Tag Archives: Tejano

Tejano Monument: Much More — So Much More — than a Statue

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It is more powerful than first imagined.  Where its creators placed it is impressive.  The idea it projects excites the mind, for it is the beginning point of a new future.  It is the new Tejano Monument on the grounds of the state capitol in Austin that will be dedicated tomorrow.  So poignant a commemoration of the past denotes the beginning of a new day.

Standing in front of the monument, one can hear a soft wind that evokes the past but simultaneously whispers the inauguration of a new time formed centuries ago but interrupted by the vagaries of demography that can make and unmake nations.  Though motionless, the statue of a Spanish explorer oversees the future: A Tejano rancher — the original, authentic cowboy — surrounded by a longhorn and another steer and other animals alongside a family that predestines much of the modern HispanicLatino population.

Upon a swath of granite that masterfully captures the sweeping expanse of Texas at its very beginning, its Tejano past is cast in bronze and the future emblazoned on a tableau of larger expectation.

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A People More Worthy than a Monument

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An insistent wind under a pewter sky inconvenienced the crowd of about 150 that last week had come to break ground for a new Tejano monument on the grounds of the Texas state capitol.  The statue commemorating the role of one of the original populations of Texas is just about complete and will be laid and dedicated on March 29.

Around me huddled in the cold were faces and names I had not seen nor heard of in a long time.  Some of the activists of the past had joined the leadership of more establishmentarian types to make the monument a reality – a reality that will end hundreds of years of exclusion of HispanicLatinos from any presence on the grounds of the capitol of a state in which they are 40 percent of the population.  As unbelievable as it sounds, in all of the commemorative statues, plaques and other monuments at the Capitol, not one – not one – pays respect to the population that settled and organized the land as Tejas that later became Texas.

It was impossible to look around me and not think of an era ending so much as a new era blowing into being in which a new history far different from the one of the past takes hold.  Continue reading →