May 2001
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.
There is a word that hangs over Estella Zermeño’s shoulder like a sack of bricks, and to explain to you why, she must sit down on a green leather couch in her home and take them out one by one. “‘Massacre,’” she says with conviction, “is offensive.” In a letter to the editor of their hometown paper, her husband, William, referred to it as “the M word.” Their concern regards one of the most infamous events in Texas history. In March 1836, 342 men fighting for Texas independence under Colonel James Fannin surrendered to a Mexican army led by General José de Urrea, only to be shot a week later under the orders of President Antonio López de Santa Anna while being held as prisoners. Texans came to remember the event as “the Goliad Massacre” and inscribed the term for generations on plaques, in history books, and across museum walls. Yet, the Zermeños believe that the proper label should have been “execution”—and to understand why this small distinction looms so large in their minds, one first has to know their family history, hear them talk about civic responsibility, debate the merits of inclusion. And suddenly, the bricks are piled up really high on the coffee table.
The history of the war that secured independence from Mexico is sacred to many Texans, and for the Zermeños to suggest that it needs a little editing would make some wonder what side Tejanos—Texans of Mexican descent—are on. But the question is hardly that simple. Estella’s family has been in Goliad for nine generations. Her ancestors fought on both sides of the war, and she dedicates her life to tracing those roots. Every time she discovers a forgotten Tejano soldier or elected official, she demands a marker, a special tombstone, a little ceremony to show some respect. She and a committee of fellow genealogists even plan to petition the Legislature to place a monument of a Tejano ranching family on the Capitol grounds. The issue for the Zermeños is not who is more Texan—but who wrote Texas history and how deeply the myths they created run even today. “It should be a shrine to the people who lived here from the beginning, not just to that event,” Estella Zermeño says of the old fort in Goliad where Fannin and his men met their doom.
Yet one also must sit down on a rustic chair inside the cold stone walls of that fort and hear out Newton M. Warzecha. A tall, businesslike man, he single-handedly holds up Presidio La Bahía, doing everything from pleading for funds to mowing the lawn on a cloudy Friday morning. And he is the one who keeps printing those letters and ads touting the annual commemoration of “the Goliad Massacre.” “How am I to change or stop the use of the word ‘massacre’ if there is no new evidence to indicate that there was something other than a massacre here?” he asks, exasperated. A native of nearby Cuero, Warzecha landed in Goliad in the midst of a career as a financial consultant. He was working in Victoria and had offered to volunteer at the presidio but was asked instead to take the helm until a new director was found. Each month ran into the next. Ten years later nobody else has been hired, since Warzecha has managed the fort so well that it has become financially self-sufficient and now draws some 33,000 students and tourists a year. “I take these things personally because of what I have put into this place,” he says, looking misty-eyed. “It grieves me very much.”
By all accounts, Estella Zermeño and Newton Warzecha had been friends, the kind of friends who went out of their way for each other. Every year, when the Zermeños and a civic group they belong to set up camp near the presidio to commemorate a Mexican holiday, Warzecha would offer a piñata for the festivities and bring out any equipment the group needed—a folding table, a public address system. When he celebrated his birthday last year, Estella Zermeño lugged her own stereo and a few people to his home just across from the county courthouse downtown, playing Lydia Mendoza tunes below his balcony and translating “Las Mañanitas.” But the debate over whether the word “massacre” aptly describes what occurred one Palm Sunday at Presidio La Bahía has punctured that friendship like a rusty nail, and now both sides are hurting. That is because their debate is not about friendship but about weightier things, like historical interpretation, the plight of the vanquished, and—though everybody wishes it wasn’t—the fact that their skin is of different hues. Straddling the San Antonio river 26 miles west of Victoria, Goliad occupies an unassuming little spot at the intersection of two lonely highways. At first glance, it appears like nothing more than a few small buildings slapped against a mix of live oak, mesquite, huisache, and brush. Yet for the visitor with a plan and an ounce of historical appreciation, it is a treasure. In the town’s square the county’s three-story courthouse is framed by a block of charming buildings dating back to the turn of the twentieth century, all proudly displaying in bold numbers their year of origin. Just south of downtown, U.S. 183 leads to a cluster of ancient gray stone structures that impose themselves onto the expansive South Texas sky. The most commanding is Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga Mission, established here by Spain in 1749. Farther along, across the river, lie the remains of an eighteenth-century Spanish settlement. PresidioLa Bahía squats in the middle of what once was a modest agricultural community. It is an impressive sight, with its reconstructed bastion and three-foot-thick walls. One can spend the night in the fort’s single guest quarters and climb atop a lookout platform after dark, soaking up the grandness as the chapel’s bells sing their eerie baritone song and the wind rustles the presidio’s original iron locks.Goliad, a town of around two thousand people today, was founded asLa Bahía in the same year as the mission and quickly became one of the three most critical areas of Spanish settlement in what is now Texas (along with San Antonio and Nacogdoches). In 1829 its residents petitioned the governor of Coahuila y Texas to change the town’s name to Goliad, an anagram of the name of Padre Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the martyred priest who had incited the Mexican independence movement. A baby boy was born just outside the fort that same year and baptized in the presidio as Ignacio Zaragoza; he would repulse Napoleon III’s invasion of Mexico at the famous Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. Goliad also is the place where, after Texian forces seized the presidio late in 1835, a group of 91 men gathered to sign the Goliad Declaration ofGoliad Independence, the first step toward the Texas Revolution. It is not surprising, then, that a calendar put out today by the Goliad Chamber of Commerce lists everything from reenactments of the military events to a city-wide Cinco de Mayo bash.
The name of Goliad was etched in Texas’ collective memory, however, through a single event—the now-disputed Goliad Massacre. In February 1836 Fannin and his garrison occupied PresidioLa Bahía in the midst of the Texas Revolution. After the Texians’ devastating defeat at the Alamo, Sam Houston ordered Fannin and his troops to abandon the fort. Timing was not in their favor. As they retreated, some nine miles from Goliad, they encountered Urrea’s cavalry at Coleto Creek. The Texians were surrounded and significantly outnumbered. Fannin thought those who were still standing after fighting for several hours might be able to escape. But when he asked his men for a vote, they were determined not to abandon their injured and instead agreed to accept Urrea’s request to cease fire. Late into the second day of a bloody exchange, on March 20, they surrendered, believing that they would be treated as prisoners of war. “For years Texans insisted Fannin got honorable terms,” wrote T. R. Fehrenbach, one of Texas’ most prominent historians, in his classic work,Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. “The evidence is otherwise; Mexican army archives hold a document with Fannin’s signature, in which he surrendered at discretion, meaning, unconditionally, and put himself and his men at the Supreme Government’s mercy.”
