Mexican War Research Articles

Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction by Benjamin Cooper

Reviewed by: Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction by Benjamin Cooper Edward Tang (bio) Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction benjamin cooper Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018 240 pp. Benjamin Cooper's Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction offers a fascinating and wide-ranging look at writings by and about veterans published during or after three formative conflicts: the American Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. Linking works from the 1770s to the 1880s, the author asserts that ordinary veterans participated in the literary marketplace to remind the public of their service and sacrifices. These actions, Cooper emphasizes, were not so much calls for sympathy as they were demands for respect from a nation that they helped to establish and then reshape through their martial endeavors. Civilian readers throughout the long nineteenth century, however, mostly ignored veterans and their concerns, even as the nation commemorated its democratic values and opportunities. These selective memories came about, in part, because audiences associated former soldiers and sailors with having the corrupt intentions of beggars, thieves, and confidence men who sought to take advantage of the public's goodwill when requesting pensions or other types of aid. A developing democratic society in the United States also saw itself engaged in "people's wars," in [End Page 595] which citizens of all stripes, and not just combat veterans, contributed to the nation's past triumphs. Cooper usefully builds on prior scholarship such as Dana D. Nelson's Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States (2015). Like Nelson, Cooper explores the efforts of ordinary people who asserted their public presence through print, or had their stories recovered in more established authors' works, even if these latter writings were unsympathetic to commoners' interests and grievances. In this manner, Veteran Americans evaluates "how literature helps manufacture American citizenship" by promoting a sense of cultural and national belonging for those on the margins of society (10). Cooper focuses on veterans as a distinct group with their own genre, as framed through memoirs, pension and prisoner-of-war narratives, newspaper submissions, pamphlets, and other material. Thus one value of Veteran Americans lies in its inclusion of texts not often examined by, or familiar to, scholars of early American culture. This archive reveals disenfranchised individuals who felt removed from how the larger populace of noncombatants celebrated their nation as a participatory democracy. Part of the problem the veterans' narratives encountered, Cooper continues, was that they competed against more popular and critically accepted genres, from historical romances in the early nineteenth century to works of realism in the latter part of the period, that adopted former servicemen's words, memories, and experiences. Stephan Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1895) presents one example, wherein the novelist never faced combat and was not born until after the Civil War. Despite veterans' facing such problems, Cooper is convincing in his argument that figures such as Joseph Plumb Martin, who fought in the Revolutionary War, "were not simply silenced victims whose injustices were interchangeable but rather wry and inventive literary practitioners" (79). An additional contribution of Veteran Americans is its chronological reach across the long nineteenth century, from which the author evaluates the broad historical overlaps with, and divergences from, each generation's war and the narratives spun from them. This approach makes Cooper's work distinctive since a large body of scholarship has assessed memories of war, public rituals, democratic ideals, and the writings about these categories within specific postwar periods. Alfred F. Young's The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (2000), Sarah J. [End Page 596] Purcell's Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (2010), and John Mac Kilgore's Mania for Freedom: American Literatures of Enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War (2016) are examples that consider the cultural currents within the post-Revolutionary era. For the years after the Civil War, we have Elizabeth Young's Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War (1999), David W. Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory (2001), and Brook...

Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War by Philip F. Gura

Reviewed by: Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War by Philip F. Gura Tim Roberts (bio) Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War. By Philip F. Gura. ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 328. Cloth, $29.95.) Scholars have remarked on the litany of social experiments, many committed to moral and political reform, which flamed in the early American republic. Alice Felt Tyler's and Ronald Walters's surveys explained mass movements including temperance, school reform, and antislavery as well as the more eccentric phenomena of utopian communities and phrenology. Rooted in Protestant evangelical religion, these reforms reflected Americans' grappling with the country's diversification and expansion and the spread of market forces. Tyler attributed this reform era to Americans' general optimism, predisposing them to be open to change. Walters, conversely, located the reforms' impulse in middle-class Americans' concern about modernization, along with confidence that improved or corrected behavior could cure modernization's evils. Tyler emphasized the reformers' lasting impact after the Civil War; Walters deemed their ambition to thwart capitalism a failure.1 Philip Gura offers a different approach to explore this reform impulse, providing not a social history survey but an interpretation of selected important reformers: George Ripley, Horace Greeley, William B. Greene, Orson Squire Fowler, Mary Gove Nichols, Henry Thoreau, and John Brown. Like his predecessors, Gura sees social reform principally characterized by faith in individual agency and in anticipation that the nation's institutions would respond to Americans' capacity for good behavior. He emphasizes, however, the central impact of the Panic of 1837, the complexity of whose domestic and international causes escaped reformers' (and most Americans') understanding. Rather than lobby for greater government control of financial institutions and/or commodity prices, reformers, reflecting a general attitude of the age previously documented by Scott Sandage, attributed the problem to individual moral corruption, which, they believed, precipitated, rather than resulted from, financial failure. But for reformers, self-examination could [End Page 192] lead to repentance; newly conscientious individuals imagined, and many constructed, various prototypes of a good society. A few radicals even engaged in dramatic acts of rebellion against the corrupted institutions of an unregulated market society.2 In its organization around selected key or representative figures, Gura's book is reminiscent of Daniel Walker Howe's study of various individuals who were intent on self-improvement as a basis for remaking themselves and their society. But while Howe noted the success stories of America's culture of self-construction before the Civil War, Gura, like Walters, emphasizes the flawed idealism of his coterie. Ripley's Brook Farm utopian community, for example, championed self-realization but could not earn enough income to be sustainable. Greeley's interests, meanwhile, were too eclectic, and his advocacy of Associationism, a model of cooperative work and living adapted from the French socialist Charles Fourier, seemed, to many Americans, too socialist. Too late, Gura implies, Greeley realized that it was slavery that needed confronting.3 Likewise, fearful businessmen blocked Greene's advocacy of mutual banking laws, a stateless system he adapted from the writings of the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in which all of a bank's subscribers, regardless of financial condition, could borrow the bank's fiat money at a minimal interest rate in order to buy land. Fowler's bestselling books about how the human brain's different regions directed certain behaviors or personality traits attracted a range of readers, from women interested in the benefits of looser clothing to prison wardens seeking to cure inmates. But these fascinations hardly constituted institutional reform. Nichols, like others, eschewed abolitionism because of a "preoccupation with another kind of bondage closer to home" (204). For her this meant advocacy of women's autonomy through their education on alternative nutrition, hydropathy, sexual activity, practice of birth control, and rejection of marriage, another influence of Fourier. Of Gura's reform leaders, Thoreau and Brown came closest to grappling with what became the critical issue of the era, slavery. Thoreau famously called for civil disobedience against the Mexican War, which he considered a proslavery conquest. Yet while a man's imprisonment [End Page...

Violence, urban space and everyday life in the Mexican War on Drugs: Tijuana as a case Study

The following paper explores the spatiality of Mexico’s war on drugs by developing an analytical frame to examine urban space in Tijuana, a Mexican northern border city. Tijuana has been signified and construed as an unsafe and violent place within the context of the Mexican antinarcotics strategy. Its construction as a dangerous space coincides with its urban and demographic expansion, as well as its connection with the global circuits of drug distribution and the implementation of the war on drugs within the city. By representing it as an unsafe space, it has been authorized the exertion of unlimited violence upon its users and inhabitants by both state and private agents producing forms of extreme citizen vulnerability. As a consequence, both the political life of the city and its citizens´ rights have been reduced to their bare minimum. Building on the analysis of Tijuana´s symbolic, demographic and urban configuration, the consequences these processes have had upon the production of the city´s residents’ political identities are explored. By delving into the microphysics of the geographical imaginations on criminality and drugs in Tijuana, this paper contributes to the analysis on the ways in which the exertion of violence within the war on drugs is linked to the variegated forms urban space is interpreted by both citizens and authorities.

Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies: Women and the Mexican–American War by John M. Belohlavek

Reviewed by: Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies: Women and the Mexican–American War by John M. Belohlavek Michael Scott Van Wagenen (bio) Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies: Women and the Mexican–American War. By John M. Belohlavek. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Pp. 306. Cloth, $45.00.) The U.S.–Mexican war has experienced a resurgence of academic interest over the last two decades. Once considered a "forgotten" war, the 1846–1848 invasion of Mexico has provided contemporary scholars an oft-overlooked lens to analyze many of the political, economic, and social challenges of the era. In spite of progress, a significant hole remained in the historiography: a comprehensive analysis of the role of women in the conflict. John M. Belohlavek's transnational study, Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies: Women and the Mexican–American War, has gone a long way in filling that gap. The war with Mexico required great sacrifice of [End Page 814] women on both sides of the conflict, although in very different contexts. Belohlavek places American women's experience within the setting of changing gender roles and expectations created by the Industrial Revolution. He similarly contextualizes Mexican women within the political and social instability of their newly formed nation. While each group labored under differing cultural limitations, both fought vigorously to establish their place within the traditionally masculine sphere of warfare. Belohlavek has a knack for narrative and brings to life the stories of individual women to better understand the challenges they faced as two neighboring republics fought over territory. Expanding beyond the titular roles, Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies documents women serving in a wide variety of positions, including guerilla fighters, combat nurses, seamstresses, porters, camp followers, journalists, financiers, and antiwar activists. Belohlavek examines these multiple roles from varied perspectives including the attitudes of Americans toward Mexican women and those of Mexicans toward American women. This transnational approach is particularly helpful in understanding the major cultural differences between the nations that exacerbated tensions along a tenuous frontier. Belohlavek's account of the women accompanying the Mormon Battalion is particularly interesting. Like the Mormon soldiers, these women suffered under the disdain and distrust of the army, yet marched thousands of miles in support of their husbands and sons. Mexican women in the conquered territories of the north proved far more generous in their treatment of their beleaguered Anglo sisters, suggesting an unspoken bond that surpassed politics and prejudice. Thousands of Mexican women also chose to follow their men to the theaters of war and shared in all the dangers and privations of the army, but without pay or glory. These soldaderas cooked, cleaned, and hauled equipment on campaigns, then rushed headlong into battle to nurse the wounded and comfort the dying. Indeed, contemporary accounts of American soldiers note the dozens of women who lay dead on the battlefields in the aftermath of the violence. Among these was the celebrated "Angel of Monterrey" who braved ball and shell to care for both Mexican and American wounded who littered the approach to this important northern city. To the horror of American troops, the unnamed Mexican woman was cut down by grapeshot, giving rise to numerous tribute poems and songs in the United States and paving the way for a larger acceptance of Mexicans in American culture. [End Page 815] While at times celebrated, Mexican women could just as easily fall prey to American violence. Volunteer troops were notoriously brutal toward local populations and at times raped and murdered civilian women, prompting families with resources to flee occupied villages for the mountains and countryside. While several past authors have cited American fascination with the "señoritas" they encountered in their travels in Mexico, Belohlavek delves deeper to examine the ultimate fate of budding romantic relations between enemies. While some Yankee soldiers overcame the racial prejudices of their culture, military regulations and family pressures from both sides doomed their erstwhile relationships with Mexican women to tragic failure. Poignant scenes of tearful separation likely occurred whenever American troops withdrew from occupied villages. Particularly moving are the stories of Mexican women whom their compatriots viewed as collaborating with the enemy. As is typical of forced occupations throughout history, after the military evacuated, civilians took their...

Invocations of the Body

Invocations of the Body Bryon Dickon (bio) Museum of the Americas J. Michael Martinez Penguin Books www.penguinrandomhouse.com 112 Pages; Print, $20.00 In his third collection of poems, Museum of the Americas, the speakers of J. Michael Martinez tell a narrative in the language of trans-historical bodies. Each poem in the collection is an exhibit, rich in allegory, and coalesces narrative and history to display the sociopolitical realities of colonialism and the immigrant experience. In addition to combining history and story-telling, Martinez also expertly incorporates literary arts with visual ones, with a photograph, a casa painting, or a postcard opening each section. These various ways of telling come together in Museum of the Americas to communicate the historical and transnational rigors associated with the bodies of immigrants. In the poem "Instructions for Identifying 'Illegal' Immigrants", the speaker invites the reader to "Consider moving through / the preface to home." Although this poem does not open the collection, its invitation begins to shape the narrative of what is to come. In Museum of the Americas, the body is the magnetic center of the poems, representing both historical and national identity. Even as those boundaries are crossed, the body remains in sharp focus throughout the poems. In this poem, the speaker says, "the immigrant will be / dried leaves amongst owl eggs / & cradles / of lacquered oak." The speaker here strikes a bargain between transcending national boundaries and maintaining a sense of self. The speaker accomplishes this through frequent invocations of the body and flesh throughout the poem. In what started as a set of instructions for identifying immigrant bodies, the meaning of the poem morphs into a manual for identifying and understanding the intersections between their bodies and identities. Martinez's collection offers a profound reading of the body through poems and photographs. The second section is accompanied by a postcard by Walter H. Horne entitled Execution in Mexico. The rest of the poems are in dialogue with this and other postcards published by Horne, depicting the violence committed against Latinx bodies during the Mexican Revolution. In this way, Martinez's speakers depict a history of violence by engaging with images of battered bodies across national and historical boundaries. The speaker in "The Mexican War Photo Postcard Company" prefaces the poems that come after by providing a brief history of the Horne post cards without sacrificing the writer's magnificent talent for rich allegory and lyricism. The speaker takes on the function of a docent, describing the images, often in vivid detail. This section does much to show off Martinez's poetic talent for incorporating vibrant imagery, bringing life to the photographs and casa paintings throughout his well-crafted collection. By the end of the section, the reader truly gets a sense that the subjects of these poems (and the postcards they describe) are anchored to "the dialectic between Self / as Subject & Self / as Object." The penultimate section of the book largely features the work's titular poem "Museum of America." In this poem, the speaker recounts the narrative of what is assumed to be General Lopez de Santa Anna's wood and cork leg. The poem combines historical narrative with wartime mythology, making the wood and cork leg become larger than life, representing "where the migrant body . . . gains political / currency only insofar as it is also a nationally unanchored art object." The leg of General Lopez endures a journey through and between trans-historical narratives as it passes from [End Page 23] Mexico across trans-historical borders vis-à-vis an Illinois sergeant, who exhibited the leg "at county fairs and festivals for 'a dime a peek.'" Through various means, the prosthetic leg appears among the exhibits of P.T. Barnum's American Museum. General Lopez's leg finally meets its final resting place at the Illinois State Military Museum. The way in which the leg is treated as an exhibition speaks volumes about the voyeuristic way in which transnational bodies are viewed. This poem showcases Martinez's skillful alchemy of poetry and creative nonfiction by demonstrating how the removed prosthetic of a Mexican body grows to almost mythological proportions. On the other hand, the exhibition of the...

American Empire: A Global History by A. G. Hopkins

Reviewed by: American Empire: A Global History by A. G. Hopkins Kori Schake (bio) American Empire: A Global History. By A. G. Hopkins. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 1008. $39.95 cloth; $27.95 paper; $27.95 ebook) [End Page 652] Even disagreeing with the premise of American Empire and gnashing my teeth at its indulgences, I was dazzled by its sweep, learned an enormous amount of history I thought I already knew, and sharpened my own thinking about American power by confronting Hopkins' ideas. In important ways, this book parallels with economic history, the political philosophy arc of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, and the cultural arc of Walter Russel Mead's God and Gold. All three tell the story of "conversion of military-fiscal states to liberal constitutions and modern economies," as Hopkins describes it (p. 36). Hopkins traces a storyline across American history, with the U.S. as colony, colonizer, agent of decolonization, non-territorial imperialist, and then, with the 2003 Iraq war, once again colonizer. The genius of this book is treating the U.S. like other colonies in its early chapters; its weakness is a fundamental mischaracterization of imperialism. Hopkins' definition that "imperialism was a form of enforced globalization that sought to increase international integration by delivering public goods to newly colonized regions" is torturously problematic, and exploration of it is not nearly as interesting as the history that comprises most of this book (p. 30). Forcing the argument to "invisible spheres of influence" only serves to blur the line between an empire and a state exercising its political, economic, and cultural power to affect the behavior of other states (p. 23). The latter is not imperial control, it is the practice of international relations. Nor does describing the civil rights movement as "internal decolonization" clarify the issues under examination (p. 40). The effects of the definitional problem are not confined to the post-45 period. Hopkins argues that the U.S. did not attain effective independence from the British Empire until the American Civil War. He makes an interesting case that the U.S. lacked the military and fiscal means to conduct independent policy internationally until after the Civil War, but concedes of the 1803 Louisiana purchase and 1846 Mexican War that expanded U.S. territory by two-thirds that [End Page 653] "even where land was purchased rather than annexed, warfare followed to make occupation secure" (p. 234). Is not conduct of war proof of an independent U.S. policy? Domestically, Hopkins ties American independence to the nation building of westward expansion after the Civil War, but oddly does not credit the earlier rounds of infrastructure such as the canal projects of the New York governors and ambitious plans of John Quincy Adams' administration with the same effect. Hopkins is devastating telling the story of American imperial control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as no different from European colonial powers. That a former colony could be so brutal a colonizer will not surprise historians of the American Indian wars, nor anyone conversant with the history of race in America, but is still dreadful and needs to ballast the buoyancy of American exceptionalism (a literature I share Hopkins' distaste for). But what is genuinely extraordinary about the American experience is that as the country became more powerful internationally, it became more liberal in shaping the order. Like Kathleen Burk in her recent The Lion and The Eagle, Hopkins wants to make all empires equal. The question that frames Hopkins' exploration is "the eternal conundrum of emerging empire: how to extract legitimacy from the barrel of a gun" (p. 4). And he is quite right to cite Leland Jenks' complaint about "selective perceptions of idealists" (p. 21). But there are elements of American policy that are objectively unique to a dominant power and they come directly from the U.S. answer to the question of legitimacy. The U.S. in its primacy created an international order where power was legitimated by agreed rules and practiced through institutions, where countries that shared its political and cultural values were preferentially protected (although they were not the only...

Language Hegemonies and their Discontents: History, Theory, Bilingualism, and Funds of Knowledge

This article reviews hegemonic impositions of language and culture over the history of the Southwest North American Region, beginning with Spanish imperial attempts to erase the existing linguistic and cultural practices of Indigenous communities. It goes on to consider the educational processes by which English language and American culture were imposed on Mexican American children and communities following the American Mexican War. Along with hegemonic attempts to subdue and dominate populations, the article also explores the myriad ways subjugated populations have expressed their discontent, from violent revolt to the creation of alternative educational programs. With reference to the latter, given the well-attested benefits of bilingualism, it is argued that one way to capitalize on the cultural and linguistic capacities of transborder populations is to integrate dual-language education and a funds of knowledge approach. Engagement in Mexican-origin children’s social networks will help educators to counter the process of cultural erasure and to ensure that bilingual programs benefit language-minority students, and not just middle-class, English-dominant students. Without support for Mexican-origin and other Latino/a students to emerge fully as complex cultural beings, we will continue to perpetuate a situation of linguistic and cultural hegemony where populations are restricted from their full human potential.

The effect of violent crime on female decision-making within the household: evidence from the Mexican war on drugs

This paper uses the surge in drug-related violence in Mexico to study the effect of violent crime on married women’s decision-making. Using a fixed-effects regression model, we find that increased violence is associated with a reduction in women’s participation in household decision-making. Yet, the effect is small—at the average, it leads to women making 0.11 fewer decisions, a decrease of 1.2% relative to the baseline value. Further, the effect is short-lived—the effect of past homicides is not significant when controlling for current levels of violent crime. We find that violence is associated with higher probability of working and higher number of working hours for women, while men experience a reduction in their probability of working. This implies that our results are likely not due to changing norms or women losing economic power but rather women spending less time at home while men take on some of the household responsibilities.

Chicanos in America after the Mexican War

Chicanos in America after the Mexican War

A Criminal Commodity Consensus: The Coloniality of State Power, State Crime and the Transformation of Property Relations in Mexico

Mexican human rights organizations accuse the Mexican military and federal police of having taken part in tens of thousands of forced disappearances in the last decade. Curiously, the regions in which people disappear are also sites of displacement and changing patterns of land tenure and production. Yet, property relations are seldom a topic of studies on illegal state activities. Through a state theory lens, including Aníbal Quijano's notion of coloniality of power, this article examines conflicts between private property and communal land tenure such asejidosin Mexico, as two different property regimes. The article aims to show how the state ensemble not only removes legal protection for communal tenure but also mobilizes legal as well as illegal means to force the change of communal lands into private property. Beyond that, the article also aims to show how these changes in land tenure regulation intersect with the Mexican War on Drugs.

The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation and World History, 1500-2000 by John Tutino

Reviewed by: The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation and World History, 1500-2000 by John Tutino Julián Durazo Herrmann John Tutino, The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation and World History, 1500-2000( Princeton: Princeton University Press 2018) John Tutino's most recent book, The Mexican Heartland, is a work of love and a fascinating study of the valley of Mexico [End Page 292] and its immediate surroundings, covering over 500 years of history. By weaving, local, national, and global strands in a complex narrative including political, cultural and economic perspectives, this book is simultaneously illuminating and profoundly stimulating. The Mexican Heartland is no short-term analysis. It draws extensively on Tutino's lifelong studies of Mexican social history and is in constant dialogue with the rest of his work. The book also draws on a breathtakingly extensive bibliography, both in English and Spanish. Moreover, especially for colonial times, Tutino also builds on substantial archival work. The book's local—> national—> global narrative is a powerful instrument and is probably its most enticing dimension. In many ways, The Mexican Heartland seems inspired both by Ferdinand Braudel's La Méditerranée et le Monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949), and Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press,1974), simultaneously demonstrating the Mexican heartland's global historical clout and its political and economic subordination as a (critical) periphery to world capitalism. Tutino's argument is especially convincing for the colonial period and the Mexican war of independence. Thinking counterfactually, had there been no silver in Mexico, how would the world have been different? The history of silver capitalism in the Mexican heartland shows us that it would have been a very different place; neither Spain and England or China and India would have been the same. Unfortunately, Tutino's coverage of the 20th century is less engaging and does not depart substantially from other histories of Mexico. To take an example, a deeper, more detailed study of Zapata and his heritage - actual and symbolic - would be extremely illuminating, especially when set in the book's local—> national—> global narrative, comparing Zapata's strongholds in Morelos to his limited influence in the Mezquital and analyzing the effects of these developments far beyond. Rephrasing the question above, had there been no Zapata, how would the world have been different? Completing the proposed analysis would certainly yield a much longer book. Once again, Braudel's long books come to mind. Nevertheless, I think this effort is necessary to address its ambitious goals, even more so as the existing literature does not engage with this issue. By linking local history to national and global dynamics in a two-way analysis, Tutino engages in theory-building. The main argument is that as long as political, economic, and cultural autonomies hold, local communities can withstand and even prosper while capitalism develops through the establishment of symbiotic domination processes, marked by powerful equilibria. If capitalist forces are weak, communities take the upper hand and may even give rise to "plenty without profit," (183) such as the Mexican heartland experienced during much of the 19th century. If there is a disequilibrium, conflict festers and can explode in violent confrontations (i.e. the Mexican War of Independence and the Mexican Revolution). If autonomies disappear, symbiotic domination is impossible and gives way to all-out capitalist exploitation, penetrating all dimensions of social life, as seems to be the case today. Tutino notes the critical place of gender relations in this process, but unfortunately this dimension of the analysis is rather weak and dependent on secondary sources. Nevertheless, Tutino's discussion of patriarchy, its social and political effects, its challenges and [End Page 293] transformations - most notably the paradoxical ways patriarchy sustains community autonomies - is tantalizing and invites further investigation. Another seductive theme in the book is the evolution of labour relations in the Mexican heartland, which features prominently in the analysis. Tutino underscores the thin, sometimes invisible lines between free and coerced work in colonial times and later on between formal and informal labour, the essence of which persist until this day. Labour...

The Pandora's Box of Solomon Carvalho: Ethnic Transformation in the Age of Manifest Destiny

The Pandora's Box of Solomon CarvalhoEthnic Transformation in the Age of Manifest Destiny Scott Palmer (bio) The photographers recruited to accompany Western expeditions, working alongside surveyors, topographers, and cartographers, were decisive contributors to the popular iconography of expansion in the American West during the nineteenth century. And while these figures were typically employed to provide evidence supporting these expansionist ventures through the visual documentation of land claims and topographic features, their own social and cultural predilections and biases nonetheless frequently emerged in their work as well. Through the auspices of one of the era's strongest advocates of manifest destiny, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the Sephardic Jewish painter and daguerreotypist Solomon Nunes Carvalho (1815–97) produced one of the more ambiguous, and overlooked, accounts by a photographer during this early phase of full-scale westward expansion. In 1853 Carvalho joined an expedition led by Benton's son-in-law, the "Pathfinder" John Charles Frémont (1813–90), a US–Mexican War veteran and among the most famous Americans of his time. Frémont's fifth expedition was to survey the "Santa Fe" route along the 38th parallel for the planned transcontinental railroad favored by Benton. Frémont, who had experimented with expeditionary photography as early as 1842, needed visual proof of the practicality of such a route; Carvalho and the German cartographer Frederick von Egloffstein were two of the men selected to supply it. Even though Frémont forbade journals on his expeditions, Carvalho wrote in secret, penning detailed letters to his wife, some of which later reappeared in John Bigelow's Memoir of the Life and [End Page 281] Public Services of John Charles Fremont (1856), a campaign biography published in support of Frémont's unsuccessful presidential candidacy on the newly formed Republican ticket in 1856.1 These excerpts later became the basis for Carvalho's expanded account of the expedition, Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West (1858), which was dedicated to Frémont's wife (and Thomas Hart Benton's daughter), Jessie.2 Notwithstanding the expedition's purpose, Carvalho's book has relatively little to say about railroads but is instead full of cultural musings and detailed encounters with the inhabitants of the Great Basin, from Ute Indians to Mormon settlers. While both Frémont and Carvalho established close connections with American Indians, they were nonetheless ardent expansionists entirely convinced of their right to take control of, in Carvalho's words, "hitherto untrodden country" (Incidents 17). In this respect, Carvalho's narrative yields a detailed portrait of the practical social exigencies of manifest destiny, describing how relationships between whites, religious sects, Native tribal rivalries and alliances, and Mexican rancheros were negotiated in the American West. And yet while Carvalho himself enthusiastically participated in the rhetoric and objectives of expansion as a member of Frémont's expedition, his harrowing journey forced him to confront his own identity as a practicing Sephardic Jew who was afforded only "probationary whiteness" (176), as Matthew Frye Jacobson describes the status of Jews in nineteenth-century America. In her book Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination Rachel Rubenstein briefly introduces Carvalho as one of the Jewish artists of the period who engaged in "complex performances of Americanness, Indianness, and Jewishness" as a strategy for "challeng[ing] their non-Jewish contemporaries' nineteenth-century visions of Jews and Indians as vanished or, if present, irredeemably alien" (25). If Carvalho indeed sought to "redeem" some contemporary agency for Sephardi such as himself, how did he manage his own avowed ideological investment in manifest destiny alongside the liminal nature of his own social position? How were these seemingly irreconcilable positions expressed through the complex technical and observational task of shooting [End Page 282] and developing daguerreotypes in the field? And how did he, as Rubinstein suggests, come to see his own racial location as (at least momentarily) coterminous with the experience of many American Indians? This study will consider these questions through a closer examination of Carvalho's strategic representations of his own ethnic identity as he adjusted to the shifting social and physical conditions during his travels in the American West. As his own privileged...

Resistance to Containment and Conquest in Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It?

Resistance to Containment and Conquest in Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It? A. Laurie Lowrance (bio) As Amy Kaplan discusses, the concept of the nation as a domestic space tied widely held views of womanhood and domesticity directly to nation building. While earlier attitudes confined women strictly to the home and to raising children, technological advances and an expanding nation changed women's roles and redefined the purpose and scope of the domestic sphere. At the same time, on a national level, continued westward expansion unsettled the boundaries between what was domestic and what was foreign. Kaplan notes, "In this context domestic has a double meaning that not only links the familial to the nation but also imagines both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of the home" (581). She continues, "When we contrast the domestic sphere with the market or political realm, men and women inhabit a divided social terrain, but when we oppose the domestic to the foreign, men and women become national allies against the alien, and the determining division is not gender but racial demarcations of otherness" (582). The Indian Wars and the US–Mexican War expanded the territory of the United States, but these conquests also brought new racial others into the nation. While the country was expanding, Anglo women—seen as moral authorities—took on the role of protecting the domestic space of the home from the foreign. Of American conquest Kaplan asserts, "While it strove to nationalize and domesticate foreign territories and peoples, annexation incorporated nonwhite foreign subjects in a way perceived to undermine the nation as a domestic space" (585). In a new, expanded [End Page 379] role, Women were not only policing their own homes but were tasked with managing the formation of nationalistic ideals—and the rhetoric of the time, both political rhetoric and the conventions of the cult of domesticity and the domestic space as seen in the sentimental novel, reinforced Anglo women's new role. Sentimental novels of the nineteenth century reflected this shift and the changing role of the women Kaplan discusses. Through well-used and well-recognized tropes, sentimental fiction worked to show the importance of women to the project of nation building. Earlier examples often focused on young, unmarried women, but with the expanding nation came new roles for women and new themes in sentimental novels. Fiction for women in the mid-nineteenth century centered on pious, married, middle- and upper-class women and the influence they held over others. While not advocating for women in political spheres, sentimental novels now showed women as providing the building blocks of the expanding nation. Anglo women became agents of change through the home—or extensions of the home such as churches and hospitals—where they could impart nationalistic, Anglo values to their children and others with whom they had contact. And as Kaplan describes it, nineteenth-century sentimental novels "explore the breakdown of the boundaries between internal and external spaces, between the domestic and the foreign, as they struggle to renegotiate and stabilize these domains" (600). American Anglo women sought roles as agents of change through the home—spreading republican values to build a solid base for a new, expanding nation. Women's work through the domestic space mirrors the work men were doing in conquering new lands—the men secured the lands while the women transformed the people. So where does domestic rhetoric and a focus on the importance of protecting the domestic space leave women of color in an expanding nation built on Anglo ideals? Through their works, Life Among the Piutes (1883) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), Sarah Winnemucca and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton rally against [End Page 380] and write through these "national narratives of containment" that aim to keep Native and Mexican American women of the West out of the public consciousness and safely passive against the machine of western expansion (Piatote 52). Both use the sentimental novel form to critique the domestic rhetoric of the time and to place Native and Mexican American women on equal if not superior...

The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War by Peter Guardino

Reviewed by: The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War by Peter Guardino Maria Angela Diaz (bio) The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War. By Peter Guardino. ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 512. Cloth, $39.95.) Like other historians who tackle the subject of the Mexican War, Peter Guardino begins his work by noting that both the United States and Mexico have a historical blind spot when it comes to the war. The Dead March is a masterful telling of the Mexican-American War that blends together the stories of the United States and Mexico as they went to war from 1846 to 1848. It provides a cultural and social history of the war that focuses primarily on what Guardino refers to as the "experiences and motivations of Mexicans and Americans of relatively modest social status, the men and women who did the hardest work and faced the greatest risks not only in Mexican and American armies but also in Mexican and American societies" (4). The Dead March is an example of the "new military history" that incorporates elements of cultural and social history to add context to the experience of war. Through the experiences of men and women in Mexico and the United States, the book takes aim at the reasons behind the outcome of the war, addressing the question of why one side lost and one side won. Guardino sets out to address the theory that Mexico lost the war because it was not as strong of a nation and had less of a sense of itself as a nation than the United States. He focuses on the United States and Mexico not as many nationalist boosters wanted to see them, but "as they were" in the nineteenth century (7). Guardino notes that even historians often fall into the [End Page 526] habit of comparison when it comes to the two countries during this period. Such comparisons often imply one's fitness as a nation and the other's lack of nationalism. The reality, according to Guardino, is that the United States was not nearly as cohesive a nation as its proponents made it out to be, a truth that would become evident once it experienced the Civil War. Mexico was a heavily divided nation, but still Mexicans possessed a national identity before the war that helped them sustain their fight. Mexicans at all levels of society invested time and energy into fighting the war. Guardino notes that President James K. Polk and his supporters hoped for a short war, yet the national fealty of Mexicans sustained the army and the war for two long years. Their interpretation of the nation was based on much more local concerns, such as protecting their homes, families, and the Catholic religion. For Guardino, the reason that Mexico lost the war was its lack of resources, which is a much more plausible argument than one emphasizing a lack of nationalism. The American economy in the 1840s was far larger than that of Mexico, and the U.S. government was propped up by the enormous resources at its disposal as a result of the market revolution that began decades before the war. Mexicans' national commitment to the war, however, consistently thwarted Americans' preconceived notions of them and their own ability to bring the war to a swift and tidy end. Their notions were grounded in ideas about gender, race, and religion. This conception of American racism toward Mexicans has been discussed in other works considering U.S. Mexican relations, yet Guardino complicates them by noting that Mexicans responded to accusations of effeminate men, criminality, and Catholicism. Mexicans articulated counterarguments that denounced American religious diversity, immigrant populations, and territorial greed. The Dead March follows several other studies of the Mexican-American War, such as Amy Greenberg's A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (2012) and Brian DeLay's War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (2008). These studies address specific aspects of the Mexican-American War and are primarily focused on the United States or Southwest Borderlands. Guardino draws on these studies and...

The Interconnection of Race, Class, and Environment in Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus

In this paper, I explore Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus published in 1995, in terms of what I call “postcolonial environmental injustice.” That is, I demonstrate that through the hard life of Estrella’s family, Viramontes shows how Mexican workers have been oppressed in American society. They have been exploited as cheap, “illegal” laborers without legal protection; They have been threatened by dangerous working conditions. In addition, I explore this work with postcolonial approach, on the basis of the historical background that through the Mexican War in 1846 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 Mexicans lost their lands and property rights; Since then, Mexican laborers have been exploited as “illegal” migrant workers. In short, I demonstrate that in Under the Feet of Jesus, Viramontes shows the postcolonial environmental injustice that has been done on Mexican migrant workers. By shedding a spotlight on these invisible migrant workers who are racially, socioeconomically, and environmentally underprivileged and oppressed, Viramontes ultimately critiques American society.

Coercive Inclusion in the Mexican War on Drugs: A Field Study of Human Rights and the State in Michoacán

Qualitative ethnographic study of the human rights violations committed in the course of the militarized combat against drug trafficking organizations in rural Michoacán unmasks state practices of coercive inclusion. The violation of human rights and the subsequent processing of human rights claims paradoxically bind the marginalized population to the formal state and foster its subordination. The practical configuration of the current arena of human rights is not the lever for a democratic, inclusive Mexico but a curtain that conceals the repressive practices that it makes possible. In the processing of human rights complaints, the legal rights of physical integrity and private property become moral rights with no effect of legal justice. Un estudio etnográfico cualitativo sobre las violaciones a los derechos humanos cometidas durante la lucha militarizada contra las organizaciones de tráfico de drogas en el Michoacán rural sirve para desenmascarar las prácticas de inclusión coercitiva del Estado. Las violaciones y el posterior procesamiento de las denuncias paradójicamente vinculan a la población marginada con el Estado oficial, fomentando su subordinación. La configuración práctica del actual contexto de los derechos humanos no funge como la palanca de un México democrático e inclusivo, sino como una cortina que oculta las prácticas represivas que el Estado hace posibles. En la tramitación de las denuncias sobre violación de derechos humanos, los derechos legales de la integridad física y la propiedad privada se convierten en derechos morales sin ningún efecto de justicia legal.

“Yo No Cruse La Frontera, La Frontera Me Cruzo” (I Didn’t Cross the Border, the Border Crossed Me)

The song, “Somos Mas Americanos” is a work of art, and every single one of its lyrics is tied to a history about my experiences, my family’s experiences, and the experiences of countless others. Lyrics like those in “Somos Mas Americanos” touch people’s souls and pierce their hearts because it speaks to the socioeconomic, racial hierarchy, racially biased politics, and laws against immigrant workers like myself in the U.S. Further than that, it educates listeners about the U.S./Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, where México lost its territory to the U.S., which explains the heated controversy surrounding the U.S.–Mexican border today.

Violence Patterns in Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969): Critical Reading

This paper focuses on the issue of violence in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) through explaining some of the cultural and historical implications of violence in the 1960s such as Vietnam War, the Mexican war and also the explosion of the feminist movement and some other important social and political upheavals that shaped the cultural context of the 1960s in America. It also sheds light on Sam Peckinpah’s approach of violence screen and stylizing violence and the representations of violence as a tormenting and brutalizing reality that matches the spirit of the age in addition to the social, political, and colonial conflicts of the 1960s. Violence and the implications of violence in The Wild Bunch whether social , cultural, psychological, or humanistic have been discussed in brief in order to show the critical approach of the film as being a rich and didactic film to watch, especially in terms of its rich cultural and historical contexts.

The effect of violent crime on the human capital accumulation of young adults

This paper estimates the effect of an unprecedented increase of drug-related violence in Mexico on the educational outcomes and employment behavior of young adults. The panel nature and the timing of the Mexican Family Life Survey allows for unique gains in this literature, as we can compare pre- and post-violence outcomes of the same individual, and control for migratory response. The results suggest that young adults exposed to increased local violence attained significantly less years of education, were less likely to complete compulsory schooling, and were more likely to be employed. This change in behavior is driven by household financial hardship rather than fear, as it is unrelated to the parents’ perceptions of potential victimization and is strongest for those with parents that are self-employed, the employment group most adversely economically impacted by the Mexican War on Drugs.

Panting for Glory: The Mississippi Rifles in the Mexican War by Richard Bruce Winders

Panting for Glory: The Mississippi Rifles in the Mexican War by Richard Bruce Winders