ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the founding decades of the Witte Memorial Museum in San Antonio, Texas. Between the mid-1920s and the late 1940s, founders, municipal leaders, donors, and journalists established and promoted a comprehensive museum that included a public narrative of Texas history that validated Anglo supremacy. The Witte Museum occupied a critical space of history-making at a time when the project of conquering the borderlands of South Texas moved from land acquisition at gunpoint to displacing ethnic Mexicans and Mexican Americans from historic neighborhoods, public representations, and memorialization of Texas history. Cultural institutions were crucial in recasting Anglo Americans as heroic and interpreting the colonization of South Texas as valorous, and at the same time displacing and erasing the public memory of Mexican, Mexican American, and Indigenous communities.
