Beyond the Alamo - Ramos

Beyond the Alamo:  Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821-1861.  By Raúl A. Ramos.  Chapell Hill, NC:  University of North Carolina Press, Published in association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, 2008.  Illus, tables, figures, maps, notes, index, 298 pages, $35.00.  The sky blue spine pleasantly complements the dark chocolate boards.  http://uncpress.unc.edu/   Raúl A. Ramos is assistant professor of history at the University of Houston.  http://vi.uh.edu/faculty/profiles/ramos.html  not http://www.raulramos.com/  He'll be one of the speakers at the upcoming Battle of San Jacinto Symposium http://www.friendsofsanjacinto.com/site/    The volume works the idea of what happened to the identity of the elite Tejano class.  Two other books come to mind for their similar intellectual texture, Walter Webb's Great Plains and Juan Bruce-Nova's Retrospace, both of which interpret identity in relationship to space, topography, or physical territory, the latter more formally extending into ethic and artistic identity.  Ramos' Beyond the Alamo first prods into the nature of the elite class of San Antonio Tejanos' identity among themselves and related to the indigenous peoples before the Anglo entrada.  Then he narrates a more traditional history of those elite Bexareño  families during the 1820's – 1850's bearing the identity proposition in mind on the threshold of and after the startling growth of the Anglo-American population.  Maybe the main spectrum Ramos uses is his continuing inspection of "relationships" between the families' members and also with the Anglo elites.  Ramos goes further in exposing why the Bexareño elite were so adept in cultural brokerage with the Anglo elites; in several points he notes the strict class structures of the Anglo Southern society and the Mexican mestizaje society. Readers new to this perspective on San Antonio may benefit from a glance at the San Antonio Public Library's bibliography at http://www.sanantonio.gov/Library/texana/sabibliography.asp and Jesús F. de la Teja's   San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain's Northern Frontier