They provided for elders “who weren’t getting the proper care that they needed,” and contributed in significant ways to “build a better community on the East side for the African Americans.” Black-owned businesses provided Black families with financial stability, enabling protests against Jim Crow Era abuses and helping in turn to provide safety nets for neighbors, Thomas writes. Now called the Carter-Taylor-Williams Mortuary, the institution has been continuously operated and family-owned since 1906, and its funeral directors played a crucial role in social justice work of the mid-20th century. One of Walker’s students, James Thomas, researched the Carter Undertaking Company, a funeral home at 601 Center Street. QR codes placed around the city connect passersby to a digital map of Black San Antonio and a richly researched essay for each featured site. In partnership with the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum and the San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation, Walker’s team of student-researchers reconstructed the histories of more than 20 locations included in the Green Books-gazetteers that mapped safe tourist destinations for Black travelers in the Jim Crow era. Similarly, San Antonio’s Safe Spots for Negro Motorists, an initiative of Texas A&M University–San Antonio historian Pamela Walker, uses digital mapping to commemorate the sites and experiences of Black San Antonians during the Jim Crow era. Visitors to Mapping the Movimiento’s website can see artifacts and images from the restaurant’s heyday and learn how Cantú became a key figure in the city’s Chicano and civil rights activist communities. Today, the restauarant building has been demolished and the land upon which it once stood is part of the downtown campus of the University of Texas at San Antonio. Known as “the first eating space in San Antonio to desegregate its food counter,” the restaurant served as a vital social hub for the city’s Mexican American community in the 1950s. “Anybody who was anybody in the Chicano movement when they came to San Antonio met at Mario’s,” says historian Jerry Gonzalez. Mario Cantú’s family restaurant is on the map, too. The landscape of memory and commemoration and race is shifting in the U.S., thanks to historians, students, activists, and community members who are reimagining it in exciting and innovative ways. They include Edgewood High School, an anchor for the city’s Mexican American West Side and focus of important judicial rulings about public school funding inequities, and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, founded in the late 1980s by Chicano and other activists working toward social justice in San Antonio and beyond. Mapping the Movimiento’s 15 sites span the 20th century. Anyone in San Antonio with a smartphone can use the interactive map. Created by professors at the University of Texas at San Antonio and its Special Collections Library, the project functions like a “bus tour of San Antonio civil rights locations,” history professor Omar Valerio Jiménez says. One of these is the digital history project Mapping the Movimiento. In season three of “ Western Edition,” the podcast we host at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, we highlight some of these innovative efforts across the West, including in San Antonio. Malleable digital technologies can be much more creative and responsive than stone statues, soldiers in bronze, or iron plaques. Hitching historical research to new digital technologies helps tell different, more inclusive, and more nuanced narratives about the past. New digital tools let scholars, students, and community members create new, and newly inclusive, forms of memorialization. The targets of these conversations have been mainly physical plaques and statues-but the resolutions are far more varied. Many wanted their landscapes to tell a different story-one that did not venerate racial violence. Communities began to think about what to do with controversial, often racist, statues, markers, and place names. In the summer of 2020, George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed prompted a national reckoning with commemoration. In San Antonio, as in many other cities, the histories of Latinx and Black communities are overshadowed by Anglo-dominated narratives. While there were many root causes of the Alamo siege, one of the most important was that Texas Anglos were fighting Mexican soldiers to uphold slavery. The didactics urge the public to observe this history with solemnity and reverie. At the Alamo, the artifacts, images, and captions on display tell a unified story: That martyrs died there for Texas independence and that their sacrifice will never be forgotten. In San Antonio, Texas, one memorial-the church-turned-fort-turned-shrine of the Alamo-dominates the landscape.
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