AbstractFrom the Alamo to Sea World, the San Antonio tourist experience reiterates an historical and ethnic narrative that positions the Anglo‐American subject in relation to the Mexican as ‘other’. Like the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, this strategy of definition and containment is inseparable from profound ambivalences about the possibility of effectively ‘naturalizing’ difference. In ‘remembering the Alamo’, the tourist is faced with the possibility of dis‐integration and an inversion of the colonizer/coloniz