Alamo Lies
By 
Months before top Republicans forced out the widely respected leader of the Alamo’s $500 million redevelopment for being too “woke,” a close political aide to Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick undertook a literal rewrite of the heritage site’s three-hundred-year history. Some time in the summer, Patrick tapped Sherry Sylvester, who worked as his adviser for five years of his tenure as lieutenant governor, to “review” the 20,000-word text panels in development for the new Alamo museum and visitors center, scheduled to open in 2027. Sylvester’s job was to get the drafts ready for Patrick’s eventual assessment.
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Sylvester has plenty of experience tailoring history to the preferences of GOP politicians. An irascible former journalist, she managed Patrick’s 2018 campaign for lieutenant governor and served as a senior adviser before landing at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank focused on injecting a brand of Christian nationalism into public life. In 2021, she wrote in her memo, Patrick tasked her with demanding that the Bullock State History Museum invite other historians to speak at a talk with the authors of Forget the Alamo, a book that argued that slavery was central to the Texas Revolution. When the authors refused, Patrick successfully demanded that the event be canceled.
Sylvester has also been involved behind the scenes in multiple controversial efforts to transform what Texas K–12 students learn about history in the classroom. In her memo, she said she’s “worked for the past 18 months” on a Bible-infused reading and language arts curriculum offered by the Texas Education Agency, and she reportedly has a hand in a state overhaul of social studies standards that educators and historians have criticized for whitewashing slavery and racism.
She also serves on the 1836 Project Advisory Committee, which was tasked by the Legislature in 2021 with promoting a “patriotic education” of Texas history. The committee was originally led by Kevin Roberts, the former head of TPPF and now the embattled leader of the Heritage Foundation. (In a previous life, Roberts was an academic historian; his University of Texas at Austin doctoral dissertation repeatedly uses the phrase “enslaved people.”) In January, Sylvester was appointed to the board of directors for the nonprofit Alamo Trust.
This crusading spirit carries over to her behind-the-scenes work at the Alamo. “I changed all references to ‘indigenous people’ to Native people,” she wrote. “The word indigenous suggests something that has always been in a particular place – like cactus or limestone formations. In terms of people, everyone who has ever been in Texas came from somewhere else.” It’s unclear if Sylvester is aware that the term “Indigenous people” was used at the request of Native Americans consulted by the Alamo Trust—a standard procedure for museums dealing with sensitive topics.
Sylvester took issue with the way the panels discussed the decimation of Native Americans by diseases that Europeans brought with them from the Old World and worried that the script implied that white people didn’t also die from smallpox and cholera. “I rewrote many of the references to Europeans bringing diseases (and the script is riddled with them) because it always came in a list of bad things that were a result of the ‘colonial oppressors.’” (Harrigan says he did not and would never use the phrase “colonial oppressors.”)
In a section headlined “Native American Voices Theatre—A Big Worry,” Sylvester seemed to question the contributions of Native Americans tapped to narrate videos on the Indigenous experience in Texas. “How are we curating those voices? How are we vetting their stories? This is very worrisome. One of the failures of the Museum of the American Indian [a Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C.] the last time I visited is that we were caught in a presentation of Native American activists who were preaching to us (we were the oppressors, they were the oppressed) about how we’d stolen all their land, etc.”
Vasquez says a subcommittee appointed by the Alamo to advise on the Native American gallery picked the narrators based on their credibility and expertise. He told me “Indigenous peoples” was just a placeholder term and that the preferred term was “First Peoples of Texas,” which would seem to solve Sylvester’s objection to Native people being present only for the past 12,000 years rather than for the millions of years since ancient seas receded, leaving behind limestone formations. “Who the hell is she to tell what our story is? Or the lieutenant governor?” asked Vasquez. “I mean, these are our lived experiences. They don’t know what our grandparents said or great grandparents said in regards to their experiences.”
Well, she’s a white woman. What else does she need? And Dan Patrick is going to be damned if any other perspective will ever matter in Texas.