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COPYRIGHT 2001 Texas Monthly, Inc.
The first one, during the Texas Revolution, ended in a massacre of Texas troops. Or should it properly be called an execution? How an unlikely war of words has opened cultural and racial rifts in a historic Texas town.
THERE IS A WORD THAT HANGS OVER ESTELLA ZERMENO'S shoulder like a sack of bricks, and to explain to you why, she must sit down on a green leather couch in her home and take them out one by one. "`Massacre,'" she says with conviction, "is offensive." In a letter to the editor of their hometown paper, her husband, William, referred to it as "the M word." Their concern regards one of the most infamous events in Texas history. In March 1836, 342 men fighting for Texas independence under Colonel James Fannin surrendered to a Mexican army led by General Jose de Urrea, only to be shot a week later under the orders of President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna while being held as prisoners. Texans came to remember the event as "the Goliad Massacre" and inscribed the term for generations on plaques, in history books, and across museum walls. Yet, the Zermenos believe that the proper label should have been "execution"--and to understand why this small distinction looms so large in their minds, one first has to know their family history, hear them talk about civic responsibility, debate the merits of inclusion. And suddenly, the bricks are piled up really high on the coffee table.
The history of the war that secured independence from Mexico is sacred to many Texans, and for the Zermenos to suggest that it needs a little editing would make some wonder what side Tejanos--Texans of Mexican descent--are on. But the question is hardly that simple. Estella's family has been in Goliad for nine generations. Her ancestors fought on both sides of the war, and she dedicates her life to tracing those roots. Every time she discovers a forgotten Tejano soldier or elected official, she demands a marker, a special tombstone, a little ceremony to show some respect. She and a committee of fellow genealogists even plan to petition the Legislature to place a monument of a Tejano ranching family on the Capitol grounds. The issue for the Zermenos is not who is more Texan--but who wrote Texas history and how deeply the myths they created run even today. "It should be a shrine to the people who lived here from the beginning, not just to that event," Estella Zermeno says of the old fort in Goliad where Fannin and his men met their doom.
Yet one also must sit down on a rustic chair inside the cold stone walls of that fort and hear out Newton M. Warzecha. A tall, businesslike man, he single-handedly holds up Presidio La Bahia, doing everything from pleading for funds to mowing the lawn on a cloudy Friday morning. And he is the one who keeps printing those letters and ads touting the annual commemoration of "the Goliad Massacre." "How am I to change or stop the use of the word `massacre' if there is no new evidence to indicate that there was something other than a massacre here?" he asks, exasperated. A native of nearby Cuero, Warzecha landed in Goliad in the midst of a career as a financial consultant. He was working in Victoria and had offered to volunteer at the presidio but was asked instead to take the helm until a new director was found. Each month ran into the next. Ten years later nobody else has been hired, since Warzecha has managed the fort so well that it has become financially self-sufficient and now draws some 33,000 students and tourists a year. "I take these things personally because of what I have put into this place," he says, looking misty-eyed. "It grieves me very much."
By all accounts, Estella Zermeno and Newton Warzecha had been friends, the kind of friends who went out of...
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