UC Berkeley

History, the adage goes, is written by the victors. As a result, history represents the values, ideologies, and most importantly for this dissertation, the remembrances of the victorious. Their remembrances never remain ethereal or disembodied; they become the object lessons about the past for those living in the present. And these object lessons, the lessons of history, become the narratives and locations that transmit a nation's idealized values and origin stories. It is in this confluence of remembrances, object lessons, values and origin stories that this dissertation examines in the Alamo. The Alamo represents a consummate site of memory for the United States. As a cultural narrative it persists from a mid-nineteenth century battlefield through the present day as a cinematic narrative. The Alamo is one of the historical watershed moments of the Westward expansion.

However, the tales of the victors (ironically, in this case, the victors at the Alamo are the Euro-Americans who died in the battle) transmit values, lessons and stories steeped in narratives of denial. They engage in what this dissertation calls the historiography of denial. Simply, the Alamo, according to the victors, represents a shrine dedicated to personal liberty, familial security, economic development, and a furthering of the best values of humanity. The victors, however, fail to acknowledge the consequences of their victory for people of color. The victorious Texans reintroduced chattel slavery, exterminated Native America, and engaged in cultural genocide against the remaining Mexican/Chicana/o population. It is these omissions that mark the Alamo as a location where the historiography of denial permits the United States to remain invested in its own belief system that genocide did not occur at the hands of "America."

The ultimate aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the Alamo represents a location that both borrows from and recreates the consummately "American" historical practice of holocaust denial, a denial that stretches from the United State's origins to the present-day.