Image: The legend of the Alamo claims the site as central to Texas independence, but the actual history challenges Texas mythology. Slave-owning Americans and racist volunteers immigrated illegally into Mexican Texas in the years before Texas Independence in 1836. They lost a battle against the Mexican Army at the Alamo, which Texas schools teach as a Mexican attack on peaceful American settlers. In fact, the Alamo was built by Native American Christian converts when San Antonio, Texas was a Spanish, and later a Mexican, mission. Hundreds of Native Christian converts and early colonists are buried there. Texas prefers a $400 million renovation plan that privileges the myth and will destroy evidence of the reality. Native Americans and descendants of early colonists are fighting the plan to deepen that historical erasure. Read the New York Times article here.
