Reconstructing North America

Abstract

This essay compares the failed secessionist movements of Juan Cortina in south Texas and Louis Riel in Manitoba. Johnson explains that Canada, the U.S., and Mexico “were intent on extinguishing competing sovereignties in the territory that they claimed as their own.” In the borderlands, followers of Cortina and Riel resisted incorporation into national communities in hopes of maintaining autonomy and self-governance, using some of the same liberal capitalist arguments as their oppressors. With the “imposition of Canadian and U.S. sovereignty in Cortina and Riel’s homelands,” “property regimes and legal systems further marginalize[d] ethnic Mexicans and Métis in both economic and political terms.” In both places resistance was ultimately overwhelmed, but “the tragedy lay not only in what befell these communities in a material sense, but also in the foreclosure of the possibility of equitable belonging that had once beckoned Juan Cortina, Louis Riel, and their countless followers.”