Forgetting the Alamo: Blood Memory by Emma Perez

Emma Perez is a highly respected historian and theorist of gender, as well as a novelist; in both incarnations she has revolutionized Chicano and Chicana and Third-World literary and historical discourse. Born on October 25, 1954, in the small, rural, Anglo-dominated town of El Campo, Texas, where she received most of her primary and secondary education, Perez escaped the provincialism of her intellectual environment to relocate to Los Angeles, where she was liberated to live her life pursuing academic study at the highest level. In 1981, Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS: Women Active in Letters and Social Change) came into being in Santa Clara, California, because of the efforts of Chicana academicians.

The book focuses on the Mexicans who remained on Mexican-turned-North American lands (as outlined in the Treaty) and those who immigrated 'post-1848' from Mexico and other Latin American countries also chose various names for themselves: Mexican-American, Latino/a and/or Chicano/a. Tiascaltecas and Otomi with the Spanish and the Spanish Moors with the Mexicans and the Mexicans with Apache and Comanche mixing into a brown race journeying (Perez, 7). The journey was carried through land expansive with bloodred horizons until they stopped and looked around and settled into what was already in our blood (Perez, 7). According to the author, the individual that he referred to as "Papi" traveled to the interior geographic regions in Mexico for the purpose of business and trade (Perez, 16).

In addressing the motives for writing her historical novel, Forgetting the Alamo, Or Blood Memory, she states, “Impatience led me to create a Tejana baby butch, named Micaela Campos, who must avenge her father's death at the battle of San Jacinto, just a month after the fall of the Alamo” (Perez, 19). Nevertheless, Pérez's first novel, Gulf Dreams, ...