What’s The Real Story Of The Alamo? A $250 Million Renovation Spurs Debate

NBC News produced this short report in October 2021, as a multi-year renovation of the Alamo – estimated by the Alamo Trust at $250 million – broke ground on its first major construction project, a 24,000-square-foot exhibit hall. The question at its centre is what story the new museum should tell.

The film sets the familiar version – a small band of rebels fighting to the death against a much larger Mexican army over 13 days in 1836 – against a longer history. Members of the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation describe Mission San Antonio de Valero, where records say more than 1,300 people were buried, most of them Indigenous, and their campaign to have the area protected as a cemetery after human remains were uncovered during work in 1989, 1995 and 2019. The narration argues that protecting slavery was central to the Texas Revolution, an Alamo descendant who has spent decades researching the defenders pushes back, and the piece ends on the hope that the site can tell all its stories.

The Alamo’s ghost stories – from the legend of spirits guarding the church to phantom defenders on the walls – almost all concern the men of 1836. This report is a reminder that the ground holds a much older and larger population of dead: the Native residents of the mission, buried there over most of the eighteenth century. Their descendants ask that the site be treated as a cemetery, not a stage.

The film is also a useful guide to why the Alamo is contested ground. How the site interprets the battle, slavery and the mission era has been argued over in public for years – the same layers of memory that ghost tours tend to flatten into a few dramatic tales.