An American Language is a tour de force that revolutionizes our understanding of U.S. history. It reveals the origins of Spanish as a language binding residents of the Southwest to the politics and culture of an expanding nation in the 1840s. As the West increasingly integrated into the United States over the following century, struggles over power, identity, and citizenship transformed the place of the Spanish language in the nation. An American Language is a history that reimagines what it means to be an American—with profound implications for our own time.
Impresiones de un Surumato en Nuevo México by Manuel Sariñana represents a remarkable literary recovery. For the first time, the novella is presented in its original Spanish and in English, painstakingly translated and annotated by Phillip B. Gonzales. Manuel Sariñana came to the New Mexico territory from Mexico to work as a Spanish-language journalist. While covering politics, he wrote and published Impresiones de un Surumato en Nuevo México as a picaresque work, a common genre in Mexico that uses satire to narrate a drama based on concrete social issues in the author’s immediate vicinity. In his preface, Sariñana makes his intent clear: to address the unseemly manner in which New Mexico’s Democratic Party attempts to gain leverage in elections. But, in a caricature of two immigrant peons, he surreptitiously takes to task how nuevomexicanos look down on people from Mexico. Gonzales provides a critical introduction, an interpretation of Sariñana’s piece, and a historical framework to contextualize the author’s experiences and the events alluded to in the novella. The result brings this important work of fiction to a new generation of readers.
This book analyzes the ways collective memories of the US-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles over several generations. As the first Latinx people incorporated into the nation, Mexican Americans were offered US citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war. Because the 1790 Naturalization Act declared whites solely eligible for citizenship, the treaty pronounced Mexican Americans to be legally white. While their incorporation as citizens appeared as progress towards racial justice and the electorate's diversification, their second-class citizenship demonstrated a retrenchment in racial progress. Over several generations, civil rights activists summoned conquest memories to link Mexican Americans' poverty, electoral disenfranchisement, low educational attainment, and health disparities to structural and institutional inequalities resulting from racial retrenchments. Activists also recalled the treaty's citizenship guarantees to push for property rights, protection from vigilante attacks, and educational reform. Omar Valerio-Jimenez addresses the politics of memory by exploring how succeeding generations reinforced or modified earlier memories of conquest according to their contemporary social and political contexts. The book also examines collective memories in the US and Mexico to illustrate transnational influences on Mexican Americans and to demonstrate how community and national memories can be used strategically to advance political agendas.
For more than a century, Mexican American journalists used their presses to voice socio-historical concerns and to represent themselves as a determinant group of communities in Nuevo México, a particularly resilient corner of the Chicano homeland. This book draws on exhaustive archival research to review the history of newspapers in these communities from the arrival of the first press in the region to publication of the last edition of Santa Fe’s El Nuevo Mexicano. Gabriel Meléndez details the education and formation of a generation of Spanish-language journalists who were instrumental in creating a culture of print in nativo communities. He then offers in-depth cultural and literary analyses of the texts produced by los periodiqueros, establishing them thematically as precursors of the Chicano literary and political movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Moving beyond a simple effort to reinscribe Nuevomexicanos into history, Meléndez views these newspapers as cultural productions and the work of the editors as an organized movement against cultural erasure amid the massive influx of easterners to the Southwest. Readers will find a wealth of information in this book. But more important, they will come away with the sense that the survival of Nuevomexicanos as a culturally and politically viable group is owed to the labor of this brilliant generation of newspapermen who also were statesmen, scholars, and creative writers.
Presents essays dealing with literature written by Hispanic Americans from the sixteenth century through 1960, evaluates individual authors, and examines the contributions of Latino authors in a multicultural, multilingual society.
In Pleas and Petitions Virginia Sánchez sheds new light on the political obstacles, cultural conflicts, and institutional racism experienced by Hispano legislators in the wake of the legal establishment of the Territory of Colorado. The book reexamines the transformation of some 7,000 Hispano settlers from citizens of New Mexico territory to citizens of the newly formed Colorado territory, as well as the effects of territorial legislation on the lives of those residing in the region as a whole. Sánchez highlights the struggles experienced by Hispano territorial assemblymen trying to create opportunity and a better life in the face of cultural conflict and the institutional racism used to effectively shut them out of the process of establishing new laws and social order. For example, the federal and Colorado territorial governments did not provide an interpreter for the Hispano assemblymen or translations of the laws passed by the legislature, and they taxed Hispano constituents without representation and denied them due process in court. The first in-depth history of Hispano sociopolitical life during Colorado’s territorial period, Pleas and Petitions provides fundamental insight into Hispano settlers’ interactions with their Anglo neighbors, acknowledges the struggles and efforts of those Hispano assemblymen who represented southern Colorado during the territorial period, and augments the growing historical record of Hispanos who have influenced the course of Colorado’s history.
Mexican Americans are rapidly becoming the largest minority in the United States, playing a vital role in the culture of the American Southwest and beyond. This A-to-Z guide offers comprehensive coverage of the Mexican American experience. Entries range from figures such as Corky Gonzales, Joan Baez, and Nancy Lopez to general entries on bilingual education, assimilation, border culture, and southwestern agriculture. Court cases, politics, and events such as the Delano Grape Strike all receive full coverage, while the definitions and significance of terms such as coyote and Tejano are provided in shorter entries. Taking a historical approach, this book's topics date back to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a radical turning point for Mexican Americans, as they lost their lands and found themselves thrust into an alien social and legal system. The entries trace Mexican Americans' experience as a small, conquered minority, their growing influence in the 20th century, and the essential roles their culture plays in the borderlands, or the American Southwest, in the 21st century.
The tenth volume in the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Series, this collection of essays reflects on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the project’s efforts to locate, identify, preserve and disseminate the literary contributions of US Latinos from the Spanish Colonial Period to contemporary times. Essays by scholars recalling the beginnings of the project cover a wide range of topics: origins, identity, archival research, institutional politics and pedagogy. From recollections about funding to personal reminiscences, the recovery of Jewish Hispanic heritage and the intellectual project of reframing American history and literature, these articles provide a fascinating look at twenty-five years of recovering the written legacy of the Hispanic population in what has become the United States. An additional nineteen scholarly essays speak to specific efforts to recover an extremely diverse Latino literary heritage. Historians and literary critics who research Spanish, English and Sephardic texts examine a broad array of subjects, including colonialism, historical populations, exile and immigration. This far-reaching book is required reading for those studying US Latino history and literature.
The legacy of the historic mutual aid organizing by US Mexicans, with its emphasis on self-help and community solidarity, continues to inform Mexican American activism and subtly influence a number of major US social movements. In Democratic Renewal and the Mutual Aid Legacy of US Mexicans, Julie Leininger Pycior traces the early origins of organizing in the decades following the US-Mexican War, when Mexicans in the Southwest established mutualista associations for their protection. Further, she traces the ways in which these efforts have been invoked by contemporary Latino civil rights leaders. Pycior notes that the Mexican immigrant associations instrumental in the landmark 2006 immigration reform marches echo mutualista societies at their peak in the 1920s. Then Mexican immigrants from San Diego to New York engaged in economic, medical, cultural, educational, and legal aid. This path-breaking study culminates with an examination of Southwest community organizing networks as crucial counterweights to the outsize role of large financial contributions in the democratic political process. It also finds ways in which this community organizing echoes the activity of mutualista groups in the very same neighborhoods a century ago.