Inventing the Fiesta City

The Dissertation Committee for Laura Elizabeth Ehrisman certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Performance in San Antonio’s Public Culture Committee: ______________________________ Steven D. Hoelscher, Supervisor ______________________________ Janet M. Davis ______________________________ Richard R. Flores ______________________________ José E. Limón ______________________________ Shirley Thompson Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Performance in San Antonio’s Public Culture by Laura Elizabeth Ehrisman, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2003 Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction: San Antonio’s Pedestrian Rhetoric……………………...1 Going Public………………………………………………………………4 Spectacle in Place…………………………………………………………6 South by Southwest……………………………………………………….8 History and Invented Tradition…………………………………………..10 The Heritage Elite………………………………………………………..12 Forgetting the Alamo…………………………………………………….14 Chapter 2 Battle of Flowers: Women, Whiteness and San Antonio’s Public Culture, 1891-1900………………………………………………………………25 The Texas Modern……………………………………………………….28 Origins……………………………………………………………………35 Women’s History………………………………………………………...36 Alamo Plaza……………………………………………………………...39 Fiestas Patrias…………………………………………………………….43 The Flower Battle………………………………………………………..47 Antiquated Foreignness………………………………………………….49 Sentimental History……………………………………………………...54 Manifest Destinies……………………………………………………….56 Age of Empire……………………………………………………………59 Chapter 3 Order of the Alamo: Heritage and Carnival in the New South, 1900- 1927………………………………………………………………………………64 Patriotism and Commercial Culture……………………………………...68 Queens of Carnival………………………………………………………72 Texas Cavaliers…………………………………………………………..80 Race, Space and Flies……………………………………………………82 New Social Orders……………………………………………………….88 In the Lugar Festivo……………………………………………………...93 Chapter 4 Night in Old San Antonio: The San Antonio Conservation Society and the Chili Queens, 1924-1948…………………………………………………...106 The Mexican Vogue…………………………………………………… 110 Mexicanos and the City………………………………………………...114 Construction and Restoration…………………………………………...119 Cultural Conservation…………………………………………………..124 Sentimental Restoration………………………………………………...130 La Villita………………………………………………………………..138 The Canary Island Fantasy……………………………………………...141 NIOSA………………………………………………………………….145 Chapter 5 Juan Q. Public: Reynolds Andricks and the Fiesta San Jacinto Association,1950-1970…………………………………………………………153 Challenging the Heritage Elite………………………………………….155 Two Cities………………………………………………………………158 Heritage and Democracy………………………………………………..164 iii Don’t Reign on My Parade……………………………………………..168 Losing the Battle………………………………………………………..174 The Fiesta City: Forgetting the Alamo…………………………………180 Embodying Difference………………………………………………….185 Re-membering the Alamo………………………………………………189 Like Parakeets…………………………………………………………..196 Chapter 6 Rey Feo and the Politics of Multiculturalism, 1970-1990…………..202 The Queen of Soul……………………………………………………...206 Fiesta Kings…………………………………………………………….211 Mexican Americans, Chicanos and Hispanics………………………….213 Charros………………………………………………………………….219 The Reign of the Ugly King…………………………………………….226 Henry I………………………………………………………………….230 The Grotesque King…………………………………………………….235 The “People’s Parade”………………………………………………….237 Chapter 7 Fiesta Rowdiness: La Semana de Carnaval…………………………245 Puro Party……………………………………………………………….249 Carnaval………………………………………………………………..252 “Rampage in the Streets”……………………………………………….257 La Semana Alegre………………………………………………………263 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...270 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………278 Vita……………………………………………………………………………...291 iv Chapter 1 Introduction: San Antonio’s Pedestrian Rhetoric “Fiesta is the psalm of San Antonio—a hymn sung for a century now by the citizenry to glorify the conviction that theirs is a place of halcyonic sophistication on the one hand and an impregnable refuge against the soul- wearying onslaught of day-to-day living on the other.” -Jack Maguire1 “Remember the Alamo? I can’t even remember my name.” - t-shirt sold on the San Antonio Riverwalk My story begins with footsteps, walking the city. During my senior year of high school, I participated in San Antonio’s Battle of Flowers Parade, one of the central events of the city’s annual Fiesta. Each year, parade organizers sponsored four of the city’s public high schools, providing the float, costumes, and all of the decorations. As a “class officer” in one of these selected schools, I could ride in this prominent city spectacle. Some of my friends, who were members of the school band, marched in the parade every year, but this was my sole opportunity. The Battle of Flowers Association chose the theme and the outfits. This year, they chose “musicals,” and so my high school float was designed for “Oklahoma!” We did not choose the costumes either. A few months before the parade, I was fitted for a “pioneer” dress—a long yellow skirt, a puffy shirt and a big white bonnet. At the time, I considered the outfit too frumpy, nor did I appreciate having to walk alongside the float, because we could not all fit on the stage itself. As one of the smaller members of the class, I was chosen to be one of the hardy pioneer 1 children, while my taller friends rode in a mock wagon above heaps of plastic yellow flowers. Despite these minor disappointments, I was thrilled to be in the event. The day of the Battle of Flowers Parade was an annual, citywide holiday, and so I knew most of my friends and family would be in the stands. We arrived at the “preparation area” several hours before the eleven a.m. start, and I spent this time alternately fascinated and bored watching hundreds of costumed people preparing their cars, horses and bikes. When we finally began to process down the parade route, I started my first “long poem of walking” through downtown San Antonio.2 We traveled south on Broadway; I passed by the four dollar seats and the flatbed trucks and lawn chairs pushed into the free spaces in-between. Young kids stood in the front rows, tossing confetti and blowing whistles. We then passed the large bleachers and the main reviewing stand, directly in front of the Alamo. We paused in front of the judges, and then turned west onto Commerce Street. We traveled past more, dense crowds, over the river, past department stores, hotels, and banks, with small crowds watching from their balconies. We turned north onto Santa Rosa Street, and finished before we hit the highway. I smiled and waved for over two hours. Every year, San Antonians organize a ten-day series of parades, street fairs, band contests and historic pageants to celebrate the city and articulate a distinct community identity.3 Throughout these many events, both San Antonio natives and visitors actively participate in this distinct civic culture. Like the 2 participants in hundreds of other urban parades, I had a brief chance to perform in the middle of a citywide audience. I enjoyed the opportunity of “going public”— momentarily becoming the center of attention. As a young child, I sat in those same flatbed trucks, eating snow cones and watching bands, mayors, police officers and festival queens pass by. Through the act of “passing by” myself, the myriad glances, waves and “hellos” were my “pedestrian enunciations.”4 This parade, as a time and space apart, was a framed event, set aside from the daily pedestrian traffic of downtown San Antonio. Yet parade participants also enacted the every day practices of walking the city. My entry into the center of San Antonio’s public culture was an act of “spatializing the city,” weaving buildings, people, and streets together.5 Within the limitations of a particular spatial and social order—the boundaries of the route and an unfamiliar musical costume—I could establish my own relationships with other participants and people lining the parade route. This parade was a special circumstance, a distinct opportunity for public visibility, but those who walked its path also spoke the rhetoric of the “disquieting familiarity of the city.”6 The Battle of Flowers Parade is as unique and as mundane as any other urban parade— shaped by national and transnational cultural currents, and yet articulated through distinct local traditions and histories as well. Fiesta is an ideal festival to study because it reflects so many of the cultural forces of its time, and yet also demonstrated the particular social relationships of San Antonio during the twentieth century. As various social actors struggled to enter Fiesta through 3 parades, pageants and street fairs, they became part of larger structures of power, but their particular footsteps often transgressed these boundaries and continually transformed the city itself.7 Going Public Both anthropologists and historians have recently recognized the pluralistic, multivocal nature of festival. San Antonio’s Fiesta, with its multiple events, is a contested terrain of various cultural domains. The notion of “public culture” most closely defines this “zone of cultural debate.”8 Within this arena, mass culture, vernacular traditions, elite institutions and national culture “are encountering, interrogating and contesting each other in new and unexpected ways.”9 Fiesta, with over two hundred events and a history that spans the twentieth century, is an arena

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