Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory: A Novel

Emma Pérez

Published by University of Texas Press 2009

Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory

A Novel

Emma Pérez

In the series Chicana Matters

https://doi.org/10.7560/719200

Overview
Contents

About this book

Runner-up, Best Historical Fiction in English, Latino Book Awards Competition, 2010

This literary adventure takes place in nineteenth-century Texas and follows the story of a Tejana lesbian cowgirl after the fall of the Alamo. Micaela Campos, the central character, witnesses the violence against Mexicans, African Americans, and indigenous peoples after the infamous battles of the Alamo and of San Jacinto, both in 1836. Resisting an easy opposition between good versus evil and brown versus white characters, the novel also features Micaela's Mexican-Anglo cousin who assists and hinders her progress. Micaela's travels give us a new portrayal of the American West, populated by people of mixed races who are vexed by the collision of cultures and politics. Ultimately, Micaela's journey and her romance with a black/American Indian woman teach her that there are no easy solutions to the injustices that birthed the Texas Republic.

This novel is an intervention in queer history and fiction with its love story between two women of color in mid-nineteenth-century Texas. Pérez also shows how a colonial past still haunts our nation's imagination. The battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto offered freedom and liberty to Texans, but what is often erased from the story is that common people who were Mexican, Indian, and Black did not necessarily benefit from the influx of so many Anglo immigrants to Texas. The social themes and identity issues that Pérez explores—political climate, debates over immigration, and historical revision of the American West—are current today.

Author / Editor information

Emma Pérez is Associate Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History and the novel Gulf Dreams.

Reviews

Filled with lush beauty, harshness, and horrifying brutality, this is one of those books in which you just KNOW what's going to happen at the end—but you're wrong.

— The Gay & Lesbian Review

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
CHAPTER 1 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
CHAPTER 2 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
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EPILOGUE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205

Language: English
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 224

eBook

Published: January 1, 2010
ISBN: 9780292799325