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Outmanned and outgunned by the Mexican army under President Antonio López de Santa Anna, the rebels were nearly all slaughtered, their bodies burned on pyres in the adjacent plaza. Nearly 200 of these Texians (as both Anglo and Hispanic rebels were known) occupied the ruins of Mission San Antonio de Valero, nicknamed “the Alamo” after the Spanish word for cottonwood. Anglo settlers, lured to the steamy, snake-filled state of Tejas by the promise of farmland and autonomy, were rumbling for independence from the increasingly centralized Mexican government. The 1836 conflict actually took place in what was then Mexico. As a kid in the late 1970s, I subscribed to that story too, even begging my mother to buy me a facsimile of Crockett’s coonskin cap at the Alamo gift shop.
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Like many locals, she bought into the narrative of freedom-fighting Texans versus villainous Mexican soldiers. My sister and I grew up in San Antonio, but she may have been out sick the day her seventh-grade Texas history class covered the Battle of the Alamo. It was sometime in the early 1990s and we were in San Antonio, lined up to see the best-known tourist attraction in Texas.Īs we passed through arched wooden doors into the 18th-century mission chapel, my sister piped in: “This is where Mexican general Santa Anna tried to take Texas back from Davy Crockett!” “What happened at the Alamo again?” asked my cousin, who was visiting from Missouri.