In the Mean Time: Temporal Colonization and the Mexican American Literary Tradition by Erin Murrah-Mandril

Abstract

Reviewed by: In the Mean Time: Temporal Colonization and the Mexican American Literary Tradition by Erin Murrah-Mandril Guadalupe Escobar Erin Murrah-Mandril, In the Mean Time: Temporal Colonization and the Mexican American Literary Tradition. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2020. 186 pp. Hardcover, $50; e-book, $47.50. In the Mean Time treats early Mexican American literature in relation to forms of time. Building on the work of Latinx scholars such as María Cotera, Marissa López, José Aranda, Rodrigo Lazo, and Jesse Alemán, Erin Murrah-Mandril considers four Mexican American authors: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Miguel Antonio Otero, Adina De Zavala, and Jovita González. Her analysis and historiography of recovered Chicanx texts, produced between 1880 and 1945, excavates how the United States weaponized time as a colonizing trick to dispossess, silence, and disenfranchise Mexicanorigin subjects following the US–Mexican War (1846–48), by which Mexico transferred nearly half of its northern territory to the United States. The book's title draws attention to the language of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that resulted in a traumatic process of exclusion: the delayed full citizenship of Mexican Americans. Grounding her argument in border studies, Murrah-Mandril reveals how "the mean time is more than a historical period; it is a mode of colonial domination—both the process of disenfranchisement and the rhetoric used to justify that process" (4). The first half of the study is devoted to the material logic behind the coloniality of time. Chapter 1 situates different forms of time (legal, transactional) in the nineteenth-century novel The Squatter and the Don by prominent Mexican American author María Amparo Ruiz de Burton within the context of US railroad systems [End Page 391] transforming time through its standardization. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, it articulates a reconceptualization of community and political economies through the homogenization of capitalist time. Ruiz de Burton's novel is typically read as resisting US expansionism involving the gradual loss of Californio property and legal standing in the wake of the 1848 Treaty, even as it problematically engages with "genealogies of ethnicity," as Silvio Torres-Saillant has shown, by aligning the central patriarch, Don Mariano, with inherited land and social advantages from Spanish and Mexican governments at the expense of Indigenous removal and subjugation. Murrah-Mandril instead interprets The Squatter and the Don as "an attempt to grapple with the US colonization of time, because time is the medium through which racialization occurs" (28). Chapter 2 focuses on the cultural work of Miguel Antonio Otero, the first Nuevomexicano territorial governor of New Mexico (1897–1906) predating its official statehood in 1912, and author of My Life on the Frontier (1935, 1939), My Nine Years as Governor (1940), and The Real Billy the Kid: With New Light on the Lincoln County War (1936 [1998]). It highlights how Otero regarded Nuevomexicano identity not as "foreign" but "native" in his writings, recalling the positionality of "foreigners in their own land," à la Juan Seguín. Murrah-Mandril demonstrates that "Otero's attempts to modernize New Mexico to meet Anglo American social and economic demands never admitted him or New Mexico into the fold of US modernity because modernist US political and literary representations of New Mexico and Nuevomexicanos continued to place them outside the temporal flow of modern historical subjectivity" (51). The remainder of the book delves more deeply into temporary ideologies to complicate the facile binary of presence/absence. Chapter 3 investigates how Adina De Zavala's History and Legends of the Alamo (1917) disrupts US modernity's sense of the past and glorification of Anglo Texan superiority by engaging in notions of inheritance linked to those absent and those ignored. Dubbed the "Angel of the Alamo" for her Texan preservation efforts, Adina De Zavala was the granddaughter of Lorenzo de Zavala, a Mexican statesman who contributed to drafting the Mexican Constitution of 1824 as well as the Constitution of the Republic of [End Page 392] Texas. Murrah-Mandril convincingly contends that "by inserting herself into the archive and into relationships with specters of the archive, De Zavala opens herself to a new subjectivity outside the linear time of debt and restitution...