**The 7th Annual** **Save Texas History Symposium: The Alamo, Keystone of Texas History: Past, Present and Future** **will be held this year at the Menger Hotel in San Antonio on Saturday, September 17.**

Missed Identity: Collective Memory, Adina De Zavala and the Tejana Heroine Who Wasn’t

Sponsored by the Texas Map Society & Barry Lawrence Ruderman Rare Maps

Published in

Save Texas History

4 min readAug 23, 2016

Having grown up in San Antonio in the 1970s, when annual field trips to the Alamo and other missions represented an important component in elementary-school education, it’s surprising that I never heard of Adina De Zavala. Simply put, she was not credited for having led the multi-year, politically charged and socially contentious battle to protect the long barracks of the Alamo from destruction; credit for this feat was and still is laid at the feet of Clara Driscoll, the proclaimed “Savior of the Alamo.” Adina’s story must be told. We enjoy the opportunities in this, the twelfth year of the Save Texas History program, largely because of the preservation of Texas history that began with Adina De Zavala. Her story, however, is much more complex than history has acknowledged.

The granddaughter of Texas’s first interim vice president, Lorenzo de Zavala, Adina dedicated her ninety-three-year life to ensuring Texas’s early history would not be forgotten amidst the state’s explosive commercial growth.

Given constraints of race, class, and gender during her lifetime, her options as an unmarried schoolteacher from a middle-class family with a Mexican surname were limited in racially divided San Antonio. Once she learned about her grandfather’s legacy, she recognized the opportunity to forge a new identity for herself by establishing her own legacy. While scholars correctly recognize her contributions as a historian, teacher, and preservationist, those who label and elevate Adina as a Tejana activist have hijacked the role ethnicity played in her motivation. Instead, the convergence of her sense of isolation, economic uncertainty, and the emerging interest in Texas’s early history provided her the ticket to transcend social spheres in which she could not have belonged. The same dynamics enabled her to forge a sphere in which she could belong and that included Clara Driscoll and her wealthy cohorts. Events related to the preservation of the Alamo unfolded, however, to illustrate how socioeconomic class trumps all.

About Suzanne Cottraux

Suzanne Cottraux brings 29 years of professional communications experience to her current position as Executive Director of Communications, Public Relations and Marketing for Tarrant County College District, the nation’s 12th-largest higher education institution. Suzanne earned her B.A. in English and American Studies from The University of Texas at Austin and her M.A. in History from The University of Texas at Arlington, where she was named University Scholar in 2011 and winner of the George Wolfskill U.S. History Essay Award (Graduate Division) by Phi Alpha Theta, the History Honors Society.

A 2003–2004 graduate of Leadership Arlington, Suzanne also was a member of Junior League of Arlington for four years, served for three years on the Advisory Board for the City of Arlington Public Library System and served on the Board of Trustees for Country Day School of Arlington. In 2014, she was named one of 24 “Great Women of Texas” by the Fort Worth Business Press. She currently serves as a member and marketing chairman of the Susan G. Komen Greater Fort Worth Board of Directors and is a member of the Fort Worth Women’s Policy Forum, the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, and Daughters of the American Revolution.

Click here to register for the 2016 Save Texas History Symposium!