Spatial and Discursive Violence in the U.S. Southwest by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spatial and Discursive Violence in the U.S. Southwest by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita William Orchard SPATIAL AND DISCURSIVE VIOLENCE IN THE U.S. SOUTHWEST. By Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. Durham: Duke University Press. 2021. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita have made enduring contributions to Chicana/o studies. In Telling Identities (1995), Sánchez examined the testimonios of Californio elites who lost their land after the U.S.-Mexico War. She discovered a counter-history that revealed the social conflicts that resulted in the Californios’ dispossession. Telling Identities was a milestone early study of 19th century Mexican American history and writing. Together, Sánchez and Pita edited the writing of 19th century writer María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, whose work, especially the novel The Squatter and the Don (1885), galvanized the study of 19th century Latinx literature and drew attention to the recuperation of texts through the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project, initiated in 1992. In their new book, Spatial and Discursive Violence in the U.S. Southwest, Sánchez and Pita continue to examine land loss, expanding their consideration to three new regions — Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas — and taking into account the effect of overlapping colonizations on Indigenous as well as Mexican American communities. The Marxist term “enclosure” is key to their study. The classical view of enclosure posits it as a shift from feudal to capitalist modes of production as communal spaces are transformed into private property. Sánchez and Pita see enclosure as “an ongoing and recurrent process” (3). Their title names the two aspects of enclosure they examine: spatial violence that is associated with state actions like war, genocide, and theft, and discursive violence that produces new subjects as modes of production are transformed, generating new discourses of citizenship and race. In the work of dispossessed writers, Sánchez and Pita detect a “critical memory” that has no nostalgic relation to the past, but instead registers “the collective scars left by history” (204). As they examine each region, they provide periodizations of the enclosures specific to a locale, taking us from Indigenous communal systems of production through the semifeudal systems associated with Spanish colonization to the capitalist modes of the United States. These deep histories are distinct for each region and always involve a multiplicity of temporalities. The chapter on Oklahoma considers the seizure of Indigenous land through a sustained reading of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit (1990), which chronicles the Osage [End Page 35] murders of the 1920s that were motivated by a desire to obtain the Osage's oil-rich land. Sánchez and Pita’s reading of Hogan’s novel clearly contextualizes the events in the novel, and demonstrates how Hogan remixes and critiques the dominant historiography about these events. Unlike the chapters on New Mexico and Texas, this chapter moves from Mean Spirit to Hogan’s other novels and works by Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday, none of which take place in Oklahoma. One wonders why the Native American writers are all contained in this chapter, and why the chapters on New Mexico and Texas deal only with Mexican American writers. The New Mexico chapter, in particular, would have conveyed a richer sense of the multiplicity of temporalities by including Indigenous voices like Silko’s. The chapters on New Mexico and Texas use writings by Mexican Americans to reveal the social conflicts at play in the contest for land while also demonstrating how these writers came to understand themselves as historical subjects. These chapters are noteworthy for drawing our attention to Mexican American complicity in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and showing the ways Mexican American writers negotiated accommodation to the forces overwhelming them as they attempted to hold onto ways of life that they were rapidly losing. Working across a large body of writing, Sánchez and Pita demonstrate how literature helps us understand the everyday experience of enclosure from the standpoint of the dispossessed and how “Chicano/a land narratives in differing ways respond to, reject, or acquiesce to hegemonic narratives of US settlement in the Southwest” (203). Given their interest in both Indigenous and Mexican...