In my last post, I recommended A Line in the Sand, an excellent book on the Alamo in history and legend by Randy Roberts and James S. Olson. The book ends with a curious episode that has had me chuckling since the day I read it.

The Alamo has been endowed with mythic significance from the first, but the mythology has morphed over time. Among other unfortunate transformations, the Alamo story became corrupted by racism. Later generations of Americans tended to see the battle as a conflict between progressive, democratic Anglos, and benighted, brown-skinned people who preferred despotism to freedom.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. When Mexico won its independence from Spain, the people adopted a democratic constitution in 1824. This document, like the U.S. Constitution, established a federal republic. This was the constitution under which Americans settled in Texas.

The problem was that political opinion in Mexico was sharply divided between those who favored a federal system and those who favored a strong central government. In 1835, the centralists prevailed when General Santa Anna overthrew the 1824 constitution and established a dictatorship.

The Alamo was actually part of a larger civil war in Mexico between the federalists and the centralists. Several other Mexican states, where a majority of the people remained loyal to the 1824 constitution, attempted to do exactly what Texans did –- to preserve their rights and liberties by seceding from Mexico. It is often overlooked that the flag that flew over the Alamo was a red, white and green Mexican tricolor, emblazoned with the year 1824.

Also overlooked, at least until fairly recently, was the role of the tejanos –- the Mexicans living in Texas. The tejanos supported the independence movement, and they were among the men who fought and died at the Alamo. In fact, the first vice president of the Republic of Texas was a Mexican named Lorenzo de Zavala. Zavala, a liberal, was serving as Mexico’s minister plenipotentiary to France when he learned that Santa Anna had made himself dictator. Furious, Zavala resigned his post and joined up with the Texans. He helped draft the constitution of the Republic of Texas.

Ironically, denying the tejanos their rightful place in Texas history allowed left-leaning historians to create their own Alamo myth –- depicting it as a particularly nasty symbol of “Yankee imperialism.”

This brings me to the curious episode with which Messrs. Roberts and Olson end their book.

A Hispanic man, a CPA with a Wharton degree, was showing his wife and three daughters around the Alamo one day. He told his girls that the defenders of the Alamo were heroes, and that they should cultivate the same virtues of courage and integrity in their own lives.

This was too much for a scruffy Anglo graduate student who overheard the conversation. Butting in, just as the family members were happily snapping pictures of each other, he decided to set the father straight: “Don’t you know what this place stands for?” he demanded. “It represents the rape and destruction of your people … You shouldn’t be teaching your kids this stuff.”

At first, the CPA listened politely, but when the Anglo student had the temerity to tell him, “You don’t understand, you just don’t understand,” he decided enough was enough.

“Escucheme, bolillo [Listen to me, white bread],” he said sharply. “If Santa Anna would have won the war, this whole city would be a shithole just like Reynosa. Soy tejano [I’m a Texan]. Mind your own goddamned business. It’s my Alamo too.”