Book review: ‘Forgetting the Alamo’

Forgetting the Alamo
By Emma Pérez
University of Texas Press
218 pp., 1 map

There are few stories as foundational to American identity as the epic revenge tale. From the genocidal Indian haters of early American frontier novels, to the sidewalk vigilantes regurgitated by Hollywood every month or so, nothing seems to bring in the public like righteous vengeance.

The stories are all reasonably similar. A quiet everyman — and this genre has traditionally been the bailiwick of men — is going about living a quiet life, when he returns home one day to find that some portion of his family has been butchered and the women viciously raped by Indians, urban malcontents or some other assortment of bad guys. Much frothing at the mouth ensues, followed by a monomaniacal pursuit of vengeance, ending in the righteous extermination of said bad guys, usually attended by some buckets of blood.

It’s a narrative that recurs with such frequency in American letters that one is, at times, a little afraid for the sanity of American culture, particularly given that the bad guys are almost exclusively dark-skinned, while the good guys are almost always, well, not. In fact, the tale originates with the likes of Robert Montgomery Bird and Judge James Hall as a way of framing an argument for the wholesale extermination of American Indians and has been used as similar justification throughout America’s long history of racial warfare.

Emma Pérez’s award-winning historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory falls within the tradition of this kind of revenge story, but only in the way that, say, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice falls within the tradition of detective fiction. It’s a delightfully playful deconstruction of the narratives used by Anglo-Americans to justify colonization, a deadly serious rumination on the consequences of that colonization, and, not least by anyone’s standards, an explosive adventure tale.

It takes place in the early half of the 19th century and follows the exploits and revenge attempts of a Tejana lesbian cowgirl who is dispossessed of her family’s ranch by a murderous, rapacious gang of marauders — otherwise known as Texas’ founding fathers — during the Anglo-American colonization of Texas.

The narrator, Micaela Campos, is as vivid as a character gets. She’s a drunken, foul-mouthed drifter tormented by the massacres she’s been witness to, and Perez’s prose leads us through her stark and violent world with the kind of deadpan humor and high style that her narrator deserves. Take, for instance, this description of the consequences visited upon an unfortunate gambler who makes the mistake of trying to force himself on Micaela’s lover, Clara:

At first I was polite. I stood and inched to the center table and locked his neck with my arm and choked the unfortunate slug until he spit. Then I knocked his head over and over against the table and blood poured out of his nose and he spit saliva mixed with blood onto the other boys, who got up and scattered. I didn’t care if they defended him or not. I was lunatic enough for the lot of them and I think they saw that I was crazy and that my lunacy came out of nowhere and none of them cared to test its sincerity. I shoved him on the floor and kick from his head to his groin and I kicked over and over and couldn’t stop and I have to say I was not inclined to stop.

Forgetting the Alamo deliberately evokes the 19th century world of Cormac McCarthy’s scalp-hunting epic, Blood Meridian, even stopping by a scalp-bounty massacre, but is no kind of McCarthy derivative. Blood Meridian is a modern masterpiece but not one that’s particularly interested in the nuances of individual character; Forgetting the Alamo, on the other hand, is as devoted to its protagonist as it is to its flawed minor characters, like Jed Jedediah, Micaela’s rakish, cowardly, and ultimately worthy cousin. If anything, Forgetting the Alamo is something of a cousin to Blood Meridian, with both sharing an ancestor in William Faulkner, and before him, Herman Melville. It’s a book that’s worthy of that lineage: a proud, raucous and wonderful novel, tearing like cannon shot through the far less proud history of America’s colonization of Texas.

Emma Pérez is a Colorado author. She teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She published her first novel, Gulf Dreams, in 1996.