Richard L. Nostrand interprets the Hispanos’ experience in geographical terms. He demonstrates that their unique intermixture with Pueblo Indians, nomad Indians, Anglos, and Mexican Americans, combined with isolation in their particular natural and cultural environments, have given them a unique sense of place - a sense of homeland. Several processes shaped and reshaped the Hispano Homeland. Initial colonization left the Hispanos relatively isolated from cultural changes in the rest of New Spain, and gradual intermarriage with Pueblo and nomad Indians gave them new cultural features. As their numbers increased in the eighteenth century, they began to expand their Stronghold outward from the original colonies.
After Santa Fe was founded in 1610, the Hispano people were restless to expand their colony. They slowly pushed their borders to the north, establishing little villages along the Rio Grande and dozens of its tributaries. Their progress was often interrupted, first by the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and later by fierce resistance from the native people whose territory they were invading. Nonetheless, over the centuries of Spanish and Mexican rule, their frontier plaza villages survived. During their long journey, these unique people retained a strong sense of their Spanish identity and tradition. Most remarkably, they also continued to speak a version of castellano, the sixteenth century language of Cervantes. Historians usually say that the outer boundary of the Hispano homeland was defined by the 1860s or 1870s. But the last of the Hispano homesteaders were not finished and continued to create new settlements in the final decades of the nineteenth century and even the early years of twentieth century. This is the never before told story of a few of these New Mexico Hispanos, among the last pioneers, who made their home along a little known river in the high mountain wilderness at the northern edge of New Mexico. And it was happening at just about the time that New Mexico became a state.
Ideas defer to no border—least of all the idea of belonging. So where does one belong, and what does belonging even mean, when a border inscribes one’s identity? This dilemma, so critical to the ethnic Mexican community, is at the heart of Homeland, an intellectual, cultural, and literary history of belonging in ethnic Mexican thought through the twentieth century. Belonging, as Aaron E. Sánchez’s sees it, is an interwoven collection of ideas that defines human connectedness and that shapes the contours of human responsibilities and our obligations to one another. In Homeland, Sánchez traces these ideas of belonging to their global, national, and local origins, and shows how they have transformed over time. For pragmatic, ideological, and political reasons, ethnic Mexicans have adapted, adopted, and abandoned ideas about belonging as shifting conceptions of citizenship disrupted old and new ways of thinking about roots and shared identity around the global. From the Mexican Revolution to the Chicano Movement, in Texas and across the nation, journalists, poets, lawyers, labor activists, and people from all walks of life have reworked or rejected citizenship as a concept that explained the responsibilities of people to the state and to one another. A wealth of sources—poems, plays, protests, editorials, and manifestos—demonstrate how ethnic Mexicans responded to changes in the legitimate means of belonging in the twentieth century. With competing ideas from both sides of the border they expressed how they viewed their position in the region, the nation, and the world—in ways that sometimes united and often divided the community. A transnational history that reveals how ideas move across borders and between communities, Homeland offers welcome insight into the defining and changing concept of belonging in relation to citizenship. In the process, the book marks another step in a promising new direction for Mexican American intellectual history.
Studies territorial and rural New Mexico in the nineteenth century, the struggle for statehood, Nuevomexicano politics, immigration, urban issues in the twentieth century, the role of Spanish in education, ethnic identity, and the Chicano movement.
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.
