REVIEW OF BENEATH SACRED GROUND

Tap Pilam’s book fills out Alamo’s history

by Elaine Ayala

     It’s not so surprising that the first book published by the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation would be one of such substance and heft.

     Tap Pilam Press’ first book arrives with a great big thud at 795 pages, weighing in at over seven pounds. It will make a substantial contribution to the Alamo’s historical record.

     “Beneath Sacred Ground: The Mission San Antonio de Valero Burial Records Transcribed, Translated and Annotated,” published by Tap Pilam Press, isn’t a book that will become a best-seller in the traditional sense.

     That was never its ambition, but it intends to serve as the new, updated, more complete primary source of the 1,154 burials that took place at Valero, and another 34 recovered from other sources.

     It’s a book aimed at new generations of researchers, scholars and historians not only of Mission Valero, now known as the Alamo; but of the indigenous peoples who first inhabited what’s now the Americas — Texas, in particular.

     “Beneath Sacred Ground” anticipates a moment when Texas and Texans are ready to accept a fuller picture and full truth about its origins.

     The book will be a profound addition to academic and public libraries, but coffee-table-book

fans will revel in the details added to the burial records from other primary sources and the beautiful illustrations.

     Spanish friars originally listed all sorts of details about those who died and were buried on mission grounds. Those who first transcribed the records, however, left out information that didn’t interest them or they considered insignificant.

     Notably, they were interested in Spanish figures, not the indigenous people who were the state’s first Christians, first Catholics, first political leaders, first builders, first vaqueros.

     So, in “Beneath Sacred Ground,” Tap Pilam Press set out to reach for a higher academic standard by amplifying the lives, contributions, struggles and ethnogenesis of Valero’s residents.

     The book provides the original text from burial records (1703-1783) with a new, full transcription plus translations into modern Spanish and English. The appendix includes another 34 burials from the same period up to 1835.

     Entries also include annotations, cross-checked with other primary sources, that include birth records, marriages, children’s births, their sacraments and other details.

“In annotating it,” author Art Martínez de Vara said, “what I decided was to give people a better sense of who these people were.”

     He included indigenous names, not just Christian Spanish names, as well as tribal affiliations, political offices, social status, family structures and compadrazgo, the godparent relationships between the Spanish and the indigenous people at the missions.

He looked for “every possible reference, but I’m certain I missed some. I’m hoping that when people use this, they’re going to find more and send them in, and someday there’ll be a second edition.”

     This fuller accounting does complicate the stories and myths told about the missions, the Alamo in particular, and of Texas itself.

     It even complicates the stories of Native Americans, whose origins weren’t the same either, arriving at Valero from so many places, near and far.

The book also underscores the presence of indigenous slaves, Black slaves, free Black people — one a soldier of African descent — as well as free and enslaved mulattoes who married into mission families.

     The text took three years to compile, said Martínez de Vara, a historian, practicing attorney, budding anthropologist and author of several history books. He’s also AIT’s tribal lawyer.

He said the burial records reveal tragic stories of famine, epidemic, conflict and forced labor. But, in them, he also saw stories of love, family ties, cultural integration, survival and above all else, resistance and resiliency.

     Martínez de Vara used AI tools to produce the illustrations in the book, indigenous people appear at the forefront in spectacular realism. European figures appear in abstract forms.

Like so many other Tap Pilam members and other San Antonians who know their genealogy, Martínez de Vara can point to direct ancestors within its pages. 

     For AIT’s executive director Ramón Vásquez, there was another intent within each page — to prove the people of Valero were buried at the mission site where a visitors’ attraction is now being renovated, all in an attempt to drive a tourism economy fed by the Alamo’s myths.

     At one time, the nonprofit Alamo Trust that manages the site denied American Indians were buried there. That’s why the 2019 letter from the Alamo Trust to the Texas Historical Commission appears early in the book.

     Penned by the trust’s most controversial leader, Doug McDonald, the letter told the historical

commission that the site shouldn’t be designated a historical cemetery, as Tap Pilam

requested. 

     “Please be advised,” McDonald wrote, the Alamo Trust “maintains that a cemetery does

not exist on Alamo property.”

     That led to this book, as did the myth of Coahuiltecan extinction, both amply debunked by the historical record.

     Tap Pilam Press produced 150 special editions of “Beneath Sacred Ground,” signed and numbered. They’re available for $124.99 at the American Indian Center, 1616 E. Commerce

Street. Other copies of the book are $99.99 and are available on Amazon.

     The Witte Museum will host a book signing and panel discussion at 6 p.m. June 19. Juneteenth

seemed like an appropriate day.

     The book’s publication coincides with the 100th anniversary of another incredible moment

recognized this month, when the United States extended citizenship to American

Indians.

     That was 1924. So, yes, getting the nation to recognize its truths is long and arduous. 

But this fall, the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation will observe its 30th anniversary, reason

enough for celebration.