple forms through which it is re-remembered: historiography, film, literature, and other genres of memorilization." (xvi) Using the constructions of remembering and cultural memory, Flores' interest is in how the Alamo operates within a modern context defined by various forms of historical production (film, literature, etc) to construct authorized forms of "History" which are reified through cultural memory. Flores argues that Alamo as a site of cultural memory was necessary to the building of the modern Texas state and the United States.


For clarification purposes, modernity can be defined as "...a transformation occurring when earlier social and cultural complexes are dislodged from the habitats of their making and reconstituted, under the weight of rationalized, technocratic forces, into distinct and qualitatively new forms. The Alamo as a site reified through cultural memory is considered as the means through which modernity was attained in the state and nation. Much like Stanton's interests in "The Lowell project," Flores is interested in the process of erasure occurring in Texas in the wake of modernity. In uncovering the submerged histories of Mexicans, the private vision of Adina De Zavala and Clara Driscoll, the Alamo plaza, and the Spanish-Mexican tradition, Flores exposes how the process of "double erasure" figured prominently within the construction of Alamo as a site of public history.

The, in my opinion, most compelling piece explicated by Flores on the "work" of modernity in the production of Alamo, occurs in the text when Flores discusses the Cinematic use of the Alamo. To assess the effects of the historic retelling of the Alamo in the cinematic frame, Flores focuses on the two films "Martyrs of the Alamo" and "The Alamo." In analyzing the histories generated within these two films, Flores reveals the strength of the Alamo as a master symbol of modernity. Using Marxist conceptualizations of the proletariat and the ruling classes, Flores argues that, "The development of the Alamo at the end of the nineteenth century had little to do with knowing the past but re-visioning it for a new social order" (158).


The new social order being the modern Texas and the modern America. Cinema becomes in this new social order, not simply a means of benign entertainment, but as "...an apparatus [enabling] the reproduction of culture in new and powerfully realist images, including its visualization of the past." (159). In its effect, cinema enabled the dissemination of the Alamo as a site divorced from its prior meaning and setting to re-create and re-remember a historically imagined memory that enabled a re-visioning of Anglo "self."This Anglo "self" as Flores persitently reiterates throughout the text builds from its pathologized relationship with the Mexican "other." Flores, through exploring the basis for the reconstituted presence of the Alamo and the Davy Crockett, reveals how events from the past are "historically" imbued for the purpose of advancing realities in the present.