History Lesson 
The Second Battle of Goliad
The first one, during the Texas Revolution, ended in a massacre of Texas troops. Or should it properly be called an execution? How an unlikely war of words has opened cultural and racial rifts in a historic Texas town.
Susan says: The Mexican Army throughout its’ history has long been known to have been without Honor on many occasions..this was one of them, albeit a tyrant of a General who starved his own men..this incident is "Honorably" known as murder. I commend the study and honoring the long and great history of Goliad, Texas, but please do not dwell on one incident, and do not pretend or attempt to rewrite the very real words of our history...has nothing to do with race, but in fact deals with the feelings of both armies at the time, would you deny this to those who endured? The fact is we are all individually imbued with our own rich history no matter if it is American, Irish, Mexican, Texan, or Italian... that cannot be changed..please try not to put words in the mouths of people who long ago fought so we have the opportunity to look back on Texas History and please to remember also, there were a great number of Mexican Texans who fought and died in the Massacre. (July 3rd, 2011 at 7:44pm)
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Although the Goliad controversy is deeply personal to those involved, its greatest significance lies in its contribution to the ongoing debate over the meaning of Texas history and the impact of that history today. Disputes such as this one become messy because they go beyond the question of who writes history to what history is in the first place. Does it represent simply our best rendering of what occurred at a particular moment in the past, based on as much evidence as the historian can muster, or is it an attempt to influence how we should think and act concerning politics and culture in the present? This latter role of history guided the traditional presentation of Texas history as taught in the schools and in popular culture. Now, arguments such as the one over the proper description of what happened at Goliad are challenging the old myth. “Historical questions like this have become very current—over a flag, a monument, a point of view—because we are at the point of debating our history,” says Ron Tyler, a University of Texas historian and the director of the Texas State Historical Association. Tyler notes that the Handbook of Texas, which is produced by the association and written by historians and laymen, uses the word “massacre” to describe the events at Goliad. He suggests that if the killings had been legal—that is, an execution—the Mexican command would not have become enmeshed in disagreement about complying. As a cultural anthropologist and the director of the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Texas, Richard Flores has studied how, by presenting the past as a morality tale of sorts, history performs symbolic work on the public mind. He believes that public history has become a black-and-white story about good and evil, ignoring those facts that made the past more complicated. In the case of the Texas Revolution, Flores suggests that people are so invested in the rivalry between Mexican and Texian soldiers that they forget that the original impetus for the Texan insurrection was not to gain independence but to restore Mexico’s 1824 constitution, which Santa Anna had abused. “The narrative of the past is very complex,” he says, “and to reduce it to a story of good and evil, or Texans and Mexicans—which was not the case—really turns it into a myth.”
Historian Andres Tijerina, a fellow of the Texas State Historical Association, says that Texas history is a history of erasing facts. “What they”—everyone from schoolteachers to the reenactors—“have done, and what they continue to do, is to create a comic book history of Texas,” he says. “And everyone knows it’s a comic book. It’s nothing but Hollywood.” Tijerina, whose book Tejanos and Texas Under the Mexican Flag, 1821-1836 took PresidioLa Bahía’s top award in 1994, believes that no matter what tweaking is made to the Goliad reenactment, it will continue to offer an incomplete and distorted version of history as long as it is looked at in isolation. “That message has nothing to do with history,” Tijerina says. “It is done to reinforce a racially divided modern Texas society, to reinforce this black-and-white image of Anglos and Mexicans where the Anglo is a hero and the Mexican is a debased tyrant. Why don’t you depict the Mexican Americans who were cheated out of their land and killed in Goliad and Victoria for the next twenty, thirty years by law enforcement officials?”
Tyler, the head of the state historical association, does not dispute that the public hews to a simple view of Texas history, despite the widespread acknowledgement in academic circles of its complexity. But he insists that historians should not have to compensate for that. “We’re trying our best to combat that notion,” he says. “I just don’t accept the idea that simply because the masses are not well informed, we should misconstrue history in order to change our viewpoint on a particular historical event like the Goliad Massacre.”
Whether lexical or not, change of some sort seems inevitable. In 1997 and 1998 the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Texas Historical Commission brought together nearly a hundred scholars, project advisors, planners, and locals, a group that included the Zermeños, Warzecha, Hardin, and Tijerina, to come up with a long-term plan for promoting Goliad’s history. A report issued by TPW in March 1999 concluded: “Outside scholars, project consultants, and the planning team all agreed that the history of the area had been overshadowed by the Fannin ‘massacre’ in 1836, leading to widespread public ignorance about the other important historical contributions of the region.” Throughout the report the word “massacre” appears in quotation marks. Bill Dolman, a director of professional services for TPW who led the planning effort, offers, “We’ve used the term ‘massacre,’ which was pretty much the accepted term at the time, but that’s not to say that we would use that same term when we redo the exhibits.” Although the agency does not manage the presidio, it does oversee the mission down the road, the battlefield, Ignacio Zaragoza’s reconstructed birthplace, and the Zaragoza monument. Dolman suggests that one option is to explain that “Goliad Massacre” was the name given by Texian soldiers to the execution of Fannin’s men. “In other words,” he reasons, “you put a historical interpretation to the term—and you explain how ‘massacre’ is an outgrowth of an execution order.”
For their part, the members of the Zaragoza Society are adamant that they will wage this battle peacefully but willfully, by taking the issue not only to the diocese but also to groups such as the Texas Historical Commission. Vargas says that Goliad is poised “to be progressive” and “help bring about a better understanding” of Texas history. “We firmly believe that sometimes you have to make a little noise to get things changed,” he says. Bishop David Fellhauer of Victoria, a Missouri native, is noncommittal at this point. But he says that he plans to convene a group of locals and historians soon to engage in “a little historical dialogue” before making a decision. And Warzecha says that as much as he takes the fort’s business personally, he will await an order and follow it.
Before the massacre debate brought tension into town, Goliad was a strikingly placid community of locals and retirees. It was, and to a great extent still is, a town where people were decent with each other, where elected officials resolved conflicts with heart-to-hearts, and where its most ardent public relations agents were the town’s residents themselves. That is why many of them are now watchful of the limited but painful social rift that has opened—and of its racial undertones. Goliad is a place where “We don’t see color” is a popular mantra, where a Mexican American mother places an order for invitations to her daughter’s quinceañera and most of the girls on the list of invited guests are white. “I came from Seguin,” says Martha Mullenix, a third-generation Texan who publishes the town’s weekly newspaper, “where it’s mainly a German and Hispanic population, and there definitely was a line there.” In Goliad—where slightly more than half of the population is Anglo and the rest is mostly Mexican American, with a small number of African Americans—different races, Mullenix says, “just blend in.” Today roughly half of all elected officials in the town are Mexican American. Yet there are silent remains of a racially marked past. An economic divide still exists: The ranches sprinkled throughout Goliad County are owned by Anglos and worked mostly by people of Mexican descent, and although the public schools today are good enough to attract even outsiders to town, Goliad’s older Mexican American and African American residents can remember attending segregated campuses.But Estella Zermeño is the last to complain. Having left Goliad for most of her adult life to work as a postal service clerk in Houston, she believes that whatever happens, it is one’s responsibility to make things better. On a cool Friday in February, she is beaming when she pulls out a letter from the Texas Historical Commission approving her and her cousin’s request for a historical marker honoring an ancestor who once was the alcalde of Goliad. “Just think—we’ve been here since 1749 and there has never been a Tejano marker here,” she says. “Why? Because we didn’t work for it. So Abel and I got on it.”
Yet, there is something about Estella Zermeño’s research that stings Newton Warzecha. In the fall of 1999, as part of a day-long conference organized by Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Texas Historical Commission to recognize the history of Tejanos in Goliad, Estella presented a family history in which she detailed her family’s loss of 9,500 acres in Refugio County after her grandmother’s uncle was murdered in 1877—a talk that Warzecha perceived to be “very, very, very anti-Anglo.” Warzecha feels that an entire history of bad race relations is being dumped on him and the presidio for commemorating one historical event. Asked what he thinks about some Mexican Americans’ feelings regarding that history, he replies bluntly, “You wouldn’t want to hear what I’ve got to say.” There is a long, empty silence, during which he furiously scribbles aimless shapes on a yellow legal pad. Then he bursts: “By golly, get over it! It’s history! I’m one hundred percent Polish. Wouldn’t it be pretty ridiculous of me to carry on grudges and dislikes against Germany because of what they did to Polish people? How is it any different than this?”
“He can’t feel what we feel,” Estella Zermeño retorts. “I have an Anglo friend who told me, ‘I don’t see color.’ I told her, ‘I don’t see color. I feel color.’” Given the choice, she and her husband say, they would not want to feel race—nor want to be reduced to the color of their skin. And they believe that the mutual allegations of racism have obscured the more fundamental issue of the impact of public history. “It’s not a race issue,” Estella adds, “it’s a moral issue. Can we call it that?”
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