SAN ANTONIO — Three miniature Alamos could be seen at downtown's Centro De Artes gallery Thursday evening. By the end of the event where attendees were encouraged to consider the iconic Texas landmark from all angles of history – especially through the Tejano lens – one of those Alamos was bashed into pieces and another was suspended upside down.
The third? It wore the colors of the Mexican flag, reflecting the perspective of this "participatory performance."
Organized as part of the ongoing "Dinner with Rolando Briseño" retrospective, which dives into the work of the eponymous Alamo City artist, the event invited audience members to swing away at one of two Alamo piñatas—the one styled as a Texas state flag.
The Alamo that wasn't a piñata, meanwhile, stood on the base of an upside-down statue of Saint Anthony.
But not for long. When the event got underway, the statue was grabbed on both sides and spun repeatedly as the fanfare of battle played over the speakers.
"I got the idea to do this statue and spin it because the story of the Alamo is spun," said Briseño, who organized a similar ceremony outside the Alamo itself from 2009 to 2012. "It's not a completely, historically accurate narrative. When you put Saint Anthony upside down, you’re asking him for a favor. What I want is the truth."
The idea behind the spinning statue of Saint Anthony – which reoriented the Alamo upside down as the saint was upright, and vice-versa – was to recognize that history can be spun, turned and rotated depending on who is telling it.
Briseño said it's that chosen perspective that resulted in only some of the Tejano fighters' names being immortalized in the Alamo chapel and the Cenotaph outside.
When the statue started spinning at Centro, it represented a metronome of history and Texans' ongoing reckoning with it. In narrating the event and describing its meaning, one of the performance's leaders equated the "white supremacy" she said the Alamo represents to recent raids ordered by state leaders in parts of Texas.
"This same attitude from the founding of Texas is still prevalent today as exemplified by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who ordered the raiding of homes of little old Tejana ladies in South Texas who helped minorities register to vote," she said. "Which is protected by the State Constitution."
The symbolism of the event continued from there.
After Saint Anthony turned dizzy from his spinning, the Alamo piñata designed to look like Texas' flag was brought out, raised and whacked by attendees taking turns with the stick.
The swings were soft and hard, quiet and loud. And while some children swung gleefully away with dreams of candy in their future, more swings were taken by adults who have had time to consider what the Alamo-shaped piñata hanging in front of them represents.
"Some people are angry at it, like most Mexican-Americans who are aware of the history," Briseño said.
When it finally broke open, it wasn't lollipops and tootsie rolls that spilled out, but dozens of tiny figurine babies of color. Briseño said it was meant to represent the Alamo as a birthplace of the modern Chicano, with all the baggage that might bring with it as people continue to grapple over its meaning.
And, a few steps nearby, it was no longer Saint Anthony who was upside down, but the Alamo, the facts of history now reconsidered.
"That’s the whole idea," Briseño said, "to make sure the truth comes in.”