In 2016, Seguin’s city council approved $59,000 in public funds to hire a firm to create a new marketing strategy for the town. The task force that oversaw the campaign called itself the “Rebranding Rangers” and chose a new slogan for the town, “Seguin. It’s real,” replacing the old one, “There’s a story here.” That old slogan, of course, had been true. Seguin’s people, past and present, reflect a mosaic of stories in the town’s collective memory—they’re just not always the stories town leaders want to tell.
While I had a mostly good childhood in Seguin, even back then I recognized what Southern Methodist University historian Michael Phillips calls “amnesia by design,” a strategy of white elites to erase a place’s history of systemic racial violence and oppression. We’ve all been to these “laborator[ies] of forgetfulness,” as Phillips calls them, where shiny veneers hide what lies beneath. Towns and cities where many locals and visitors alike are only interested in cosplaying the past, co-opting the rugged aesthetic of Mexican vaqueros—boots, brimmed hats, worn jeans—or wearing bedazzled shirts with Native iconography while not actually knowing about the Native Americans who continue to live on this land. Seguin often feels like a giant film set where everything is a prop and everyone is an actor in the surreal tragedy of Anglo Texan heritage.
When I was growing up there, suspicion of Black and brown people was still thick in the air. Sometimes I could damn near taste it. It was my girlfriend’s father refusing to shake my hand. My friend’s dad singling me out of a tangle of sweaty boys to threaten when he’d had enough of our roughhousing. My friend’s mother bursting into the room yelling at me, “What did you do?! What did you do?!” when her son cried out after getting his own hands stuck in a Chinese finger trap.
What did I do? I got out of Seguin as soon as I could.
I returned again recently to visit the Texas Ranger monuments. First I headed to the original site of the Ranger station near Walnut Branch, where walking down the steps to the stream felt like descending into the past. Nestled between a sushi bar and a used-car lot, the glen is covered by southern live oaks and desert willows. When it rains, the water moves beneath the hill where the station once stood, glides across an old stone dam like glass, and swirls under the West Nolte Street bridge. In a nearby rose garden, a granite marker dedicated in 1976 to commemorate the United States bicentennial reminds that “earlier chapters were lived here by Indian tribes long before Columbus ‘discovered America.’ ”