|
Patrick Chases Alamo Remake CEO Off
after Buckingham Decries Woke Posting
Capitol Inside
October 25, 2025
San Antonio businesswoman Hope Andrade - the first Hispanic woman to serve as secretary of state in Texas, took the wheel at the Alamo Trust on Saturday in the wake of Kate Rogers' abrupt resignation the day before from her position as the chief executive officer for a non-profit organization that's in charge of the project.
Rogers' sudden departure came hours after Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick demanded her exit based largely on a college paper that she composed as a graduate student two years before while serving as the public-private partnerships executive director. The powerful state Senate president cited "troubling" comments in Rogers' doctoral dissertation in a letter that he fired off on Thursday to the Alamo Trust's board of director in a push to run Rogers out of the lead overseer role for the old mission's remake.
"These writings are incompatible with the telling of the history of the battle of the Alamo," the lieutenant governor told the board in the unusual communique.
Patrick cited a difference of opinions on the presentation of the landmark's history as a driving cause for the Rogers ouster. Patrick wants to keep the focus on the famous battle during the Texas Revolution while local officials favor a more expansive approach that includes information about the mission's home to indigenous people in its early stages.
But that's not what got Rogers the boot as the non-profit's president and field general. Rogers put her future as the engineer on the Alamo restoration at serious risk in the college paper in question when she mentioned the book Forget the Alamo and declined to condemn it as fake news.
Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, whose agency is managing the restoration project for the Trust's board, actually set the stage for Rogers' ouster on October 14 when she launched a probe into a social media post by the non-profit promoting Indigenous People's Day. Indigenous people is a term for native Americans.
"This is frankly unacceptable and it has been deleted," Buckingham declared in a post on X. "Woke has no place at the Alamo. The
@TXGLO is
is investigating how the Alamo Trust reviews and approves content for social media posts to Official Alamo accounts. We will be holding those responsible accountable and will be implementing a new process to ensure my office has oversight."
Written by a trio of Texans that includes a pair of journalist and a Democratic operative, Forget the Alamo ignited the lieutenant governor's wrath with its publication by Penguin Press in 2021. Patrick strenuously objected to the book's theme - that the men who died at the Alamo were fighting for the preservation of slavery and fueled by promises of land grants in exchange for their service. That was heresy in the eyes of the lieutenant governor, who's a true believer when it comes to the yarn about the Texans' clash with Santa Ana and the Mexican army revolved on freedom and liberty exclusively.
The excerpt from the dissertation that Rogers produced in 2023 in a quest for a PhD contained one long and rambling sentence about the book that Patrick did everything in his power to try to discredit. It featured the words myth and heroes in quotation marks - apparently to show that she was quoting from the book. Rogers did not endorse either theory about the Alamo defenders' motivations in the college paper.
But she mentioned that the city of San Antonio owns the plaza outside the front of the Alamo - and she pointed out that an advisory council supports the inclusion of the mission's history from the time it was a home for indigenous people to the Texas Revolution to the civil rights era in the presentation of the narrative on which the site will be promoted.
The now-former Alamo Trust CEO had a separate line in the college project about the need for academic freedom without interference from political officials. Rogers talked in the dissertation about the balancing act that her position as the president and CEO of the Alamo Trust required when answering to both the state and the city. "Locally, the politics are quite different and at the opposite end of the spectrum,"
Rogers wrote at the time. Rogers said that the Land Office staff remained on "high alert" on decision with potential political implications. She noted Patrick's "personal passion" for the project and how his team had been heavily involved in the project since securing a $50 million investment as seed capital four years ago.
"Personally, I would like to see the Alamo become a beacon for historical reconciliation and a place that brings people together instead of tearing them apart, but politically that may not be possible at this time," Rogers wrote. "For all of these reasons, I had to be very careful with my study and its implications as it could have negative consequences for the $300 million Alamo Plan as well as my job."
Welcome Wilson Jr. - the chairman of the six-person board for Alamo Trust, Inc. - said that Andrade was the natural choice to fill the vacuum left by the successful Patrick power play.
“The Board’s unanimous vote in naming Hope as our next leader is no surprise,” Wilson said in a statement. “She is a steady hand, knows what needs to be done, and has the confidence of our benefactors, donors, and local and state leadership involved in the project.
Andrade, who's 76, served on the Texas Transportation Commission for nearly a year when Republican Rick Perry was the governor. Perry appointed Andrade as secretary of state and she served for four years until stepping down in 2012.
more to come ...
| 
