National Identity on a Shifting Border: Texas and New Mexico in the Age of Transition, 1821-1848

Abstract

Traditionally, we have told the story of how nations emerged as a triumphant tale of domination exerted by a determined center over reluctant peripheries and by persuasive officials over skeptical masses. The literature depicts state formation and nation building as originating from the core outward and from top to bottom. Sitting at the apex of all political and social organizations, the state has been granted the leading role. After all, it was the state that built the infrastructure linking the center to all corners of the nation, increasing the network of communications within a territory and thus helping integrate a national market. Under the auspices of the state, a nationalist ideology was fashioned and disseminated to all prospective citizens. And it was the state bureaucracy, employing novel means of communication such as mass education, that perpetuated the nation unto subsequent generations. Whether accounts spotlight institutions or identities, the underlying theme is centralization: The national state wins out over lesser political organizations and potential challengers, and the people divest themselves of previous ethnic or local loyalties as the nation becomes their overriding identity.1 This core-periphery, top-down model has recently come under criticism. In particular, E. J. Hobsbawm has made a crucial methodological point: Although nations tend to be promoted from above, they nevertheless have to be analyzed and understood from below, in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist. People's perceptions (and not nationalist propaganda) constitute the most critical yardstick against which we can measure the success of attempts at national construction. Historians and theorists have been understandably concerned with state-sponsored nationalist discourse, but they have been less adept at explaining why this discourse