25 Texans in the Land of Lincoln

Twenty-five history students from St. Mary’s University take a 2,000 mile bus trip from the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas to Springfield, Illinois to build a Day of the Dead altar honoring Abraham Lincoln’s support of Mexico, and then to ask the Illinois State Military Museum to return General Antonio López de Santa Anna’s prosthetic leg to Mexico. With humor, humility, and a few animated history lessons, these students, mostly Mexican American, raise questions of identity, national borders, museum ethics, and collective memory. You will even learn a bit about the war Mexicans never forget and Americans hardly remember: the US-Mexican War, known to Americans as the Mexican American War and to Mexicans as the War of the United States against Mexico.

The quest made the front page of the Wall Street Journal the day before the 2016 Presidential Election and was covered on local TV and radio in Texas and Illinois. At a moment of heightened antagonism against Mexico and Mexican Americans, these students remind us to examine how we tell the story of our shared history across the border.