Mexican-American War Research Articles

Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement by Lori A. Flores

Reviewed by: Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement by Lori A. Flores Carolina Ortega (bio) Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement By Lori A. Flores. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 304pp. isbn 978-0300196962 Eating fresh, local, and organic produce remains a top priority for people in today’s society, yet what might escape individuals’ minds is the labor that goes into the harvesting and production of fresh fruits and vegetables in the United States. In Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement, Lori A. Flores reminds readers of the hardships fieldworkers have faced and continue to face in order for consumers to enjoy a fresh salad. Flores focuses on the Salinas Valley on California’s central coast—popularly known as “Steinbeck Country” for John Steinbeck, a native of Salinas and author of Tortilla Flats, East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath—a region long “praised as a center of national food production and called the ‘Salad Bowl of the World’” (2). But the Salinas Valley also has a long history of farmworker mistreatment and anti-union suppression by California growers. Therefore, Grounds for Dreaming presents “A turbulent history of worker exploitation, racial segregation and discrimination, violence, and transnational suffering” (3). Flores examines the history of Mexican Americans, braceros, and undocumented Mexican immigrants within the Salinas Valley agricultural fields, and the tensions that arose between these three groups. The Bracero Program, a bilateral agreement between Mexico and the U.S., instituted as a temporary guest worker program during World War II to alleviate the labor shortages experienced during the war, brought millions of Mexican men to work under labor contracts throughout the U.S., including the Salinas Valley. The program ran from 1942 to 1964, but Flores shows that California growers continued to hire braceros as late as 1968, thereby adding to ongoing tensions between Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals. According to Flores, some Mexican Americans blamed Mexican nationals “for stealing jobs, impeding union organization, and exacerbating the public perceptions of all Mexican-origin people as foreign, undesirable, and criminal” (5). Tensions between what Flores calls the “Mexican American-bracero-‘wetback’ triad” and the efforts to end the Bracero Program, constitute the bulk of chapters two, three, and five. Arranged in chronological order, Chapter One explores race-making in California following the Mexican-American War and the Gold Rush. Furthermore, Flores shows the racialization of Asian and Mexican workers in the Salinas Valley, both groups seen as “naturally suited” for the stoop labor of the fields. The chapter also discusses the strikes conducted in the 1930s by Okies and Filipino agricultural workers, provoking a violent response by the growers and law enforcement. The violent response and anti-union sentiments of the growers during the 1930s would be seen again in the 1970s when Mexican-origin workers tried to unionize agricultural workers in Salinas. Chapter Two focuses on the World War II years and the conflicts that arose, not just between whites and Mexican Americans, but also between Mexican Americans and braceros. Chapter Three explores the “wetback era” of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the sentiment of betrayal that Mexican American agricultural workers felt towards the state of California, “which created the Bracero Program and [the] immigration system that did not protect them as worker-citizens, but instead served at the pleasure of agribusiness” (8). Chapter Four analyzes the formation and lifespan of the Community Service Organization (CSO) in Salinas in 1954. The CSO was founded by a group of friends who mobilized a fight for a fair trial for a Mexican American youth accused of murdering an Italian peer. Flores examines the successes and failures of the CSO in Salinas and maintains that the CSO dissolved in the 1960s because it failed to create interracial alliances that involved the larger Mexican-origin community and because it did not want to risk “its cultivated image of respectability” (9). Chapter Five examines the death of more than two-dozen braceros at Chualar in 1963 after a train struck a bus transporting braceros...

Wartime Collaboration: Theatrical Space and Power in Conquered Los Angeles

Wartime CollaborationTheatrical Space and Power in Conquered Los Angeles Andrew Gibb (bio) In April and May of 1855, a San Francisco weekly, The Golden Era, printed a three-part serial entitled “The Drama on the Pacific: First Theatricals in California,” providing future theatre scholars with the first published history of theatre in the Golden State.1 That journalistic chronicle contains a description of the first recorded theatrical production in what is now the city of Los Angeles: a series of performances mounted during the occupation of that city by US soldiers near the end of the US-Mexico War of 1846–48.2 For the theatre historian, J. E. Lawrence’s account is maddeningly uneven—by turns painstaking and imprecise, chauvinistic and culturally aware, and frequently contradictory. But if the text is closely read through the context of subsequent scholarship on nineteenth-century Californio (Mexican Californian) society, a remarkable tale emerges from the confusion: one of power, class, resistance, and collaboration (in both the theatrical and wartime senses). Bringing this story to light requires challenging the assumptions about theatrical space that lie at the heart of Lawrence’s account. That this should prove necessary serves as a reminder to theatre historians that spaces of performance are not only a reflection of how a given culture defines performance, but also of how it perceives power. Lawrence’s serialized history begins with the assertion that “theatrical representation in California commenced with the first unfurling of the American Flag on the Western border of our Continent,” a statement revealing an unabashed Anglo-centric bias. And yet, Lawrence’s nationalist fervor led the author to extensively document the theatrical activities of the US soldiers who came to California during the US-Mexico War, inadvertently contributing to the history of theatre in Los Angeles.3 [End Page 64] In the second installment, Lawrence tells of an entire theatrical season offered in Los Angeles by the soldier-actors of a unit known as the New York Volunteers, beginning in June of 1848 and lasting until September of that year. In a three-hundred-seat theatre apparently built for the occasion, the Volunteers gave performances of The Golden Farmer, The Idiot Witness, Bombastes Furioso, and “several more dramas and farces,” together with The Marble Statue and “other pantomimes.” Lawrence goes on to identify eleven “members of the Thespian corps” by name, and details the warm reception the Volunteers received from the populace of occupied Los Angeles.4 Given Lawrence’s patriotic tone, these details paint a picture of industrious and talented New York boys, sharing the theatrical blessings of liberty with the art-starved inhabitants of “a distant and almost unknown dependency of a semi-barbarous Mexico,” and in so doing winning the hearts and minds of the locals.5 In the very next installment of the history, however, appearing only two weeks later, this tale of Los Angeles theatrical genesis is revised. Lawrence admits to “performances in Spanish which preceded the advent of the Volunteers,” productions that “alternated” with those of the Volunteers, once they arrived. These plays were apparently mounted in a theatre that “cost between five and six thousand dollars,” a structure financed by “a gentleman from Mexico.”6 In order to incorporate this new information, the narrative must expand from a tale of magnanimous victors proffering the gift of art to a story of a bicultural rotating repertoire, or maybe even a multicultural theatre district. In either of those scenarios, the story of the first theatrical performance in Los Angeles appears to demonstrate the power of art as an intercultural bridge, even when the cultures in question are separated by the great gulf of war. Theatre may indeed have that power, and a bridging of Anglo American and Mexican Californian cultures may well have been at work with these productions. However, the contradictions apparent in Lawrence’s two accounts, particularly as they involve the performance space, suggest that the shows reflected a more ambiguous reality: one of the powerful forces engaged in the complex intercultural negotiation of California’s future. In short, the performances spatially represented a microcosm of events playing out beyond the theatre’s walls. Precisely locating these wartime productions...

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican–American War. By John C.Pinheiro. Oxford University Press. 2014. ix + 240pp. £24.99.

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican–American War. By John C.Pinheiro. Oxford University Press. 2014. ix + 240pp. £24.99.

Mexicans in the Making of America

According to census projections, by 2050 nearly one in three U.S. residents will be Latino, and the overwhelming majority of these will be of Mexican descent. This dramatic demographic shift is reshaping politics, culture, and fundamental ideas about American identity. Neil Foley, a leading Mexican American historian, offers a sweeping view of the evolution of Mexican America, from a colonial outpost on Mexico's northern frontier to a twenty-first-century people integral to the nation they have helped build. Mexicans have lived in and migrated to the American West and Southwest for centuries. When the United States annexed those territories following the Mexican-American War in 1848, the unequal destinies of the two nations were sealed. Despite their well-established presence in farm fields, workshops, and military service, Mexicans in have long been regarded as aliens and outsiders. Xenophobic fantasies of a tidal wave of Mexicans overrunning the borders and transforming real America beyond recognition have inspired measures ranging from Operation Wetback in the 1950s to Arizona's draconian SB 1070 anti-immigration law and the 700-mile security fence under construction along the U.S.-Mexican border today. Yet the cultural, linguistic, and economic ties that bind Mexico to the United States continue to grow. Mexicans in the Making of demonstrates that has always been a composite of racially blended peoples, never a purely white Anglo-Protestant nation. The struggle of Latinos to gain full citizenship bears witness to the continual remaking of American culture into something more democratic, egalitarian, and truer to its multiracial and multiethnic origins.

The Civilizing Machine: A Cultural History of Mexican Railroads, 1876-1910. By MichaelMatthews. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013, p. 321, $33.58.Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory. By Robert F.Alegre. Lincoln: Unive

The Civilizing Machine: A Cultural History of Mexican Railroads, 1876-1910. By MichaelMatthews. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013, p. 321, $33.58.Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory. By Robert F.Alegre. Lincoln: Unive

The Borderlands of the Korean War and the Fiction of Rolando Hinojosa

This essay reads the work of Rolando Hinojosa for the ways in which it invites a consideration of the two wars that the United States fought in the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the US-Mexico War and the Korean War, respectively—as part of a continuous history of US empire. It examines the array of cross-racial identifications operant in his Korean War trilogy—Korean Love Songs, Rites and Witnesses, and The Useless Servants—which attach variously to Japanese and Korean civilians as well as to North Korean and Chinese soldiers. In so doing, this article shows how Hinojosa's war writings are part of an Orientalism that is deployed in the service of anticolonial and antiracist critique but that also recapitulates aspects of the colonial imaginary. These works also engage in an auto-critique of how certain segments of the Chicana/o population came to be beneficiaries of a liberal Cold War racial dispensation that enabled limited forms of upward mobility for some communities of color.

You and What Army? Violence, The State, and Mexico's War on Drugs

In late 2010, WikiLeaks made public hundreds of private communications between US State Department facilities in Mexico and Washington, DC. The documents contain frank observations made by US bureaucrats and officials about Mexican politics and government, but are especially pointed in their treatment of Mexico's declared ‘War on Drugs', which, since 2006, has been the focus of unprecedented negotiation, cooperation, and tension between the two governments. With a few notable exceptions, geographers have largely stayed away from the study of illegal practices, and relatively little research in this area employs an explicitly spatial analytic. In this paper, we examine how the spatialization of the drug phenomenon operates as an official strategy of intervention – illicit phenomena like the illegal drug trade are rendered in spatial terms in order to become amenable to specific kinds of state intervention. This requires considerable boundary work, and we draw from the WikiLeaks archive to explore how state actors continuously work to materially and discursively isolate trafficking from a larger social, political and institutional context. The paper concludes with a discussion of the contradictory and incoherent narratives and conditions that constantly threaten to overflow these constructed boundaries, along with the structuring assumptions of the drug war.

Two Armies on the Rio Grande: The First Campaign of the US-Mexican War by Douglas A. Murphy (review)

Reviewed by: Two Armies on the Rio Grande: The First Campaign of the US-Mexican War by Douglas A. Murphy Christopher Menking Two Armies on the Rio Grande: The First Campaign of the US-Mexican War. By Douglas A. Murphy. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014. Pp. 356. Photographs, maps, bibliography, index.) Recent scholarship on the U.S.-Mexican War has tended to focus on peripheral aspects rather than the fighting itself. Douglas Murphy shifts back to a more traditional military history of the war. However, he has notably expanded the field with his emphasis on Mexican sources to portray both sides on the opening days of the U.S.-Mexican War. Murphy’s book discusses the origin and execution of the Rio Grande Campaign, [End Page 81] providing a detailed narrative of the events starting with General Zachary Taylor’s march to Corpus Christi through his capture of Matamoros. The most pronounced aspect of this book is Murphy’s effort to discuss the Battles of Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, and Matamoros from both sides of the conflict. This is an important advance in the literature, because few books, Mexican or American, convey the Mexican military perspective. Mexican works have tended to focus on the politics surrounding the conflict rather than the military operations of their forces. In this, Murphy excels. He effectively recounts the movement of both armies and the problems their commanders confronted. The voices of officers on both sides are clear, while the reader can sense the struggles the Mexican generals faced when dealing with their own, unstable government. Murphy is able to convey many voices due to his extensive use of letters, diaries, and government documents from both Mexico and the United States. His research includes some new sources not previously used and new interpretations of older sources. In particular, Murphy uses quotes from common soldiers in the United States Army, which allows the reader to understand army life not just from a top-down, operational level, but from the perspective of an American in the ranks. He superbly brought American soldiers to life, but this reader is left wanting more of the same for Mexican soldiers. Although there are issues that limit Murphy’s ability to expand in this area, it would have added a layer of depth to the Mexican narrative he provided. While this book is a more traditional military narrative, Murphy also provides glimpses into the significance that South Texas and the Rio Grande had in American history. Within his narrative of the war, he describes the Rio Grande as a catalyst for economic growth and a source of political conflict for the region. Though this book focuses on the movements of armies, it also places the borderlands between Texas and Mexico as a crucial setting for events that changed the course of both Mexico and the United States. Throughout his book, he subtly hints at the greater significance of the actions taken by the generals on both sides of the river. This book greatly expands the scholarship on the U.S.-Mexico War by providing readers with a far better look at the Mexican side of the conflict. Murphy’s balanced approach to the narrative gives new insights into why the first campaign of the war followed the course that it did. This book is important for anyone wanting to learn more about South Texas or the border relationship between the United States and Mexico. [End Page 82] Christopher Menking University of North Texas Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

La Chota y Los Mafiosos: Mexican American casualties of the border drug war

After the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ended the Mexican American War in 1848, the United States-Mexico border became a site of intense smuggling. Increased smuggling along the South Texas-Mexico border also resulted in the increased policing and militarization of the border. The interrelated practices of militarization, policing and smuggling have become an integral part of an ever-evolving borderlands’ existence as many Mexican Americans have sought the opportunity to make a lucrative income as drug smugglers and policing agents. The result is the division of Mexican American peer groups along the border into members of the “criminal underworld” and the law enforcement agencies that police these criminals. This division has exacerbated tensions in border communities, and it has increasingly come to define the complexities and contradictions of life in the South Texas-Mexico borderlands during the 40-year tenure of the war on drugs. Despite the growing concern over the intensification of drug violence in the borderlands, there has been relatively little effort to critically analyze the social realities of the drug war along the US-Mexico border. In this article, I examine the impact of drug trafficking and drug war policing on a South Texas border community, by reflecting on the experiences of Mexican American drug traffickers, los mafiosos, and Mexican American law enforcement officers, la chota. As the social actors actively engaged in the drug war, the life histories of these drug traffickers and law enforcement officers reveal the detrimental effects of escalating border militarization, and also highlight the “expendability” of Mexican Americans in the militarized Mexico-United States borderlands.

For God and Revolution: Priest, Peasant, and Agrarian Socialism in the Mexican Huasteca by Mark Saad Saka (review)

For God and Revolution: Priest, Peasant, and Agrarian Socialism in the Mexican Huasteca. By Mark Saad Saka. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2013. Pp. xxi, 186. $50.00. ISBN 978-0-8263-5338-2.)Over the past thirty years, major regional studies, mainly of Mexico's southeastern states, have explored the way in which nineteenth-century civil and foreign wars drew rural communities into politics as indigenous peasants took to arms in support of regional and national causes in exchange for promises of constitutional guarantees. For God and Revolution is a welcome contribution to this literature. Well suited for undergraduates, this short book provides a fascinating case study of the popular roots of Mexican liberalism, Catholicism, and republicanism.Mark Saad Saka's region is the Huasteca, encompassing the vast Panuco river basin that includes segments of five states and serves as a natural boundary between east-central and north-eastern Mexico. The first five chapters chart 400 years of resistance of the region's Maya-speaking Teenecks to Aztec, Spanish, and republican rule. The final two chapters explore the principal focus of the book: a peasant rebellion between 1877 and 1883 led by indigenous leader Juan Santiago under the banner of death to all those who wear pants!Hard to reach from Mexico's highland centers of power, even from its own provincial capital of San Luis Potosi, the Huasteca provided sanctuary and a strategic reserve for forces opposed to colonial rule and later to foreign invasions. Saad Saka traces a pattern of peasant guerrilla forces embracing national causes, manifesting first in the insurgency in 1811; continuing through the federalist movement of the 1830s, the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, and the European Intervention of 1862-67; and culminating in Diaz's rebellions against Juarez's centralizing liberalism during the 1870s. Santiago's rebellion is explained as a response to secular changes facing much of rural Mexico during the final decades of the century: the privatization of church land and town lands, the use of forced labor for constructing of roads and railways, the growth of large estates, mounting insecurity of land tenure and worsening terms of sharecropping, the introduction of sugar with its accompanying abuse of labor, and so forth. Particularly interesting is the involvement of radical priest Mauricio Zavala who, after first promoting education and social reform in the state capital, moved in 1873 to Ciudad del Maiz and promoted primary schooling throughout the region, paying close attention to the needs of indigenous-language speakers, women, and field workers. …

Robert F. Alegre. Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory.

Robert F. Alegre. Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory.

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John C. Pinheiro (review)

Reviewed by: Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John C. Pinheiro Nicholas Pellegrino Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War. By John C. Pinheiro. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 240 pp. $29.95. In Missionaries of Republicanism, John Pinheiro traces religious, racial, and ideological themes within American culture to explain how Americans justified, opposed, and interpreted the Mexican-American War. While Democrats and Whigs sparred over issues like slavery, expansion, and protective tariffs, anti-Catholicism provided a “common vocabulary and shared categories of thought” that helped unite an otherwise divided nation (16). The central argument is that the roots of Manifest Destiny (and antebellum American identity) were planted in anti-Catholic soil. The “unifying discourse” of anti-Catholicism – which increased as a result of Texas’s annexation and the war – “transcended section, religious denomination, and political affiliation” (1). It tied together racial and nativist assumptions that collectively informed how Americans viewed themselves and their neighbors to the south. Much of Pinheiro’s book aims to show how Americans of nearly all denominations, political orientations, and classes viewed the war through an anti-Catholic lens. Pro-war Democrats emphasized the potential for missionary activity if the United States annexed the “mongrel” Catholics of Mexico. Anti-war Whigs scoffed at this notion, arguing instead that Mexican Catholics were unfit for civil or religious freedom. While Protestants had long believed that American Catholics of English and Irish descent were unsuited for republican government, their Anglo-Saxon or “white” heritage suggested that they might be transformed into republican citizens. Not so for Mexican Catholics. The combination of their inferior race and religion, to many Americans, rendered them incapable of managing the demands that came with republican government. The war “clarified these preexisting perspectives on race, national identity, and religion” by drawing on the tradition of anti-Catholicism during an especially tense period of Protestant-Catholic relations (4). [End Page 73] Pinheiro also delves into the politics of the 1840s. He explores the tensions that the Polk administration faced as it tried to convince Catholics in America and Mexico that this was not a religious war while simultaneously appeasing the nativist factions within the Democratic Party who insisted that Providence had been responsible for the conflict. Polk appointed Catholics as chaplains to calm Catholic concerns, but this move only reinforced anti-Catholic anxieties about the growing influence of the Roman Catholic Church. Chapters on the annexation of Texas, Manifest Destiny, recruitment, soldiers’ experiences during the conflict, and Protestant leadership explore those anxieties and the ways in which anti-Catholic sentiments influenced responses to the war. Pinheiro’s most salient point is that American identity and the war itself were unintelligible without reference to anti-Catholicism. In that way, this work may be read alongside a rich literature on American anti-Catholicism. But Pinheiro successfully marries the anti-Catholic tradition to prevailing racial assumptions of the era. Missionaries of Republicanism therefore contributes to an emerging scholarship on religion and race. It will be of interest to scholars of American religion, race, and specialists in the Mexican-American War. Although some scholars will lament that it leaves Catholics themselves relatively muted, Pinheiro’s work will delight academics across a variety of disciplines. Nicholas Pellegrino University of Nevada, Las Vegas Copyright © 2015 American Catholic Historical Society

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War

Journal Article Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War Get access John C. Pinheiro. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xii, 240 pp. $45.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 4, March 2015, Page 1266, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav058 Published: 01 March 2015

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican–American War by John C. Pinheiro (review)

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican–American War. By John C. Pinheiro.

The Son by Philipp Meyer (review)

Reviewed by: The Son by Philipp Meyer Don Scheese Philipp Meyer, The Son. New York: HarperCollins, 2013. 561pp. Cloth, $27.99; paper, $16.99; e-book, $12.49. “No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth” (164), says Peter McCullough, the conscience of this epic novel and the son of Colonel Eli McCullough, legendary Indian captive turned Indian fighter, Texas Ranger, and eventual patriarch of a 250,000-acre “proper acreocracy” (501) in southeastern Texas along the Nueces River. Dispossession and the legacies of conquest are the main themes here, in a family history (genealogical chart included) spanning the years 1836 to 2012. The author chronicles the displacement and near extermination of the Comanches by the first waves of pioneer settlers, the removal of the Mexicans by the Texans, then the gradual takeover of ranchers and cattlemen by the petroleum industry. The narrative is constructed from three different points of view: that of Eli McCullough, recounted through a wpa recording from the 1930s; that of his son Peter, chronicled through journal entries dating from the 1916–17 period, the time of the modern Mexican Revolution; and that of Eli’s great-great-granddaughter Jeanne Anne, a stalwart Republican feminist matron whose recollections take us up to the present. We see how the lives of these three individuals intersect and are affected by a grand sweep of historical events and forces: the conflicts with the Comanches, the US-Mexican War, the Civil War, the Mexican Revolution, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, the oil boom and subsequent embargo of the post–World War II era, and the two Iraq wars. Some figures, like the Colonel, seem to make and transcend history; others, like his son Peter, the Comanches, and the Mexican Americans who live along the border in the early twentieth century, are victimized by it. Jeanne Anne, with more than a bit of the Colonel in her blood, comes into her own after the premature death of her oil-catter husband and learns to profit from the boom-and-bust cycles of the industry, eventually becoming a legend in her own right and twice gracing the cover of Time magazine. I found most riveting those early portions of the novel representing Eli’s captivity narrative. Part ethnographic study of the [End Page 414] Comanches, part potboiler narrative and coming-of-age story of a thirteen-year-old white boy slowly inducted into the culture of the most powerful tribe on the Southern Plains, this aspect of the tale represents a revision of the revisionist school of western American history. To some degree the long-dominant myth of rugged individualism is challenged in the novel: “The strong white man comes to an unpopulated wilderness and proves himself. Except there has never been any such thing” (311), says Maria, whose once-aristocratic family has been ousted from its rancheria along the border. However, the Comanches, through young Eli’s interactions with chiefs and medicine men and “squaws,” are depicted not as politically correct Dances with Wolves–type Noble Red Men but simply as people, human beings who love their land, families, and tribe and who will do anything, no matter how seemingly brutal, to save their homeland. Reflecting back on his life, Eli extols his time with the tribe as “the greatest summer I ever had” (207), and when he is forced to return to white society because of the tribe’s decimation by smallpox, he laments that the forty acres of his host’s property felt “like a postage stamp. I was used to having twenty million or so at my disposal” (333). But in the end even as powerful and legendary a figure as the Colonel is a victim of historical forces, in this case manifest destiny and progress. “There are many things I have wanted to save,” he says to Peter late in life: “the Indians, the buff alo, a prairie where you could look twenty miles and not see a fence post. But time has passed those things by” (352). As well as a historical novel, this work is also an environmental history describing one of the greatest transformations of a bioregion...

A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture by Raúl Coronado (review)

Reviewed by: A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture by Raúl Coronado Maria A. Windell (bio) A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture raúl coronado Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013 555 pp. Officially, Mexico is not simply México. It is, more properly, los Estados Unidos Mexicanos: the United States of Mexico or the United Mexican States. For many today, the echo implied by this name suggests that Mexico—and Spanish America more broadly—attempted and failed to replicate the structure and government of the United States of America. It is against this assumption and its long history that Raúl Coronado writes in A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture. The intellectual heritage and ideological transformations traced throughout A World Not to Come are vital to understanding the development of Spanish America as a site both independent of and yet in relation to the United States. For A World Not to Come uncovers a now-forgotten—or now-incomprehensible—conception of modernity, one that emerges in Spanish America from amid a collision of Catholic, Protestant, and secular theological-political Enlightenment discourses. The world of print culture named in Coronado’s subtitle is one not only of material culture and circulation but of oral, visual, and performative religious and political texts. [End Page 283] Print, orality, and performance then intersect with extensive etymologies and discussions of translation as A World Not to Come explicates the religious and political histories that shaped both practices of print and the construction of language in Spanish America during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In tracing the contexts that shaped Spanish American discourses of independence and nationhood, Coronado emphasizes that such discourses are neither poor imitations nor simple derivations of Euro-Anglo Enlightenment articulations of rights, liberty, freedom, individualism, and so on. Within Latina/o studies and literary scholarship, critics such as Kirsten Silva Gruesz and Marissa K. López have begun to delineate a history of Latina/o print culture; they and others, including scholars such as John-Michael Rivera and Jesse Alemán, engage in broader discussions regarding the transformations Latina/o writing and culture undergo as US-Mexico relations shift throughout the Texas Revolution and the US-Mexican War. Border historians Andrés Reséndez, Karl Jacoby, Louise Pubols, Rachel St. John, Omar Valerio-Jiménez, and others have contributed political, economic, military, multiethnic, governmental, and cartographic histories vital to reconstructing borderland culture and what Rivera terms “the emergence of Mexican America.” Coronado brings to these discussions not only an extended time line, one that stretches from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, but also an emphasis on religion. In order to understand Latina/o reactions to US imperialism, Coronado asserts, we must “understand the world of nineteenth-century Latinas/os on their own terms, prior to their being colonized” (391). Such an understanding, Coronado argues, requires excavating the Catholic Scholastic tradition that underlies Spanish America’s alternate path to modernity. The care with which Coronado sets out the structure and evolution of Catholic Scholasticism, its intersections with, and its implications for Spanish American thought justifies the scale of A World Not to Come (its five hundred pages include an introduction, nine chapters, conclusion, several primary-source appendixes, and notes). Following the Protestant Reformation, Coronado writes, the Catholic Reformation “reaffirmed the importance of visuality, orality, and community as a means of accessing the divine” (47). Hispanic Enlightenment thought, moreover, developed within a world that “refused the split between the rational mind and the spiritual life” (61). Thus central “Enlightenment” concepts, including “the [End Page 284] genealogy of individualism, of thinking of agency as embodied solely in human beings, follows a different path in the Catholic Hispanic world” (51–52). In part by tracing the intricacies and transformations of terms such as patria, nación, país, and pueblo, Coronado sets forth a discursive tradition in which not the individual but a sense of community (defined through concentric circles of belonging) grounds the language of reform and revolution. This tradition, Coronado argues, leads to an essential difference in the ways that British...

John C. Pinheiro, Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War

John C. Pinheiro, Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War

The Intertext of History and Literature in Face of an Angel, a Postmodern/Post-neocolonial Memoir by Denise Chávez.

As the title itself suggests, the present article aims at tracing a parallel between history and fiction in the novel Face of an Angel, a fictional autobiography by Mexican-American writer Denise Chávez. Therefore, it is the focus of the current paper to analyse how the intertextuality between Chávez’s plot and the historical periods that work as backdrops to the narrative operate. In order to set the boundaries of this research, three phases were selected for their relevance to the development of the narrator/protagonist, Soveida Dosamantes and also to the Chicanos’ historical process: the period that followed the Mexican-American War, the boiling 1960’s and the supposedly promising 1980’s. For the purpose of carrying out this paper, the works by Stuart Hall, María Antonia Oliver-Rotger, Ellen McCracken, among others, were used as its theoretical support

“In the Name of Civilization and with a Bible in Their Hands:” Religion and the 1846–48 Mexican-American War

Religion was crucial to how Americans and Mexicans saw their enemies and motivated themselves to contribute to the 1846–1848 war. The very strength of religious attitudes made controlling their effects difficult. Some U.S. troops attacked Mexican Catholicism, inspiring Mexican resistance. Conversely, Mexican authorities sometimes sought to limit religiously inspired resistance. Furthermore, at a key moment some Mexicans felt their religious concerns required them to violently oppose their own government. Mexican negotiators gained protections for Catholics in the territory transferred by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, but anti-Catholic politicians in the U.S. Senate eliminated these protections before ratifying the treaty. La religión constituyó un factor crucial en la manera de concebir al enemigo y de animarse a participar en la guerra de 1846–1848 entre estadounidenses y mexicanos. La misma fuerza de las actitudes religiosas dificultaba el control de sus efectos. Algunas tropas estadounidenses atacaban el catolicismo mexicano e inspiraban así la resistencia. A su vez, las autoridades mexicanas a veces buscaban limitar la resistencia inspirada por la religión. Además, en un momento clave, algunos mexicanos sintieron que sus preocupaciones religiosas les exigían oponerse violentamente a su propio gobierno. Los negociadores mexicanos obtuvieron protección para los católicos en el territorio transferido mediante el Tratado de Guadalupe Hidalgo, pero los políticos anticatólicos del Senado de Estados Unidos suprimieron esta protección antes de ratificar el tratado.

Missionaries of republicanism: a religious history of the Mexican-American War

Missionaries of republicanism: a religious history of the Mexican-American War