Burial ground under Alamo stirs challenges
SAN ANTONIO — Raymond Hernandez was a boy when his grandfather would take him on walks to the Alamo, pointing at the grounds around the Spanish mission founded in the 18th century.
“He’d tell me again and again, ‘They built all this on top of our campo santo,’ ” said Hernandez, 73, using the Spanish term for cemetery. An elder in San Antonio’s Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation, he added, “All the tourists flocking to the Alamo are standing on the bones of our ancestors.”
On a busy day, thousands of visitors explore the Alamo, the site of a pivotal 1836 battle in the Texas Revolution where American settlers fought to secede from Mexico. But long before the Alamo garrisoned secessionists, Spanish missionaries used the site, known as the Mission San Antonio de Valero, to spread Christianity among Native Americans. People from different tribes built the Alamo with their own hands, and missionaries buried many of the converts, as well as colonists from Mexico and Spain, around the mission or right under it.
Now, a new battle over the Alamo is brewing, as Native Americans and descendants of some of San Antonio’s founding families seek protections for the human remains while Texas officials press ahead with a contentious $400 million renovation plan for the site.
Lawyers for the Texas General Land Office and the nonprofit Alamo Trust argue that the Tap Pilam’s claims of ancestral lineage do not give them a “constitutionally protected right” to have a hand in how human remains found at the Alamo should be treated.
Courts have handed victories to the Alamo’s official stewards, which the Tap Pilam have appealed while raising pressure on the authorities in public protests and private mediation proceedings.
Their strategy has come close to producing results, though a resolution remains elusive.
Two people involved in the mediation proceedings said this week that Texas state officials were preparing to yield to requests to regain access to the Alamo chapel for religious ceremonies, improve training for Alamo staff and have a role in handling remains.
The parties even reached a tentative settlement, according to court documents filed this week, though the settlement would need to be approved by the San Antonio City Council and other parties. But in a statement Tuesday, the Land Office said it would go on fighting the Tap Pilam in the courts.