20181217.0430

On 14 December 2018, an updated version of Scott Huddleston's "Buried Mission Wall in San Antonio Exposed at Job Site" appeared in the online version of the San Antonio Express-News. In it, Huddleston reports on the construction of apartments near historic mission sites owned by the Archdiocese of San Antonio and the construction project's recent uncovering of buried mission-wall footings. Conflicting commentary about the extent of damage, as well as opposition to the work and background on it are offered. Also noted is the specter of unearthing human remains during the excavation needed for the construction. The article ends with a reported warning not to let the same thing happen to the other San Antonio missions that happened with the Alamo, the area around which the city is trying to clear in favor of preservation and appropriate veneration.
It is interesting to think on the idea of buried walls in San Antonio. I know the city is 300 years old--the tricentennial attracted no small amount of attention--but it is not a thing that usually occurs to me. Nor yet does the association of centuries-long history, that some of it is simply underfoot, the world of now resting upon it, a boat buoyed up by the sea of old. I am far more used to thinking about such things as they apply to other places than the Alamo City, some of which I have visited and into the depths of which I have at least partly seen. I am far more used to thinking about such things in the contexts of cities with millennial histories, cities far removed from where I now am rather than an hour down the road.
But as I think on it, it makes sense that there would be such things in San Antonio; the city has a rich history, having done much in three centuries. People have lived and died, families have risen and fallen, the shape of the city has shifted as it has grown and grown and grown, and, like all else, it rests upon what has been, emerging from it and being supported by it, borrowing strength from it whether it knows it is or does not. It is the kind of thing that I've argued about in other contexts, and there is little if any reason it should not be true for the Alamo City as for any of the grander, older cities commonly associated with the trope, or with the legended ones whose origins are obscured by both the passage of time and the workings of artists' mouths and pens and minds upon them.
And I wonder, too, what will be built upon the ruins we leave behind. Such texts as this one are ephemeral in the short term, but all are ephemera if enough time is permitted. The same is true of stone edifices, whether they are razed to make way for the newer that is not necessarily better or they are allowed to crumble against the slow and certain forces that the universe brings to bear through time. But while such things endure, they may allow for other things to follow, and, seeing what I and my contemporaries follow, I am not sure I can see what will follow us. I can hope it will be better as I understand better to be, but I also know that what is understood to be better will, itself, differ from what now is--and things will move that way. Still, it is a thing worth thinking about...