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Texas Identities: Moving Beyond Myth, Memory, and Fallacy in Texas History ed. by Light Townsend Cummins and Mary L. Scheer (review)

In this volume’s foreword, the distinguished historian of Spanish/Mexican Texas Jesús F. de la Teja asserts that by rethinking the concepts of “identity, myth, and collective memory,” previous scholars have offered “a healthy reassessment of accepted truth” about the history of Texas that this volume aims to continue (pp. ix, x). For the most part, however, this volume does not. Principally, it does not fully engage the central issue up for reassessment, what de la Teja notes as the “overwhelmingly Hispanic” identity of nearly half of the state’s 28 million residents and their history (p. ix). But its commentary on nonHispanics also disappoints to some degree. Drawing largely on previous scholarship, the editors’ introduction rehearses the argument that correcting myths, memories, and fallacies is necessary for reassessing this history. They note, for example, that the intellectuals J. Frank Dobie, Roy Bedichek, and Walter Prescott Webb offer “the epitome of written expression rooted in Anglo-American conceptualization of Texas identity” (p. 9). But the editors overlook the most astute critic of Texas identity, myth, and memory, the Mexican American intellectual Américo Paredes, who engaged Webb on his mythic Texas and his racism toward Mexicans in 1958, initiating the historical revision that this volume purports to continue. Missing also is Larry McMurtry’s 1968 critique of Webb. Stephen L. Hardin’s essay remembers the Alamo, reminding us of its myths and historical fallacies, but his revisions seem repetitious for close students of this subject. He also elides a more fundamental fallacy. He very briefly cites in an endnote the necessary work of Richard R. Flores, but that discussion might have been expanded and made part of the essay. According to Flores, the Alamo was not remembered for a long time after the battle, and it was used as a U.S. Army quartermaster’s depot, as a supply store, and as a saloon. Only beginning in the 1890s was it really “remembered” in its mythic sense and then not only largely as part of the capitalist redevelopment of downtown San Antonio but also as a symbolic cudgel to control Mexican Americans (Flores, Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol [Austin, 2002]). Chapter 2 by coeditor Mary L. Scheer focuses on an anomaly in the Texas constitution of 1836. Written exclusively by men, the constitution excluded 673 BOOK REVIEWS