Whose Story?

Sylvia Herrera When the Bob Bullock Texas State History museum opened in March 2001, it advertised itself as “The Story of Texas.” It still calls itself the story of Texas in letters chiseled into the top of the building, on its Web site, on signs directing visitors to the museum, and even on the refrigerator magnets you can buy in the gift shop. When I first saw the slogan, I wondered how there could be “the” story of Texas, since Texas has been culturally diverse throughout its history as a part of Mexico that became a separate nation and later a state. Shortly Texas will have no one group as a majority. I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, where the great majority of the population, like me, is Mexican American. How was this new museum going to present my story? I had to go and find out

. When I first walked into the lobby, I noticed

the large mosaic on the floor but I couldn’t figure out what it depicted. I just saw a campfire and a bunch of wiggly figures. Someone next to me told their kids that they’d be able to see the entire mosaic from the third floor. I decided to wait and do the same.

The first exhibit I saw was the “It Ain’t Braggin’ if it’s True” (one of my friends told me I had to see the shrine to Lance Armstrong and the rhinestone car). The name of the exhibit didn’t make much sense to me though; aren’t all museum exhibits, especially ones about history, supposed to be true? The big banner in the middle of the room didn’t help much either. It simply said “Vision” and had a quote about

how only those with great vision can see opportunity where others see empty space. Maybe those who have this type of vision get the braggin’ rights?

Texas was never a big empty space. The Spaniards and later the French who came here discovered cultures that were centuries old. But history, and the museum itself, begins with European colonization. The history of Texas, one of the signs says, was shaped by the way the different groups of people who came to Texas responded to the land and to each other. So land, and interaction between different groups of people, would be used a lot in the telling of this story of Texas, I assumed. In this first room, though, I noticed something else that would continue throughout the museum. All of the mannequins, no matter what ethnicity they represent, are white—not Caucasian, but a strange plaster white. The only way you know what group they represent is by their costumes.

As I wandered through the “Mission” area of the museum, I noticed that there was little discussion of the violence I had heard about happening in and around the missions. Everything seemed watered down. Missionaries and soldiers “relied” on the native peoples for supplies. The “Indians” were “indifferent” to attempts to convert them.

The next area was called “Gone to Texas,”

featuring Stephen F. Austin’s attempts to get settlers to move to Texas in order to make it more stable. Texas, it seems, was still an empty space. But what had

happened to all of the native peoples? There was a little stump in the middle of the room with a sign that asked the same question. The answers were in a notebook on the back, one page for each group of native peoples, all of which were exterminated or moved out of Texas. I wondered, though, how many visitors actually stopped to page through the book. We were in a section where dioramas lit up and spoke when you pushed buttons.

Where were the Mexicans? Texas was owned by Mexico at this time, but the only people represented here were Europeans, a few African Americans held in slavery, and a few renegade Comanches. Maybe there would be answers to this question upstairs.

A big statue of Sam Houston greeted me as I reached the second floor. Next to him was a sign that said, “Building the Texas Identity 1821-1936.” I’d just learned that there were lots of different people in Texas before 1821, and that it was owned by Mexico up to this time, so I was surprised to find that Texas still had no identity. I guess what they meant was an identity separate from Mexico. When I saw the life-size diorama of the first shots fired in the Texas Revolution, I remembered the “It Ain’t Braggin’” exhibit I saw downstairs. This diorama showed the shouting Texans with a cannon that they had borrowed and now refused to give back to Mexico. They were shouting and brandishing a flag that said “come and get it.” Seizing opportunity, whether it be land, a rhinestone cadillac, or a borrowed cannon, is heroic and the story of Texas.

Throughout the area dealing with the Texas Revolution, the only personal accounts of those who fought and fled during the revolution were by Anglos. According to a museum display, the population of Texas in 1836 included about 35,000 Anglos, 3,500 Tejanos, 14,200 Indians, and 5,000 African-Americans held in slavery. Granted, Anglos were the majority, but didn’t any of these groups leave behind a record of their experiences? Maybe not. That would explain why they all seem to disappear for the next 50 or so years that the museum represents.

At the third floor landing, I read this quote, given without a source: “If you work hard, are smart and tough, and get a little bit lucky, Texas can be a bountiful place.” The display after this sign tells the story of the ranchos and how the Spanish established the cattle business and the image of the cowboy in Texas. But then there’s a sudden shift to farming, and the only Mexican-Americans represented anywhere else on the floor (including the sections on the oil business, the military, and the space program) are migrant workers. The gap is never explained unless we take that quote at face value.

I was done, but I still wanted to take in the full view of the mosaic on the lobby floor. I finally realized that it shows a campfire and seated around it, in a bird’s-eye view, are the people supposedly represented in the museum (cowboys, Indians, Mexicans, and so on). The legend around the mosaic says: “Born around the campfires of our past, the history of Texas.” It presents a nice picture—all these people sitting peacefully around the campfire, as if they had all come together to tell the story they all have in common. I also looked up to the banners hanging from the ceiling. Each one has a photo of a person of a different ethnicity and the words “It’s my story.”

It’s not my story. The story I know from my family and the land where I grew up is too complicated to fit onto three floors. There is a lot of conflict, a lot of joy, and many, many brown faces. In the year 2000, the population of Texans who claimed Hispanic heritage was 32%, a fact you would never guess from the displays in the Bullock Museum. We are not all migrant workers, dictatorial generals, converted Indians, or romantic figures from stage and screen. We are war heroes, scientists, entrepreneurs, and politicians. We are Texas, and it’s time to tell our story too.