My Neighborhood

Actually, I don’t even live in San Antonio. I commute on highway 181 from Floresville every other day to school. The highway runs right through my town, and I live about a mile and a half from it. I live right in the downtown part of Floresville, so there are a lot of houses around me compared to the people who live in the subdivisions on larger plots of land. The road to get to my house is right off of 181, just follow it down through downtown. If I can be more specific, my house is pretty much on the west side of the town.

Generally, the area that I live in is mostly middle class. Right down my street (on South 3^rd), the houses are, for the most part, well maintained. On the opposite side of C Street, the houses are more lower class. These houses tend to be less maintained. Also, the neighborhood is made up of mostly middle aged to elderly people with a few kids running around here and there, and only like four teenagers that I can tell. My neighbor to the right of my house is an elderly Floresville native. As far as I can tell, the population on my street is divided up into middle class Anglo families and lower class Hispanic families. To be broader, the entire downtown area seems to be mostly middle class. There aren’t really any upper class people downtown, as they are more inclined to move out to the subdivisions off of the highway. I would say that in general, the Hispanics dominate in terms of population in Floresville. There are many Hispanic families that like to stick together and live near each other.

As far as major businesses go, Floresville has seen a great deal of expansion in the past few years. An HEB was built there about three or four years ago with a strip mall, so many businesses have picked up a space of their own. Some of the businesses to open up shop there are Domino’s (which I worked at, sadly), Bealls, and Subway. They’re even finishing up construction on our very own Whataburger, which is pretty exciting. Since the opening of HEB, they also built a Bill Millers right next to our main traffic light. Some of our older businesses, however, have been there since I was a kid, such as McDonalds, Church’s, Wal Mart, and JC’s Super Burger.

We have every school from Pre K (Head Start) to High School, but so far we don’t have a higher education facility. The city was thinking about using our old hospital as a local community college, but nothing has happened yet. Not too many years ago, the city had a newer hospital built called the Connelly Memorial Hospital located off of 181 next to the Ancira Ford dealership. Down the road from the main downtown district, we have a small park called Pecan Park where people usually go to walk or take their kids to the playground. There’s a city park down 97 where we have a baseball field, a pool, and a few pavilions for parties and such. All of these things, the businesses, the hospitals, the schools, and the parks, are very beneficial to our community because it lessens the need to travel 30+ miles to San Antonio every time we need something.

There’s a strong sense of community in Floresville which stems from the fact that there are a lot of family ties and old friendships that keep the community strong. There aren’t really any major problems; it’s mostly peaceful and quiet. Occasionally, we will have construction, which can get pretty noisy in the mornings. We have modest amenities in Floresville, nothing too fancy, but sometimes it’s nice to get out and go into San Antonio. We don’t really have any gangs, only the occasional hoodlum trying to cause trouble or just trying to be cool.

When I’m not at school or work, I just stay at home to study or go to Julian’s house since we have all the same classes. To get to his house, I just went from E street up to 3^rd street and follow that across 97 and his house is up the road across from the cemetery. There is a library next to the courthouse, but it’s really small and always full of kids, so it’s useless trying to study there. We used to have a coffee and ice cream shop that offered free wi-fi, but that business tanked. This was right off of 181 next to. I work at the Dollar General, which is right up 181 next to Wal Mart. It’s part of a strip mall kind of deal, just like the HEB Heritage Plaza. It only takes about ten minutes to get to work from my house, which is a nice set up.

For the most part, my close friends live either in or around Floresville. Julian, Eddie, and Marisa live in town nearby, but Aaron, Joel, and Yvette all live either on a county road or in a subdivision. It doesn’t take long for us to get to each other’s houses, maybe about 15 minutes at the most. When we’re all together, we love to go to San Antonio and chill. Most of the time, it’s a movie at the quarry, eating at Chili’s at City Base Landing, or Starbucks on Military. On rare occasions, however, we get to go out to a concert at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Selma or Sunset Station, which is located right behind the Alamo dome in downtown San Antonio. Selma is about 50 minutes to an hour away from us, so it’s not often we do this. Sunset Station is pretty close, taking only about 40 minutes from Floresville. \

All in all, Floresville is a quaint little town that offers just about anything that we really need. Major areas of interest are located further away, so that’s a disadvantage. When you think about the problems that we don’t experience because we’re such a small town, it really balances it out. We don’t have a huge drug and gang problem and there’s certainly minimal traffic around peak hours of the day compared to San Antonio, so I would say we’re doing pretty good.

Alamo Movie Relavance

In 1960, United Artists released a movie portraying the battle of the Alamo starring John Wayne. This was the first of two major Alamo movie releases, the second being the 2004 film starring Billy Bob Thornton. In both films, the movie star (John Wayne, Billy Bob) play Davy Crockett, with the only difference being that the newer version sort of humanizes the character, rather than him being some uber hero of some sort.

The older film seems to greatly follow myth and popular belief rather than dig into the facts. It shows Travis as a very articulate man, and this kind of makes the other characters seem really dumbed down and simple, which I think is kind of odd. Also, like I said earlier, the 1960 film shows Crockett as very heroic. There's no denying that he was probably a brave soldier, but the film just glorifies him so much that it's hard to take seriously. Also, it shows Jim Bowie receiving a wound to the leg from a cannonball and taken into the church for shelter and care. In reality, Bowie was actually ill and was bedridden, but the cannonball wound is way more interesting and heroic, so they went with that. Crockett's death is also glorified, showing him blowing up an ammunition room. But how could this be when real life survivor Susanna Dickinson saw him dead on the ground in the plaza? Also, it portrays Bowie and Travis as having very clashing personalities as they argue very often throughout the film.

The 2004 film really tried to steer away from the myths and fables that people were so used to being shown. The film was directed by John Lee Hancock, a native Texan who took great care to ensure that the legend that he holds close to his heart is portrayed as accurately as possible. He did this with much success, as the film had little historical inaccuracies and certainly a considerable amount less than it's 1960 predecessor. For instance, the facade of the church (which people coincidentally mistake for the front of the Alamo) is missing the top arch or hump that make it so recognizable today. They did this because that hump was not actually added until years after the famous battle when the church and the rest of the mission was restored by United States Army soldiers during their occupation of the mission. It isn't completely without flaws though, because it still showed Travis and Bowie arguing many times throughout the film, as in the other.

To me, this made the newer movie much more believable and realistic than the older movie. It's understandable, though, because they did the best with what they could during that time period (1960). They didn't have a huge budget and they cared little for historic accuracy and instead went for the glorified version of the event rather than digging deeper for the truth. I suppose overall that was a good move for them because people probably didn't really want all this history and education in a movie. Nowadays, however, people want to be entertained and walk away with a new understanding or viewpoint on something they probably knew little to nothing about anyways. The newer film really enriches the entertainment with education. Coincidentally, the film oddly did not do well at all in the box offices. It never broke even with the ticket sales after shelling out $140 million for the shooting, production, and marketing of the movie.

Over all, I think the newer movie with Billy Bob holds more historic value than the older and is in turn more entertaining (at least in my opinion). The John Wayne movie is okay, but just for kicks. I don't really think it was that awesome or anything. Maybe just for the action and the "what if" factor, but it doesn't really spark my interest in terms of history. But for some odd reason, it won so many Academy Awards it would make your head spin. If anything, I would recommend that somebody should watch both movies and compare them and also see how accurate they are. In either case, it's just a safer bet to research the battle in the textbooks or online to get the real information.