Remembering (and Rethinking) the McCombs Frontier Americana Collection
A visual, material, and spatial analysis of who “earns” the right to create the social and cultural image of Southwestern’s place in history
The Red & Charline McCombs Campus Center finished construction in the Spring of 1998. Funded by a $6 million gift (one of the largest donations in the history of Southwestern), and named after the donors Billy Joe "Red" and Charline McCombs. Both Red and Charline McCombs attended Southwestern, and Red McCombs was a longtime Board member. Please see the entry “Who was Red McCombs?” for more details.
The McCombs Campus Center features dining facilities, meeting rooms, and a ballroom space. When it was built, it combined and replaced both the University Commons, the circular dining hall that used to be located to the north of the Chapel, and the Student Union Building, which had served as the campus hub since the 1950s on the same site as the current McCombs Center. Soon after its completion, the McCombs Center came to be known among students as the “heart of campus.”
Part of the McCombs Center design included two intersecting hallways of glass exhibit cases on the second floor surrounding the ballrooms, which were filled with part of Red McCombs’ “Frontier Americana” collection. The loaned collection, originally intended to be placed there only temporarily, included a wide range of objects, from books, to skulls, clothing, Native American artifacts, and lots of weaponry. Accenting the startling array of pistols, rifles, knives, and swords were also a set of cannons placed at the beginning of the hallway, casually sitting next to the sofas. At the very end of the hallway, high above the floor, was an oil painting depicting the Alamo. The collection maintained its place on campus from the Spring of 1998 to the Fall of 2023.
This is an entry about what it meant for that particular collection to be displayed in that particular place for that particular period of time, and what it tells us about the influence of donors on the everyday physical and cultural environment of campus. Indeed, while many students today recognize more McCombs’ influence on the physical infrastructure, his influence on the ideological infrastructure of Southwestern is even more important. And nowhere is this more apparent than with the Frontier Americana Collection, which reflects McCombs’ fascination with Anglo myths about “the frontier” and Texas Independence and the early Republic of Texas.
In 2017, Red McCombs was interviewed by the San Antonio Express-News about the Frontier Americana collection, asking why he chose to collect these weapons and conquest-related items in the first place. He said that what fascinated him was that these artifacts were a part of “who was here before we were here.” This simultaneously fetishizes and erases the experience of Native Americans in the history of Texas and the U.S.
The Frontier Americana Collection is not the only example of McCombs’ objectification/commercialization of Native American people and culture. As the founder of the Red McCombs Automotive Group, he owned a variety of car dealerships across the state of Texas. The Red McCombs’ Hyundai dealership located off the Northwest Loop 410 in San Antonio formerly displayed a large fiberglass statue of a Native American, posed with a feathered headdress and raised hand. You can almost hear him saying “How,” like an old Western movie. The “marketing gimmick” maintained its place in front of the dealership for over 40 years before it was taken down in July of 2023, shortly after McCombs died. In announcing that the statue was being removed, the Vice President of Marketing for McCombs Enterprises Peter Brodnitz explained that the giant figure no longer met Hyundai's guidelines for the look and feel of their dealerships, yet he also stated that "It is the end of an era. We're bummed about it."
The Navajo Times details a different instance where McCombs proposed a multi-million dollar real estate development of hotels, casinos, golf courses, and upscale housing on Navajo land near Lake Powell. In 2009 the LeChee, Navajo Mountain, and Ts'ah Bii Kin chapters rejected the land development proposal, each chapter highlighting the land’s significance as a sacred place where they prayed for protection when their people were taken to Hwééldi (a Place of Suffering).
Contextualizing the placement of the Frontier Americana collection at Southwestern with these other instances of the exploitation of Native American people, culture, and land led me to the conclusion that what the collection displays most of all is McCombs’ “fascination” with a very partial and problematic version of Texas history, rooted in a settler-colonial mentality that glorifies the Anglo history of Texas, rather than a recognition of the systematic brutality that the Native American people faced during this time period.
For as long as it was there, the materialization of these events through the collection’s presence in the Campus Center invoked conflicting feelings within the Southwestern community, from shame, to fear, or even disgust depending on an individual’s identity and their social, and embodied relationship to the colonial history of Texas. This conflict led many within the community to question the ongoing presence of the collection in such a prominent place in the building known to be the “heart” of campus, as it does not at first glance portray a history related to Southwestern. However, by portraying a history of Texas the way it did, it became intertwined with the history of Southwestern as Texas’ oldest institution of higher education. That’s because the McCombs collection and Southwestern’s own history both normalize the same Anglo settler-colonialist myths.
While the question of whether the collection should have been displayed in the first place is a complex debate on its own, its placement for over a generation shows how ideas of Southwestern are created and perceived based on an individual’s position within the community as a student, faculty, and of course a donor, with an emphasis on how these titles are intertwined with the social construction of race and ethnicity.
As a donor, McCombs had a certain way he wanted his funding to affect the campus space. Unlike other donors, who might not have an embodied relationship to the campus from the student perspective, the creation of this affective response is heightened by his experience as an alum. Although the university Administration markets Southwestern’s history as the oldest institution in Texas, this fascination with/appreciation of the more gruesome aspects of Texas’ history and its colonization of indigenous people runs contrary to their push towards diversity and inclusion initiatives. At the same time, the Administration is incentivized to appease donors by implementing their ideas on campus to maintain funding for the university.
Other Placing Memory entries on McCombs’ Frontier Americana collection affirm how these conflicting messages invoke unique responses from students as they question how/if their identities as racial minorities are respected by the institution outside of this marketing of diversity and inclusion.
This contrast between the affective responses elicited by the collection reveals how McCombs’ spatial influence on the campus through the materiality of the collection itself, and his name inscribed onto various campus landmarks, leads to an ideological influence that suggests a prescribed attitude towards the colonial history of oppression of Native American people. As students navigate these spaces built by McCombs’ influence, this ideology translates to the current campus culture, leading them to question whether the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion actually manifests positive experiences for racial minorities on campus or is rather another reinforcement of the centrality of whiteness.
In analyzing this conflict in the creation of a campus culture through the Frontier Americana collection, I question the ways members of the Southwestern campus at different institutional levels observe and reckon with the ways individual voices create a collective image of Southwestern that shapes the way community members interact with the campus space.
