It’s quiet at the San Jacinto Historic Site this weekend, the battlefield, soaring monument and Battleship Texas closed to the public indefinitely. With all the action on Independence Parkway focused on the charred and grotesquely twisted tank farm a mile or so away, the historic site, the hallowed ground, is almost as quiet as it must have been on an April day in 1836, just before Mexican Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and his exhausted minions set up camp near the juncture of Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto River.
The re-enactors won’t be touching off their cannons today. The crowds won’t be strolling past tents and campsites and pausing to watch a ragged band of Texians advancing on a somnolent Santa Anna and his men.
We 21st-century Texans, though, could use the unexpected hiatus to reconsider what it is we’re re-enacting, what it is we’re commemorating when we remember the epic Battle of San Jacinto. With a Texas bicentennial not too many years away, it’s an opportune time to discuss and debate the distinction between myth and reality, a good time to examine Texas history (and myth) with clear eyes, unafraid of what we encounter.
Texans know the San Jacinto story as it’s been handed down through the years. A ragtag army of fewer than a thousand men, rank amateurs when it came to soldiering, their rage fueled by the slaughter of their fellow Texians at the Alamo, fell upon Santa Anna’s superior forces on a spring afternoon in 1836 and in less than 20 minutes routed the invaders, killing about 600 of the enemy while losing only nine of their own. The glorious victory under Gen. Sam Houston not only liberated Texas from Mexico but also opened up the American Southwest to this nation’s Manifest Destiny.
“The Texas past, as set down in factual and fictional literature, as passed on in song and cinema, is related as a sort of semi-sacred history,” the late Texas historian T.R. Fehrenbach observed some years ago, noting that the early events were almost always poorly or sketchily recorded. “And although none of the pioneers were supernatural beings, many of them have always seemed larger than life to us. Their deeds, rarely self-explicated, cried out for elaboration and embellishment.”
Embellish we did, so that in seventh-grade Texas history classes, in books, movies and song, in popular culture, in dicta from the State Board of Education, myth superseded history. Most historians, including the venerable Fehrenbach, acknowledge the value of myth, not as a synonym for untruth but in the more traditional sense of the word — myth as a way of explaining a culture’s common reality, its system of values. Commonly accepted myth is vital, but it leads us astray when it becomes a substitute for reality.
The annual San Jacinto Symposium, held this month at UH-Downtown, offers a model for reassessment. Texas historians at the symposium distinguished myth from reality by exploring the role of women in the Texas Revolution, exploding the myth that the revolt against Mexico was a male-only affair. Women may not have been on the front lines, but they were making ammunition, tending the sick and wounded, helping finance the endeavor and keeping families intact at an immensely stressful time. And not just Anglo women. Tejano and African-American women played vital roles.
Texas historian James Crisp, professor emeritus at North Carolina State University, has described the symposium as “a forum where history can be carefully separated from myth without sacrificing the popular passion for the past.”
Reality is invariably multilayered, richer and more complex than myth. Myth is the lair of heroes, once and forever, while reality is open-ended, never finished. Myth acknowledges reality and seeks to incorporate its multiplicity of meanings. Myth fuels the passion alluded to by Crisp; reality keeps it honest.
Keeping it honest means acknowledging that we’ve been telling the Texas story from an Anglo perspective all these years, even though the state has been richly multiethnic from the beginning. Our straitened view distorts the truth and works to our disadvantage, as Chronicle business columnist Chris Tomlinson noted a few days ago.
“Our growing multicultural, multiethnic society and economy must include other perspectives to thrive,” Tomlinson wrote.
Another example of myth colliding with reality: University of Texas historian H.W. Brands points out that Houston’s victory at San Jacinto had nothing to do with the defeat of the Alamo, except for furnishing a rousing battle cry, nor did it end the war or guarantee Texas independence. The captured Santa Anna was overthrown in absentia, and the Mexican government immediately disavowed the agreements he negotiated with the Texans. Only when the United States annexed the Lone Star State nearly a decade later were Texans free from Mexico.
To acknowledge reality is not to diminish the accomplishments of brave and resourceful forebears. It is to acknowledge that early Texans were flesh-and-blood human beings, not larger-than-life heroes rehearsing for their inevitable roles as courthouse statuary and city, county and street namesakes. They were flawed and multifaceted, just like us, which makes them all the more interesting. Their collective experience — and ours — is richer, more complex and more varied than we have imagined.