Myth, Ruin, Memory: Whiteness and the Construction of a European Frontier in Texas

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Frontier myths rely on invisible notions of whiteness and monolithic narratives of movement. In the mid-19th century, Alsatian and German migrants arrived in Texas as part of an empresario-led colonization program. In this paper, I visit the archives, ruins, and oral histories of Alsatian Texas to examine how white identities informed place-making and vice versa on Texas’ constructed frontier. This is not a story about becoming white vis-à-vis becoming American; rather, it is a story about how European settlers entered into and replicated frameworks of American whiteness while also carrying European frameworks of whiteness into the places, geographies, and histories they created. A myth, a building, a story: I trace how whiteness scaffolded the invention and maintenance of frontier myths, how it shifted to accommodate changing worlds, and how it spanned generations to draw and maintain borders around history, language, and place.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow