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Refusing the Favor tells the little-known story of the Spanish-Mexican women who saw their homeland become part of New Mexico. A corrective to traditional narratives of the period, it carefully and lucidly documents the effects of colonization, looking closely at how the women lived both before and after the United States took control of the region. Focusing on Santa Fe, which was long one of the largest cities west of the Mississippi, Deena González demonstrates that women's responses to the conquest were remarkably diverse and that their efforts to preserve their culture were complex and long-lasting. Drawing on a range of sources, from newspapers to wills, deeds, and court records, GonzĂ...
Feminism, Nation and Myth explores the scholarship of La Malinche, the indigenous woman who is said to have led Cortés and his troops to the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán. The figure of La Malinche has generated intense debate among literature and cultural studies scholars. Drawing from the humanities and the social sciences, feminist studies, queer studies, Chicana/o studies, and Latina/o studies, critics and theorists in this volume analyze the interaction and interdependence of race, class, and gender. Studies of La Malinche demand that scholars disassemble and reconstruct concepts of nation, community, agency, subjectivity, and social activism. This volume originated in the 1999 "U.S. Lat...
Twenty-one Chicana scholars and writers create theory through fiction, performance, and essays. They address the secrets, inequities, and issues they all confront in their daily negotiations with a system that often seeks to subvert their very existence. They have to struggle daily not only with the racism that pervades our lives, but also with the overwhelming male domination of the "macho" Chicano and Mexican culture.
For over three decades the work of Antonia I. Castañeda has shaped the fields of Western History and Chicana Studies. From her early articles on Chicana representation and political economy, to her most recent work mapping gendered violence and gendered resistance in the history of the U.S. Southwest, her work is consistently taught in classrooms and cited extensively. Yet Castañeda's work has been scattered throughout journals and anthologies, a "paper chase" for historians to track down. Three Decades of Engendering History ends the chase. This volume, edited by Linda Heidenreich, collects ten of Castañeda's best articles, including the widely circulated article "Engendering the History...
In Forging Arizona Anita Huizar-Hernández looks back at a bizarre nineteenth-century land grant scheme that tests the limits of how ideas about race, citizenship, and national expansion are forged. During the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexico War and the creation of the current border, a con artist named James Addison Reavis falsified archives around the world to pass his wife off as the heiress to an enormous Spanish land grant so that they could claim ownership of a substantial portion of the newly-acquired Southwestern territories. Drawing from a wide variety of sources including court records, newspapers, fiction, and film, Huizar-Hernández argues that the creation, collapse, and eventual forgetting of Reavis’s scam reveal the mechanisms by which narratives, real and imaginary, forge borders. An important addition to extant scholarship on the U.S Southwest border, Forging Arizona recovers a forgotten case that reminds readers that the borders that divide nations, identities, and even true from false are only as stable as the narratives that define them.
Spanning two centuries, this collection documents the lives of fifteen remarkable Latinas who witnessed, defined, defied, and wrote about the forces that shaped their lives. As entrepreneurs, community activists, mystics, educators, feminists, labor organizers, artists and entertainers, Latinas used the power of the pen to traverse and transgress cultural conventions.
The golondrina is a small and undistinguished swallow. But in Spanish, the word has evoked a thousand poems and songs dedicated to the migrant's departure and hoped-for return. As such, the migrant becomes like the swallow, a dream-seeker whose real home is nowhere, everywhere, and especially in the heart of the person left behind. The swallow in this story is Amada GarcĂa, a young Mexican woman in a brutal marriage, who makes a heart-wrenching decision—to leave her young daughter behind in Mexico as she escapes to el Norte searching for love, which she believes must reside in the country of freedom. However, she falls in love with the man who brings her to the Texas border, and the memor...
“Someday,” Candelaria Garcia said to the author, “you will get all the stories.” It was a tall order, in Magdalena, New Mexico, a once booming frontier town where Navajo, Anglo, and Hispanic people have lived in shifting, sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping worlds for well over a hundred years. But these were the stories, and this was the world, that David Wallace Adams set out to map, in a work that would capture the intimate, complex history of growing up in a Southwest borderland. At the intersection of memory, myth, and history, his book asks what it was like to be a child in a land of ethnic and cultural boundaries. The answer, as close to “all the stories” as one migh...
"Both noted and new scholars reweave the fabric of collective, family, and individual history with a legacy of agency and activism in the borderlands in these twenty-one original selections. Contributors explore themes of homeland, sexuality, language, violence, colonialism, and political resistance within the most recent frameworks of Chicana/Chicano inquiry. Art as social critique, culture as a human right, labor activism, racial plurality, Indigenous knowledge, and strategies of decolonization all vitalize these selections edited by one of the country's most respected historians of the borderlands, Antonia Castaneda.
Watch the Author Interview on KNME In both the historic record and the popular imagination, the story of nineteenth-century westward expansion in America has been characterized by notions of annexation rather than colonialism, of opening rather than conquering, and of settling unpopulated lands rather than displacing existing populations. Using the territory that is now New Mexico as a case study, Manifest Destinies traces the origins of Mexican Americans as a racial group in the United States, paying particular attention to shifting meanings of race and law in the nineteenth century. Laura E. GĂłmez explores the central paradox of Mexican American racial status as entailing the law's design...