Remember the Alamo (2004)
Remember the Alamo (2004) This episode of the PBS American Experience series looks at the struggle over Texas from the perspective of tejanos, the territory’s Spanish-speaking Mexicans. Documentaries about the Alamo typically focus almost exclusively on Texas’s American settlers and their fight against Santa Anna. This film is almost entirely about how tejanos experienced the conflict and what happened to them in the years after the war. A considerable portion of the film is devoted to the tejano leader Navarro, friend to Texas founder Stephen Austin and ardent supporter of Texan independence. Curiously, other famous Alamo tejanos like Juan Seguín go almost completely unmentioned. Most surprising, the actual battle for the Alamo receives just a few minutes of the film’s running time.
This documentary bears the high quality cinematography of most episodes of American Experience. Visually, the film relies on large amount of still photographs and footage of scenery. Only a few key scenes are depicted through recreations; these are all small in scale (close-ups on just a few actors) and are not dramatized through dialogue. Explanations are provided mostly through narrative voice-over, although this is punctuated frequently by on-screen expert commentators. With a total running time around 55 minutes, the film could be used in secondary and college history classrooms—though the slow pace might prove a problem for younger grades.
Though useful as a statement of the tejano point of view, the film would have been more effective overall if it had included more of the traditional Alamo story integrated with the expanded treatment of tejanos. Instead, the tejano experience ends up feeling separated from the Alamo narrative. Thus, the film risks overstating their place in the larger events—though important politically, tejanos numbered no more than 4,000 by the 1830s in contrast to the more than 30,000 American settlers. The best features of the film are its unique perspective and rich use of documentary evidence (diaries, letters, newspapers, legal records).
Scott Metzger Pennsylvania State University sam59@psu.edu
