Women and Chile at the Alamo Feeding U.S

Women and Chile at the Alamo Feeding U.S. Colonial Mythology

Suzanne Bost

Guillermo Gómez-Peña (1994,28) apt- ly characterizes the ambivalence toward Mexico in U.S. popular culture in terms of food and violence: “The current media war against the Latino cultural other is intercut with eulogies to our products. Blood and salsa, that’s the nature of this relationship.” “War” between the United States and Mexico has long been cast as a desire to consume the “other” within the Anglo-American body and nation. From the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the current obsession with “Latin” culture, U.S. national, cultural, and economic forces have viewed Mexico as a commodity to incorporate. Blood circulates with salsa and tequila throughout this history of (neo)colonial ingestion. The U.S. desire to consume Mexico has always been contested by anticolonial- ism as well as by xenophobia (defending national and corporeal purity), but Manifest Destiny and NAFTA have had their way thus far. I will focus here on one site where the contours of this battle are drawn: the Alamo. The competing national claims that converged at this Texas mission have been encoded in popular culture as desire that is simultaneously alimentary and heterosexual. This intersection of food, sex, and cultural plunder is apparent in U.S. corporate manifestations, such as Taco Bell, whose advertisements appeal to heterosexual masculinity by establishing a metonymic relationship between women and tacos and by framing this romance within a mission-style architecture reminiscent of the Alamo.1 This setting—like other Taco Bell ad campaigns highlighting border crossing, patriotism, and revolution—associates U.S. consumption of Mexican food with the historical framework of colonialism, but coding (inter)national relations in

493 494 Nepantla terms of fast food, flirtation, and adorable chihuahuas trivializes the political reality.2 Eating tacos is a matter of national and sexual conquest, such advertisements seem to suggest, appropriating Mexican culture to demonstrate U.S. machismo. The “quiero” in Taco Bell’s famous slogan, “Yo quiero Taco Bell,” reflects this convergence of appetite, love, and appropriation in U.S. packaging of Mexico.3 It is no wonder that many estadounidenses are eager to “make a run for the border.” Over the past century and a half, a proliferation of representations—from Augusta Evans’s novel Inez: A Tale of the Alamo to Fiesta San Antonio and the films of John Wayne—has engendered and racialized a mythic Alamo that satisfies Anglo-American expansionist fantasies. The central role that women and chile have played in the formation of this myth corresponds with U.S. (neo)colonialist efforts to incorporate Mexico nationally and economically. U.S. patriotism remembers the Alamo as a fiesta to displace the historic U.S. defeat there and to reclaim the Alamo for its own pleasure. Yet remembrances that fracture these racial and sexual myths, such as Sandra Cisneros’s provocative story “Remember the Alamo” (1991), which I analyze at the close of this essay, offer strategies for resisting the colonial consumption patterns reenacted there by hungry tourists.

Methodology: Touring and Consumer Colonialism Tourist Experience #1: Mexico North and South of the Border I have visited “Mexico” in many different places—from Epcot Center’s “Mexico” in Florida to the San Antonio missions and “Old” Mexico itself—and been struck by a common scene in all of these locations involving white tourists, spicy food, and pleasure. An American Mexicanism—a term I derive from Toni Morrison’s “American Africanism” to signify an “American” (or, rather, U.S.) mythology of what Mexico represents—repeats this pattern both North and South of the border.4 In San Antonio, tourists in sombreros ﬂoat on dinner barges behind the Alamo. In the restaurant that forms the center of Epcot’s “Mexico,” mariachis sing “¡Ay ay ay ay, canta no llores!” [Sing, don’t cry]. In Oaxaca, an elderly woman begs for coins in an outdoor restaurant while a U.S. tourist raises his tequila in a toast to Mexico: “They just love to party here!” I have been think- ing, in particular, about the relationship between food and colonialism, the role of ﬁesta in U.S.-Mexico intertwinement, and my own complicity when I am a tourist. U.S. tourists consume Mexican culture as a desirable commodity— Cinco de Mayo parties, chile, margaritas—while this consumption is supported by a history of war, Mexican poverty, and borderlands violence. Certainly this is no clear binary of victim and oppressor: Mexico, too, promotes its image as a 495 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo pleasure destination, and not all U.S. tourists are blind to the contortions behind this image. Though I like to think of myself as a “posttourist” in Mexico, savvy to its constructs and implications, it is impossible to move between the U.S. and Mexico, either internationally or between communities in the United States, without being in some ways complicit with these asymmetric consumption patterns. Can estadounidenses ever be anything but tourists in their engagements with Mexico? Am I a tourist when I eat tacos in my hometown?

I begin with tourism to interrogate tensions within my own methodology as well as to outline the shape of what we might call “consumer colonialism.” Tourism and colonialism both depend on the “otherness” of the site being consumed and overpower “the other” in similar fashions. A tourist eats the other’s food, buys the other’s products, takes in and processes elements of the other culture, but generally retains the same contours of self that she or he had on leaving home. And so with colonialism: though the colonizer’s “empire” expands (actual geography historically, economic property in consumer colonial terms), part of the colonial project is neutralizing the otherness, the threat, the resistance of the colonized object, making Jamaica part of England (and not the reverse), Mexico part of Spain (and not the reverse), and Mexican culture a U.S. commodity (and not the reverse). This conversion is facilitated by folding the other within the body, nation, economy, or photo album of the colonizer. The Alamo, and the tourism industry that has been built up around it, are particularly subject to this dynamic as Anglo-Americans compensate for their initial failure to “consume” Mexico at the battle there. The cultural hype surrounding the Alamo in Texas— memorabilia, fictionalized representations, streets everywhere named for the U.S. heroes who died there, even Anglo-Texan bravura itself—are en- gines of the continued “processing” of the Alamo within the U.S. national body. Thus, around the Alamo—as well as in many other sites of U.S.- Mexican conflict—we find a cultural and touristic continuation of U.S. war with Mexico. In “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” María Lugones (1990, 400) differentiates “loving travel” from the arrogant, agonistic travel of “a conqueror, an imperialist.” Touring implies a certain imperviousness to the object being studied and a rigid method (following guidebooks and maps) rather than the “openness to surprise” of Lugones’s loving traveler, who “does not expect the world to be neatly packaged, ruly” (ibid.). Though travel ideally could transform preconceptions, the type of tourism I critique here feeds on, rather than challenges, the otherness and 496 Nepantla objectification of the site being toured: it consumes asymmetrically and re- inforces the “arrogant perception” of the consumer. (The implied arrogance and gluttony of the tourist help to explain why few tourists are proud to be recognized as such.) In his study of tourism in Mexico, Daniel Cooper Alarcón (1997, 157) suggests that a first-world tourist “does nothing but consume and spend discretionary income,” his or her sense of superiority bolstered by the “native’s” assumed backwardness. Carole Boyce Davies (1994, 24) distinguishes between tourism and “serious engagement based on mutual respect.” I would argue that mutuality between superpowers and their neighbors is usually just rhetorical; unequal stakes, resources, commitments, and needs unbalance exchange. The United States has a long history of turning to Mexico (either across the border or within the United States) to test the boundary between pleasure and pain. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry (1985, 12) asks: “How is it that one person can be in the presence of another person in pain and not knowit—not knowit to the point where he himself inflicts it and goes on inflicting it?” This question could apply to the impervious, consuming tourists in San Antonio, Epcot, Oaxaca, or even to the United States itself, as a prosperous nation alongside Mexico: both the tourist and the dominant nation, often unknowingly, contribute to the pain of the other merely by enjoying their own privileges.5 Beyond this unwitting complicity, however, perhaps pain is part of the “fun” of Mexican culture for some U.S. tourists (and, as we will see in the consumption patterns surrounding the Alamo, the displacement of Anglo pain is central to San Antonio tourism). In a continuation of an American sadism begun in the nineteenth century, Mexican suffering often highlights U.S. “fiesta.”6 Even this painful underside of tourism satisfies the quasi-romantic stereotype of Mexico as home to poverty, drugs, disease, violence, and abjection—as a repository for all of the signs of unhealth that the U.S attempts to purge from itself and to fence off in its image of “South of the Border” (or the south side of San Antonio). Tourists are told not to drink the water there. Every fiesta includes a mythic worm in the tequila. (Ac- cording to bell hooks [1998, 186], “the lure of ‘the Other’ is the combination of pleasure and danger.”) Dangerousness might enhance the pleasure to be found in tourists’ carnivalesque Mexico, lifting restrictions (minimum drinking ages, laws against prostitution, speed limits) within the confines of a touristic excursion (which is other to one’s “real” lifestyle). The history at the Alamo is an example of actual Mexican agency over U.S. nationality 497 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo and Anglo bodies, and the tourism that follows this history has attempted to redirect that pain with a touristic sensibility. As this essay describes Anglo consumption of Mexico in Texas, it inevitably repeats these patterns of tourism and gazing across borders. Such transnational/transcultural gazing should be an important topic for Mexican and Chicano studies in the United States, where the popularity of Mexico as a tourist commodity invariably influences the trajectories, reception, and distribution of these studies today. Even academics writing about Mexican culture, both south of the border and in the United States, feed and feed off current U.S. desires to consume Mexico. As I write, I try to combat the “pleasures” of happy consumption with an awareness of power dynamics, the ways in which consumers actively resist self-transformation, and the (neo)colonial pain of consumption itself. My methodology does not fall under the framework of “border studies” per se, as what interests me most is the spatial incorporation that accompanies consumer colonialism. Picture not one linear border divid- ing dominator and dominated but rather a three-dimensional space in which one encompasses the other, taking the dominated within its own body/nation (both literally, through food and land acquisition, and symbolically, through corporate commodification). One of the problems with border studies is the tendency to privilege one site of cultural and national conflict and to assume spatial demarcation. U.S.-Mexican relations are far more complicated. It would be difficult to separate Mexican elements from U.S. ones and vice versa; the two nations infuse each other culturally, racially, and, from a historical perspective, nationally. Mexico and the United States encounter each other at multiple locations throughout both countries, neither are unified entities, and other nations are involved in the terrain of U.S.-Mexican relations. These borders are topologically incoher- ent. Despite geographic and cultural incoherence, the dominant economic reality at U.S-Mexico borders everywhere is binary. The ideal response to border ambivalence, as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987, 78–79) proposes, would be finding a position that is “on both shores at once” and that, “at once, see[s] through serpent and eagle eyes.” This is a difficult stance to visualize, given that one eye has such greater power over the policing of U.S.-Mexican borders and the parameters of (inter)national relations. An- zaldúa’s “new mestiza” “works out the clash of cultures” “in [her] very flesh” through moliendo, mixteando, amasando (79–81). If the new mestiza’s strategy is metaphorically realized through the process of kneading and 498 Nepantla grinding masa for tortillas, the “newU.S. critic’s” strategy—to defy binary divisions—should also involve mixing, revolving the ingredients over and over in her own hands rather than waiting for a ready-made tortilla to be handed to her on a plate.

Defeating Anglo-American Loss at the Alamo U.S. nationality has been reiterated time and again at the Alamo, not only through battle but also through tourism and the creation of narratives. The mythic Alamo that this history has produced is buttressed by repeating patterns of gender, race, and ethnicity in the literature, films, and tourist industries that filter our memory. In this section, I analyze the conversion of the Alamo from historical site to national fetish, offering reasons why the U.S. popular imagination seems unable to remember the “real” Alamo itself. It took much deliberate work to establish Anglo transcendence over the Alamo as a tourist site: disenfranchisement of Mexicans in San Antonio and resignification of the mission’s meaning. In the historical moment for which the Alamo is famous, the United States did not consume Mexico; rather Mexico consumed U.S. bodies. In March 1836, as Texans battled for independence from Mexico, a tremendously outnumbered bat- talion of Anglo-Texans, with a few sympathetic Southerners and Mexicans, occupied the Mexican mission and were consumed within its walls after refusing to surrender to Antonio López de Santa Anna and the Mexican forces. In defiance of the expansive dynamic of Manifest Destiny, it was the Anglo-Americans who were contained in this battle, and the rebel outpost was reincorporated into Mexico. This reversal of Anglo fortune fueled the violence of the Anglo-Texan victory at San Jacinto a few weeks later as well as this and subsequent cries to “remember the Alamo.” But what are we remembering? Beginning with the enshrinement of the Alamo in the 1890s, San Antonio’s self-construction as a tourist destination is consistent with patterns of Euro-American (neo)colonial consumption. Néstor García Canclini’s analysis of urban monuments, in Cul- turas híbridas, is relevant here. According to García Canclini (1989, 281), monuments are originally “the works with which political power conse- crates the founding people and events of the state.”7 The monumental significance of the Alamo has evolved to reflect the interests of those in power. The abandoned Spanish mission—originally a sign of Spanish Catholic colonial expansion in the Northern Mexico territories—became, 499 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo after the battle in 1836, a marker of loss, “a great tomb, a place of horror tomany...wherethefloorwasshoe deep in the blood of friend and foe” (De Zavala 1996 [1917], 36). The Alamo was not monumentalized as a tourist site until the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) shifted its meaning again. The two remaining buildings of the Alamo mission were owned by private businesses when Adina De Zavala—a Texas-born descendant of a Mexican federalist and an Irish immigrant—declared, “Let us save our landmarks and sacred battlefields and buildings as reminders and monuments....Allthat are left to remind us of the sublime sacrifice of the men of the Alamo” (36–37). Employing the Christian rhetoric of sacrifice helped De Zavala to resignify the Alamo as a source of pride rather than a marker of devastation. She founded the De Zavala Daughters to preserve historical sites in Texas (the Spanish missions in particular) and merged with the newly formed DRT in 1893. In 1892, De Zavala secured a promise from the owner of the Alamo properties, Gustav Schmeltzer, that he would allow the De Zavala Daughters the first option to buy the properties when he sold his business. In 1906, with financial assistance from a wealthy white DRT member, Clara Driscoll, the Alamo properties were acquired to be used as a monument. At this point, a new “battle” waged over what the new monument would monumentalize, and women were the agents in constructing this memory. Although the DRT initially agreed to have De Zavala care for the Alamo, the executive committee ultimately gave custodianship to Driscoll in recognition of her financial contribution (which totaled over $20,000, or almost a quarter of the final cost) (Flores 1996, xvi). At several points when she disagreed with Driscoll’s management, De Zavala seized the keys to the Alamo to preserve her version of the site’s historical memory. In 1908, she learned that the DRT planned to remove the convento building, which she referred to as “the Alamo proper,” as it was the building in which most of the 1836 battle was fought (the church, left in ruins at that period, was where the women and children hid). Driscoll believed the convento building was ugly and wanted to level it to highlight the church and to create gardens to enhance the tourist site (xv, xviii–xix). Additionally, a hotel company planning to construct “a first-class fire-proof hotel...toaccom- modate the ever-increasing tourist and health-seeker’s travel” wanted to remove the building to gain Alamo Plaza frontage (De Zavala 1996 [1917], 212–13). De Zavala barricaded herself in the convento without food for three days, but the upper story was ultimately razed in 1913 (Flores 1996, xviii–xix). De Zavala (1996 [1917], 46) writes, “Long the battle waged—it 500 Nepantla was De Zavala Daughters versus Commercialism!...newinterests en- tered the contest to destroy the Alamo proper, purchased by Texas and the De Zavala Daughters in 1906, but, the latter firmly stood their ground.” The commercial emphasis of the DRT’s Alamo restoration is reflected in the greater value assigned to Driscoll’s financial contribution, over De Zavala’s historical efforts, as well as in designs to enhance the beauty of the grounds—self-conscious construction of an object for tourist consumption. Richard Flores (1996, xlii) writes that “it is De Zavala’s intense effort to understand, interpret, and restore the Alamo both as a Spanish mission and place of battle, that distinguishes her understanding of this place from that of Clara Driscoll and the DRT.” But popular imagination—from sou- venirs to artistic renderings—“remembers” the Alamo as the church and the commercial plaza, forgetting the national, ethnic, and ideological history De Zavala fought to preserve. De Zavala’s writing countered the dominant Alamo mythology that was being formed. For instance, contrary to the myth that the white Susannah Dickinson and her daughter were the only survivors, De Zavala interviewed a don Enrique Esparza, whose father Gregorio died in the battle at the Alamo and who, “along with his mother and three siblings walked out of the Alamo alive after the battle” (xxiv). The reminder of Mexican heroes dying for the cause of Texas independence, and of Mexican women and children barricaded in the church, disrupts the racial binary associated with the Alamo and troubles the exalted image of the blonde mother and daughter leaving the Alamo alone (as John Wayne popularized it in his 1960 film, The Alamo). Indeed, a number of Mexicans fought alongside the Anglos, and the battle memorialized as an Anglo-Texan cause began as a Mexican protest against Santa Anna’s annulment of the Mexican Constitution. Had De Zavala won her battle for custodianship of the Alamo, we might remember it relative to Mexican liberalism—in honor of De Zavala’s grandfather, Lorenzo, perhaps, the first Vice President of the Republic of Texas and an author of Mexico’s 1824 constitution. As Flores argues, the lines drawn at the 1836 battle of the Alamo were political and ideological rather than ethnic or national (x), but the question of what the Alamo would memorialize as a tourist site—the Driscoll/De Zavala “battle”—shifted the axis of Alamo memory to nationalism and ethnicity. The women’s battle mimics the ethnic binary attached (largely as a result of their struggle) to the 1836 Alamo battle, but with An- glos (Driscoll) defeating Mexicans (De Zavala) this time. Holly Beachley Brear (1995, 88–89, 92) describes the erasure of De Zavala’s name from the 501 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo

DRT’s history and Driscoll’s attainment of “mythic status” as “guardian angel” over the Alamo, with “heavier historical emphasis” placed on her role in “saving” the Alamo. Driscoll was named “Queen of Fiesta” for three consecutive years, at her death her body was laid in state inside the Alamo church, and today’s Alamo features a Clara Driscoll Theater named for the monument’s “Savior” (91–92). The tourist site is not designed to honor Mexicans: it reflects the realization of Anglo-American Manifest Destiny and a national/ethnic binary. Nationalist myopia filters out Mexican agency and Anglo-Mexican cooperation.8 Even Flores’s analysis of De Zavala’s efforts, in his introduction to the newedition of her 1917 History and Legends of the Alamo, emanates from this binary logic. As he struggles to understand De Zavala’s commitment to Texas heroes, and her assertion of an “American” or “Texan” identity rather than a “Mexican” one, he concludes that her “fervent declaration of Texanness” is a result of “ethnic abandonment and reattachment,” “personal repression” of her Mexican ethnicity arising from “ethnic hostility and racism” in Texas (Flores 1996, xlvii). This logic assumes that “Texans” and “Americans” are not Mexican and that “the rhetoric of cultural nationalism [that] is clearly absent from her writing” would be the best way to articulate De Zavala’s identity (xlv). This nationalist insistence on a divi- sion between Texans and Mexicans was not the governing logic during the battle for Texas independence but, rather, seems to have been popularized during the 1890–1910 enshrinement of the Alamo. De Zavala’s influence (along with that of Gregorio Esparza and Lorenzo De Zavala) was likely eclipsed because it defied the binary around which popular memory of the Alamo was constructed. U.S. nationalist interests demanded the elevation of Driscoll and Susannah Dickinson as white female heroines in order to reinforce—in tourist mythology if not in reality—the contested border between the United States and Mexico. These mythic lines in the sand leave no place for Mexican Americans. García Canclini (1989, 280–81) argues that “monuments open to the urban dynamic facilitate memory’s interaction with change and are kept current by means of the ‘irreverences’ of citizens,” who “hybridize” the monuments by adding signs of urban growth, advertising, and modern social movements. Such evolution should allowfor resistance to the dominant mythology. Yet the urban irreverances, advertising, and popular culture surrounding the Alamo today still favor the commercialism and Anglo-American Manifest Destiny celebrated by Driscoll’s DRT at the turn of the twentieth century. As of June 2002, despite the potentially resistant 502 Nepantla stance of Chicano skateboarders, Alamo Plaza was “kept current” by blonde tourists in souvenir sombreros, Powerpuff Girls snow cone stands, a wax museum replicating the exalted mythification of the Anglo-Texan patriots, and a Taco Bell. Though culturally hybrid, Alamo kitsch caters to white American consumption of an ego-reinforcing Mexican tourist commodity. In Alamo Plaza and along the River Walk, Mexico is still presented as a fiesta, and, in the Clara Driscoll Theater, the remote other in historically inaccurate Alamo mythology. National, cultural, and ethnic boundaries might be undermined by postmodern crossings, but shrines to white patriotism all the more emphatically feed nostalgia for white national hegemony. García Canclini suggests that “a dubious or wounded power theatricalizes and celebrates the past in order to reaffirm itself in the present” (24–25). Perhaps in re- action to changing political dynamics in San Antonio (see Rosales 2000), conservatives have relied on organizations like the DRT to enforce “the cultural patrimony,” which, according to García Canclini’s reformulation, operates like cultural capital, “to reproduce the differences between social groups and the hegemony of those who achieve preferential access to the production and distribution of goods” (137). As in his interpretation of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, the Alamo solidifies a static sense of patrimony. The Texas/Mexico binary still attached to Alamo tourism reflects a “mystical adherence to a set of archaic religious and patriotic goods, without any productive relationship with contemporary conflicts” (190). Remembering the Alamo turns the focus backward to the myth constructed by the DRT and thwarts concern for “real” history as well as for contemporary San Antonio. We cannot get past the binary reproduced by tourist consumption and commodification until we remove the mythified Alamo from popular imagination.

The Alamo and White American Consumption The Alamo has been invoked as a symbol of U.S. patriotism during historical moments of particularly intense national self-analysis, including the turn of the twentieth century, the post–World War II period, and today. Because of their historical remove from the battle of 1836, these representations are more about the anxieties of their own periods than they are about the Alamo. In the latter part of the nineteenth-century, as the United States delineated its racial contours relative to the abolition of slavery, the “settlement” of the NewMexico Territories, and increased immigration, the 503 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo

Alamo presented a symbolic framework for much mythification of white American womanhood. Augusta Evans Wilson, who is known for her rac- ist romances of Southern femininity, turned initially to the Alamo as a backdrop to illuminate the virtues of white American domesticity. Her relatively obscure, xenophobic novel Inez: A Tale of the Alamo (1855) is a melodramatic romance that appears, on the surface, to be notably not about the Alamo or the minor character Inez. Invoking a symbol of 1850s U.S. national and racial anxieties (including anti-Catholicism and disdain for the Mexican residents of the nation’s most recent territorial acquisition), Evans encodes her celebration of white Protestant femininity through a represen- tation of Anglo-Texans’ sacrifice at the Alamo. While most writers of the period turned to slave women as the opposing pole for the “cult of true womanhood,” Evans addresses the other U.S. South, and different national and ethnic tensions, by studying white womanhood alongside the Mexican presence in the United States.9 Most of the narrative follows the cross-country travels and the drawn-out illness of the emphatically pale, quiet, angelic, and cold-handed Protestant character, Mary. In a subtle alignment of representations, Mary and the Alamo are imbued with the same qualities. In this way, the significance of the Alamo is mediated by Evans’s reverence for Anglo-Saxon Protestant femininity. One of the fewscenes set at the Alamo occurs in a narrative break of just nine pages, which intrudes on Mary’s deathbed scene in Washington, DC. We leave Mary fading on the pillows, switch perspectives to the battle at the Alamo, and return immediately to Mary’s mild passage to heaven in the nation’s capital. This juxtaposition highlights the injustice of Mary’s untimely death—raising it to the level of a national tragedy— but projects anxieties about death away from Mary, Washington, and, by extension, “America,” and onto the Alamo. Evans (1855, 241) writes, “Oh! San Antonio, thou art too beautiful for strife and discord to mar thy quiet loveliness. Yet the fiery breath of desolating war swept rudely o’er thee, and, alas! Thou wast sorely scathed.” In this complaint, San Antonio bears all of the pain, and the “lovely” body that is “rudely” (indeed rapaciously) “scathed” by Santa Anna’s “fiery breath” is the Alamo: “The sun went down as it were in a sea of blood, its lurid light, gleaming ominously on the pale, damp brows of the doomed garrison. Black clouds rolled up and vailed the heavens in gloom. Night closed prematurely in with fitful gusts, min- gling the moans and strife of nature with the roar of artillery....‘God help us!’” (242; my emphases). This melodramatic personification of the Alamo recalls the frequent descriptions of Mary’s damp brow—“large drops stood 504 Nepantla on her pure, beautiful brow” (237)—which, in her illness, is veiled by dark covers much like the dark clouds “vailing” the Alamo. Her beloved Dr. Bryant, who later returns to Texas to die at the battle of Goliad, cries out to God on Mary’s behalf as the narrator cries out to God for the Alamo—“O God! Spare me my gentle angel Mary” (239)—but ultimately “the shadow cast by [Death’s] black pinions” covers her face at the same time that night falls “prematurely” on the Alamo (251). Evans’s invocation of the Alamo expresses the pain of white American loss, which is more obscurely coded in the conventionally sentimental deathbed scene. San Antonio contains the physical reality of death, while Mary’s passing in Washington, DC, remains ethereal. This distinction upholds the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres and the “cult of true womanhood,” preserving white femininity in a realm above material concerns. Such exaltation is, however, reserved for white Protestant women. The Mexican Catholic character, Inez, highlights Mary’s qualities by em- bodying their opposites: her hands are “hot—burning,” her “masses” of raven-colored hair fall to her waist, and she is described as “fearless,” “fever- ish,” “restless and piercing,” “haughty,” “contemptuous,” and “cursed” (35, 59, 263, 268, 278). In opposition to the virtuous and virginal Anglo-Texans, Inez comes to represent a too-sexual, too-forward Mexico that perversely brings destruction on itself. After rejecting her betrothed and losing her father, she cross-dresses (stereotypically, with a sombrero and a Mexican blanket) to escape imprisonment by the evil San Antonio priest, forwardly declares her love to Mary’s Dr. Bryant—an “avowal [that] gives [him] inex- pressible pain”—and ultimately dies alone, “raving,” damned to purgatory by the priest, “denied” both a “peaceful end” and a consecrated burial (248, 277, 287–91). Inez’s solitary, miserable death renders Mary’s more blissful by comparison, as all pain is projected away from the Anglos and onto the Mexicans. Yet the Anglos’ future is inextricably, and here unwillingly, intertwined with Mexican pain and with Mexico as a nation. Inez begs to be allowed to follow the Anglo-Texan soldiers and to serve Bryant, but he rejects her love and wishes never to see her again (277). After Bryant is killed at Goliad, however, she steals his body in the night, buries it in secret, and ultimately has her own buried next to his. This fictionalization of U.S.-Mexican relations, written less than ten years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, could be designed to justify U.S. claims to Mexican land and to support tropes of Anglo-Saxon superiority and Manifest Des- tiny. According to this logic, the virtuous Anglos tried to reject Mexico’s advances, but the aggressive, seductive Inez and the treacherous armies of 505 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo

Santa Anna dominated at the Alamo and at Goliad. The routing of Mex- icans at San Jacinto is thus justified. This version of history shifts blame onto the shoulders of Mexico, even savoring the pain of the vanquished, and rewrites war as romance. U.S. incorporation of Mexican land is presented as the consequence of Mexican seduction: a self-destructive señorita who threwherself at the Anglos’ feet and trapped the United States alongside her for eternity. There is a biographical context for the novel’s locale. In 1845, when she was ten, Evans’s family moved to San Antonio, where her father sought to recover the family’s fortune. According to Shannon Nichols (1997, 479), “Although Matt Evans’ business [in San Antonio] prospered, Indian raids, street brawls, and busy brothels shocked and alarmed the new residents. Finally, in 1849, the dangers of frontier life led the family back east to settle in Mobile, Alabama.” This description might suggest that San Antonio presented the corruption of domesticity and femininity that inspired Evans to take up the cause of white women’s virtue. Inez was Evans’s first novel, and its alignment of national politics and true womanhood set up the model that Evans later used in her better-known Confederate novels. Yet the cultural conflict in San Antonio, against which Evans’s girlhood identity was formed, proved unpopular material for readers in the 1850s, and Evans did not achieve literary success until she shifted her gaze to the Southeast and the crisis over national identity emerging around the Civil War (480). For many nineteenth-century readers, the internal split within the United States and the newmyths of endangered Southern belles provided a more obvi- ous context for the elucidation of white American womanhood than did the U.S.-Mexican conflict. In both contexts, though, Evans depicts white women threatened by incursions from racialized others (slaves or Mexi- cans), and this feminine vulnerability acts as an icon for the threatened nation (Confederate or U.S.) battling a degraded enemy (Yankee or Mex- ican). (In the end, though, Mary’s cousin reclaims the family plantation, with slaves, and Mexico is defeated.) Since Inez was Evans’s first attempt at fusing didactic politics with the sentimental literary mold discussed by Hazel Carby (1987), Jane Tompkins (1985), and others, this novel can be seen as laying groundwork for a nationalist “true womanhood” built on binary opposition. Although Evans’s “tale of the Alamo” remains obscure, representations from later in the century, which still shape Alamo commemoration today, also center on women. The engendering of San Antonio’s tourist industry in the 1890s uses the Alamo to negotiate Anglo-American pain 506 Nepantla and pleasure. Americana magazine reports on the birth of San Antonio’s Fiesta tradition: “In 1891, following a fashion then popular on the French Riviera, the patriotic ladies of San Antonio assembled a retinue of carriages, proceeded in style to the city’s most famous landmark, and then cheerfully pelted each other with flowers in a mock skirmish...staged in front of the Alamo to commemorate Texans’ bravery there and their subsequent decisive victory over Mexico at San Jacinto” (Kiene 1991, 41). The creation of Fiesta San Antonio layered sexist and anti-Mexican stereotypes. The Battle of Flowers Parade, and the entire carnival itself, were orga- nized until the 1950s by the wives of wealthy Anglo businessmen, attempt- ing to bring tourist money to San Antonio (Brear 1995, 19).10 The haute couture performance—in which white carnival queens throwing flowers stood in for the men who died there shooting guns and canons—invoked nineteenth-century images of white middle-class femininity to appeal to tourist sensibilities. If Augusta Evans used the Alamo to celebrate the “cult of true womanhood,” the carnival used “true womanhood” to celebrate the Alamo. Making the battle women’s business obscured the brutal violence at the Alamo and trivialized Mexican opposition to U.S. conquest. In the nineteenth century, activities considered to be within the purview of women were limited to domestic, private, decorative, or moral concerns—not issues of national security.11 The “feminization” of Alamo enshrinement thus ap- pealed to U.S. tourists by displacing the painful national history attached to the site with parades and fiestas, symbolic gestures of domestic joy. In addition to the carnival queens, late nineteenth-century San Antonio boasted legendarily “coquettish” Mexican “chili queens” who, as Candace Kiene (1991, 42) describes it, encouraged “exuberant consumption of pungent Mexican chili...innineteenth-century open-air markets.” In this juxtaposition, white queens veil physical violence with surface display, while Mexican queens feed alimentary and sexual desires. Like August Evans’s Mary, the white women reflect the mythical plane that displaces bodies, pain, and history, while the Mexican women, like Inez, present the material plane of bodies consumed near the Alamo. Fifty years after the battle itself, San Antonio’s tourist industry tried to move past the pain and violence that motivated Evans’s melodrama, satisfying the desires of war- weary men with women, food, and touristic conversions of Mexican culture. And the racial divide between the women who served up this touristic imaginary guaranteed that it was Mexico that was being consumed, not Anglo America. 507 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo

Alamo commemoration began at the same historical moment that San Antonio chili was gaining national attention. According to Donna Gabaccia’s (1998, 108) study of U.S. “ethnic” food consumption, the Mex- ican food that was previously considered to be inedible by Anglos—for whom its “fiery” peppers supposedly “biteth like a serpent”—was being more readily consumed in San Antonio by Anglo miners, traders, and soldiers who patronized the chili queens from the 1870s until they were outlawed by a xenophobic Health Department in 1936 (109, 133). The 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago is credited with first introducing chili to the nation at a booth called the “San Antonio Chili Stand.” After 1893, chili stands and the Alamo both attracted increasing numbers of tourists to San Antonio (109).12 Chili, Alamo commemoration, and the Battle of Flowers are contemporaneous markers of U.S. consumption. Significantly, all three emerged at a time when U.S. anxiety was focused internally on its own lack of racial coherence and national unity—after Guadalupe Hidalgo, after the Civil War and Reconstruction, during a peak of “nonwhite” immigration and the birth of the mythic “Wild West.” The Alamo also figured prominently as an oppositional pole in post–World War II/Cold War symbolic gestures of U.S. exceptionalism and solidarity—from presidential politics to television.13 In the 1950s and 1960s, both the Alamo and Mexican food enjoyed increased visibility within U.S. commodity culture.14 According to Randy Roberts and James Olson’s (2001, 230) recent study of Alamo narratives, “The nationalization of the Alamo by Walt Disney’s famous 1954–55 [Davy Crockett] broadcasts—the event that transformed it from a Texas shrine to an American one—was spurred by the Cold War and by Disney’s sense that America needed heroes who represented liberty and the rights of man.” John Wayne’s 1960 film follows this logic. In Wayne’s depiction, Davy Crockett and his Tennessee Volunteers use Texas/Mexico as a backdrop for making themselves heroes. While watching his fellow men drinking and dancing in a cantina full of Mexican women, Davy comments: “They think we came South to hunt and get drunk.” After William Travis, commander of the Anglo force at the Alamo, responds that “they seem to have accomplished that,” the camera cuts to the legs of a Mexican woman doing a cancan on a table. One of the Volunteers later thanks Davy for showing them the world, a touristic experience where white men can assert their corporeal mastery. Jim Bowie brags that Mexico provides “just everything a man could want in the way of country, for looking at or for growing on...[and]thewomen folk, well pshf!” After the sultry “Flaca” proclaims her love for Davy, he too claims to 508 Nepantla have found what he lacks: “When I come down here to Texas I was looking for something and I didn’t knowwhat ....It’slike I was empty; well I’m not empty anymore” (Wayne 1960). What fills white men’s lacks, in these scenes, is Mexican women, who are packaged with the opportunities for danger and adventure to be found in Texas. The ending of the film—when the golden-haired Susannah Dick- inson passes through the lines of Santa Anna’s men, who remove their hats in reverence as she is escorted out of the Alamo with her daughter—also celebrates the white American housewife, the cause for which men died.15 The exalted white femininity that was at risk in Augusta Evans’s “tale of the Alamo” has been saved in the World War II generation; in the film, Susannah’s safe passage out of the mission reassures viewers that Anglo-American purity was not consumed at the Alamo and that white domesticity reigns.

Chile, Sex, and the Nation It is not irrelevant that women and chile play a prominent role in Alamo mythology. The Alamo has been encoded as a sign of (white) national heroism in the U.S. popular imagination as part of a cultural struggle to assert dominance in the face of international vulnerability and to define national particularism in opposition to the country’s racially, nationally, and culturally mixed formation. The obsession with “ethnic foods,” today and historically, corresponds to this anxiety about the lack of ethnic coherence in the United States. U.S. commodification of “Mexican” chile follows a nationalist logic and neocolonial power dynamic that is sexual and touristic. Consider the marketing strategies of another San Antonio “chili” manufacturer, Gebhardt. A 1923 recipe booklet, Mexican Cookery for Amer- ican Homes, emphasizes a distinction between Mexican and American nationality at the same time that it appropriates Mexican cuisine with neocolonial rhetoric: “Fewbut the native born even learned the art of properly preparing and blending the various spices that make that real Mexican tang....Itwasonly when Gebhardt succeeded in preparing and blending these spices into [sic] piquant perfection of Eagle Chili Powder that Mexican dishes really became practical so far as American homes were concerned” (Gebhardt Chili 1923, inside cover). Cooking with Gebhardt chili, this booklet seems to promise, al- lows one to claim the “illusive” “piquancy” of Mexican chile—“to surprise and please your friends and family” (1)—while also reinforcing the line between Mexican “natives” and “American homes.” Gebhardt’s language 509 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo highlights the otherness of Mexican cuisine at the same time as it emphasizes the “Americanness” of their own Eagle brand chili products, which are “nowquite common in every home” across the United States (11). Offi- cial endorsements convert Mexican chile into a symbol of U.S. nationality: Gebhardt products are “accepted by the United States Government as the standard for chili powders, being adopted by the commissary departments of both the army and the navy” (front cover) and “prepared by Mexican chefs in the big, sun-lit, white tiled Gebhardt kitchens” using “only choice Government inspected meats” (16). Perhaps in an effort to combat fears of Mexican corruption, germs, or diarrhea, cleanliness is emphasized throughout, as are the purity of the chili and its positive impact on digestive health. Mixed in with the recipes are painstaking accounts of sanitation processes: “The Gebhardt kitchens are among the finest in America from a standpoint of cleanliness, sanitation, fresh air and efficiency. No expense or trouble is spared to keep them spot- less. Every day boiling water and live hot steam are applied to every nook and corner, every machine and tool being subjected to thorough cleansing. All foods are...packed by white clad daughters of Mexico under the rigid supervision of a U.S. Government inspector” (31). The language here is almost military, subjecting the Mexicanness of the chili and of the workers to the rigors of white uniforms and U.S. government sanitation. The standards of U.S. domesticity battle otherness, routing the germs while retaining just enough “piquancy” to entertain the family. In a narrative that recalls Augusta Evans’s elevation of white Ameri- can womanhood in juxtaposition to Mexicans and the Alamo, emphatically white kitchens oppose unrefined Mexicanness and make chili palatable and officially healthy for “Americans.” As Evans’s Mary is exalted by juxtaposition to Inez, Gebhardt opposes the illicit and unsanitary San Antonio “chili queens.” Yet while Mary dies and the Anglo-Texans lose at the Alamo, in twentieth-century San Antonio Clara Driscoll’s DRT reigns, chili queens are put out of business, and Gebhardt triumphs, invoking the mythic purity of white womanhood to seal off the nation symbolically from outside contamination. The process of nation building is assisted by incorporating marginal territories and assimilating them into the dominant body, a process that can be modeled symbolically through sex or eating. It is no accident that San Antonio commemorations use women’s bodies to sell access to the pleasure and pain associated with Mexican culture. Following the binary and patriarchal logic of the virgin/whore dichotomy, domestic queens and 510 Nepantla sexual queens provide symbolic means for protecting the domestic space and for subsuming the other. Either by eating Gebhardt recipes that are “frankly the adaptation of Mexican flavor to famous and accepted Amer- ican dishes” (1), made domestic by their wives in their own kitchens, or by consuming the chili of the chili queens (and, metonymically, the bodies of the sellers themselves), Anglo businessmen symbolically assimilated the other within their own frameworks. In American Encounters, José Limón (1998, 108–9) discusses how, from nineteenth-century cowboy ballads to contemporary popular music, Anglo male domination of “the West” is represented vis-à-vis an erotic attraction to a Mexican woman (often a “bar-girl/prostitute”) who is per- ceived as “other,” juxtaposed with a domesticating “religious, virtuous, faithful, and hardworking” Anglo woman to whom he must ultimately return. In Limón’s interpretation, the Mexican woman “represents something repressed but longed for by the dominant culture” (132).16 The mythic señorita “bar-girl” has become a fetish, an accessible yet potentially corrupt- ing object of colonial desire. I would argue that eating is the most appropriately colonial erotic response in that it consumes the other in the process of satisfying this desire. Once the Anglo man has fulfilled his politicized desire for the señorita, according to Limón, he may redirect his “discrim- inating” tastes to the white woman—Susannah Dickinson at the Alamo, or “Susie” in Limón’s rendition—and his allegiance to the white domestic “settlement” of the colonized space (112). In “Eating the Other,” bell hooks (1998, 183) argues that “when race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power-over in intimate relation with the Other.” Eating the other overpowers the other. Since the satis- faction of consuming the other is produced in the conquest of external or marginal territory, however, some demarcation between self and other must remain. One must paradoxically install signs of the other’s opposition, its spiciness, its risk to one’s health, even as one incorporates it. The “real” other is thus supplanted by the dominant’s fantasy, like the señorita bar girl, by way of what hooks calls “a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other but denies the significance of that Other’s history through a process of decontextualization” (191). When Gebhardt and Taco Bell pose their products as other, it must only be a pose, a touristic construct that affirms gringo nationality. 511 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo

hooks also suggests that “within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (191).17 This sentiment is particularly apt when consider- ing estadounidenses’ relationship to Mexican food.18 “American” food, like white American identity, is rendered bland by the privileges of the economically and politically dominant, which enable it to seem colorless, the norm from which all else departs. In my interpretation, eating and sex are collapsed within marketing strategies that pose chile as a dangerous woman to highlight its otherness in relation to the bland, white American self. Hot sauce names such as “Scorned Woman (Watch Out She’s Mean)” and “Pleasure and Pain XXX-Rated Hot Sauce” (with a voluptuous domi- natrix on the label claiming “It hurts so good”) support this sexual illusion. Recalling Limón’s interpretation of the cowboy ballads, symbolically rep- resenting Mexico as both chile and feisty, sexualized woman enables male fantasies of taming and containing the other. As with Augusta Evans’s rep- resentation of Inez, depictions of San Antonio’s mythically coquettish chili queens, or the cantina women who entertain Davy Crockett’s volunteers, Scorned Woman hot sauce tempts men to prove their mettle and promises a pleasure enhanced by mastering “her” painful heat in their mouths.

Tourist Experience #2: Consuming Mexico in the Nation’s Capital The Latin American Studies Association held its 2001 meeting in Washington, DC. Coin- cidentally, Vicente Fox was in Washington at the same time, hoping to persuade President George W. Bush and Congress to expand citizenship to Mexican workers living in the United States. On the first night of the conference, we could hear the fireworks that marked the grand finale of the state dinner. The next morning, the day I was to present an early version of this essay, the newspaper placed outside my hotel room door carried the headline, “Bushes’ First State Dinner a ‘Fiesta.’” In an uncannily timed convergence, the one-page spread in USA Today reporting on the presidential visit was dominated by the meal that the Bushes served to the Foxes: “Maryland crab and chorizo pozole,” “poblano whipped potatoes,” and “red chile pepper sauce and tequila sabayon sauces” (Keen 2001). In a gesture that was perhaps meant to reflect U.S.-Mexican alliance, the state dinner assimilated Mexican food into the form of mashed potatoes. It also featured estadounidenses’ favorite synecdoches for the pleasure and pain provided by Mexico: red chile peppers and tequila. The long article describing the dinner appropriately sits above a large picture of Mexican women preparing tortillas in a Toledo, Ohio, grocery—a photo designed to accompany a shorter article about Mexican workers in the United States. Finally, along 512 Nepantla the right edge of the page, a single-column story reports on the political content of the Bush-Fox visit, reflecting the Bush administration’s reluctance to change immigration policy.19 Anxieties about nationality and extending citizenship are thus marginalized, Anglo-cized Mexican “fiesta” is foregrounded, and the entire narrative rests upon the image of Mexican women cooking. It is almost as if the president brought fantasies of Texas chili queens with him to Washington.

What is the logic behind contemporary U.S. consumption of Mexico? Are “poblano whipped potatoes” appealing in 2001 because we are in the midst of a postnational, postmodern, multicultural celebration of hybridity? Be- tween 1985 and 1991, the number of Mexican restaurants in the United States increased by 40 percent, “nonethnic” U.S. commodities—from ice cream and jelly beans to beer and self-defense spray—have incorporated chile peppers, and salsa sales surpassed ketchup sales (Paterson 2000, 122– 29); indeed, some say that salsa is the newketchup. Given the actual hostili- ties that haunt the U.S.-Mexican border, Amy Bentley (1998, 244) attributes the “mainstreaming and elevation of Southwestern cuisine” to “cultural amnesia.” I would argue, however, that it is just the opposite: cultural memory demands the consumption of Mexican food. Most estadounidenses remember all too well both the guilt of conquest and the border crossings they have been told are a threat to economic health and national security. Incorporating Mexican border crossing makes it “American,” recasts it in the dominant culture’s terms. In the 1890s as well as today, most estadounidenses consume only a limited fantasy of Mexico—their mythic margaritas, challenging chiles, and vixen Inezes—because these images make light of Mexican presence in the United States. This “American Mexican- ism” is restricted to realms of pleasure, where it poses no serious threat to U.S. integrity. Running for the border at the taco stand on the corner averts the U.S. gaze from “real” Mexico and any national pain estadounidenses fear from “real” border-crossing.”20 Against the backdrop of globalization, the U.S.-Mexican border remains a fetish in the U.S. media. Estadounidenses are questioning not just the success of border patrols but also the logic, justice, or proﬁtability of borders themselves. The boom of “Tex-Mex” restaurant chains like On the Border—whose Web site promises “the joys of venturing off the map” (”On the Border” 2001)—feigns jouissance in the absence of boundaries only to make the border more visible as a threatened symbol, keeping national integrity on the map like a fortress under siege. A newcrisis in the meaning of U.S. nationality might be driving estadounidenses today to reingest the 513 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo margins of the nation, to remember the Alamo in order to defend it con- tinually. U.S. capitalists want to market Mexico on their own terms before they, themselves, are consumed by the “Latin invasion” of consumer goods, the Mexicanization of the U.S. population, or dependence on Mexican oil. By transplanting the border symbolically inside the United States—Taco Bells in every town, Coca-Cola saturating Mexican markets—corporate culture disavows Mexican challenges to U.S. proﬁts and national boundaries. The United States can then eat the other and keep its border, too.

Resistance The Alamo remains a powerful symbol of embattled American values.21 In the last two decades, it has been a stage for those trying to protect the myths of the “pristine” nation—including the Ku Klux Klan, antiabortion protesters, and U.S. veterans—and those mocking such myths with irrev- erent performances: Ozzy Osbourne urinating on the Alamo or Pee Wee Herman looking for his lost bicycle in its basement (Roberts and Olson 2001, 296–97). Tourist promotions of Alamo glory, Latina vixens, and hot sauce eclipse many counterdiscourses. Laura Elisa Pérez (1999, 20) claims that Chicano aesthetics act as “agents of ideological disorder,” “the disordering embodiment of the radically abject,” when they are taken into the dominant national discourse: “The cultural practices of Chicana/o discourse may indeed ‘pass’—into the ever refurbished dominant discourse, but they are not fully translatable: they are not fully digestible, and it is precisely their ideological unpalatability that is again recycled, again injected, like endless fishbones, slowly, steadily wounding the consuming body.” Pérez’s reference to abjection and indigestible fishbones provides a compelling model for resisting alimentary incorporation: the dominating body/nation inadvertently consumes wounding resistance along with its mythic chile. Here again pleasure and pain converge, but this pain is less pleasurable because the object consumed becomes the agent. Once eaten, the chile causes indigestion, fights back, transgresses the boundaries of the dominant, like diarrhea—an emblematic process of abjection as well as an emblematic disorder of the tourist (see Kristeva 1982 [1980]). There is nothing brave or sexy about diarrhea; it ruptures the imperviousness and mastery Lugones associates with agonistic travel. The Alamo, too, acts as a sort of fishbone in Texas’s stomach, a wound Texans cannot forget. Although the dominant Alamo myths celebrate Manifest Destiny, these representations were designed to hide the reality of Mexican victory and 514 Nepantla

Mexican authority. A foreign body within, the Alamo is a challenge to national boundaries, a loss stuck inside U.S. memory, and a fracture in the foundation of U.S. rights to Mexican land. The meaning ascribed to the Alamo by the dominant culture relies on reenacting the dominant myth and public acceptance of that myth. Yet some publics (starting with the De Zavala Daughters) have resisted the DRT and John Wayne–style stories. I conclude with a good example of a Chicana refusal to remember the Alamo as a chapter in the narrative of Anglo-Saxon Manifest Destiny.22 Sandra Cisneros’s “Remember the Alamo” (1991) was published exactly one hundred years after the first Battle of Flowers parade. Her tribute to the Alamo buries Texas history within the fictionalized “history” of her narrator, Rudy, who forgets his personal experiences of abjection by adopting a glamorous stage persona: “But I’m not Rudy when I perform. I mean, I’m not Rudy Cantú from Fallfurrias anymore. I’m Tristán” (Cisneros 1991, 63). “Tristán’s got nothing to do with the ugly, the ordinary. With screen doors with broken screens or peeling paint or rawhallways.The dirty backyards, the muddy spittle in the toilet you don’t want to remember. Sweating, pressing himself against you, pink pink peepee blind and seamless as an eye, pink as a baby rat, your hand small and rubbing it, yes, like this, like so, and your skull being crushed by that sour smell and the taste like tears inside your sore mouth” (67). This description simultaneously invokes and denies sexual abuse (presumably by a white man since his “peepee” is pink). It cites the violation of Rudy’s physical boundaries (both body and house) as it solidifies cognitive boundaries by patching up broken screens of memory and sealing the paint of history’s crumbling buildings. Like the Fiesta queens’ displacement of Anglo-American loss, and the DRT’s restoration of the devastated Alamo, Tristán tries to defy physical abjection and macho violence, “his sisters jealous because he’s the pretty one. But they adore him, and he gives them tips on their makeup” (65). Beyond this stereotypical attribution of transgender identification to childhood abuse, Tristán’s story casts identity, memory, and gender as personal creations. Like Augusta Evans, Cisneros dedicates little narrative space to the Alamo itself. In both Inez: A Tale of the Alamo and “Remember the Alamo,” the site’s framework sets the tone for stories about gender. Cisneros’s choice of the Anglo-Texans’ rallying cry for her title is ironic. While Evans’s remembrance incites retribution for lost Anglo-American values and heroes, Cisneros’s remembrance undermines those values and heroes. Tristán per- forms at a club called “The Travisty,” which is located behind the Alamo: 515 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo

“Every Thursday night at the Travisty. Behind the Alamo, you can’t miss it. One-man show, girl. Flamenco, salsa, tango, fandango, merengue, cumbia, cha-cha-chá. Don’t forget. The Travisty. Remember the Alamo” (63). On the level of the literary narrative, the “travesty” is the “one-man show, girl,” and “Remember the Alamo” provides directions for finding the club. On the historical level, remembering that Alamo puts readers in mind of violent warriors like William Travis (of whom Tristán’s performance is a travesty), the massacre of white men (which could avenge Rudy’s personal history), and the travesty of justice associated with both the slaughter of Anglo-Texans and the ultimate incorporation of Texas/Mexico as part of the United States. According to Mary Pat Brady’s (1999, 131) reading, “The club’s location ‘behind’ the Alamo positions it in the heart of a tourist zone but outside of tourism’s purview. ‘Remember the Alamo’ both quotes the battle cry and ironically twists its significance, reducing it to a directional signal while suggesting that the Alamo itself has more than one meaning.” The literal meaning of the Alamo in Cisneros’s story is the directional one, one that privileges Tristán’s transgender Chicano relationship to the site, “behind” the tourist front. Just as Cisneros’s story reveals Rudy’s pain beneath the glamorous artifice of Tristán, Tristán’s narrative reveals suppressed pain and queerness behind the mythic Alamo. This ex- posure ruptures the colonialist heterosexual romance that Limón discovers in cowboy ballads and that I discover in chile consumption and Alamo commemoration. The final words of Cisneros’s “Remember the Alamo” are a two- word paragraph: “This body” (67). “This body,” alone in its own paragraph, is free from historical, sexual, or racial specifications, ready to be modified with one’s own constructs. It is not a general “the body,” though. (There are no universal bodies, just as there are no neutral histories.) “This body” makes it individual rather than mythic. We knowthis body to be the site of sexual violation. We also knowthis body to be the source of graceful flamencos. The self-authored mobility of the latter defies the overpowering gesture of the former. The creation of Tristán, the dancer, evokes physical integrity and thus provides a foundation for empowered action in the face of violent disempowerment: “Courageous. Put on your seat belt, sweets. A ride to the finish. So bad it aches” (66). As with the Battle of Flowers, he re- places Alamo violence with performance, but Cisneros retains the edges that remind us of historical pain. Tristán bravely loves and dances “like a body that wants to give and give of itself, that wants to create a universe where nothing is dirty, no one is hurting, no one sick” (67). This alternate political 516 Nepantla economy transcends violence without exacting vengeance. It appropriates authority for one who was deauthorized, basing politics on an identity that is explicitly choreographed in resistance to pain and domination. Throughout this battle of representations, the engendering of the Alamo and the ethnic significance attached to it have been fluid. “Remem- ber the Alamo” has come to mean a disremembering of history. Dominant culture “staging” of the Alamo has consistently denied Mexican authority and displaced the violent emasculation of the white men who died there with symbols of white heroism and sexual prowess. Like the glamorous Tristán, this Alamo facade seals up the paint, patches the screens, and has come to signify an assertion of U.S. pride, white machismo, and Manifest Destiny. It is therefore invoked at moments of vulnerability—historically and today—to symbolically seal up the nation. The links I have found between Alamo commemoration, tourism, and the U.S. chile industry showa correlation betweeneating, sex, and (neo)colonial domination and suggest that the dominant culture’s pleasures and patterns of consumption are serious business. The key to U.S. fantasies about Mexico seems to be imperviousness. Mexico is only “fun” for tourists when pain and suffering are safely contained in restricted areas. Probing behind these fantasies reveals national anxieties and weaknesses; resistors can find the vulnerable places where the dominant is subject to the other and throwtheir fishbones there.

Notes An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Latin American Studies Associa- tion’s 2001 convention in Washington, DC. 1. Of course, there are Spanish missions all over Texas, NewMexico, and California, and perhaps Taco Bell founder Glen Bell, himself a Californian, did not have the Alamo exclusively in mind as an architectural model. Likely not all consumers make a conscious connection between Taco Bell and the Alamo. I would argue, however, that, as the most recognizable mission in the United States—indeed, as something of a fetish in U.S. national symbolism—the Alamo will be evoked in the minds of many Americans viewing Taco Bell advertisements. The rhetoric of running for the border, images of male adventure, and the revolutionary allusions coupled with Taco Bell advertising reinforce this association. 2. The ad I have in mind aired in 1998, with the Taco Bell chihuahua posed as a revolutionary in a beret, speaking before throngs of people chanting for gorditas. 517 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo

3. It is not surprising that José Limón (1998, 1, 7), too, begins his introduction to American Encounters with reference to the Taco Bell chihuahua and starts his first chapter by referring to the different meats consumed by Anglos and Mexicans in Texas. Food is the most prominent “medium” for Anglo- Mexican negotiation in American popular culture as well as a model of how, as Limón notes, this negotiation, though crucially about domination, is also about “identity, desire, love, [and] need” (2). 4. In Playing in the Dark (1992), Morrison defines “American Africanism” as “the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served” (6). “American Mexicanism,” as with American Africanism, refers not to Mexico itself but rather to the “entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people” (7). 5. I am studying U.S. consumers not as a sociological group but as an implied audi- ence for marketing strategies that promote white American domination and Mexican subservience. This binary is clearly disrupted by Mexican agency, critical white “posttourisms,” and the ambivalence of Mexican Americans (as consumers and tourists themselves). 6. The carefree enjoyment of U.S. tourists—about 88 percent of the tourists in Mexico (Cruz 2002)—rests on the assumed complacency and service of the Mexicans who supply margaritas and sombreros to satisfy their stereotypes. While many Mexicans do indeed profit from U.S. tourism (see, for example, Cobb 1981), this economic and cultural relationship feeds the myth, implanted during the plunder of “Manifest Destiny,” of Mexican service to U.S. transcendence. The Mexican Secretariat of Tourism promises this servile relationship on its Web page: “servir es un privilegio” (Secretaría de Turismo 2002). Linguistically, this statement is not remarkable, as courtesies such as “a sus ordenes” (at your orders) or “solo para servirle” (just to serve you) are common Mexican formalities in any context, not just tourism. Yet structurally, this statement feeds asymmetrical consumption patterns. 7. The translations of García Canclini are my own. 8. Some Mexican-American leaders in San Antonio, like former Bexar County His- torical Society chairman Henry Guerra, have protested the erasure of De Zavala’s name from city history (Brear 1995, 90–93). 9. See Carby 1987 for a study of the ways in which antebellum women writers represented slave women as the “other” of white womanhood. 10. Latinos had no official role in Fiesta until the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) created the Rey Feo (Ugly king) position in 1947 (Brear 518 Nepantla

1995, 21–22). According to Brear, Fiesta today tries to efface the history of Anglo domination that marks Alamo commemoration by displaying “an image of unity, denying publicly any discord between Anglos and Hispanics” (22). 11. According to the San Antonio Conservation Society, “from the 1920’s through the 1940’s the organization was one of the few opportunities for women in San Antonio to fight important battles” (quoted in Kiene 1991, 43). The shift from actual battle to Battle of Flowers shifts the meanings of “important,” “history,” and “conservation.” As a feminist, I value women’s power over Alamo memory, but this authority is built on gender stereotypes that trivialize women’s work. 12. San Antonio is the origin of many U.S. corporations’ “Mexican” food products. It is reportedly the site where Elmer Doolin first discovered Mexican friotes in 1932 and purchased the recipe for what became fritos. “Typically, Frito-Lay claimed not to knowthe name of the Mexican from whomDoolin bought the fritos recipe” (Gabaccia 1998, 165), effacing the Mexican origins of the food later marketed by the “Frito Bandito.” In the 1940s, Pace Picante sauce, another San Antonio native, got its start in Dave Pace’s San Antonio liquor store (Paterson 2000, 130). 13. For example, in 1956, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson met with Texas governor Price Daniel in a publicity demonstration in front of the Alamo. 14. According to Richard Pillsbury (1998, 160): “Anglos from the Southwest have always eaten a bit of Mexican food, but not until the late 1950s and 1960s did Mexican foods begin finding their way onto the plates of visitors to the region and residents of nearby states.” This is the same era in which Taco Bell was born. At the end of World War II, Glen Bell started a drive-in hot dog business in San Bernardino, California. In 1952, he “became increasingly interested in the idea of alternative menu items” (Taco Bell 2001). The first “Taco Bell” franchise was built in 1962. Pillsbury (1998, 160) writes in his history, No Foreign Food: The American Diet in Time and Place: “Glen Bell’s development of a chain of taco stands designed to be competitive with other fast food outlets in the early 1960s did much to spread familiarity with the foods. His reddish-tan pseudomission concrete-block structures complete with plastic saguaro cactus garbage cans, the signature bell in the peak of the false front, and a gas campfire were unforgettable.” Mission-style architecture associated Taco Bell with the Alamo—a familiar sign of U.S. patriotism in the 1960s imagination—and pseudo-campfires simulated a Davy Crockett–style adventure of “roughing it” south of the border. The incorporation of Mexican culture thus livened up the emerging fast food industry. 519 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo

15. Roberts and Olson (2001, 275) anachronistically suggest that Wayne’s film is a celebration of U.S. “family values.” 16. Limón (1998, 111) regards this sexual desire as a “fissure in the colonial enterprise, a break with the sexual repression concomitant with that [thrifty capitalist] ruling order,” but I rather see sexuality as a central component of the physical fact of colonialism. 17. In her study of the marketing of hot sauce in NewOrleans—an industry that is likely a product of “plunder from the 1846–1848 Mexican War” (Paterson 2000, 4)— Heather Schell (2001) examines tourists’ desire to consume hot peppers in terms of economic development. For Schell, it is important that these peppers are associated with the cooking of impoverished nations and regions (Mexico, South Asia, the Caribbean). Schell notes: “Most of the people I sawsampling the [hot] sauces wanted to suffer and were evaluating the sauces using pain as the main criterion....Thetourist with the burning mouth is not suffering meaningless pain....Wecanplay around with feeling like someone on the bottom rung of the social ladder, but it is safe because we won’t be staying” (214–15). As tourism is about bolstering oneself while consuming an other, sampling hot sauce provides a culinary experience of “third world suffering” and demonstrates the tourists’ mastery. As a tourist act, this experience is terminable at the visitors’ command, and the money exchanged highlights the tourists’ power over the object of consumption. In this way, “third world” pain brings tourists pleasure. 18. In “Eroticism and Gastrosophy” (1972), Octavio Paz argues that “a Yankee meal” reflects a “maniacal preoccupation with the origin and purity of food [that] is the counterpart of racism and discrimination”—while Mexican cooking features a “cult for the passionate and murky ragouts,” whose promiscuous blends and spices “constitute a major scandal” in the United States (74). Paz links the mixtures within Mexican cooking to pleasure, attributing Anglos’ interest in Mexican cuisine to a shift in morality: “The erosion of traditional morals and the decadence of Christian rituals” cause “hunger and thirst—for fiestas and rites” (75, 79–81). “Nowis the time of pleasure,” according to Paz (80). 19. According to USA Today: “Privately, some administration officials said Fox’s time- table caught them offguard, and they would have preferred that he not state it publicly. They said it will be difficult to move immigration legislation through Congress quickly. Congressional Republicans generally want more limited changes” (McQuillan and Hall 2001). 20. Even U.S. restaurants run by Mexicans satisfy (intentionally or not) touristic longing to experience Mexico as a commodity designed for U.S. consumption. 520 Nepantla

21. Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush have notoriously revived Alamo mythology in the build-ups to both their Iraq wars and the invasion of Afghanistan by rhetorically drawing “a line in the sand,” thus casting themselves as modern-day incarnations of William Travis, who according to legend drewa line in the sand and gave every man the choice to cross it and join him in a ﬁght to the death to defend the Alamo. Of course, unlike Travis, they were not putting own lives at risk. 22. At the end of John Sayles’s ﬁlm Lone Star (1996), Pilar tells her white half-brother/ lover to “forget the Alamo.” Emma Pérez (1999, 127) writes: “To hear the words ‘Forget the Alamo’ from a Chicana is, for me, freeing, a freedom from a history that nags me for re-vision” since Pérez, too, “a tejana by cultural construction, [has] been trying all [her] life to forget the Alamo.”

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