When the Alamo and four Spanish-colonial Missions achieved UNESCO World Heritage status in 2015, many touted the potential impact for the community. Increased tourism and development could be an economic boon to the areas immediately surrounding the missions on the city’s Southside, and many anticipate the historical restoration of Alamo Plaza. However, as the plans for the plaza have revealed, preservation does not always begin with agreement.
“Everyone in San Antonio loves the Alamo, but they all wouldn’t describe their love in the same way,” San Antonio Conservation Society Executive Director Vince Michael said.
The Office of Historic Preservation‘s first-ever Living Heritage Symposium invited academics, architects, urban planners, preservationists, and other experts to discuss the cultural elements at stake in the preservation of the built environment. It takes place during the second annual San Antonio World Heritage Festival, which celebrates the world heritage designation.
“What are we trying to preserve, and what is this fanfare all about?” panelist and preservation expert A. Ege Yildirim asked those gathered at the Bexar County Courthouse on the first day of the symposium Thursday.
The symposium will look at case studies and best practices to help San Antonio make the most of its World Heritage sites, ensuring that they become anchors for culture, not just buildings with inadequate context.
“Sometimes it’s easier to find pieces of value, but one misses the big picture,” Yildirim said.
Organizers agreed that “cultural heritage improves the cohesion of cities,” but to do so the conversation must move beyond the built environment and its visual impact. “How can heritage promote inclusiveness and resilience?” asked symposium moderator Andrew Potts.
That will be the question posed in several breakout sessions during which attendees can develop recommendations for San Antonio.
While local, state, and federal policy can help preservation efforts, “perfect legislation isn’t really the point,” Yildirim explained. What’s more important, she said, is how sites are managed within their context. In that effort, grassroots organizations, community groups, and local planners have the opportunity to contribute.
The community’s voice is an essential piece of an improved preservation process, Michael said. “What we’re really trying to focus on is how to take the existing process and integrate cultural heritage as well as buildings.”
The conversation is more complex when that culture includes voices that have been historically excluded, he added.
Many times members of historically oppressed communities – the Latino community, for example – will give the answers that they think will keep them safe. They will try to reflect the values they think those in power want to hear, especially in the United States’ current political climate, Michael said.
He cited recent conflict over Confederate Monuments as an example of how preservation can mean different things to different communities. “Heritage, like we saw with the monument removal, can become a polarizing issue as well. It’s easy enough to say, ‘Let’s ask the community,’” Michael said, but the community doesn’t always speak with one voice.
While only one panelist represents the Latino identity, Michael said that the panelists’ expertise would be put before many Latino participants who could utilize it as they set their own priorities and worked together toward recommendations for the City.
Michael hopes to develop concrete policy from the symposium. Whether it is a legacy business ordinance like the one in San Francisco, or adding cultural heritage components to surveys, he hopes to see practical tools put in place in San Antonio.
When we ask ourselves, “what are we trying to preserve”, I think we should consider history as a guide to future action.
The 10-1 decision by the city council to take down the Robert E. Lee monument in Travis Park was pivotal for the city of San Antonio. The move to do so was in the interest of saying to ourselves and the world, we do not stand for symbols of racism, oppression, and slavery. We will not glorify these things, immortalize them, or identify with them. It is not who we choose to be. I think that is a very bold, and powerful thing to do.
On the other hand this confuses me, because while the CoSA has taken this hard stance, it brings into question other historical monuments in our city which could be interpreted by many today to represent the exact same things we claim to be trying to get away from. For example:
The Alamo, Concepcion, San Juan, San Jose, Espada:
None of these buildings were built by people paid with fair wages. They didn’t have rights, unions, or political platforms. They had to learn to speak Spanish, change their names to Spanish names, change their religion to Catholicism, erase their own culture, and the ones who resisted were often met with persecution and violence. We call this hegemony. Such is the history of the Spanish with the natives of Texas. They were built by people whose entire way of life had been converted and modified to become subjects of the Spanish empire. In essence, the natives were used as beasts of burden to create influence in an area contested by the French. The outposts of the Spanish empire were very political, as well as religious in nature.
Why then, doesn’t anyone seem to be speaking about these buildings as the true local symbols of oppression, racism, and slavery? The Spanish spoke of the natives as an inferior race, one to be subjugated and the equivalent of a child to an adult. They were horrible to them. I find it awkward that our city chooses to identify itself as opposed to the symbols of southern white oppression, yet it is okay to immortalize and make money off of symbols of Spanish oppression of the people who were here before all of us? Not just make money, but spend millions of dollars to keep them generating more money for a city which claims to take a hard stance on not heralding icons of oppression. I feel this is hypocritical.
The West Side:
When we talk about the Mexican-American community currently working hard to preserve the urban fabric of the West side previously mentioned in an article published by the RR, again I find similar disparities.
One group of people forced to live in that part of town. This is horrible and racist. I do not agree with it. I think diversity is healthy in all parts of our city. I look forward to a time when the East, South, North, West, and central parts of town are all equally “flavorful”. I use the word flavor because the article I’m referencing talks about “keeping the flavor” of the barrio.
To me this is very weird..what I gather from the article is that it is important to maintain Mexican-American identity and resist gentrification. I think gentrification is a good thing for under-served communities. I think new faces in new places is exactly what spurs economic growth. The sentiment that I got from the article is one of, “this is our spot, we don’t want you to come here”.
I find this ironic because it was wrong in the first place to create a community that is 95% one group of people. I don’t feel like that is healthy for a community as a whole. Theirs is not the only community in town, there are other people who would love to open up to you, get to know you, and heal the wrongs of the past with open communication. When you close yourself off to that, you miss an opportunity to grow.
Furthermore by maintaining government subsidized housing in the area it is my opinion that you give zero incentive to the people of that area to do anything about improving their community. I was raised to believe that continuously financially supporting people who cannot currently take care of themselves is actually a handicap to the people who need to get out of their debt the most. Sometimes you have to be allowed to fail in order to grow, and succeed.
I think it is a very interesting conversation happening in San Antonio right now. As a straight white male, I find much of the conversation offensive as I seem to be the end of the finger that everyone here chooses to point. It is hard not to become reactionary after seeing a lot of that. It is also hard not to call out our choices to maintain a homogenized community with the power of government, and herald historical icons of oppression.
Maybe we’ve started taking steps in the right direction, but I think San Antonio has a long way to go before really being equal and balanced about its approach to ending division within our community. This is an outsider’s perspective because I only moved here a couple of years ago. Perhaps my birds eye view just makes people angry, maybe people just roll their eyes, but I think this city has much more self examination to do and we are definitely not there yet.