Writing Homework Help

In Chapter Six and the Epilogue, the author Monica Muñoz Martinez discusses the challenges she and other historians faced in launching the temporary exhibit “Life and Death on the Border 1910–1920” at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. Based upon your reading of the book, do you find Martinez’s focus on the alternate stories of the racial and ethnic conflicts along the Texas/Mexico border an adequate way to fill in gaps when it comes to telling the story of Texas and the American West? What do you consider to be the strong points of the author’s argument about alternate stories (oral histories) and what do you see as potential problems with this approach to history? Explain your answer.

chapter 6 FROM THE SUMMER of 2012 until the summer of 2014 I lived in Austin and worked at the University of Texas at Austin as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Mex- ican American Studies (CMAS). I remember walking into the reception office for the first time and seeing a framed photograph on the wall of Américo Paredes, smiling, holding his guitar. This was the center that Paredes built while he taught at the university. In this center, and in Mexican American studies classes across the campus, he loomed large. I also frequently bumped into the legacy of Walter Prescott Webb. Every day that I drove to campus I parked my car in a garage on San Antonio Street and made the long walk to my office at CMAS. I walked passed Walter Webb Hall, a building adjacent to the parking garage. In the spring of 2013, I gave a talk in the Walter Prescott Webb lecture room. I spoke about the Porvenir massacre with the portrait of Webb looking back at me. When the chair of the history department invited me to give the lecture, I noticed in the e-mail signature that the endowed faculty posi- tion was named in honor of Walter Prescott Webb. Walking around campus in the Texas heat, I occasionally wondered what inter- actions that Paredes and Webb might have had in Austin. On at least one occasion Paredes was aware that Webb could possibly undermine his career. In 1957 Paredes become frustrated with an editor at the University of Texas Press, Frank H. Ward- law. Considering “With His Pistol in His Hand” for publication, Wardlaw sent the manuscript to Walter Prescott Webb, then, chair of the press’s advisory board, to assess the work. Paredes wrote in a letter to Wardlaw on February 21, 1957, that if he had known Webb was on the board, he would not have sent his manuscript for consideration. “Though I have not for a moment doubted his impartiality in judg- ing what I have written, I do think I should not have put Dr. Webb in the position of passing on something that attacks his own work. There is no personal ill-will on

my part towards Dr. Webb, of course. But I do feel that his work deserves rather strong criticism.” Paredes was concerned that the recommendations by a biased board would defeat his purpose in writing the book. “I would rather not water it down,” he explained, “I doubt I could revise the manuscript so that the faculty advisory board could accept it for publication.”¹ Wardlaw quickly responded pleading with Paredes to consider submitting a re- vised manuscript to the press. He assured Paredes that “although [Webb] ruefully finds himself the villain of the piece at several points,” he recognized that the con- tribution was long overdue. Of Webb, Wardlaw wrote, “He said that he has always considered it a weakness of his book on the Texas Rangers that he was unable to give the Mexican attitude toward the Rangers, and their side of the border conflict, with any degree of thoroughness. He says he made an effort to get this material but was unable to do so largely because of the language barrier.”² Paredes would go on to make select revisions, and the university press would publish the book in 1958. The keepers of history opened the door that year, ever so slightly. More than half a century later, residents and scholars are trying to push it wide open. On Thursday January 21, 2016, the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum opened its doors to visitors attending a symposium for the exhibit Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920. The flagship state history museum was literally too small to contain the public enthusiasm for the exhibit. Online registration for the event reached capacity within days of being announced. Over 200 people reserved seats and more e-mailed and called with requests for a spot on the waiting list. As word spread, the demand for seats increased. Guests who already had tickets e-mailed with requests to add two more or five more to their group. Even elected officials had to be squeezed onto the list. To meet the demands the Bullock staff coordi- nated a second faculty panel on Saturday, January 23, the same day the exhibit opened to the public. Crowds were eager to see the exhibit not because they wanted to consumecurated history, to see a collection of objects, or to learn a history they did not know. They came because they did know, because they had heard these stories from their fathers or their grandmothers. They came to witness a history long dis- avowed now on display in a state museum. People lined up at the Bullock because they had waited for over a century for the cultural institutions of Texas to officially recognize the role of the state police and politicians in enacting a reign of terror so devastating that the effects would reverberate for generations. They came to bear witness to that first public reckoning. Many of those visitors were descendants of victims of racial violence. For over a century their relatives had been portrayed as bandits and threats to the nation. The memories they kept, the artifacts they protected, and their efforts to tell an alter- native history made the exhibit possible. A history they helped preserve would fi- nally be on display in a state museum. This was a historic moment for the making of public history, an important step in reckoning with histories of racial violence. Some of the visitors also came to the symposium with skepticism and doubt. For over a century, state institutions had kept racial violence from public view or, worse, had celebrated periods of genocide, slavery, and extralegal violence as necessary steps toward modernity. Carved in the pink granite exterior, the Bullock museum façade welcomes visitors to explore “The Story of Texas,” a singular offi- cial account of Texas’s past. Visitors wondered, would the state museum finally tell a history that recognized crimes against humanity? Would the Bullock finally lament the dead? Meeting official histories with a healthy dose of skepticism is a widespread prac- tice for racial minorities and marginalized groups in Texas. Chicana cultural theo- rist Rosa Linda Fregoso described learning to question Texas history when she was young. She remembered that in her eighth-grade Texas history course, the instruc- tor gave “heart-wrenching” lectures on Anglo–Mexican struggles for Texas’s inde- pendence and juxtaposed Anglos portrayed as “noble” with Mexicans described as “villainous.” While Fregoso learned at school about “the cruel streak in Mexican

nature,” at home her father gave her an informal education in vernacular history and introduced her to alternative accounts of the past. In her analysis of Pilar Cruz, the leading Tejana character in the film Lonestar, Fregoso writes that the character’s countermemory of Tejas put her “in touch with a long tradition of opposition to racist discourse, with popular forms of knowledge, transgressive tales of resis- tance, subaltern practices of suspicion of official versions of history.”³ The mu- seum exhibit would have to contend with the deep-seated suspicion that many visi- tors, like Fregoso, had learned from an early age. The centennial of the peak anti-Mexican violence in 1915 provided an opportunity to insist that Texas cultural institutions finally acknowledge the dozens of new histories, literary works, and cultural criticisms that had dispelled the myth of the Texas Rangers. To be sure, shifting pervasive representations of the past would be impossible if state institutions did not participate. In the twenty-first century, pub- lic history became the terrain for efforts by scholars and residents alike to shift public understandings of histories of racial violence in Texas. MEMORIALIZING VICTIMS OF STATE VIOLENCE Residents who practice vernacular history-making have been calling for a public reckoning and a public dialogue about Texas’s violent past. Their efforts confront public histories, like those at the Texas Ranger History Museum and Hall of Fame, that disavow state-sanctioned violence in the early twentieth century. In doing so, they continue the practice of what Américo Paredes described as “anamnesis,” a praxis against forgetting. After decades of researching these histories, many residents are increasingly impatient with the slow efforts by state institutions to encourage a new public understanding of the past. The Internet has enabled some people to avoid the usual mechanisms of state bureaucracy and make these histories public on their own. One is the website Los Tejanos, created by Hernán Contreras, a resident of Houston. By treating his family history as a window into Texas history, Contreras

those are the pages from chapter 6