One Tejana, Adina de Zavala, found herself at this intersection when she decided to become involved with the preservation of the Alamo. Although the state was steeped in its legend by the late nineteenth century, the Alamo had suffered the fate of other missions, falling into disrepair, because for many years the U.S. government expected local preservationists to raise their own funding for cultural and historical sites.143 Such was the case for the Alamo. Today, the Alamo is one of the most visited sites in Texas, but for a long while it was used to store grain as part of a U.S. quartermaster depot, and for several other purposes, until the state bought the lease in 1883 and the entire property in 1904 at the urging of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas.144 That organization was then given custody of the site, and its restoration was completed through the efforts of two women: Zavala—whose grandfather, Lorenzo, was the first vice president of Texas and helped craft its constitution—and the wealthy Texan Anglo Clara Driscoll, who had the means to help fund its purchase.145 The women had differing views on how the site should be restored, a disagreement so intense that it was later referred to as “the second battle of the Alamo.”146
For Zavala, the Alamo could honor the men who fought there in 1836 and at the same time be returned as much as possible to what it had been like as a Spanish mission, including the restoration of the convent that had been next to the church. For Driscoll, the ruin of the convent should be torn down as it only distracted from the chapel, which, in her mind, ought be the main focus because that was where the heroes of the Alamo died.147 This led to years of heated disagreement; Zavala at one point barricaded herself inside the Alamo site in 1908. A court order in 1910 established the legitimacy of Driscoll to manage the Alamo, though this did not affect Zavala’s willingness to continue her battle. Their division represented the quite divergent views of Texans. Driscoll’s vision was of an Alamo that represented victory by Anglo-Americans and pride in their accomplishment. Zavala, on the other hand, drew from ideas that reached back to the Spanish period, as evidenced by her interest in the convent, and into a longer, more layered, and more entangled history. Remembering the Alamo, it turned out, would be much more difficult than it sounded.
Driscoll’s vision ultimately won out and the site of heroic commemoration was renovated and expanded by 1936, in time for the Texas centennial, celebrating the state’s independence from Mexico. That would be the year, according to the retailer Stanley Marcus, of Neiman-Marcus, that “the rest of America discovered Texas.”148 Indeed the famed department store was involved in the celebrations, and many Texas businesses hoped it would draw the nation’s attention to the state. In Texas, unlike California, however, the rosy glow of the past was cast not on the state’s Spanish roots but on its Anglo ones.
In California, the Spanish craze continued to spread, aided by the creation of an entire architectural style, known as Spanish Revival, which emerged around the 1920s.149 Newly built towns, such as San Clemente, which billed itself as the “Spanish Village by the Sea,” looked postcard perfect, with their white houses with red-tiled roofs. That such a trend emerged in the interwar period was, to some observers, a form of cultural respite from the challenges of modern life, not least war, technological changes, and shifting social demographics, including the rise of immigration and the growth of urban living.150 Evoking a mythical “Spanish past” may have been a reassuring distraction from contemporary concerns, but not everyone was buying it. The prominent Californian journalist Carey McWilliams wrote in a 1946 essay that what was really driving what he called the “fantasy heritage” was the arrival of so many outsiders from elsewhere in the United States who needed a “mythology” in order to give themselves “a sense of continuity in a region long characterized by rapid social dislocations.”151
Californio families were cast as living museum pieces in this fading past, though they were really split between a heritage that on one hand romanticized the story of their “Spanish” predecessors and on the other forced them to confront a world that increasingly called them Mexicans.152 However, they were able to carve out enough social space to claim this Spanish past and the implied whiteness for themselves, while the more recent immigrants were branded “lower-class” stock and “Mexican.”153 Californios continued into the twentieth century to be active in this recasting of their past, with many helping to create and promote local pageants and parades that highlighted the “Spanish” nature of the state. These fiestas served to invent traditions; perhaps the best-known surviving festival is Santa Barbara’s Old Spanish Days, which began in 1924. The initial fiesta involved parades, rodeos, musical events, and “traditional” Spanish dancing. Participants wore costumes that depicted them as Spaniards, Chumash Indians, or Mexicans. Posters from the earliest days of the festival and even from more recent times are illustrated with women wearing the flamenco dresses of southern Spain, while men were sometimes in embroidered Mexican charro suits, playing guitars or on horseback. Often the Santa Barbara mission church was used as a peaceful background. Although newly created, the event was meant to evoke a sense of tradition.
The enthusiasm for all things Spanish could be found throughout the state. In San Diego, it was embodied in the restoration of the Casa de Estudillo in the Old Town part of the city, which tried to cash in on the Ramona myth, as this building was supposed to be the inspiration for the house where the popular novel’s heroine marries. The Old Town was restored and its hilltop presidio was rebuilt in 1929.
Even earlier, in 1915, San Diego wanted to hold an exposition in honor of the opening of the Panama Canal, but San Francisco was hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in the same year. Undeterred, San Diego set to work on its ambitious celebration, renaming its City Park after Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first European to cross the Isthmus of Panama. The project was plagued with internal squabbles and a change of architects. New Yorker Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue was appointed, and he wanted to put Spanish Baroque in place of the Native American, Mission, and Pueblo styles that the local committee was more eager to use. Goodhue was already known for his “Spanish churrigueresque” work, with its elaborate ornamentation, which won out in the end.154 The park today is a nearly overwhelming mix of styles, showing influences all the way from Moorish to Mexican Baroque, with wide walkways, fountains, and gardens evoking the sense of a world lost to time. The San Francisco exhibition, on the other hand, used temporary structures.155
The growing interest in the Spanish past was not limited to the West. In the 1920s, a movement arose to bring a network of roads together into the Old Spanish Trail, mostly what became U.S. Highways 90 and 80 running from Jacksonville, Florida, to San Diego. At the time, no major road connected the southern parts of East and West. Today, that road intersects with what is considered to be the “real” old Spanish trail in Arizona and New Mexico—mule tracks used for herding cattle, smuggling, or gold prospecting.
The idea for the Old Spanish Trail highway was first expressed in 1915, and the project’s managing director, Harral Ayres, claimed it was born from the enthusiasm of some four hundred people. He wrote, “Somehow it seemed as though the spirit of the padres and the conquistadores flamed again in the soul of these Anglo-Saxon pioneers. … We who have watched these modern men from Florida to California rise to the demands of this southern highway construction are proud that the soul of the crusaders is not dead.”156 By October 7, 1929, these motoring enthusiasts gathered for a banquet in San Antonio to celebrate the trail’s completion—groups from across the country had raised money to pay for some roads and bridges. Ayres was also shrewd enough to request federal funds from the War Department to improve the road between Pensacola and New Orleans by framing the lack of a connected highway along the borderlands as a national defense issue.157 Today a large concrete sphere, which has a plaque on the front commemorating its dedication in 1928, is the mile zero marker for the Old Spanish Trail, sitting under the shade of a large tree on the grounds of the visitor center in St. Augustine, w
hile its corresponding end point waits more than two thousand miles away in San Diego.
The road had a powerful pull, not just for motorists but also for the cities along the route, such as Albuquerque. New Mexico, like other parts of the West, had seen the arrival of tourists, as well as people looking for a healthier climate, appearing by the trainload. This had already bolstered tourism and efforts to sell Spanish, Mexican, and Native American handicrafts.158 The rise of the automobile would bring even more of the adventurous, the curious, and the health-minded. While the Old Spanish Trail passed south of Albuquerque, Route 66, which linked Chicago to California, went right through it. By the 1930s, outsiders began to buy up the single-story adobe and wooden homes in the village and convert them to shops, selling arts and crafts.159
Like the other cities founded by the Spanish, Alburquerque had a plaza. Known as La Plaza Vieja, it sits in front of an eighteenth-century church, San Felipe de Neri. In the 1880s, the town had been divided into Old and New parts, with the latter a couple of miles away, home to most of the Anglo and European settlers who, along the way, managed to drop the first “r” out of the town’s spelling, rendering it Albuquerque.160
When the tourists started to arrive, Anglos in the city began to demand that Albuquerque be “improved,” worried that a placid and “dirty” Old Town, mostly populated by Hispanic Nuevomexicanos, would not appeal to tourists. To its residents, it was a close-knit and lively home, but the pastures around La Plaza Vieja were soon swallowed up as land was used for housing. The Old Town was subsumed into the larger city, its authentic past replaced by a commercial present trading on the old days.161 The Hispanic legacy in New Mexico now had to be packaged up and made desirable to tourists.
The southeastern United States also joined in the rediscovery of its Spanish roots. Hernando de Soto received a hero’s commemoration during the quadricentennial celebrations of his landing and exploration of North America in 1935. Congress set up a De Soto Expedition Commission to plan the events and mark out his actual route, though in the end it decided to participate only in 1939’s Pan American Exposition in Tampa.162 On May 30, 1939, in the sleepy Florida town of Bradenton, the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America erected a slab of carved rock, not unlike a rough-hewn gravestone, as the De Soto Trail Monument, which was donated to the National Park Service in 1948. Since there is no evidence that De Soto actually landed here, the marker is vague, saying it “commemorates the 400th anniversary of his arrival on the shores of Florida.”
De Soto loomed large in those years. The first De Soto sedan rolled off Chrysler’s assembly lines in 1929, and models—often with a conquistador as a hood ornament or incorporated into the logo—remained in production until 1960. Motorists, it implied, were modern conquistadores who could discover their own new lands. At the same time, the mighty conquerors had been reduced to consumable kitsch.
During the WPA period in the 1930s artwork on public buildings—influenced by the Mexican mural movement that started a decade earlier—included depictions of de Soto or was often based on the broader theme of “discovery.”163 Admiration of the conquistadores in this period reflected not only their use as symbols of conquest but also the comfortable dominance of the Anglo world over the Hispanic. The Spaniards’ association with Catholicism and even the atrocities they committed melted away, leaving instead men who seemed to be little more than figures from an adventure story.
Against this larger cultural backdrop, the historian Herbert Eugene Bolton wrote a number of pioneering works about the borderlands, volumes that covered the earliest period of Spanish exploration in the Southwest as well as Florida. Bolton himself was a man of the frontier, born in 1870 and raised for the most part in rural Wisconsin. He studied for part of his PhD under Frederick Jackson Turner, whose writings no doubt influenced him on some level.164 Bolton’s work took him to Austin, Texas, which inspired him to focus on the Southwest. He then joined the University of California at Berkeley in 1911 and never left, cultivating a steady stream of graduate students who focused on borderlands history, at a time when the Spanish language was also starting to be taught in public schools in the United States. (The number of public school students learning Spanish rose from 5,000 in 1910 to 263,000 by 1922.)165
One of Bolton’s most enduring contributions to the field was his transcription and translation of borderlands documents from archives in Spain and Mexico. However, his best-known work, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest, gave him the greatest set of problems, and his struggle with the book—first published in 1921—illustrates the challenges in bringing the Hispanic history of the United States to a broader audience, even at a time when there was interest. Spanish Borderlands was meant to be part of the Chronicles of America series published by Yale University Press, but when Bolton submitted his manuscript, his editor rejected it and three further drafts. At issue was Bolton’s interpretation; his editor wanted him to take a more Anglocentric stance and explain how Protestantism and the spread of Anglo culture triumphed over and drove out Catholic Spanish culture, but Bolton refused.166 His editor insisted on hiring a ghostwriter to help push the dominant Anglo narrative into the work. In the end, Bolton prevailed, and he even made a point of illustrating how Spanish culture had persisted, especially in the Southwest:
Even in the old borderlands north of the Rio Grande, the imprint of Spain’s sway is still deep and clear. Scores of rivers and mountains and hundreds of towns and cities in the United States still bear the names of saints dear to the Spanish pioneers. Southwestern Indians yet speak Spanish in preference to English. Scores of the towns have Spanish quarters, where the life of the old days still goes on and where the soft Castilian tongue is still spoken.167
Bolton’s interest in the borderlands later broadened into an even larger vision, which he spoke about in his 1932 address to the American Historical Association. He called this the “Epic of Greater America,” and it conceived of the development of the Western Hemisphere in a more holistic way, rather than focusing solely on the story of the United States. Bolton believed that the history of the United States could be better understood in a transnational context and that “the study of thirteen English colonies and the United States in isolation has obscured many of the larger factors in their development, and helped to raise up a nation of chauvinists.”168
Many historians at the time found his comments controversial, though the following year U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt would take a similarly hemispheric approach in his attempt to foster, in theory, better relations with Latin America through his Good Neighbor Policy. This was an attempt to focus more on trade and less on military interventions in Latin America, a point he spelled out in his inaugural address of March 4, 1933, saying he wanted to dedicate the United States to “the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.”169
THE FIRST TWO decades of the twentieth century were a time of large and intimately connected realignments for both Mexico and the United States, in the context of a world profoundly shaken up by the conflict in Europe. Amid all the memorable events, the everyday lives of millions of people were swept up in the momentum produced by the wars, revolutions, and economic meltdowns. Anita Brenner was caught in such waves, moving back and forth across the border, and far and wide away from it.
She was born in 1905 in Aguascalientes, in central Mexico, to an Eastern European Jewish family. Her father, Isidore, had left Riga, in Latvia, and tried his luck in Chicago in the 1880s, before moving on to Mexico, ending up in Aguascalientes, which had railroad and mining work. The residents of the town were already an international mix, with people from the United States, France, and Germany lured by job prospects. Isidore started as a waiter at a local restaurant and over time worked his way up into landholding prosperity. Like millions of other people in Mexico, he saw this tranquillity ruptured by the coming of the Mexican Revolution.
The revolution was a defining period in Anita Brenner’s life, for logistical, emotional, and artistic reasons. Her family left Aguascalientes a number of times during the conflict—first fleeing in 1912; returning and leaving again in 1914; and then departing for the last time in 1916, settling in San Antonio, Texas.170 Such was the hostility against the United States that on one of their crossings the family were forced to wave a German flag in an attempt to identify themselves as anything but American.171
After the fighting ended, Anita continued to return to Mexico, alternating those trips with studying in Texas and, later, attending Columbia University in New York. In Mexico, she found herself surrounded by people who would become key members in the flourishing artistic circles that arose during and after the revolution. Photos of Brenner at this time show a young woman with short, cropped hair and an intense gaze—a photographer’s muse and a friend of people like the muralists Diego Rivera and his wife, the artist Frida Kahlo. She also enjoyed the company of other foreign artists lured to Mexico, such as the Italian-American photographer Tina Modotti. Many of the Mexican artists she socialized with were connected to left-wing movements and causes, ranging from Communist Party members to those offering refuge to Stalin’s enemy Leon Trotsky, who was later murdered in Mexico. Her life and work began to overlap, and in 1929 she published Idols Behind Altars, which introduced an English-speaking world to Mexican art. The following year she was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue her writing.
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