by Erin Murrah-Mandril, UT Arlington.
Adina de Zavala was dubbed “the angel of the Alamo” when she barricaded herself in the Alamo building in 1908 to save it from demolition. She specifically occupied the long barracks, also known as the convento, where much of the fighting of the Alamo battle occurred. De Zavala refused to give the keys to her rival in the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT), Clara Driscoll, who wanted to demolish that part of the building in order to emphasize the chapel that has since become the iconic emblem of the Alamo battle. This ‘second battle of the Alamo’ splashed across national news and became a centerpiece of Adina de Zavala’s biography for years to come.
Though de Zavala, like Bowie and Travis, ultimately lost her battle over the Alamo, she left the DRT and went on to preserve the Spanish Governor’s Palace and numerous missions in the San Antonio area. She also collected troves of archival material throughout her life. She understood the importance of archiving Texas history and was well versed in Texana archives far and wide. In a 1901 address to the Club Women of Texas, she explained “In the libraries and archives of Mexico and the libraries of Europe, are rare and wonderful books and unprinted manuscripts relating to Texas.” In that same speech, she implored lay historians to study the lives of early Texans, explaining, “to biography we must look for the disclosure of much hidden history … to it we are indebted for the most interesting details.” Today’s readers would also do well to follow her advice (there is still no book-length biography of Adina de Zavala, for example!). But you don’t have to travel to Europe or Mexico, of course, to learn the secrets of Texan archives.
…an archivist is, at heart, a storyteller.
The largest archive of Adina de Zavala’s papers is housed at UT Austin’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, and another substantial collection of her material is at the Sisters of the Incarnate Word University in San Antonio. However, smaller collections of Adina de Zavala Papers have made their way into numerous other institutions throughout Texas, including Baylor University, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library, and our own UT Arlington Library Special Collections. The idea of an archivist may bring to mind someone who oversees rows of dusty velum books, filing cabinets, or cardboard boxes containing loose papers. Yet an archivist is, at heart, a storyteller.
De Zavala told the story of the Alamo battle again and again throughout her life in newspaper editorials, requests to donors, correspondence with professional historians, and her own published book History and Legends of the Alamo and Other Missions in and Around San Antonio (1917, republished in 1996 by Arté Publico Press). In the book she includes transcribed or photocopied archival documents such as church records, a list of Alamo defenders, letters from William Travis, and an 1836 engineer’s plan of the building. She also includes the local social history of the building through poems, folk tales, and her economic battle to secure the site for future generations of Texans. Her book is a balance of information and intrigue.
Equally savvy is the archivist responsible for organizing De Zavala’s papers for UT Arlington’s Special Collections. Archivist do not often (or ever) see their name in lights, but they are the guardians and organizers of national and cultural knowledge. The “finding guide” is an invaluable source of information about what materials are in a collection and in what order. Finding guides are often digitized in library search engines and kept as printed documents at the physical archive. A finding guide with too little detail keeps researchers from understanding the full scope of a collection, possibly saving their precious travel dollars for a site with more certain historical material. Too much detail in a finding guide—much like a table of contents that attempts to describe the entire book—will mire the research process and leave nothing to discover. Diana Lee Mays, the woman who organized and indexed UT Arlington’s De Zavala collection strikes that perfect balance, creating a finding guide more like a book jacket that entices you to open the novel.
Nothing is more enticing than an envelope that instructs the reader not to open it.
Mays’s description of a folder containing 11 letters includes this phrasing: “A secretive note from Adina de Zavala to her sister telling her not to open it. The note contains 2 enclosed pages of family history” (19). Nothing is more enticing than an envelope that instructs the reader not to open it. Rather than divulging its contents to researchers, Mays figuratively calls out to them to enter the archive and solve the riddle on their own. As it turns out, De Zavala’s secret note was a transcription of her family’s baptismal record, which revealed that her grandfather—the first vice president of the Republic of Texas, Lorenzo de Zavala—adopted the first son of Adina’s grandmother, Emily West de Zavala. Henry, or Henrique as the baptismal record calls him, has unclear parentage. While Lorenzo referred to Emily as a widow, no record of her prior marriage has been found, and she and Lorenzo were involved in an extramarital affair while he was estranged from his first wife. These details mar the romantic and honorable image that Adina de Zavala perpetuated in her writing about Lorenzo De Zavala, the man for whom she named her DRT chapter. Adina’s family was also embroiled in land claims dating back to Lorenzo’s lifetime, claims from which Henry was excluded. In the letter accompanying the secret document Adina tells her sister, “Not even the priest knows I found this as I told him I did not find anything I wanted.” It must have been a serious secret, indeed, for Adina, a devout Catholic, to bend the truth to the priest who kept the archived baptismal records.
Like May, I leave it to the reader to discover the other secrets of de Zavala’s archive. Elsewhere in the finder’s guide, May writes, “John Henry Brown offers seemingly fatherly advice to Adina de Zavala corresponding with Victor Rose. … There may be a good story here with the right investigation” (12). May’s phrasing is an act of intellectual generosity, a treasure map showing where the riches lie that leaves it for another scholar to unearth. She explains that “Adina de Zavala seems to have a public image quite different than the one that is tucked away in some of her correspondence.” (12) UT Arlington is fortunate to have a collection of Adina de Zavala’s letters and documents, but perhaps more fortunate to have archivists who know how to make the Special Collections both enticing and accessible.
Dr. Erin Murrah-Mandril: Erin Murrah-Mandril is an Assistant Professor of English and a Research Associate for the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her work and teaching examine Mexican American literary history with a particular interesting in Southwest studies and literary theory. Her book, In the Mean Time: Temporal Colonization and the Mexican American Literary Tradition (2020 University of Nebraska Press) examines the way Latina/o authors of the U.S. Southwest reimagine time and place in the wake of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Her articles have appeared in Western American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Aztlán, and the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage series. Dr. Mandril is currently working on a project that explores Latina birth culture in the early twentieth-century U.S. Southwest.
