New plan on burial grounds at Alamo

City’s work to find sites will involve descendant groups

With the $450 million private-public plan to restore Alamo Plaza again moving forward, city leaders have committed to working with descendant groups to identify the locations of mission-era cemeteries.

As part of a project “reset” announced March 1 by Mayor Ron Nirenberg, the city said last week that officials would conduct an archival investigation and form an archaeology committee to offer guidance on interpretation of cemeteries of Mission San Antonio de Valero and the Alamo fort.

A human remains treatment protocol, separate from one in place at the stateowned Alamo, will be developed for handling any bone fragments, coffins, shrouds or other burial remnants unearthed in the city-owned portion of the plaza.

What’s most surprising is that the city’s approach includes the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation, which sued the nonprofit Alamo Trust and Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, seeking to be involved in the handling of remains on the Alamo grounds.

The city, which is partnering with Bush and the trust on the Alamo project, has stood by the state’s position that the trust’s own process, guided by an advisory panel limited only to experts from federally recognized tribes, meets legal requirements and respects the site’s cultural significance.

Because Tap Pilam is not federally recognized, it is precluded from having a representative on the Alamo Trust’s archaeology committee. Ramón Vásquez, an executive member of Tap Pilam, said the trust’s approach also excludes descendants of early Spaniards and others who lived here in the 1700s and 1800s.

Now the city wants to work with Tap Pilam, whose members trace their lineage to the indigenous families who lived, worked and were buried at the Spanish missions, including the Alamo.

Vásquez believes the city’s commitment to pinpoint the location of one or more cemeteries is a step forward but something that should have been pursued in the mid-1990s, when the city last considered a major plaza makeover.

“I am moving through this reset very cautiously and carefully. But I am open to rebuilding those relationships,” said Vásquez, who sits on the 30-member Alamo Citizen Advisory Committee and is executive director of Tap Pilam’s fundraising arm, the American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions.

City officials have said opposition from members of the citizen panel to the Alamo Trust’s protocol led to the change. An archival investigation of archaeology reports, deeds, newspaper articles and other documents will guide a “plan of action,” including formation of an archaeology committee, Assistant City Manager Lori Houston said.

“Our goal is to avoid human remains, yet interpret them when we can,” she said.

It’s likely one of the reasons the revamped multimillion-dollar plan for restoring and renovating Alamo Plaza no longer includes excavating a large part of it and lowering the ground level by 24 inches to mark the original parameters of the historic mission-fort. Instead, the new plan calls for using surface pavers to mark that area.

The archaeology panel will include representatives of 16 cultural groups that have advised the city on treatment of remains at Christus Santa Rosa’s downtown children’s hospital and Milam Park, where other historic cemeteries had been. That includes Tap Pilam.

The federally recognized Native American advisers on the Alamo Trust’s archaeological panel also will be invited to participate on the city’s panel.

An archaeological report from 2016 excavations in the plaza hasn’t been released to the public. But a map produced by Pape-dawson Engineers was submitted in 2019 to the Texas Historical Commission as part of Tap Pilam’s proposal to have the area named a Historic Texas Cemetery.

The Pape-dawson map identified three areas where remains are most likely to be found: the north end of the plaza, below and near the front of the Hipolito F. Garcia Federal Building; beneath and around the Alamo church; and on the south end of the stateowned Alamo grounds.

Vásquez said he’d like to see use of ground-penetrating radar or other technology to further define cemetery boundaries. The historical commission last year declared the church a verified cemetery and granted a permit for the Alamo Trust to exhume four burials found during excavations aimed at preserving the nearly 300-year-old structure.

Tap Pilam asked the commission last year to recognize part of the plaza as an “unverified cemetery” — a place with evidence of human burials but no verification by an expert. But the historical commission decided evidence for the designation was “not sufficient at this time.”

The prospect of finding remains in the plaza reopens a debate on DNA testing. The Alamo Trust’s protocol rules out “destructive analysis,” which is viewed as offensive to many Native American groups. Some experts have said it’s costly and ineffective.

But not all indigenous people oppose DNA testing. Some descendants and archaeologists have argued that testing should be an option, particularly because Catholic and non-catholic cemeteries at the mission would have been a resting place not only for indigenous people but also Canary Islanders, Tejanos, freed or enslaved Blacks, Anglos and others.

Vásquez said the Texas Health and Safety Code gives descendants a right to ask for DNA testing.

“If we were talking about a 100 percent known Indian burial ground, we would not be talking about DNA,” Vásquez said. “But the fact that this is not an Indian burial ground, and that this is a Catholic cemetery, and that there are non-indians buried in this cemetery, potentially Alamo defenders, lineal descendants under the law have a right to ask for that (testing).”

Descendant groups have begun collecting DNA samples of their members. Lee Spencer White, president of the Alamo Defender Descendants Association, said her group has started a “DNA database” from living Alamo and mission descendants.

Tap Pilam’s fundraising arm has committed to cofund a DNA study with Texas A&M University and has collected at least 100 samples, Vásquez said. But rather than hashing out the issue in court, he said, the local project leaders need to negotiate with the Land Office and Alamo Trust.

“Because if not, we’re going to butt heads — us and the state,” he said. “And that’s been my biggest fear, that we don’t look far enough into the future and try to address these issues ahead of time.”

Vásquez believes that happened with the Cenotaph. Project officials pinned their hopes on moving the monument as a major element of the plaza makeover. But when the historical commission denied a permit for the move last year, the project almost unraveled.

“We were putting out images and getting people hyped up about this move without ever realizing whether it could be feasible or not,” he said.

The Alamo, long recognized as a Texas icon because of the 1836 battle there, also was San Antonio’s first permanent Spanish-indigenous mission — a history that’s been acknowledged through a World Heritage Site designation and a community tricentennial.

Vásquez said he’s hopeful the Alamo project will yield “fruits that came out of this process” for future generations, including “lessons of perseverance and resiliency.”

Tap Pilam, he said, is “a proponent of this project in terms of telling the stories of the entire site.”

“We want to see it happen, because we don’t believe we’ll ever have a chance in our lifetime to ever see something like this again,” he said. “But it’s got to be done right.”