The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War: Narrative, Time, and Identity 9780292792845

Citation preview

the literatures of the u.s.-mexican war

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

t h e l i t e r a t u r e s o f​ t h e u . s . - m e x i c a n w a r​ Narrative, Time, and Identity b y j a i m e j a v i e r r o d r Í g u e z​

University of Texas Press, Austin

Copyright © 2010 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2010 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rodríguez, Jaime Javier.   The literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War : narrative, time, and identity / by Jaime Javier Rodríguez. — 1st ed.    p.   cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-292-72245-3 (cl. : alk. paper)   1. American literature—1783–1850—History and criticism.  2. Mexican literature—19th century—History and criticism.  3. Mexican War, 1846–1848— Literature and the war.  4. Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature.  5. Mexican War, 1846–1848—Influence.  6. Mexican Americans in literature.  I. Title. ps208.r63  2010 810.9'3587362—dc22 2009036447

Para mi Papá y Mamá, Luciano Adrián Rodríguez y Esther Guajardo Rodríguez De ellos todo

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Contents



p r e f a c e ix I n t r o d u c t i o n Narratives, Borders, Dreams  1 ONE U.S.-Mexican War Novelettes and Dime Novels: Cousins, Seducers, Bandits  17

Act One: Tales of Chivalry  28 Act Two: Encounter on the Frontier  56 Act Three: Fictive Facts  81

TWO Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  110 THREE Nation and Lamentation: The Catalysis of Mexicanidad  153 FOUR Mexican Self-Consciousness: El monedero and the Quest to Reform Mexico  182 FIVE Mexican American Visions: Grief and Liberation in Global Time-Space  207



e p i l o g u e Narrative Arcs, Arrows of Time  249



a pp e n d i x Novelette Titles  255

v i i i   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War



NOTES 257



BIBLIOGRA P HY 289



INDEX 301

Preface

I began reading the literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War in hopes of finding new ways to understand the intersections of narrative, history, and identity as they converged along the geographic and cultural boundaries between the United States and Mexico. The novelettes, dime novels, poems, and other writings from Mexico and Mexican American literature displayed their desires and anxieties with such force and clarity that they seemed to be nearly transparent windows through which one could see origins and fundamental themes and revelations. I wished also to critique the contemporary border stories as propagated by the mass media in the United States. Having grown up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, I, and others like me, have understood those depictions as simplifications of actual problems and conditions, with the region’s vitality and creativity nearly completely omitted. I set out, then, on a recuperative undertaking, hoping to make present the elided and to complicate the oversimplified. Along the way, however, I began to suspect that the recuperative project as I had initially conceived it aimed at themes resting on the surface of a different field of investigation. I began to wonder increasingly about history and narrative, the way both constitute identity, and the way identity remains a project of continual recuperation. As I read the often seductively chaotic novelettes written about romantic adventures during the war, as I looked into how Mexican writers angrily denounced the invasion of their country, and as I studied the complex responses by Mexican American writers, I began to wonder whether the literary nationalism in the United States that elides

   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Mexican Americans and other Latinas and Latinos had in the nineteenth century already arrived at narrative formations that included Mexico and Mexicans, and by extension Mexican Americans, but included them in a certain way. More specifically, I began to consider whether the national story in the United States had been constructed not just on an evasion of Mexico’s complexity and presence but through an intensely pervasive mediation between the forces of cultural integration and the dynamics of global mutability. Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans had become defined not only as racially alien but, in this paradigm, as avatars of a fundamental, hemispherically valent, discontinuity. The recuperation would be of a different kind, not one addressing a missing history but a narratological interrogation of cross-national temporal and spatial displacements. Among the terms that would eventually emerge would be those of radical alienation and cultural incoherence as effects of a war, a conflict that, rather than being only in the past, took on aspects of an embedded national memory. The new questions now had to do with a national military experience and trauma that, from a certain perspective, remained intensely present, a border war that ended officially in 1848 but continued in various ways and with complex results throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, persisting today perhaps most visibly in the cycles of border militarizations. Such a basic premise required an analytical framework that would allow not just for historicist study but also for narratological analysis sensitive to the ways memory and time can be fluid, dynamic, and unbounded. As my research developed, my studies took on a number of dimensions, guided by mentors and colleagues who understood the potential for this war’s discourse to speak to immediate literary and cultural concerns. One of its key features lies in its comparative approach, embracing Mexican and Mexican American literature as well as previously canonical and popular writing from the United States. The premise behind the wide field of view is that the anxieties embedded in U.S.-Mexican War literature can illuminate contemporary (and perhaps future) interactions among Mexico, Mexican Americans, and Anglo, or white, citizens of the United States. My inter-American approach makes clear my debt to other similar studies, such as that of Kirsten Silva Gruesz, who in Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing charts new pathways for understanding cross-national literary exchanges as keys for the study of the Americas and for the relocation of Latinas/os in the hemisphere. Her call for redrafting the story of the United States to accord with a broader inter-American history lies close to the central

Preface  

xi

spirit of my own argument. Indeed, part of my thesis rests on tracing the way the cross-national experience of the war dropped out of war fiction soon after the fighting commenced in 1846. A key element in my argument is that the war’s characteristic “forgetting,” in collective memory as well as in imaginative literature, began almost as soon as the shooting started along the banks of the Río Bravo/Rio Grande. Time, then, as imagined and as denied, emerges as a critical player in the war’s literary dramas. In this part of the study I rely primarily on a Bakhtinian analysis of narrative form and community. My discussions about Mexican literature consider how the traumatic invasion that began in 1846 and ended in 1848 catalyzed formative dimensions of Mexican nationality, an identity fraught with internal self-criticality. I am concerned, then, with how modern Mexico’s literary nationalism has lines of connection back to the cataclysmic loss of nearly half its territory, and I rely here on various critical levers, including those offered by anthropological accounts of narrative meaning, but I also rely on studies of Mexican history and nationalism, such as those by David A. Brading, Timothy Anna, and Nestor García Canclini, who ground their analyses in Mexico’s complex engagement with modernity as well as nationality. In the domain of Chicana/o literature, I examine the literary legacy of the U.S.-Mexican War to consider how terms of globalization in Chicana/o discourse emerge from that conflict, although in ways that are both oblique and direct. The war’s territorial and social upheavals within the Mexican community north of the imposed border may best be understood as globalizing effects leading to the concomitant dialectic between regionalism and internationalism. I know of no other study that concentrates on Chicana/o writing about the war in this way, although many have explored the deep strata of hybridization and international, pan-American consciousness that permeate the Mexican American experience. Analyses such as José David Saldívar’s Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, Gruesz’s more recent work, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and Emma Pérez’s The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History—all these and more have established a vocabulary of extranationalist, globalist identity forms that shape a great deal of Latina and Latino writing. These inter-American musings also owe a foundational debt specifically to Anzaldúa’s work in Borderlands/La Frontera, primarily in the way she draws out the connecting tissue between trauma, dispossession, and violence and a globalist tension embedded at the center of Chicana/o discourse. Whereas Gruesz’s analysis informs a redemptive undercurrent in this study, Anzaldúa reminds us how much work still remains. Let me emphasize here that I do

x i i   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

not claim that the status of Mexican Americans today in the United States is precisely the same as it was in the nineteenth century. When I claim that Mexican Americans are generally elided in the U.S. collective imaginary, I am making a relative case. Mexican Americans clearly have a large and growing presence, but as a recent dispute about the inclusion of Latinos and Latinas in Ken Burns’s documentary on the Second World War reveals, many Mexican Americans and other Latinas/os justifiably feel excluded from the larger national narrative of U.S. American identity and history. Ultimately, I argue that the chief significance of this war literature lies not only in an indictment of racism, masculinism, or classism—although these are significant—but also in that it opens to view how the presence of Mexico in the agonistic sphere of the Americas counteracts the mechanisms of existential nationalist coherence in the United States, and that the presence— ­invasive and violent—of the United States globalizes Mexico in the sense that it simultaneously corrodes national belief and thereby leads to a desire for social coherence. Mexican Americans emerge from the war as complex avatars of a multicentric identity field that extends beyond the paradigms of ethnicity or race. The U.S.-Mexican War can be understood as illuminating a critical and continuing element in U.S nationalist thought, Mexico’s own national narrative in relational terms, and the legacy of war as a constituent of Mexican American evocations of dynamic identities. Although my observations arise from a nineteenth-century event, I propose that they pertain to our contemporary and future moment of Mexican-U.S. conflicts and exchanges, and that they lead to three questions: Might Mexicans and Mexican Americans continue to stand permanently against Anglo American essentialism in a manner that has no direct resolution? Might the United States be said to continue to denationalize Mexico by, say, continuing to siphon away large segments of its citizens? Finally, how might today’s (and yesterday’s) Mexican American population define itself in a future of intensifying globalism? At this point, it is necessary to ask what unites these three large analytical projects—what thread or theme runs through the five chapters. Certainly, the U.S.-Mexican War as a fundamentally disintegrative event lies at the gravitational center. I would also add that an elision of history winds its way through all five chapters of this book. Mexicans and Anglos have come to stand for each other’s subsumed field of contingency. When each confronts, or “sees,” the other, each is in a deep sense encountering a history of war in which both victor and vanquished remain traumatized. In this interpretation, echoes of the U.S.-Mexican War continue to constitute the definitional frame through which each nation-space perceives the other. Within this herme-

Preface  

xiii

neutic of war, Chicanas/os, or—the less politically charged term—Mexican Americans, inhabit a mediating zone that is imbued with the lingering echoes of the war’s upheavals and thus challenges the national coherence, the belief, in the nation-states of both the United States and Mexico. The “border zone” I delineate thus is less about a utopian third space and more about a troubled but nevertheless energizing and creative region of loss and disruption. The following chapters delineate my arguments and at times pose lingering questions and confusions, in the hope they may contribute to conversations about the United States, Mexico, and the always evolving borders between them. Mostly, however, I hope that this study leads to new questions, new ways of asking about and thereby responding to this particular, and intensely fascinating, dimension of the Americas. As I developed this project, I was profoundly aided and supported by my family, key friends, and many colleagues, and I could not have completed this work without their continuing advice and constant encouragement. My gratitude must begin with my family, long a bedrock of support, love, and understanding, and most especially my parents, Luciano and Esther, to whom this work is dedicated. Above all, their infinite inspirations made this work possible. Special gratitude also goes to my brothers Luciano and Armando, who helped in numerous ways large and small. I wish also to note the continuing support of many members of my extended family, among them Leandro and Lupita Martinez and David and Hilda Martinez. I also wish to especially thank Christine Ortega and Jerry and Norma Quintero for their continuing friendship and support. I must extend yet again my special thanks to Professor Sacvan Bercovitch, who informed, guided, and corrected the earliest draft of this study and who has continued to support my work. Similarly, I must thank Professor Doris Sommer, Philip Fisher, and Werner Sollors, all of whom contributed in various ways to the development and completion of my early research at Harvard. I thank especially my colleagues during my time in Boston University’s Writing Program, especially Professor Michael Prince and Professor and esteemed poet Tino Villanueva, and I also thank the graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Notre Dame, who provided inestimable assistance with their questions and classroom discussions. I gratefully acknowledge the support I received at the University of Notre Dame; in particular, Professors Glenn Hendler and Steve Fredman were generous with their assistance, as was Professor Gilberto Cardenas, executive director of the Latino Studies Institute at Notre Dame. I wish also to thank Professors Ben Olguín and especially José Limón for their advice and steady belief in this project at various stages

x i v   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

of the study. Special thanks go to Professor Victor Figueroa, who assisted with early translations of the poetry of Guillermo Prieto (any errors there are entirely my responsibility). I thank the staff at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, in particular Assistant Head Librarian Margot Gutierrez, and the staff at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, both at the University of Texas at Austin and both essential in providing numerous key resources. The Rare Books and Special Collections Department at Northern Illinois University rendered great assistance in providing access to its collection of dime novels, as did Dr. Thomas Kreneck and the staff at the Special Collections and Archives Department at the Mary and Jeff Bell Library at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, who provided vital assistance in researching the life and work of Jovita González. Finally, let me thank the staff at A. M. Willis Library at the University of North Texas for their generous assistance during the completion of this manuscript. A version of this work first appeared as a dissertation in 2000, and I wish to express once again my continuing gratitude to many who provided great assistance in that first endeavor. I began my graduate studies at the University of Houston, and three professors there deserve special mention, Nicolás Kanellos, Thomas Ford, and Lois Parkinson Zamora, all of whom in various ways first showed me the possibilities that inhere in literary studies. I must give special thanks also to Professor Nicolás Shumway, Professor Mauricio Tenorio, and Professor David Montejano, and also ranger Karen Weaver at the Palo Alto National Historic Battlefield Site, for their advice, assistance, and friendship during the final stages of those first drafts. I am grateful to the Ford Foundation for its financial support during a critical early stage. Let me note with continuing affection and appreciation the support of fellow students and friends Elio Brancaforte, Irina Harris, Ken Ward, Carlos Rodríguez-Iglesias, Bernie Perley, Mike Soto, Dominik Weiss, Christoph Eisenring, Geoffrey Minter, Terri Oliver, and Karen Halil, all of whom in many ways remain in my thoughts. I wish to also thank Theresa May, executive editor of the University of Texas Press, for her steady support of the project, and Marjorie Pannell for her work copyediting this volume. The list above must remain partial, but I am keenly aware that many others contributed to my efforts in too many ways to count. I am equally thankful to all of you for your support and for your thousand kindnesses. To the named and the unnamed, to those directly involved and to those whose support may have only seemed peripheral but was not, know that I am truly grateful. Thank you.

Introduction

Narratives, Borders, Dreams

I begin with three observations: first, the U.S.-Mexican War remains largely, and infamously, unknown by most citizens of the United States1; second, Mexican Americans in the United States dwell for the most part on the margins of the national imaginary; and third, Mexican Americans in their literature and other arts emphasize forms of identity that value hybridity, or mestizaje, over essentialist notions of the nation-state. An elision of war, a continuing exclusion, a pervasive anti-essentialism. The following analysis of U.S.-Mexican War literature argues for a relationship among all three, but it specifically relies on a claim that the literature of the war, especially in the nineteenth century, reveals that the conflict undermined, at least momentarily, modes of nationalism in both the United States and Mexico. The point might seem commonsensical, given that war writing often dwells in violence and trauma and frequently exhibits antinarratological pressures, but to bring forward the U.S.-Mexican War as a destabilizing event is to contemplate possible linkages to the ongoing psychosocial anxieties about national meanings in the global moment of the early twenty-first century. If one considers how often the U.S.-Mexican border has been a zone of international violence, how intensively the border remains militarized to this day, and how closely matters of U.S. identity erupt from anxieties about Mexican contact, then observations made about the openly declared war in the 1840s can come to seem not only relevant but urgent and crucial to our contemporary moment. Thus, what lies behind the following analyses is an abiding sense that the

   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

literary materials on the U.S.-Mexican War, fought from 1846 to 1848, can be keys to contemporary relationships among Mexicans, Anglo Americans, and Mexican Americans. Needless to say, that raises a range of problematic questions. How can one prove that fears about Mexican immigration or the assimilability of Mexican Americans, or the abiding concerns for recognition among Mexican Americans, all stem from a mid-nineteenth-century conflict, or even correspond in any significant way to the plots and characters to be explored in the following pages? After all, my work here involves fiction and poetry from a very different time and written under very different conditions. Any conclusions about such literature, even when restricted to seemingly reliable points about the literature itself, run a risk of presentism,2 and so a project that openly sets out to link the aesthetics of nineteenth-century literature to a contemporary political condition might seem troubled from the outset. To meet these risks, I have endeavored to remain conscious of my own narrative imperatives, but also to maintain a commensurate criticality and an emphasis on the literary forms and subject matters of the texts under discussion, although history and national culture play key roles. Throughout the following chapters, which themselves move deliberately toward the present and then the future, I stress a narratological elision of time in the literature rather than a drawing out of the various and particular relationships between the literature and its social context. I hope thereby to show that what is most salient about the writing under review is not only its connections to the nineteenth century, although these are important, but also what it says about the conditions of war, persistent conflict, and the abiding anxieties between the United States and Mexico. These possible connections between then and now must remain somewhat speculative, matters of musing hypothesis rather than absolutist argument. In fact, in certain ways I am content in this book to focus on the movement of ideas and motifs across the multifarious terrains of the literary; this is so because I am usually discussing writings once dismissed as “popular,” writings understood perhaps to be socially significant but not necessarily as having particular literary dimensions that might be tracked across genres. Thus, reading the “literary” back into pulp fiction already makes a straightforwardly recuperative argument. On the other hand, a mass-market pulp novelette appears at first as a one-dimensional surface so keenly flattened and polished that it seems to do little more than reflect its social circumstance. Indeed, popular narrative often engrosses students of literature because it seems written not by authors but by readerships, thus promoting an expectation that we may learn something about a “country,” a “nation,” or

Introduction: Narratives, Borders, Dreams  



a “people” by reattaching social history to characters and plots. I too map the literary domain of the U.S.-Mexican War by identifying plots and characters and other features of the literary environment as it seems to have existed during and shortly after the war itself. My mode of analysis, then, values both these general realms, the literary and the social, in an exploration of their interdependence, but my aim is to shed light on the U.S.-Mexican War’s specific and continuing significance. At the very least, I hope my meditations bring forward the aesthetic nuances in works that may seem to be reducible only to matters of contextual contingency. It is perhaps a truism that popular art forms conceal a daunting complexity. What appears simple and formulaic almost without fail quickly becomes intricate and challenging. Thus, even when I emphasize basic claims about the literary environments surrounding the war at midcentury, the conclusions I propose might strike some as surprising or counterintuitive. But my method searches for the more abstract relationships between literary performance and a particular historical event that can be understood as the U.S.-Mexican War, or contact with Mexico and Mexicans, or, also, as contact with the Americas, or, finally, as contact with temporality. Rather than ahistorical truths, what I am writing about here can best be described as transient, historical, and specific effects emerging from the still evolving collision between the United States and Mexico. Somewhat like Walter Mignolo, who in Local Histories/ Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking understands modernism as a category of colonialism, I sense that the United States of today cannot so easily keep the past in the past—at least not the particular past of the U.S.-Mexican War. There certainly will come a time when the events of 1846–1848 recede into distant memory, perhaps rewritten, but from a certain temporal vantage point, the military conflict of the mid-nineteenth century has only just happened, and perhaps continues at this very moment, as suggested by other Chicana/o critics, such as José Limón, who in Dancing with the Devil argues for war as an organizing structure in South Texas and other border locations, a “state of social war” (Limon 15) continuing on into the twentieth century. Which leads to the central question running through this study: To what degree does the U.S.-Mexican War usefully illuminate the present moment of Anglo-Mexican tensions? For example, there is the matter of George Lippard and his 1847 fantasydocudrama Legends of Mexico, the book that initially spurred my thinking about the literature of the war. As I read it for the first time, Lippard’s nearly surreal recreations of the war’s early battles—with only the most casual, openly dismissive use of historical facts—vibrated with an anxiety remark-

   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

ably consonant with the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as if these fictive forays into nationalist propaganda had opened a window into how Anglo America thought about Mexico and Mexicans not in 1847 but right now, today, and the key issue at hand, then as now, was not only race or class but something more basic to the mythology of “America,” the notion of a single nation with a narrative that explained its hallowed origins and its meaning. In other words, Lippard’s text argued that what was at stake in the war against Mexico was the very meaning of life in the United States, which is but a short distance from the contemporary mass-media agon over the presence of undocumented Mexican workers and the “Mexicanization” or “Latinization” of the country. I turned to the literature of the U.S.-Mexican War, then, to see if I could find in it something that would reveal the machinery of a permeating anxiety little changed over the generations. Reading Lippard, to put it in a different way, led me not to wonder about anti-Mexican racism in 1847 but to consider the lines of connection between writers like Lippard and current-day apologists for a pure, coherent, sacred “America,” which could then explain both the excision of the war from the nation’s collective memory and the discrimination against Mexicans and Mexican Americans, who are seen by those essentialists as corroding the fabric of U.S. American political and cultural ideology. The matter was not merely one of “constructions,” of jingoistic U.S. Americans labeling Mexican Americans in some false way, because the escapism of popular literature arises from something that requires, or seems to require, escaping. To dissect such anxieties, one might begin with a common essentialist indictment—the charge that Mexicans are antidemocratic, for example, which is demonstrably untrue—or one can, as I do here, focus on the fear of cultural disunity prompted among many by the presence of Mexicans in “America” and massively supported by the materiality of antiMexican writing, broadcasting, and other forms of cultural expression. One might simply ask what lies at the core of U.S. American anxieties about Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The first answer that arises is race. Mexicans are racially “other” in many sectors of U.S. society (not all), and thus the victims of racist aggression, and there can be no question that race matters now as much as then, as Omi and Winant have argued in Racial Formation in the United States, a study that dramatizes how racial constructions and social structures interact to create and maintain racist hierarchies. But Lippard’s Mexican enemies in Legends of Mexico were not only dark-skinned rancheros but, just as often, fair-skinned members of the Mexican aristocracy. Was that an ephemeral element of a particular time? Or might we need to understand

Introduction: Narratives, Borders, Dreams  



anti-Mexican racialization as being accompanied by the always pressing national anxiety posed by Mexico? Might the anxiety among U.S. American purists today be based more or less on the same high stakes as were once perceived during the U.S.-Mexican War? Such musings led me eventually from the war to the modern moment, in which Chicana/o activists and artists argue for a hemispheric America without borders, or for an America that is both bordered and borderless at the same time, or for an identity based less (or not at all) on the nation-state than on globalist notions of justice and tolerance. To an extent, then, the following analyses argue for a historicism tempered by an attention to “what repeats,” to quote Marjorie Garber in her critique of some new historicist practice, not to assert eternal verities but—and here I reference Garber’s own quotation of Benjamin—to “‘represent the age that perceives them [past events]—our age—in the age during which they arose.’”3 My narratological emphasis intends to add to contemporary historicist studies of Mexican-U.S. contact, and not to discount the separation in time between now and then. I am interested in understanding the narratological remnants of a furious military collision and in offering an argument that explains their persistence but certainly not their eternity. Let me add that I am not forecasting an end to the nation-state, nor am I arguing that Mexican Americans are by definition or inherently globalized, or that a globalized consciousness ought to be a utopian goal. The odds are low that Mexican Americans will actually lead to the disuniting of the United States, or that they alone will radically alter the course of the nation. Nor am I claiming that contact with Mexico inaugurates an international consciousness within the United States, although I do claim that the war, Mexico, and Mexicans or Mexican Americans amplify that kind of awareness and the resultant tensions and anxieties. I am here musing on the way Mexican Americans, because they often instantiate a kind of dual or multinationalism, can be readily perceived—or projected—as threatening to national singularity. This is only a problem for you if you, along with the late Samuel Huntington and others, believe that “America” has been a single, unified nation with more or less the same principles whose statist origins can be pinpointed to a particular July day in Philadelphia in 1776. Regardless of one’s views about the origin and future of the country, it is nonetheless possible to understand anti-Mexican sentiment as being grounded in national essentialism, but not against Mexicans, exactly, and here is where I offer an alternative interpretation of the relevance of the U.S.-Mexican War. Anti-Mexican antagonism aims at a group of people that hold two or more national identities together with a spectrum of racial mestizaje, and thus stand against the basic premise

   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

of a consistent single national ideology. The matter moves from such notions of hybridity toward the realm of modernist discourse because the “other” in this dialectic is not “Mexican” but a domain of being by definition opposed to singular boundaries. Said another way, what troubles anti-immigrant activists along the southwestern U.S. border is not the “flood of illegal Mexicans” but more precisely the artificiality of the international border, or, to follow the analogy, not the flood but the even more imaginary floodwall. By this hermeneutic, Mexican Americans endure discrimination not only because many are dark-skinned but also because they are walking, talking proof that the United States, like other nation-states, depends on an ephemeral, always evolving, yet still vital national fiction, and what this approaches is the envisioning of Mexican Americans as global avatars. The matter at hand, then, lies not only within concerns of racial identity or cultural artifacts but also with narrative itself, with historiography, and with time. These are broad concerns, these observations and questions in which I collapse more than 150 years of history—again, not to impose ahistorical timeless verities but to consider that in the future, the temporal distance between 1848 and 2010 may come to seem very brief, that the international moment of violent conflict known as the U.S.-Mexican War might be rewritten someday not as a minor prelude to the Civil War but as the defining moment in the story of the United States and in the story of Mexico, new narratives to then be overwritten someday by others. One final prefatory note: the argument I pursue does not essentialize all Anglo Americans under the same critique, whether they exist in the moment of war in the nineteenth century or today. Indeed, the history of my home region of South Texas reveals how the most virulent anti-Mexican racism has developed in periods of significant AngloMexican comity, not to mention intermarriages, economic partnerships, and political coalitions among Anglos and Mexicans. The dimensions of this study, moreover, touch on the dynamic cultural potential of Anglo Americans, who in the modern age may themselves increasingly cross previously reified boundaries. The following chapters reflect on an eclectic, disparate collection of readings, but they coalesce around the historical moment of the U.S.-Mexican War, as either central issue or background, and through the initial proposition that the war’s literature makes visible the mutability of nationalist identity. The war’s literary manifestations projected national ideals not because writers felt guilty, either about their nation invading another or about the weakness of their own nation in the face of invasion, but because the war—perhaps like all wars—made apparent that identity always rests on a sandy foundation.

Introduction: Narratives, Borders, Dreams  



The writings pursued here go to war not against nations, exactly, but against unpredictability, which I believe it safe to say nearly always attends war and the writing of war. Military conflicts typically devolve into chaos, confusion, and disaggregation as much as they wrestle with often unspeakable, perhaps unwritable, violence, as Paul Fussell explored in 1975 in The Great War and Modern Memory, a key study in the literature of the First World War. The U.S.-Mexican War is no different, even though it lasted less than two years and resulted in a treaty that fixed the boundary between the two nations, then quickly began receding in the U.S. American public memory. The point may seem banal until one considers that writers often approach the U.S.-Mexican War as an act of hypocritical aggression by one nation against another, as if the most disturbing fact of the U.S.-Mexican War were that it contradicted U.S. ideals of republican freedom, and that once we understand that, we have unfolded the war’s meaning. But—and here I borrow from the work of Thomas Hietala in Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America—the paradox of manifest destiny lies in its emergence from a domain of national insecurity. This is the doorway through which I enter my literary analyses: exploring Hietala’s paradox in the literary record, showing how the nineteenth-century literature of the war in both countries wrestled with the terrifying disruptions of nationalist belief. The first, overarchingly synoptic, premise, then, is that the literature of the U.S.-Mexican War reveals nationalist fears rather than patriotic confidence, in both Mexico and the United States. From this paradigm of anxiety, my analysis of the U.S.-Mexican War literature leads to a set of three discussions corresponding to the United States, Mexico, and finally Mexican Americans. I draw the primary theoretical foundation, the interpretive frame relied on throughout the book, from the structural analysis of M. M. Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination, because in my reading the problem each nation-state poses for the other has less to do with race or culture and more to do with narrative. For example, for the cultural purist in the United States, it is not only that Mexicans are “brown” or “working class”—though fictional Mexicans emerge with such constructions clearly enough—but also that Mexicans in this calculus stand for the erosion of American meaning, where “American” stands for an exceptional balance between the stress of individuality and communal meaning. What I find compelling is the way such anxieties attend the U.S.-Mexican War, as if this military conflict cracked open the best, clearest view into the problems posed by Mexicans for certain kinds of “Americans,” and also, let me hasten to add, the fears generated by yanquis for Mexican intellectuals and writers. The conceptual field of Mexico and Mexican, then,

   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

becomes invested with a memory of war trauma, elided and recast, and thus all the more significant. The literary investigation to follow, then, investigates how popular literature of the period exemplifies the stresses and fractures at the intersection of literary production and quotidian reality, this being, as I claim, one of the keys to understanding the Mexican presence in the United States. Attending the argument, as might be surmised, is another theoretical influence, the historiographic critique offered by Hayden White in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, among others, critical interrogations that reveal the fraught exchanges between the recording of facts and the drive toward meaning, a project involving the dialectics between synchronic ahistoricality and diachronic time. Thus, I am not claiming an essential difference between fiction and nonfiction; rather, I am claiming— drawing now from Bakhtin as well as White—that fictional writing of the war tends to resist a consciousness of time, whereas historical documentation of the war tends to be informed by a greater sense of unpredictable mutability. But fiction and history do not divide along the line between invention and truth, and my intent in part is to explore varieties of historical imagination, as well as the historical significance of the fantastic. Near the center of these investigations lies a claim that, for a brief moment, the U.S.-Mexican War actually created an opportunity to see both Mexico and the United States as having more or less equal claims to an American nationality. Today, most critics understand how nation-states exist in a hierarchical arena, divided up along different modes of interpretive value; in such a world Latin American nation-states have been relegated to a variety of subordinate categories. But nineteenth-century nationalism, as Anthony Smith has noted, posited “nationness” as a common denominator (paradoxically, in terms of exceptionalism), and it is that fleeting possibility that circulates in some U.S.-Mexican War texts. Clearly, the Monroe Doctrine and Anglo American racism and essentialism had already stacked the deck against a utopian sense of international respect, but wars often have unpredictable blowback effects, surprising contradictions, and paradoxes. In the case of the U.S.Mexican War, the fighting could actually lead U.S. soldiers to question hard dichotomies and could lead some U.S. writers to at least recognize Mexico’s claim to national sovereignty as similar, if not always equal, to the claims of U.S. America. Let me add here also a note on the set of terms I use to refer to the Anglo American imaginary: although I occasionally use “white,” I most often use “American,” in bracketing quotation marks, to denote the dream of racial and cultural exceptionalism undergirding a great deal of U.S. American

Introduction: Narratives, Borders, Dreams  



nineteenth-century nationalism, and “U.S. American” is my way of denoting the United States as only one nation-state in the hemisphere presently known as the Americas. As might be expected, I strenuously try to avoid conflating America with the United States; whenever I do employ the term, I am referencing the hemisphere in its entirety. “Anglo” and “Anglo American” refer interchangeably to the self-ascription of those in the United States who may see themselves as “white,” and not Hispanic or Latina/o. Somewhat like Mexicans in the mythology of the United States, literary Anglo Americans in Mexico function as agents of nationalist disillusionment, as destroyers of national belief. Again, the conflict might generate distinctions of class, or “civilization,” the infamous gringo invader being in many literary works little more than an uncouth barbarian, but at bottom, the invading U.S. army operates as an abstract agent of existential destruction. For Mexicans witnessing and enduring la guerra del ’47, nothing less than Mexico’s entire existence seemed at stake; yet from the shards and fragments of military defeat, a national belief, an ideology, began to coalesce, although Mexican nationality has remained troubled by a modernist self-consciousness.4 Do Mexicans see the United States in similar terms today? It’s hard to say definitively, but I am thinking here of the famous aphorism apocryphally attributed to President Porfirio Díaz about Mexico being so far from God and so close the United States, a seemingly self-deprecating mythic aphorism that probably took hold because it casts the United States as an absolute antithesis to Mexico’s national dream. For both Mexico and the United States, broad abstractions were probably inevitable, given that both nations were founded on utopian ideals, on the promise of America being the environment for humanity’s final redemption. What is undeniable is that in Mexico as well as in the United States, the enemy became The Enemy. Everything seemed to be at risk, because both sides believed, and perhaps many still do, that they were actors on a cosmic stage. What then of the Mexican American response? How did these writers see the war whose conclusion meant that those in California and other northern Mexican states went from being Mexican to “American”—technically U.S. citizens—with the stroke of a pen on a peace treaty? To pursue the question, I draw mainly on twentieth-century fictions by authors who viewed themselves as Mexican American, that is, as ethnically marked subjects, the stakes being no less absolute for them than they were for authors much closer in time to the war itself. Just as national meaning is the troubled terrain for nineteenthcentury national writers, Mexican Americans write about the war in ways that reveal lingering trauma, a psychological and cultural scarring, but one

1 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

that leads now not simply to dismay and aporia but also to cultural reconstitution, both tendencies—we can see them dialectically as toward doubt and toward belief—emerging in Chicana and Chicano war literature as more or less in uneasy tension. Identity, then, for these writers resides not in the materiality of culture, not in language, food, or customs, not in “ethnicity,” but in the stress, familiar in discussions of globalization, between tradition and invention. Indeed, my discussions throughout these chapters often touch on matters of globalization and modernity, two other key terms in my analysis. By globalization I do not mean a unidirectional homogenization of culture but rather the double move that leads at one end toward universalization and at the other to particularization, and here I follow the work of Roland Robertson, Stuart Hall and many others. Globalization means, in this sense, a state of crisis—moderate or intense—but still a troubled terrain, which nonetheless opens out toward invigorating possibilities. Starting from this agonistic paradigm, I address how globalization’s contradictory process emerges not only in metropolitan centers, the capitals of empire, but also in the hybridizing and hybridized global contact zones such as South Texas and, more generally, the U.S.-Mexican border. Chicana and Chicano literatures often exhibit dramatic instances of modern or postmodern interrogation, and I follow here standard definitions, which see modernism marked by a deep nostalgia for a former unity and postmodernism as a form of negotiation of that nostalgia, resulting in an always ambivalent play of multiple centering projects. Moreover, Fussell’s thesis in The Great War and Modern Memory5 directs the United States to consider the potential parallels between twentieth-century warfare and modernism, which would lead to an understanding of twentiethcentury Mexican American literary recoveries of the war as ironic responses to military violence and psychological trauma. These terms—globalization, modernism, postmodernism—all play central roles in the U.S.-Mexican War literature precisely because the experience of contact with a foreign other and the experience of brutalizing military violence tend toward the fragmentation of singularizing projects. Thus, to claim that the Mexican American experience emerged from a legalistically formative moment in 1848 as modernist crisis is to ask how the legacy of territorial dispossession and psychological devastation stemming from the U.S.-Mexican War has established at least one important foundation for Mexican American society. Such an analytical paradigm understands the linkages between war, modernity, and globalization as key terms in Mexican American culture and aesthetics. Other studies of the U.S.-Mexican War literature have provided the grounding for my work here, and I want to acknowledge their contributions

Introduction: Narratives, Borders, Dreams  

11

to this study, but also to explain my own methodology and the distinguishing features of my project. The landmark work in studies of U.S.-Mexican War literature remains Robert W. Johannsen’s To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (1985), the most comprehensive review of U.S. American writing and other forms of expression about the conflict. Johannsen recovers and remarks on practically every element of the war’s literature and delineates its role in both promoting the war and offering platforms for its critics. The other work of great value is Shelley Streeby’s American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (2002). Like Johannsen’s, Streeby’s nuanced and comprehensive study also concentrates on charting the literature of the war as an index to the nation’s sociological landscape at the time of the fighting, though her study deals more pointedly with racial, gender, and labor tensions within U.S. America’s mainstream. Although these works differ in substantial ways, they are both simultaneously empowered and limited by a focus on the nineteenth century, as if the impact of the war came to a conclusion along with the ending of hostilities or shortly thereafter in the ensuing decades. Both Johannsen and Streeby tend to understand popular war writing in the United States as being part of the large, anti-Mexican, manifest destinarian push into the western territory, pulp fiction enlisted in programs to racialize Mexicans and to further a U.S. American internal class and racial consolidation. Both rely to various degrees on implied or explicit criticism of Anglo American essentialism, either to register how war literature functioned as part of the war effort—a key aspect of Johannsen’s project—or to explore how the literature reveals class and racial anxieties in the United States at midcentury—­perhaps the most fundamental aspect of Streeby’s approach. Also important in establishing key historical bearings is Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (1981), which investigates how the war catalyzed ideas about Anglo-Saxon identity and supremacy. Finally, I note also the important contribution made by David Kazanjian in The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (2003), a chapter of which focuses on the complexities of racial formation during the war and, most pointedly, during the Caste War in Mexico’s Yucatán. However, he, like Streeby, reads the U.S.-Mexican War novelette fiction mainly as an index to U.S. social anxieties of that time, and he seems to regard war novelettes as unified by a general project to assimilate some Mexicans (those deemed white or white-like) and to eradicate the “Indianized,” hence barbaric, darker-skinned natives. My project agrees in many respects with and draws from all three of these scholarly studies, especially given that all of

1 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

them recognize the complications coursing through these texts, as well as from many other studies that excavate U.S. culture, sociology, and national identity in the nineteenth century. My work, however, draws its main inspiration from the category of war literature itself, and so it is more concerned with matters of physical and existential trauma, disruption, and meaning. In other words, I relate U.S.Mexican War literature to the U.S.-Mexican War itself, taking these texts not as mere escapism that speaks about societal divisions back home in Boston or New York or Philadelphia but as fictions that register questions and problems raised directly by military conflict with Mexico. Let me acknowledge that this is indeed a retroactive framework. I began with my own suspicion that what I was reading in Lippard was more than a form of propaganda, and I began to sense that the relationship between Mexico and the United States today could be defined within the above-mentioned overlapping categories of trauma, disruption, and meaning, and these in turn could speak to a more enduring understanding of the U.S.-Mexican War and, more crucially, to larger facts regarding Anglo-Mexican tensions. I have grouped these arguments in five chapters, each one focusing on a particular writer or group of writers. A lengthy Chapter 1, divided into three acts, begins the analysis by launching into a discussion of U.S.-Mexican War novelettes, early mass-market fiction that preceded and informed the more familiar genre of dime novels. I begin here for two reasons: first, the writers of these war novelettes concentrated most directly on the war, and thus these texts are useful as introductions to the subject of U.S.-Mexican War literature, and second—and critical to my general project—these novelettes exemplify the very process of historical elision. I show in this chapter how the novelettes can be subdivided into three distinct—though always overlapping—categories that move from a kind of historical documentary interwoven with a sense of chivalric, aristocratic equivalence between the United States and Mexico, through an intermediate stage in which the war begins moving into the background as a cultural and racial hostility against Mexico begins to harden, to a third stage in which the war is mentioned but expelled or excluded from narratives characterized by high levels of abstraction, quasi-war tales that are dominated by Mexican bandits. By beginning with this triad, I lay out a key aspect of my argument, which is not only that the iconic Mexican bandit figure is a vestige of the war but that he instantiates an illuminating genealogy within the category of U.S.-Mexican war fiction. Said another way, the stereotypical figure of the Mexican bandit is inversely related to the presence of historical contingency. Let me note here that at no

Introduction: Narratives, Borders, Dreams  

13

point in this study do I mean to suggest that the mutual relationality I locate in a chivalric imaginary actually references a moment in which real Mexicans and real Anglo Americans saw themselves as equal participants in the Americas. Rather, these literary motifs document a range of modalities generated by a profound unease attending the invasion of Mexico. Thus, when I refer in this study to an equivalent or reciprocal relationship between the United States and Mexico, I am referring to the very border-defying energy unleashed by the U.S.-Mexican war in a kind of paradoxical blowback, and also to the same energy as always already inhering within the Americas, to which the fantasies of nationalism respond in part by establishing cultural and jurisdictional borders. U.S. America—and other nations—have never actually existed in a utopian space of “equivalent” nations, but one of the key points about the U.S.-Mexican War is that it confused the issue; it blurred the comfortable hierarchy between a noble, progressive, fully authorized United States and a supposedly backward, anachronistic, corrupt Mexico. The fires of battle often burn away customary definitions. Chapter 2 focuses primarily on a single work by James Russell Lowell, a prominent man of letters in Boston at midcentury, whose The Biglow Papers (1848) languishes as a largely unappreciated and untaught antiwar satire. Along with Lowell’s somewhat difficult text, I consider how the complications for U.S. American identity that erupt from the war move through and shape writings by Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In different ways, these texts challenge casual reading, resisting national essentialisms or failing in their attempts to discover it. For example, Lowell’s Biglow Papers comprises three different voices and uses several metafictional devices, and it features fragments of narratives rather than any single dramatic arc, being the kind of text that lends itself to discussions of modernity and postmodernity during the nineteenth century. Its complexity places it at the center of this chapter because its ideological fissures lie at the core of the meaning of the U.S.-Mexican War. Specifically, I read Lowell’s three primary characters as each expressing a distinct response to the war, a new triad that might at first seem to parallel the three-part analysis in Chapter 1, because the issue in both chapters concerns a tension between narratological resolution and epistemological uncertainty. But Chapter 2 does not parallel Chapter 1 as much as it explores its middle paradigm. In other words, Chapter 2 probes deeper into a field of “frontier” ambiguity as a defining characteristic of the U.S.-Mexican War. The result is a character analysis that explores three different disruptive effects of contact with Mexico: (1) a turn inward, grounded largely in national exceptionalism, (2) a meditation on the

1 4   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Mexican enemy as a projection of the hidden or denied reality of the United States, and (3) an exploration of the nearly complete dissolution of national belief. In Chapter 3 I shift to Mexican writing about la invasión norteamericana and investigate the invasion poems of Guillermo Prieto, written from 1847 to nearly the time of his death in 1897. Prieto’s war poems dwell in the agonistic response toward invasion and the defeat, and, like U.S. writers writing about the war, Prieto also framed matters in abstract, absolute terms. Prieto’s poems, as might be expected, dramatize the extreme rupture in national belief triggered by the U.S. invasion, but they also hint at the first stirrings of recovery, at least in terms of a reconstituted national story. I concentrate on his poems first, because they offer a sustained response, a decades-long concentration, on the meaning of the war for Mexico, and second, because Prieto himself as a writer and politician straddles the very divide I seek to bridge in my own analysis. Mexico broke from Spain officially in 1821 after a ten-year revolution, but it never got going as a domain of national meaning until after the U.S.-Mexican War; the defeat at the hands of the barbarians from the north forced Mexican intellectuals and writers to define themselves through the vocabulary of American utopianism—already in play before, of course, or else there never would have been a break from Spanish control, but the liberal reformers who wanted to emulate the United States began to gain traction, somewhat paradoxically, after the U.S. invasion. Prieto’s poems, as much as they rail against the gringo invader, bring forward the narratological workshop in which reformist ideals began to gain new momentum. Mexico’s nationalism remains a troubled, uncertain field, as many others have noted, and rather than simply mark the origins of Mexican national identity, a review of this writer’s response to the U.S. invasion sheds light on the catastrophic violence that may continue to unsettle the Mexican nation-state, as well as mark an ideological turning point. I should point out that I am not making a recuperative case for liberalism itself but rather tracking its narratological grounding in the catastrophe of the North American invasion. Chapter 4 continues the discussion of postwar Mexican literary nationalism with a review of El monedero (The Counterfeiter), by Nicolás Pizarro Suárez, a long novel of more than six hundred pages published in 1861 but set primarily during the time of the war. Indeed, the novel may be one of the few lengthy, energetically reflective novelizations of the Mexican experience during the U.S. invasion. In many ways, El monedero leads to the same conclusions I propose for Prieto’s poetry, because Pizarro also writes from an agonistic perspective, the war for him similarly raising problems of personal

Introduction: Narratives, Borders, Dreams  

15

and national meaning. The difference is that Pizarro’s literary answer to the dismembering of the country is more overtly utopian, more clearly informed by democratic ideals, as it chastises the United States for nefarious hypocrisy. Prieto’s poems, regardless of their time of composition, represent the trauma, the lamentation, that seeks a new beginning; Pizarro’s novel, though severely conflicted, yet deploys the more developed structure of a utopian argument. In the end, El monedero’s answer to the problem of the war depends on abstract values of ultimate good and ultimate justice. As in the United States, meaning and redemption emerge as the operative terms of the U.S.-Mexican War, which is to emphasize that like many wars, the one between the United States and Mexico generated explorations of essential ideals. In the final chapter I turn to fictional works by Mexican Americans that incorporate the war as a critical narrative element. These works reject calls for a singularizing national identity, either Mexican or U.S., as if having been cut off from both nations leads not to nostalgia for Mexico or a desire for inclusion in the United States but a third response that oscillates not between two nations, but between faith and doubt. In keeping with many other literary expressions of war, these texts, by María Amaparo Ruíz de Burton, Jovita González (with Margaret Eimer), Nash Candelaria, and Maria Cristina Mena (Chambers), sound chords in minor keys, plaintive and skeptical. Yet they exhibit a double, holographic quality, at times invested in tradition or belief, at other times energized by the possibility of new forms of identity, which informs them with the sharp edges of globalized perception, a feature I discuss at some length because it suggests how the dislocations that follow upon war and violence can evoke the kinds of interruptions in time and space that resemble modes of global consciousness. That is, the dual-national and non-national imperatives driving parts of Chicana/o aesthetics can be traced not just to twentieth-century hybridity but also to the field of international military conflict in the nineteenth century. Again, as in the Mexican literary domain, relatively few Chicana or Chicano authors have written fiction or poetry about the U.S.-Mexican War, but in this case all four of the authors in this chapter are distinguished by being key figures of Mexican American literature who at least momentarily turned their writing energies to the U.S. invasion. Studies of Mexican Americans often rely on models of previous waves of immigration, or they concentrate on racial dichotomies or, at times, seek to understand Latinas and Latinos as actors in a new utopian America, Las Américas—all valuable and necessary re-visions. What I present here basically argues for inter-American conflict as a critically important aspect of

1 6   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Mexican American life, art, and culture. This may seem a pessimistic stance compared with the immigrant story, which leads to assimilation into U.S. ideals; or the antiracialist attack that calls forth tolerance, miscegenation, or the neutralization of race as a definitional category; or the new utopia of a hemispheric America that invests in a dream of the just society. The present work offers no singularizing proposition, and when I meditate on possible futures, they remain speculative possibilities. This may be because war literature concentrates on moments of chaos, destruction, and disillusionment, turning our attention to the outermost limits of narrative. To settle on conflict in the Americas as a key to a great deal of U.S.-Mexico interactions and as one of the defining features of the Mexican American experience attempts only to explain a particular history and to describe a given condition, not to predict the dissolutions of nations. Further, my analysis remains grounded in the inevitability of evolution in human cultures precisely because of their catalysis within crisis. At best, we may glean certain possibilities and anticipate a few of our challenges; to such ends I have aimed the present study.

U.S.-Mexican War Novelettes and Dime Novels One

Cousins, Seducers, Bandits

Setting the Stage: A Preface to Three Acts With a shooting war flaring along the northern banks of the Rio Grande in the spring of 1846, novelette writers in the rapidly growing eastern centers of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia must have congratulated themselves on their rising fortunes. Here was an exciting national adventure providing a new rich vein from which to mine the ore of mass-market fantasy. An exotic landscape, an evil dictator as an enemy, an oppressed people ready for the liberating catharsis of benevolent invasion, golden-haired heroes, and a plain-talking general, Zachary Taylor, whose dress and manner had more than a touch of the American frontiersman, a dash of Leatherstocking himself 1—what more could a writer of popular melodrama ask for? Almost immediately, the widening midcentury current of potboiler fiction began featuring adventure stories set in the time and space of the war in Mexico, but these varied in their approach to both Mexico and Mexicans, inflected as they were by intersecting currents of cultural beliefs, emerging communication technologies, and anxieties activated by a need to conduct and to justify a highly controversial military invasion. Novelette writers were not the only scribblers rushing to cash in on the war’s narratological opportunities, but their efforts—mostly short adventure tales about 100 pages long—directly incorporated the conflict as an element of imaginative fiction, and because their authors strove to cater—or pander—to an emerging U.S. American readership, they have understandably

1 8   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

become the focus of several scholarly literary studies that examine the intersection of narrative and social context. My own approach begins by noting that the novelette form holds an interstitial place in U.S. literary history, a pulp medium that evolved from the rapid expansion of penny press newspapers and anticipated in its target markets and its fantasy adventures the western dime novel, a fictive form in the moment of breaking free from its journalistic origins but not yet the fully rendered paperback western. At the genre’s birth in the 1840s, the invasion of Mexico was only one of many historical crises to get potboiler treatment; revolutionary heroes, sea adventures, Indian wars, and more all filled the pages of the highly consumable novelette. Yet the rise of the novelette as popular and populist entertainment coincided with real and escalating tensions between the United States and Mexico at midcentury and yielded, in its U.S.-Mexican War variant, an intricate blend of romance, fantasy, history, and reportage.2 At least thirty extant titles can be defined as U.S.-Mexican War novelettes, tales set either amid the war itself or on related terrains of conflict such as the bitter dispute over Texas.3 On cursory reading, these novelettes might seem to blur into a single, incessantly repeating, focus-grouped Hollywood script: heroic Anglo-Saxon soldiers travel to Mexico to battle—successfully, of course—an oppressive regime, liberating both nations in the process. But the tales are not monolithic, and their differences are ultimately more interesting, revealing, and relevant than their similarities. This chapter attends to a particular set of novelette variations to peer into the significance of Mexico within the larger story of an expanding U.S. America. Unlike Streeby’s analysis, which frames these fictions in a more unitary field of racial and class productions, I argue for three distinct kinds of U.S.-Mexican War popular fiction, moving, more or less, from stories in which Anglo and Mexican enemies are literally part of the same family, to an intermediate moment in which Anglos and Mexicans test each other’s national loyalty, to a final and more enduring zone that fixes and fixates on the features of the iconic Mexican bandit, a familiar mode of plotting and characterization in which the Mexican enemy operates as absolutely evil and as a threat to Anglos and Mexicans alike, a characterological structure strongly aligned with images of terrorists. This is not to say that the contradictions within the imperializing dream Streeby elucidates play no role, but that I read them in different ways and organize them along a more rigidly defined architecture in an analysis aimed at showing that the U.S.-Mexican War’s literary legacy erases Mexicans as visible agents of hemispheric American history. Racism works to control and stabilize internal fault lines, and it depends on economic and governmental powers that confine, define, and op-

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

19

press the objects of its attack. Erasure, on the other hand, signals a potential breakdown (a temporary one) in the securing simplifications of externality, and the paradigm I pursue below hints at how the war unsettled strict us-them dichotomies. What ultimately interests me, however, has to do less with plot clichés or anti-Mexican stereotypes and more with history, with the way the war itself, either as agent or as platform, drops away as these military docudramas gravitate toward a reconfirmation of essentialist Anglo Americanism. The resulting dynamic typology of the Mexican enemy functions as a gauge that measures not merely anti-Mexico bias but historical specificity as an indicator of narrative limitation. These fictionists, it should be noted, rarely had any firsthand experience on the front lines. Most of the novelettes discussed here were published in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. They were read mostly by men, and mostly by members of the working classes, soldiers in the military, and immigrants.4 Not surprisingly, and as Johannsen and Streeby document, novelette writers indulged in various concerns about national allegiance in their rambunctious romances, a term that in this study refers broadly to the kind of writing that blends military exploits and love affairs with the adventures of a protagonist who undergoes a succession of trials and tribulations that culminate in an affirmative resolution of happy marriage or family reunification, or both. No wider claims for the centrality of romance in American culture is being made here beyond these: romances have been a popular form in U.S. society, they exhibit a discourse directly concerned with national identity, and they remain the only literary fiction genre to have generated extensive, imaginative writing on the U.S.-Mexican War. Other writers and other genres dealt with the conflict, but rarely with the imaginative verve of the novelette. As I noted earlier, Streeby’s study of the war’s popular fiction has broadened the discussion with a study of racial, labor, and political tensions in the years during and after the war, and her analysis in American Sensations offers important contributions regarding the interconnecting social and literary resonances between novelette fiction and the rising U.S. urban centers—empire and city. Without question, these tales, as Streeby has explored them, further our understanding of how imperialism fuels the engines of U.S. identity, and how the U.S.-Mexican War played an important part in the dramas of nationalist consolidation during the nineteenth century. Furthermore, without American Sensations, we would still be lacking a pathway that connects as powerfully and persuasively the invasion of Mexico with the more general westward expansion on the part of U.S. Americans. Like Michael Denning’s Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America, to which

2 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

any study such as this one also owes a great deal, her work recovers these fictions at the intersection of nineteenth-century U.S. politics and economics. I propose, however, that war novelettes modulate with a dynamism that speaks to the war’s effects within U.S. America’s cultural terrain in ways that illuminate the continuing, present-day dynamics between Mexicans, Anglo Americans, and Mexican Americans. In a way, I am reading these novelettes as being actually about the U.S.-Mexican War, and as such having a good deal to say about that military conflict and the borderland dynamics between Mexicans and Anglos. The key is the way these works differ among themselves, thereby constituting a richly textured field of varying plots and characters that points to the seismic impact the U.S.-Mexican War had on U.S. society, a collision that reverberates today in tense discussions of “American” national identity and destiny. Without question, the war tapped into anxieties of race, but more important, it triggered worries about national destiny and helped crystallize a lasting definition of Mexicans as fundamentally anti-American, antimodern, and antidemocratic, lasting because it drew its energy not only from racial anxieties but also from the tensions inherent in narrative invention. It is entirely germane to this discussion that the “sensationalism” referenced in Streeby’s title circulates today within the mass media much as it did during the war, and that Mexicans and Mexican Americans continue to trouble the national body politic as Mexicans did back then. Thus I am intrigued by the fanciful possibility that the novelettes discussed in this chapter might speak to our contemporary border tensions more directly than they do to anti-Mexican racism, and this may be the most presentist conceit shaping my argument, a desire on my part to forcefully construct and then impose the immanence of these hallucinatory, evanescent daydreams. Nevertheless, in the pages that follow I make the case that U.S.-Mexican War novelettes illuminate how and why the complexities and ramifications of the war, of Mexicans, and of Mexican Americans often remain silent and elided today within mainstream U.S. American society. A key premise in that argument relies on an observation that might strike some readers as paradoxical: I begin by showing how the war challenged—not furthered—the structures of essentialist cultural dogma. Thus, when I claim that the U.S.-Mexican War persists like a lingering echo, what I mean is that the same anxieties once brought into the full light of day by the conflict continue to draw out the energized opposition of Anglo American essentialism precisely because the war could suspend differences between Anglo Americans and Mexicans, not only as a threat to whiteness

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

21

but more critically a suspension that threatened to rewrite the narrative of the Americas. Such intricacies notwithstanding, the writing about the war not only records social discourse but registers the active buttressing of cultural, racial, and psychological boundaries. To a degree, I read these novelettes as a “dialectic of cultural and artistic interests,” as elucidated by John G. Cawelti—not a simple cause-and-effect relationship but more of a social and aesthetic field in which varieties of “effective order or unity” are proffered for a variety of readerships.5 Before launching into the details, in the form of a three-act play of sorts, a more specific introduction to my argument is in order, a definition and explanation of my terms and my methodology regarding a triad of reading domains. I group the principal categories around the terms Chivalry, Frontier, and Western,6 each of which raises a distinctive set of issues and narrative resolutions requiring a brief prefatory overview. The chivalric narratological solution to the contradictions of the war, as I conceive it, equates an Anglo American elite with a Mexican elite, interpreting the war as a momentary feud between national equals. The real villain in such cases is often a third party that has manipulated both nations, or families, into a conflict. Although such texts frequently demonize foreigners and mestizo “mixed bloods,” they rarely traffic in categorical anti-Mexican propaganda, and they tend also to see the United States in nonexceptionalist terms, as one nation in the larger American hemisphere. The frontier solution proposes a strident, and anxious, exceptionalism, deeming Mexico a failed country that deserved military invasion. Although only one of three distinct forms that evolved during and after the war years, it taps into an anxiety about national purity recognizable today in the ritualistic but still virulent rhetoric about “brown hordes” from south of the border. Finally, the western narrative draws elements from the chivalric and the frontier forms, but gives sharper edges to one of the most defining paradigms for Mexicans in mainstream U.S. culture by extending the demonization of Mexicans to the furthest limit, comfortably locating them as non-national figures of evil, purveyors of violence, theft, and terrorism, destroyers of all social and civil order. This final category most demonizes the Mexican enemy when he is least militarily threatening. No novelette adheres exactly to one or another of these three story modes, but each category expresses a distinct tendency, and together the categories present a number of questions. For example, why might the onset of military conflict be an occasion, fleetingly, for international unity, and then become—after the defeat of Mexico—the terrain for unrestrained xenophobic projection? Might

2 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

the spectral array of Mexicans pertain to images of Mexicans and Mexican Americans circulating within contemporary U.S. America? Or not circulating. Mexicans and Mexican Americans, like the U.S.-Mexican War, remain today largely invisible and “unthought of,”7 except when they register in U.S. American culture as transgressive, which leads to the exertions of erasure. For in these rapidly produced, consumed, and forgotten fictions of the last century we see how a historical event can appear in several narrative modes, tending toward elision. The narrative embedded in my analysis terminates by erasing, or re-erasing, Mexico as an alternative and equivalent America. Let me note that the extremes at each end—chivalric and western—are less conflicted than the highly volatile and critically important intermediary stage of greatest ambiguity and ambivalence, which constitutes the domain of inquiry in Chapter 2. This middle field worries as much about the artificiality of “America” as it articulates an anti-Mexican racism. My view is that the systematic sublimation or substitution of a Mexican cousin by a Mexican bandit foreshadows the effacement of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from contemporary U.S. society. As in the nineteenth century, Mexicans and Mexican Americans today trigger contradictory projects of American self-definition among certain sectors of U.S. cultural exceptionalism, which is one reason why I believe U.S.-Mexican War novelettes resonate with today’s frequent militarizations of the contemporary border. In one sense, a return to the U.S.-Mexican War illuminates what has been a continuing conflict. Although I present three narrative categories, my study emerges partly from a straightforward division into the first two basic narrative dispositions noted above, an initial bifurcation that parallels a distinction offered by Richard Slotkin in The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890. His analysis of U.S.-Mexican War novelettes—and I am beginning here precisely where Streeby does, but with a different reading of what follows—noted that they present Mexicans as either “savage” and of “the ‘lower orders’” or as a people “containing a genuinely aristocratic element.”8 Writing about the enigmas presented by this war literature, Slotkin comments on what would at first seem to be the critical point of departure: None of the published works enjoyed wide popularity or favorable notice, and none gave birth to series or imitations, as the Frontier romances had done. As literary territory the Mexican War barely exists, and certainly occupies less imaginative ground than the least of the skirmishes with the Iroquois or (in a later era) the Apache. Some

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

23

quality in the historical experience itself appears to have doomed to failure the attempts of writers to assimilate the experience to the existing language of literary mythology.9 Is the U.S.-Mexican War, then, charged with an anomaly that resists the more mundane ordering projects of romance and myth? Most likely not. That is, it is not that writers never mythologize the war but that they mythologize it in a particular way.10 The better question asks how and when this particular war falls to the powers of U.S. national self-invention. The answer pursued in Chapter 1 relies to a great extent on Bakhtin’s study of the novel form, an analytical framework that stresses the difficulty of mythologizing that which remains enveloped by the open-endedness of contemporaneity. For Bakhtin, narrative order works on events receding in time. To state the premise of this chapter another way, the U.S.-Mexican War resists mythologization because, in some ways, it is still being fought and has not quite receded into a past from which it might be recovered either as collectively remembered history or as fiction, or both. Slotkin’s general observation is on target, but he leaves the issue unexplored, an elision par for the course in U.S. historiography. Most suggestively, such terms as silence, evasion, amnesia, avoidance, absence, and erasure establish the basic vocabulary in the suppression of history charted in the U.S.-Mexican War novelettes themselves. When read through my interpretive frame, Slotkin misses the relevance of the one narrative figure that comes as close as possible to an incarnation of a U.S. American myth of the U.S.-Mexican War, the Mexican bandit.11 The U.S.-Mexican war and the Mexican bandit might seem to occupy incommensurate categories. After all, where is the U.S.-Mexican War in John Huston’s classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), which deployed some of Hollywood’s most memorable Mexican bandidos? A second look, however, reveals that bandit-like Mexicans, or renegades, figure as one of the most common elements of U.S.-Mexican War novelettes. A better question is why a once dominant contextual feature (the war) dissipated, leaving the villainous bandido, ranchero, or guerrillero alone inside an amnesiac nation, the only character that existed before the battles, performed various roles during them, and continued long after. Like other fictional bandit iterations, the Mexican version stands as an aftereffect of massive territorial and technological collisions, large shifts in demographics and identity. The war may have dropped away from the plots, but the Mexican bandit continued embodying troubling issues of nationality in the twentieth century just as he had in the middle of the nineteenth.

2 4   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

The key point about the bandit figure, however, is not that he emerges from the U.S.-Mexican War but that the war seems to have momentarily recast him as a positive American actor. The evil, racialized Mexican enemy has at least some origins before the conflict in earlier tales of the western frontier, and also to a degree in early Alamo battle tales, where Mexican villains performed as stock antagonists, roles they would reprise in dime novels.12 And sympathetic portrayals of Mexicans also existed, perhaps most widely consumed in William H. Prescott’s monumental history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, a work that speaks to the way Spanish invaders and Native Mexican resistance would for a time constitute a precursor to a later English invasion of North America. More than any other aspect of U.S.-Mexican War novelettes, it is the sympathetic view of Mexican renegades that suggests how the war itself momentarily deemphasized standard dichotomies between good Anglos and evil Mexicans, how the severest excoriations against U.S. imperialism found some purchase, at least briefly, in the imaginations of popular romance writers, who transferred them onto fantastic dramas of love and violence. Today it is rare to find a Mexican bandit figure linked openly to the deterritorialization of Mexicans during and after the U.S.-Mexican War, a notable exception being Clint Eastwood’s film Joe Kidd (1972, Dir. John Sturges), written by Elmore Leonard, in which John Saxon plays the heroic Mexican renegade Luis Chama. Though far in the background in Leonard’s script, the U.S.-Mexican War constitutes a cause of cultural tensions in the film that suggests how a more balanced American history could establish the legal and cultural authority of Mexicans in the U.S. Southwest. The essentialist value of Mexicans as stock villains probably needs little elucidation, but for the record, I offer this initial statement: Mexican bandits survive as cultural icons precisely because they stabilize systems of cultural belief, which are challenged by the facts of the war against Mexico and by the continuing presence of Mexico within the United States—geographically, culturally, and imaginatively. Mexicans characters that do not fit into the conventional dime novel vocabulary then make visible a different mode of perception wherein Anglos and Mexicans share broader American affinities. Let me underscore at the outset that the points of convergence made apparent by the war and that I pursue below are not redemptive. In fact, more often than not, when Americans and Mexicans find themselves on equal terms, they do so as members of an upper economic class expressly defined as white or fair-skinned. It would be a serious misreading of my analysis to see the U.S.-Mexican War as an event that somehow brought the nations together, either in the so-called real world or in literature, or that it somehow furthered

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

25

a moment of racial tolerance. Wars, as we know all too well, are crucibles for hatred. Yet, as perhaps all wars do, the U.S.-Mexican War disturbs neat divisions, and such an unsettling lies at the center of this study, and not just in terms of race, as Mexican enemies in these fictions can be markers for or against nationalism, civilization, order, or cultural control—all within scenarios in which the most evil bandits may themselves also be defined as white or aristocratic. Such high stakes on the war’s rhetorical battlefield emerged from a fundamental debate in the United States over the justness of the invasion, a dispute arising from the fact that Mexico was a sovereign republic, democratic in design if not in fact, and deserving of its own claims to territory. Although fascinating as expressions of U.S. American manifest destiny, I attend to such concerns here not to castigate cultural essentialism but to demonstrate how the conceptual problem posed by Mexico signified that U.S. writers and politicians were dealing with a recognition of their own nonexceptionalism as much as with national differences. In certain ways the agonistic reflexivity about national identity echoes, to a degree, the medieval shift toward feudal self-consciousness, an idea I develop below. However, instead of class as the key boundary in question, the nineteenth century also deployed a reflexive sense of nationness that permeated debates about the United States’ political identity. For the war’s wordsmiths, the paramount challenge was to reconcile the pressures of relative nationalism with an ideology of exceptionalism, which led to a fabulous interlarding by nationalistic intellectuals, politicians, poets, and novelists of providential claims within national discourse, the first balancing the relativism implied by the second. What I mean by “national” here is the nineteenth-century form of collectivizing identity that arises from a world understood as being divided into distinct but relationally equivalent nations. Broadly speaking, nineteenth-century nationalism posited a world of “nations,” whereas older forms of cultural cohesion tended to mark external cultures as fundamentally noncivilized, outside “the centre of the universe.”13 In working through various meditations on national belonging, I will be referencing ideology as a thought system that resolves contradictions, an Althusserian premise that views ideological awareness as a primal constituent in the construction of individuality and as a catalyst for agency.14 Ideology, in this sense, activates and constitutes subjects irrespective of any particular moral value. Indeed, there may be a correspondence between the absence of moral justification in U.S. American westward expansion and the impressive amount of ideologically inflected literature and other art about heading west. Within destinarian discourse, then, the word nation is fraught with the

2 6   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

tension between asserting an individualistic but symmetrical identity, on the one hand, and on the other basing identity in an ahistorical matrix in which self-definition emerges from a powerful, religiously driven belief in chosenness. Nationality is thus not the same as nationalism. The rhetorical dictates of U.S. exceptionalism primarily required exclusion and isolation from the world, giving popular currency to romance forms such as the more reductive novelettes and dime novels that affirmed oppositions and boundaries in an American hemisphere that seemed antithetical to cultural continuity. Romances that, however, sought to negotiate U.S. America’s engagement with its nonexceptionality, in this case those chivalric novelettes about the U.S.Mexican War that recognized the relativizing aspects of the conflict, ran into the strong and ultimately overpowering resistance of a deeply seated denial of worldly contingency.15 The fiction modes thus categorized have an immediate—perhaps palpable is the best term—correlation to the real world, not merely in the wider matrix of sociological and demographic tensions but in the very war itself. Throughout this study I draw comparisons between the novelettes and an array of nonfiction discourses and debates emanating from the war, a strategy that demonstrates the diversity of responses to the conflict. Soldiers, politicians, preachers, and war correspondents variously disseminated their thoughts in a range of settings. The interpretive premise I begin from attends to the ways aesthetics, politics, and economics are relationally productive. Thus, in what follows, I begin by foregrounding a domain of writing that bridges the divide between the war in Mexico and the publishing houses on the East Coast: chivalric novelettes evince features cognate with the materials emerging directly from soldiers’ diaries, letters, and military campaign memoirs, texts that develop in and from a Mexican landscape and, in a literal sense, bring the war home. Frontier novelettes cast the war as a site for the resolution of internal domestic pressures, but rather than search through controversies relating to Catholic immigration, for example, or the tensions generated by slavery, one can find directly relevant arguments and anxieties in congressional debates about the acquisition of Mexican territory. In these speeches, specifically and paradoxically in antiwar speeches, internal anxieties and the controversy about the war converged in a high drama about the nation’s destiny (much as it does today). Finally, the western or bandit variant can be understood as the most successful U.S.-Mexican War tale, perhaps because its answer to the problems of the war relies on a narrative that most forcefully represses the challenge of history with the centering power of mythology, which I claim here constitutes a fundamental quality it shares with journal-

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

27

ism, a public record concerned with demarcating collective identity in part through the performance of “factual” documentation. Although my categorical system might be challenged as reductive, I do believe the general tendencies can be discerned and tracked with structural features, and a vocabulary of identifiable plots and characters. (I offer a bibliographic mapping in the appendix.) Most important, however, history itself functions as a rhetorical gauge. In chivalric novelettes, writers tend to make explicit references to real battles, dates, historical figures, and, significantly, to the political debates about the war. In frontier treatments, composed more or less simultaneously with chivalric variants, the war lingers conspicuously in the background, as Mexican soldiers and bandits seem to exist in a more abstracted, psychological terrain. Finally, the western (bandit) form extends this logic to the point where Mexicans and Anglos are practically removed from any history of territorial, international conflict, although the Mexican bandits I discuss always have a tangential proximity to the war, which, although it no longer breaks through into the plot, remains nonetheless present, a deliberate lacuna. The Mexican renegade as hero has mythic value in Mexican and Mexican American cultures as well, although for somewhat different reasons, to which I turn later.16 It bears noting that the points of convergence between the various discursive modes reframe novelettes that might otherwise be dismissed as having little or no social value.17 More can be said about these tales, but it is time to read into them, to engage with their fantastic plots and characters, to consider the variations and homologies. Many of these stories retain their powers of seduction, and novelette readers today may find themselves intensely and surprisingly caught up in their fantastic plots. How, exactly, will the hero finally overcome the enemy, and will the leading lady find her match? How will the protagonist interact with the armies of two nations? How will the world be made right again? That the tales are unrealistic, outlandish, even surreal might strike a chord in readers who find mere reality less than satisfying, which might then raise other questions about any neat separation between pulp fiction and a society’s political-ideological architecture, but that’s a topic for a different analysis. Here we are concerned with a war that began one day in late April of 1846 when a squad of U.S. soldiers was ambushed by Mexican troops somewhere along the north bank of the Rio Grande, about twenty miles or so upriver from the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. forces regrouped, defeated the Mexicans in two early battles, and crossed the river. Back in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, writers dipped their pens in their inkwells and began writing stories.

Act One: Tales of Chivalry

“Can I now but avenge my murdered parents and my fair young cousin, then peace and happiness may once more dawn for me and Rafael Rejon at last cease to wage the dread warfare of Vengeance on the Invader, which has made the Lion of Mexico terror and scourge to the race which murdered his kindred, but now gives him his bride.” —Rejon, a character in The Mexican Ranchero; or, The Maid of the Chapparal

Knights in Battle I consolidate and structure my discussion of chivalric tales by focusing primarily on two paradigmatic novelettes, one used to exemplify what this mode proffers as the axial conflict, the other to scrutinize how the form comes to a resolution. Along the way I reference other novelettes with similar chivalric qualities. They all share two distinguishing features: (1) the frequency with which central Mexican villains are drawn as heroic and chivalrous and (2) a propensity for the historicity of the war and debates about the invasion’s justice to periodically emerge amid their otherwise fantastic plots. Both traits set them off from their frontier and western variants. These properties, however, also speak to the way chivalric texts dissipate national difference both at the point of theme—that is, in the way they envision their subject—and at the point of closure, in the way they resolve the plot. In the end, heroic Mexicans reveal themselves as morally equivalent to their U.S. enemies and at times even part Anglo American,18 and happy marriages unite as well as reconcile Mexicans with Anglo American invaders. These same novelettes often express moral doubts about the justice of the war, an important motif I return to later in the chapter. They do not, however, argue against the war overtly, or express significant sympathy for the war’s victims, or harbor a tolerance toward racialized Mexicans. Rather, they feature a class division in Mexican society, casting aristocratic Mexicans in a positive light and the “lower classes” with a predictable array of racist dogma. Here I am reading these characterological systems in accordance with Streeby’s analysis, but her emphasis is on how war novelettes in general reveal a spectrum of race, class, and gender anxieties more or less as projects aimed at justifying or supporting or promoting the war. As my point of entry suggests, I often note characterological features, much as Streeby does, but I aim them toward different ends. For example, Streeby outlines how “international race romance” furthered a fantasy of in-

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

29

corporation and domination of the Mexican enemy in the form of a feminized prize.19 In my analysis, however, cross-national marriages trouble not the ideals of pure whiteness but the premises of U.S. national exceptionalism. Furthermore, she groups the happy endings of cross-national marriages with what I see as the distinctly different closures deployed by other novelette and dime novel forms, which do not end in marriages but in reconsolidated domestic and national spheres. In fact, cross-national marriages, even when metonymic for a captured, feminized Mexican nation, constitute only one kind of ending. In any case, the Anglo Americans in chivalric variants tolerate, even welcome, Mexican enemies as long as they are white and wealthy, race and class markers in this way implying, as Streeby has shown, supranational linkages between the United States and the rest of the Americas.20 Within this imaginative sphere, national identity is less imperative than shades of skin color and economic status. Because they begin by assuming a world with more or less interchangeable national loyalties, chivalric texts stress analogues between the United States and Mexico, comparisons that foreground a worldly, contingent definition of the United States that the nation’s midcentury rhetoric of liberating mission would categorically dismiss or relegate. Of all the novelettes in this study that can be read as chivalric, probably the most perfect dual-national symmetry lies in a work by Charles E. Averill, a writer of numerous adventure tales, who in 1847 published The Mexican Ranchero; or, The Maid of the Chapparal: A Romance of the Mexican War. In this relatively early war novelette, Averill pairs an Anglo American military hero, Captain Herbert Harold, with a carefully matched Mexican rival, General Rafael Rejon.21 Their initial conflict and eventual familial bonding is a paradigmatic example of the evaporation or erasure of difference commented on briefly by Fredric Jameson in his review of medieval narrative in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, an interpretive scaffolding I reference below. Not only do both men feel a mystic connection to each other when they first meet, but the narrative reveals identically tragic personal histories: each man’s parents were brutally killed during shadowy, inexplicable attacks on their homes when they were young, and both attacks included parallel kidnappings—Harold’s younger brother, William, being one victim and Rejon’s young cousin, Josefa, the other. In the tale’s early scenes, both are in Mexico accompanied by their sisters, Alfredine Harold and Buena Rejon. After the customary series of thrills and chills, Harold falls in love with Buena, and Rejon will be united with Alfredine, or rather reunited, because it turns out that she is his former lover. Three weddings apparently being better than two, Averill continues the romantic unions by joining young William

3 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Image of the Mexican ranchero astride a horse with a banner reading “Vengence (sic) on the Invader.” Rafael Rejon, the Lion of Mexico, appears on the battlements of Mexico City as an orientalized exotic. The banner in this image suggests how war fictions could frame the United States as an invading aggressor. Texas Collection, the Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

and Josefa. Finally, as the story peaks, readers discover that Rejon and Harold are actually cousins—that Rejon is actually only half Mexican. In this way, Averill reveals the Mexican enemy as not only friendly but a half-Anglo member of the U.S. American family. The tale’s true villainy resides in Raleigh, a distant Irish relation of the Harolds, and his evil min-

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

31

ion Montano, a Mexican whose mixed race, or mestizaje, testifies to his inner corruption and irremediable evil, racializing gestures probably due in part to the influence of James Fenimore Cooper and quite common in both chivalric and frontier tales. The presence of a treacherous Irishman and a corrupt Mexican might suggest that the tale is more like a frontier or western tale, in which all antagonists are villainous. But although Raleigh22 and Montano are paradigmatic evildoers, they act on the margins of the tale’s more central military conflict and ultimately succumb to a network of characters comprising both Anglos and Mexicans. Racist invective operates, no doubt, to demean “half-breed” Mexicans, as well as suspect Irish, but these villains inhabit the zone of an ancillary conflict often overshadowed by the tensions and resolutions involving the primary aristocratic actors. In frontier and western novelettes, to draw out the contrast, almost all Mexicans are villains and as such command the narrative stage as primary antagonists. Chivalric versions invoke landscapes where Mexicans—and in some cases Anglos—are both evil and noble and where the significant, central battles and prominent dramatic roles rarely involve perfidious Irish meddlers or thuggish mixed bloods.23 Further, whereas the frontier novelette frames Mexico categorically as a national enemy, in a chivalric novelette like The Mexican Ranchero, the conceptual terrain of Mexico and Mexicans does not in itself denote moral value or villainy. A stubbornly patriotic Rejon never relinquishes his loyalty to Mexico. In fact, his deeds are as violent as his words are haughty, for he opens the novelette by killing several U.S. soldiers in the tale’s initial moments—a rare act by a sympathetic Mexican character in these fictions. Chivalrous, aristocratically elevated Mexican enemies figure in other tales as well: Inez, the Beautiful; or, Love on the Rio Grande, ends specifically at the Battle of Palo Alto with the chivalric surrender of a General Olmedo, and The Vidette: A Tale of the Mexican War begins with a friendship between the Anglo hero and a Mexican “robber” who has volunteered to defend his country “when danger threatened her, and a hostile band were upon her shores.”24 Both men suffer wounds during the Battle of Cerro Gordo. The robber, “a noble specimen of humanity,”25 dies from his injury; the Anglo hero survives and undertakes a journey that ends with his marriage to the Mexican’s daughter. Such heroically freighted devotion to the Mexican nation differentiates most chivalric novelettes from their frontier counterparts, where anxiety about the permeability of such internalized boundaries is constantly suggested by ardent protestations of U.S. American fealty and by the occasional transference of allegiance to the United States among various Mexican characters. Few such agitations about national identity trouble the typical chivalric novelette.

3 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

The salient fact here is not so much that white and rich Mexicans are heroic but that a figure like Rejon functions at once as the tale’s aristocratic Mexican protagonist and as the story’s Mexican renegade. A rogue warrior, Rejon acts independently of his nation’s military, fighting for Mexico but according to his own rules and often for reasons more personal than national. As the leader of a band of guerilla fighters, Rejon throws his men into battles that seem little more than erratic, spontaneous acts of retribution against victorious or nearly victorious U.S. forces. Such disaffected outcasts abound in war novelettes of the period, but only in some is the tale’s heroic Mexican both primary figure and bandit hero. Where did this consociation with the aristocratic white Mexican come from? Was it merely the consequence of long-standing Anglo American cultural and racial essentialism? Or does the war itself lead to a more tolerant view of the Mexican enemy? Such questions have no absolute, deterministic answers. No single point of origin can be said conclusively to lead to a complicated Anglo affinity for certain kinds of “good” Mexicans, because the effect can be traced to a constellation of shared attributes—race, class, liberal ideology, national consciousness, and so on. The modulations in the novelettes themselves suggest the variety of narrative lenses circulating in midcentury with which U.S. Americans could view Mexicans. Here, however, I wish to explore the possible lines of direct connection between aristocratic chivalry and the U.S.-Mexican War, and little effort is needed to discover that the discourse coming directly from the war’s front lines resonates with chivalric tales. The surviving record shows that U.S. troops in Mexico could readily experience a degree of class-based empathy for and affinity with their Mexican opponents. Combining irony and paradox, these chivalric novelettes draw their historical materials not primarily from the many antiwar arguments that sought to make a case against expansionism but from those writings that issued most directly from the fighting, some expressing the most virulent racist outlooks. True, many outraged protests against the war in sermons and speeches emphasized a national relativism, and thereby expressed empathy for Mexico. Clearly, these arguments emanated from a national self-consciousness about the justice of the war, pointedly asking whether the United States could justify an attack on a neighboring “sister republic.” These debates, however, tended to meditate not on Mexico but on the United States. Their worries ultimately had to do with the moral damage the war would inflict on a country that was supposed to stand for democracy and liberty.26 The war discourse that emerged from the men on the front lines, on the other hand, furthered a

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

33

project of boundary dissolution in part because it made a class division within Mexico between the white elite and the Indian and mestizo masses. Crossnational alliances in chivalric fiction correspond, then, to a battlefield rhetoric because combat accounts also frequently draw lines of fraternity between U.S. soldiers and certain members of the Mexican upper class. Most notably, one finds a persistent respect for Mexican officers among U.S. soldiers, which is why heroic male Mexicans in some novelettes, like Rejon, are not entirely aberrations in this fictive world. Furthermore, even when elaborating a racist system of disparagement and disdain for Mexicans and Mexico, the frontline combatant frequently alluded to the war’s disastrous effects on Mexicans and their country. Even if we acknowledge that much of the response to the Mexican enemy was hostile, the surviving record of soldiers’ letters, diaries, memoirs, and other documents indicates that U.S. troops often grudgingly admired the Mexican enemy’s obstinate resistance. The point here is that the complications we see in the fiction have their analogues in the war itself, in the discursive field most directly emanating from the violence of military confrontation. To an extent, a strategic desire among U.S. combatants to romantically ennoble their own military exploits underlies some of their romanticizations. But in many ways the invasion of Mexico was a foray into an exotic otherworld, and such travels tend to have, or to be understood as having, consciousnessexpanding effects marked by introspection and self-criticality. When invasion of a different domain becomes an encounter with an alternative worldview, we can likely expect, as Eagleton notes in Ideology, that the invaders will express complicated and contradictory views about the enemy.27 Judging by a great deal of war literature, the experience of combat itself can be a terrifyingly disorienting experience, driving participants toward uncharted levels of self-reflection. Even if in some cases such gestures of warrior magnanimity may have been no more than rhetorical flourishes, they occur with enough frequency to indicate that many of these traveling soldiers did undergo a shift in, or expansion of, subjectivity, even if localized around a self-reflecting admiration for Mexicans perceived to be white or Spanish. Front-line discourse appears in other media and at later times, such as news dispatches and war memoirs written after the fact, but I concentrate here on battlefield diaries and letters, texts often written amid battles and troop movements and perhaps therefore a bit less self-consciously performative. Although their precise origin and circumstances of composition cannot always be known for certain, U.S. soldiers penned them, and they thus emanate from the experiential fields most prox-

34   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

imate to the war itself. Just as the fictions often split their Mexican antagonists into positive and negative categories, so too did U.S. soldiers in their war diaries and letters, displaying a class and race bias in favor of Mexican officers and against most rank-and-file Mexican soldiers. With certain exceptions, such as the consistently negative rendering of General Antonio López de Santa Anna,28 U.S. soldiers in their private accounts often praised the bravery or chivalrous demeanor of Mexican officers; on occasion, they dined with their Mexican counterparts or attended balls and galas with members of the Mexican upper classes. Such episodes and asides can be found in various battlefield accounts, but among the more telling are the war letters of Lieutenant Theodore Laidley. His correspondence charts a change in attitude, beginning with a hostile disdain for Mexicans as “a great set of cowards,” then gradually evincing a tempering as he reveals a sympathy for Mexican wounded, notes how the upper classes are “decent looking,” claims that he would like to participate in the Catholic services he attends but does not understand,29 then says that the more he sees of Puebla, the more he likes the city. He criticizes severely the depredations U.S. volunteers perpetrated on Mexicans, and finally, as the war ends, declares that he intends to learn Spanish, and is not as eager to leave Puebla “as I was.”30 Laidley’s letters chart an unusually sharp alteration in consciousness, but similar displays of empathy run through, to varying degrees, most of the eleven extant diaries I reviewed. The key point here is not that U.S. soldiers underwent battlefield conversions, suddenly seeing themselves in their Mexican enemies. Rather, the battlefield accounts point toward racial and class biases that responded positively to Mexico’s own internal social and economic divisions, dividing the population by race and class in a way consonant with the suspension, almost the erasure, of national difference staged in chivalric novelettes. Laidley, for example, notes how while the upper classes “receive U.S. as kindly as they dare, the lower classes, those whom we are doing great service are our bitterest foes.”31 One may argue that the important variable here is the racism itself, and that Laidley’s writing simply tracks a race-based self-identification with certain Mexicans. Or one might note that class and race are deeply intertwined in the United States, race often substituting for notions of class hierarchy. But class biases in the military have an internal pedigree rooted in the edification of the warrior-hero. To begin with, U.S. military officers identified themselves as a higher class of professional warriors, often casting a condescending eye on the people they viewed as common rabble. Military historian Samuel Watson notes that U.S. officers were generally leery of territorial expansionism and tended to view

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

35

with suspicion those undisciplined civilians who crossed into foreign territory.32 U.S. American officers, he explains, were more likely to see their enemy counterparts explicitly as members of their own professionalized class, an affinity extensively corroborated by war diaries and letters written from the Mexican front lines. For example, the journals of Private Richard Coulter and Sergeant Thomas Barclay note how a Mexican colonel received a military funeral with honors that was attended by U.S. officers,33 and the war memoir of Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, who reached the brevet rank of major in the Corps of Engineers, describes how in the heat of hand-to-hand fighting he rescued a Mexican officer from certain death at the hands of a U.S. soldier about to run a bayonet through his neck.34 While such episodes are overshadowed by the violence, bigotry, and a pervasive disdain for the general Mexican population, their regularity indicates a predisposition to accept the Mexican officer elite on terms very much like, if not actually of, equality. For their part, the Mexican upper classes often seem to have responded in kind, as some accounts by U.S. officers remark on friendly invitations by Mexican officials to attend “fandangos,” as they called Mexican dances—events at which the U.S. representatives typically noticed the beauty of Mexican women. Another display of polite decorum among elitist belligerents weaves through the diary of Colonel Samuel Ryan Curtis, who commanded the U.S. garrison in Matamoros35 during the war’s early months and during a continuing struggle against Mexican guerillas. Curtis writes that he soon developed an amicable relationship with Augustín Menchaca, a Mexican lawyer and alcalde (city mayor), whose status made him different from the “lower orders.” After Curtis’s first dinner at the Menchaca home, complete with a multicourse meal and claret, the colonel, in a wry moment, wrote, “The servants were very alive and obedient, and I regard the difference of modes a very trifling matter which all countries seem foolishly addicted to. What can be the difference to a philosophical mind whether we commence with beans or end with them?”36 On the other hand, Curtis asserted and underscored conventional race and class boundaries, as he did after attending a fandango in Matamoros that only the “medium class” attended and where “many of the men and women displayed the darkest outline of indian features.”37 The passage makes the obvious point about the elevation of whiteness, but in many such moments of proto-anthropology, U.S. officers and soldiers made certain to situate skin color within a historical context of European imperialism. When praising Mexican officers in combat, or women who had caught their eye, they usually suppressed and erased their Mexicanness by

36   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

emphasizing Spanish or Castilian origins. To take a ready example, one of many, Lieutenant Ralph W. Kirkham labeled the Mexicans a “cowardly race,” but praised a Mexican general, Terres, as a “Spaniard by birth” and “a brave officer,” concluding his journal by describing a Christmas dinner at the home of “Mr. Pizarro, a Spanish gentleman.”38 All of the above might lead to the conclusion that what’s operating in wartime anti-Mexican racism reduces to an architecture of color, of “whiteness,” say, against “black,” “brown,” “red,” some ineffable “darkness,” and so on. But to be Spanish or Castilian is not exactly the same as being white; more precisely, it is a variant of whiteness, an optical impossibility and—what I wish to stress here—an ideological problem. Racism in the United States must be acknowledged as an element in U.S. American class divisions, but at the crux of my analysis lies something like a division cutting across the division—a Mexican society that could be read as an American parallel to the United States, not “the same as” but “like.” That is, the front-line war experience could force U.S. troops to redraw the lines between insider and outsider, placing some Mexicans in positive roles, others in negative categories, in a process that brought to the fore historical, imperial homologies between both countries. Although never explicitly stated, these “elite” Mexicans were not actually being admitted as white but rather as equivalent European aggressors. Whether seeing Mexicans as class or racial peers, their varied experiences in Mexico required U.S. soldiers and officers to make distinctions that undermined absolute nationalist singularities, the U.S.-Mexican War in this way creating at least the possibility of equivalent and variant identities. In a crucial sense, these predilections are nationalizing, because to be a nation in the nineteenth century meant to have a relational identity (as opposed to an exceptionalist one). To be a nation meant to be thus recognized by other nations in a world of nations. In a sense, the more philosophically minded apologists for the invasion of Mexico got exactly what they wanted, a recognition of the United States as a “nation” fully capable of displaying power in a global arena of other nations. It is thus not surprising that chivalric novelettes regularly affirm different national identities even as they draw class alliances that unite the warring sides. What novelette chivalry does is demonstrate equivalency, not identical sameness, at least in the sense that Mexican nationality and U.S. American nationality both authorize their respective defenders. The corresponding features of chivalric tales lie in how they deploy a Mexican space that is simultaneously like the U.S. nation-state and different from

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

37

it. They assert connections of race and class between well-born Mexicans and Anglo Americans, at times even family kinships, but insist on nationalizing centers of identity and action. Typically, they assign the Mexican renegade to the narrative’s empathic center as patriotic hero battling an invading army. To take my favorite example, Rejon’s first appearance in The Mexican Ranchero immediately frames the war within a Mexican interpretation as the renegade leader comes into view brandishing a flag emblazoned with the legend, “Vengence on the Invader!”39 Much of Averill’s florid prose is little more than a well-worn orientalism that exoticized the foreign enemy, but just as real soldiers fighting in and writing from Mexico could recognize that Mexicans were defending their country against an invader, so too could Averill, as when he has his hero explain his Mexican loyalty: “The daughters of this benighted land of Mexico are ever more noble and brave spirited than her degenerate sons, who seem to have a blood less pure and lofty in their mongrel veins. ’Tis the true reason I, perhaps, have escaped the taint—this mingling of American with Mexican blood in my nature; yet I have ever felt this was my true country, by whose dark fortunes in her day of gloom I have thought it my duty to stand against all perils and at all hazards. My mission of vengeance has strengthened me too in this course, for ’twas an American my father told me oft who was our hereditary foe and afterward became my parent’s slayer in cold blood,—and thus have I made common cause with invaded Mexico; and rightly too, for was it not the country of my sire’s adoption and the land of my mother’s race, as well, too, as the place of my own and my sister’s nativity?”40 The passage invites various analyses, but here I draw attention to the words “invaded Mexico,” a rhetorical touch that asks the reader to adopt the Mexican perspective—“and rightly too,” as the Mexican hero adds. Whatever violence ensues, Rejon acts as he must, as anyone in his position would if he or she were brave, loyal, and honorable. An even more pointed indictment of the war can be found in another of Averill’s novelettes, The Secret Service Ship; or, The Fall of San Juan D’Ulloa: A Thrilling Tale of the Mexican War (1848). In this tale, the Mexican heroine Isora La Vega41 proclaims her admiration for the democracy of the north and her love for the invader, midshipman Rogers,42 who, as he pleads for Isora’s hand in marriage, bemoans the state of war between the “two sister republics”:

38   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

“Why not now become my bride?” asked Rogers, tenderly. “My country—vengeance, bid me to stay. Nor should it well be otherwise. You, too, Senor, have a country, to which you are devotedly attached; you would never think of laying down the arms which you have so gloriously borne in the cause of your native land—nor think you I would for one moment withdraw him I love from his duty to his country? No; I love my own too well for that?” “My own loved Isora, you are indeed a noble girl;” exclaimed her lover, in deep admiration. “Mexico’s maidens are the noblest gem and most beauteous flower of her fair land.”43 Isora de la Vega’s devotion to her country and Rejon’s national loyalty are of a piece, two testimonials of national belief that never waiver, even when the ardent Rogers presses Isora and asks why she will not break a “fatal vow” to never join him in marriage while the two countries are at war: “‘Never, never, Rogers, while Mexico and America are foes to each other,’ exclaimed the brave girl, firmly.”44 The integrity of chasteness here is redirected toward fealty to the nation-state. Averill actually goes further in this tale than even some of the more sympathetic chivalric novelettes, given that his Santa Anna is also portrayed as a well-meaning victim of a truly black-hearted Mexican general, Ampudia.45 Indeed, Rogers actually rescues Santa Anna from the evil Ampudia late in the tale. Firmly within this chivalric mode, and yet another tale in which dueling belligerents discover a common ancestry, The Volunteer; or, The Maid of Monterey appeared in 1847, authored by Ned Buntline (Edward Zane Carroll Judson), who would go on to become one of the leading figures in the early dime novel industry.46 Here again, the novelette asks readers to see the war as a chivalrous, though unfortunate, contest. Edwina Canales, the Mexican heroine, who like Rejon is revealed late in the story to be half Anglo, delivers a trenchant critique of the war in a conversation with her younger brother, whose own disillusion is then echoed by Edwina’s Anglo American lover, Blakey: “I am tired of a war in which we get nothing but hard knocks and poor pay,” was the natural remark of the younger Canales, and his sister added,— “Yes, brother—a war in which those who are most innocent are the greatest sufferers. I am sure that the poor peasantry whose fields

Cover image for the novelette, The Secret Service Ship. Isora, the Mexican bandit queen, duels with the nefarious Mexican traitor, Roberto, the Robber of the Rio Grande. Mexican women are depicted variously in novelettes, from primarily love interests for Anglo American heroes to more complicated representations that also express steadfast devotion to Mexico, as is the case here. Texas Collection, the Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

4 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

are laid waste, and whose little all has been destroyed, who have been preyed upon by their own countrymen more than by their foes, and had but little to do in drawing the desolating storm of war down upon themselves!” “It is one that I have seen enough of to satisfy me for a life-time!” added Blakey, “and as my term of service soon expires, it will probably be the last war of invasion in which I shall ever participate. I would die for the defence of my country, but never again will I leave her borders to seek for glory!”47 To reiterate a key point: in all of these illustrations, writers portray Mexicans either as aristocratic opponents or as both aristocratic and part Anglo American—always “like Americans,” but also always proud Mexican nationals. The resulting internationalist consciousness—a modality that preserves difference as it proclaims parallelism between the United States and Mexico—would oppose the classification of characters along systems of stable moral hierarchy more familiar in anti-Mexican wartime propaganda. Admittedly, there are always shadings and exceptions. For example, in the speech by Isora quoted above it is Mexicans who are Mexico’s greatest problem, a sentiment not expressed by Rejon, and the Buntline tale similarly alludes to the premise that other Mexicans victimize Mexicans more than do U.S. military invaders. The matter of gender emerges here as an undeniably critical dimension. As Streeby has shown, these Mexican women quite literally function as trophy wives, but for Streeby these tales of “international race romance” figure as metaphors of U.S. aggression, both national and masculinist. Yet the striking feature of a great many other war-era novelettes is precisely the way they avoid the projects of racial or national integration. The chivalric form, then, is only one, quite particular mode of conflict resolution, a more or less sympathetic sense of closure that attempts to resolve the contradictory needs to proclaim victory against Mexico while contemplating at least briefly the Mexican space as an authorized, viable American domain. That many war novelettes do not end with international weddings undergirds a great deal of my analysis in Acts Two and Three. If conflict in chivalric novelettes pits two nationally equivalent nations, two American republics undergoing an unpleasant, unfortunate, but happily temporary disagreement, what then of the resolutions? How do these novelettes settle scores and tie up loose ends? As with many domestic troubles, love saves the day.

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

41

Love in the Americas The characterological architecture that bridges the divide between U.S. military officers and members of the Mexican aristocracy foregrounds a key narratological fissure, the response to which, as might be expected, unites men and women in cross-national engagements or marriages. Again, Averill offers an archetypal model in The Mexican Ranchero, in which the nuptial denouement sutures the wounds of war with three interfamilial marriage dyads of cousins, each joining a (half ) Mexican with an Anglo American.48 These pairings, singularly aristocratic as they may be, stand as conspicuously cross-national because Rejon, as the principal antagonist, unwaveringly identifies with Mexico, not once pausing the action to soliloquize a tribute to U.S. democracy, the default gesture of political and cultural submission from Mexican characters in many frontier variants. In chivalric tales, the Mexican national loyalty of Mexican antagonists never entirely or even significantly suffers from pangs of self-doubt or self-loathing. Similarly, the protestations of unshakable nationality never impede the course of aristocratic true love. The second Averill novelette mentioned above, The Secret Service Ship, both imposes and transcends national allegiances as much as, if not more than, does The Mexican Ranchero. Here, Averill conjures up a somewhat surreal tale that blends gothic horror with adventure romance. It concludes when Rogers, the hero, rescues and marries Isora—a Mexican “bandit queen” and the fictional daughter of the real Mexican general Rómulo Díaz de la Vega, a Mexican officer portrayed in actual newspaper reports from the battlefields as being a brave man of noble bearing.49 Isora, beautiful and proud, initially rejects Rogers’s love in order to keep fighting for her country, momentarily respecting the line of difference that the conclusion will suspend. Her chivalry also invests her with a morality equal, if not superior, to Rogers’s, who represents an invading army. In fact, Isora’s national commitment registers as even more profound than the flamboyantly anti-invader Rejon’s, because it implies, first, an unbreachable loyalty to the Mexican nation-state, and second, that only the war blocks a happy resolution, love for one’s country superseding eternal happiness. Literary Anglo-Hispanic pairings of this sort can hardly be called new in the 1840s, a leading example being Cooper’s Inez and Middleton in The Prairie (1827), a union that closes the novel in much the same way as marriages often do in chivalric novelettes: a happy and foundational synthesis of Old and New Worlds in which a feminized Hispanic Catholic domain gives way sexually, theologically, and politically to a liberating, Protestant, heroic

4 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Anglo U.S. imperial power. Cooper’s cross-national pairing also conjoins two “white” and aristocratic families, thereby, like Averill years later, dealing with and resolving a common problem, the confrontation between differing American histories and religions. It is not race that troubles these unions so much as a collision of imperial histories in a realm where mirroring racial and class reflections elucidate inter-American homologies. Again, as with the problem of defining just what kind of enemy the Mexicans were, military memoirs and battlefield correspondence show that U.S. troops during the war made notations that echoed at least the longings for inter-American romance with the kinds of Mexican women being rendered imaginatively in the pages of pulp escapist fiction. However, unlike the more or less symmetrical association of class alliances and sympathetic Mexican enemies, a reading of battlefield erotics leads not to direct associations but to a more interior narrative logic striving to balance sexual attraction and violence with anthropological discrimination. As might be expected, not only did front-line soldier-writers create empathic demarcations among the enemy, but in their diaries, letters, and memoirs they reveal a discourse of sexual temptation presented by Mexican women that similarly tracks along class and racial lines. These were men far from their homes, wives, and fiancées, many of them traveling for the first time in an “exotic” land. As Richard Bruce Winders notes, More than a few romances blossomed between American soldiers and dark-eyed señoritas. Zo Cook, an Alabama volunteer stationed in central Mexico, recalled an officer he knew who took a Mexican bride home to Montgomery when the regiment returned home. He included the usual racial disclaimer, “She was of pure Castillian blood.” Cook contended that many war brides would have been taken to the United States if the army had made transportation available for the Mexican spouses of enlisted men.50 The same racial calibrations abound in the novelettes, where alluring Mexican women emerge from central casting with fair skin and blue eyes. That gesture, whether in fictions or in war journals, neutralizes the power of sexuality to overcome presumed racial boundaries even as it references Mexico’s Spanish imperial history. But the writings from the war fronts offer a fair amount of evidence that Mexican women, regardless of their complexion or class, attracted the eyes and sexual fantasies, and no doubt the sexual aggressions, of U.S. soldiers and volunteers. One of the most fascinating and

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

43

erotically laden reactions to Mexican women comes from the private letters of young Lieutenant Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh Dana, who sustained a playfully erotic correspondence with his wife, Susan, first during the major campaigns with General Zachary Taylor and later with General Winfield Scott. What makes Dana’s letters fertile ground for literary interpretation (perhaps also for armchair psychoanalysis) lies in his repeated expressions of disgust regarding Mexican women, which also demonstrate a riveted preoccupation with the subjects of his disdain. In one evocative letter he describes what his wife’s sister, Kate, would look like dressed as a “señorita.” I offer an extended section of it here to provide a sense of the psychic drama of attraction and repulsion playing out in Dana’s coltish musings: I met a señorita yesterday at the sutler’s store who had a gold cross on her neck which I asked her to sell me, but she could not do it until she asked her “madre.” I wanted only to buy it for you as a little curiosity, for you should not put it on after she had worn it. She was about the color of a mulatto and I suppose just as lousy as all the rest of them. They are absolutely disgusting and sickening in that respect. They are mighty ugly, filthy-looking women, but all have pretty feet and ankles. I understand they are very primitive in their simple manners, think nothing of seeing naked men or of going swimming in the river, quite naked in full view. I have not seen any such sights and will not look at them for your sake. In fact I have been over the river but three times and have found nothing there to attract me in the least. They have fandangoes there every Sunday night. Many of our young officers frequent them and cut all kinds of capers among the girls. From what I hear of them I should suppose they were very rowdy things. Should I be so edified as to happen on one in our marches, I will tell you all about it, but certain it is that I will not go over to Matamoros to seek one. I am pretty much of a sobersides here but keep in first-rate spirits. . . . If Kate [Susan’s sister] were not so lazy and fat and greasy she might write me occasionally. Ask her if she can’t get a costume à la Mexican señorita to show herself to me in when I come home. If she will put it on and let me see her in it, I will bring her one. It comes halfway down the bosom, showing just enough. An inch farther would be too much. Then it is nearly up to the knees, showing a pretty foot and ankle and a good deal of well-shaped leg. These last she might not like to show, but the Mexican women are not crooked-legged.

44   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

The Mexican señoritas do not wear drawers, and when the wind blows right there is no telling how much one might see, but such things always strike me stone-blind and I never see anything.51 Dana’s letters foreground a conflict between physical desire and racist dogma, but other writings about Mexican women delineate tensions better described as being between racial temptation and domestic loyalty. Lieutenant Kirkham, for example, dispatches a letter to his wife in which he mentions how he gazes longingly at her miniature, but then adds: You know I threatened when I got among the Mexican girls to play the gallant. I have not found time yet, and besides I have only seen one girl here who had even a pretty face. I saw her at mass in the cathedral in Jalapa. I judged she was thinking more of an officer beside her than she was of her prayer book, or her beads which she was counting. But she was pretty! Such beautiful large, dark eyes and such a graceful figure, and she wore her rebozo [shawl] so coquettishly. I believe I should have followed her, but a very sour, cross-grained duenna [dueña] who was with her made me change my mind.52 These “dark eyes” encode a sexual longing that can overcome racial divides, a gesture that stresses the way the experience of Mexico could bring to the fore not only the dream of racially pure aristocratic fraternity but also the historical fact of racial and sexual violence. Similarly, chivalric novelettes deploy happy marriages not only among the blonde and blue-eyed but frequently through portrayals of an exoticized Mexican spouse with the hair and eyes of “southern climes.” Even if such accounts by soldiers of Mexican women rely on a similar logic, and even if they at times imagine a “dark” objective of their fantasies, they generally adhere to a class- and race-preserving fantasy of identity. On the other hand, something else is also at work in these Mexican flirtations. Perhaps the best way to approach the subject is to note that, in a fairly typical preamble, the U.S. American soldier often sounded a note of discovery when gazing at the beauty of Mexican women, as if suddenly coming upon an unexpectedly sublime feature of the Mexican landscape. The following is from the diary of Lieutenant Rankin Dilworth: At our camping ground there was a señorita who was by far the handsomest female that I had seen since I parted with E[mily] M. M. She

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

45

was very beautiful. She was dressed in a loose white dress and walked like a queen. One of my sleeve buttons came off, and she volunteered to sew it on. When she had finished it, she drew my arm towards her mouth. I modestly held back when I saw a pair of lips that could not be surpassed approaching my hand, but she only wanted to bite off the thread.53 These asides, more or less run-of-the-mill features of war journals and letters, attest to the prevalence of erotic attraction during the war. Yet they continually evince a documentary quality, the Mexican woman now not only an objectified icon for Mexico but because of that also requiring the objectifications of a proto-anthropology. “She was dressed in a loose white dress,” “she wore her rebozo,” “cross-grained duenna,” “[t]he Mexican señoritas do not,” and so on. The reason, that is, that these men might have felt at ease writing about Mexican women to their families, even to their wives, is that at some level they reinscribe national or cultural boundary lines. The documentary imperative, that is, works in tandem with the fantasy of racial and cultural purity. Significantly, Winder’s quotation of Cook remains within a subjunctive mode—“many war brides would have been taken to the United States if [. . .].” Of eleven published campaign journals and collections of letters I reviewed, not one divulges an actual love affair, an amorous encounter, or an eventual marriage, irrespective of the skin color of the Mexican women—which could mean that U.S. troops in the field more often suppressed than revealed the truth of their sexual aggressions, or it could also mean that they interjected a mode of sexual referencing more borrowed than experienced. That said, the frequency of such references, from the erotic wordplay of Dana to the formal language of Curtis, dramatizes how these references carefully maintain a discriminating barrier, at least along the terms of culture if not expressly of nationality. It is this dualistic boundary-crossing (internationalizing) and boundary-defining (nationalizing) dialectic to which the chivalric novelettes can be productively compared as cognate fictions. Averill’s The Secret Service Ship surpasses most novelettes in that it confronts both racial and national tensions by casting Isora as the daughter of wealth and prestige, but a war trophy nonetheless rendered in dark hues, “radiant with all the beauty of Mexico’s sunny southern clime, matchless in the perfections of the magnificent queenly figure, the superb black eye, the glossy waves of night-hued hair.”54 But because the war itself, not nationality or race, blocks the marriage, The Secret Service Ship situates its core disturbance precisely in terms of a contemporaneous national confrontation—rather than,

46   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

say, in a fanciful back-story involving shadowy villains. A concluding speech by Rogers in this tale makes the point plainly: “Dearest Isora,” said her lover tenderly and gladly, “we shall soon be happy, and you will be all my own, for this war that now divides us for a brief time must soon close beyond a doubt and then there will be no bar of nationality between our union.”55 One might read the above passage as an overarching denial of national boundaries, but the Mexican Isora, much like Rejon, never rescinds her Mexican loyalty, much as she laments the sad state of her country. Averill’s conclusion mentions that the lovers marry after the war, but it does not disclose where they make their home. Even if Isora marries her U.S.-American paragon of manly virtue, it does not necessarily follow in this tale that she returns to Boston or New York as a sexually functional war artifact. Although her body constitutes a conventionally gendered metaphor for military conquest, it must be placed within a context that preserves Mexico’s status as a viable national entity rather than a wilderness of racial confusion and cultural anachronism. Indeed, the opening prefatory in Averill’s narrative announces something more akin to a friendly sporting contest rather than a brutal, often bigoted campaign for territorial aggrandizement: The glories of the Mexican War are already enshrined in the temple of fame. But the romance of the war is not less thrilling, wild and tragic than is its history glorious, terrible and magnificent. Naught to the popular mind so deeply interesting . . . as the romantic scenes, incidents and eventful associations of the grand campaigns at this moment in prosecution between the American government and our sister republic of Mexico. Then ho! for the romance of this war!56 In other quarters, the idea of Mexico as a “sister republic” met with severe stress and outright denial, but here it represents the basic investment of chivalric novelettes because it draws a bordering line between Mexico and the United States while placing both nations on an equal plane—different, perhaps, in outward signs, but not in inner content, sisters—or brothers—of common parents. National identities in this domain remain operative, even as class and racial essentialisms were being overlaid across a map of North America. It was a way of coming to terms with the presence of a distinctive national entity already in possession of an “American” birthright, and com-

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

47

mensurate with a hemispheric and historical consciousness threading through U.S. political discourse at least since Monroe’s 1823 message to Congress, which keyed the terms of the Monroe Doctrine by imagining a common domain of “our southern brethren,” a paradigm Gruesz explores.57 By emphasizing class in the seductions of the aristocracy, these writings were able to argue, in effect, for a coherent world in which national differences were both undeniable—made overt by the war—but unimportant, because cross-national, even limited cross-racial linkages could be achieved within the same aristocratic class. The sexual asides in the war memoirs mentioned above do not proclaim national equivalences, but they begin to hint, perhaps no more than that, at a more relativistic multinational perspective that imagines a unitary class, or race, nonetheless divided by nationality. They remain caught in Dana’s basic dilemma: a desire to assert, or imagine, cross-national erotics without relinquishing a domestic and nationalist integrity. Chivalric marriages may seem aimed primarily at a masculinist domination of a feminized Mexico, but they actually perform the resolution of a contradiction: supranational alliance together with nationalist belief. The supranational closure achieved by chivalric novelettes perhaps constitutes a simple and logical extension of a conflict between aristocratic equals. But I have lingered here precisely because such resolving nuptial events appear sporadically at best in the surviving novelette archive. One might have expected that international romances of this type would have been routine. After all, what more paradigmatic marriage system could be proffered to represent the capturing of half of Mexico’s northern territory? But these dualnational weddings appear alongside frontier iterations that, although similarly emerging directly from the war, theatricalize it in far different ways, meditating not on a unification across the Americas that acknowledges historical contingency but on a reunification within the United States that denies temporal change. The U.S. Southwest has a history of Anglo-Mexican marriages from California to Texas, the stories of which remain generally untold within broader U.S. American popular culture and history. An exception is the 1960s television western series The High Chaparral, in which wealthy rancher Big John Cannon—channeling John Wayne for the small screen—marries into a wealthy Mexican family and becomes, in essence, the patrón and patriarch of a sun-baked southwestern hacienda in which both Anglo and Mexican characters find their fraternal inner selves while fighting the unfailingly inscrutable, grim-faced Apache natives. In the main, however, the facts—that is, the history—of Mexicanized Anglos and Anglicized Mexicans remain conspicuous lacunae in the general U.S. social narrative.

48   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

The Theater of History Although both frontier and some western dime novels make peripheral allusions to the war, and although they both at times extract characters and events from the historical record, it is primarily in chivalric forms that the war itself, as an actual event, becomes both the central stage and the background, as well as a pressing subject, indeed almost a player in the drama, and this gets to a key issue: the restive dynamic between Mexico and the ambiguity and the open-endedness of history. When novelettes cast Mexicans in sympathetic colors and shadings, they also deal more fastidiously with the war as a historical agent. In The Mexican Ranchero, for example, the opening action puts the reader in the troubled aftermath of the U.S. occupation of Mexico City, and Rejon’s status as a marauding renegade draws on actual reports of fragmentary resistance by scattered Mexican forces. Not only is Rejon resolutely defiant in the face of the hated invader but he undertakes various machinations to sabotage the signing of a peace treaty, another allusion to a great deal of angry Mexican sentiment that deemed such an agreement an indelible ignominy. There are also brief cameos by Nicholas Trist and General Zachary Taylor, fictionalized but demonstrating again Averill’s attention to the actual war. Even more than The Mexican Ranchero, Averill’s The Secret Service Ship draws on a quasi-historiographic project, as its main events happened during General Scott’s infamous 1847 artillery attack and landing at Veracruz, the narrative detailing actual generals and officers on both sides of the conflict. Beyond this docudramatizing of battles and officers, these fictions also seem proximate to the historical matrix in the way characters frequently pause to expound directly on the war, often, as we have already glimpsed, with nagging doubts if not outright condemnation. More than the traits and mannerisms of warrior courtesy and more than the allurements of class singularity, chivalric novelettes literalize a theater of war, their narratives at once invested in and invested by the conflict as an ongoing, immediate actuality. Deserving mention here is a very different U.S.-Mexican War story, practically the antithesis of the novelette, “The Volunteer,” by Grace Greenwood (Sarah Jane Clarke), which appeared in an 1851 collection of her work. Yet, as in chivalric novelettes, a critique of U.S. imperial expansionism coincides with a highly negative view of national exceptionalism and a dramatic, if sentimentalized, documentation of U.S.-Mexican War history. I note “The Volunteer” to suggest how even a tale that deliberately attacks masculinist romance fantasies found at the thematic core of novelettes can rely on a similar imaginative landscape that suspends national boundaries. In the tale, a young and very

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

49

insecure Herbert Moore volunteers for the war so that he may win glory and thus feel equal to his beloved, Margaret Neale, who comes from an influential and wealthy family. She, however, is so adamant that he not go to war that she uses her political connections to try to prevent his enlistment. Despite her machinations, Herbert manages to sign up as a private, goes to war, suffers severe wounds, and returns in quite bad shape, but is eventually ministered back to health by Margaret—only, however, after undergoing something of a catharsis in which he comes to understand his own selfishness. The story deserves a more thorough study, but its primary value here lies in the way it registers Mexican death and grief in a project that overtly labels Mexico a “sister Republic.”58 Although clearly not a “chivalric” tale, the discovery nonetheless resembles that of chivalric encounters—the enemy is fundamentally like us. Furthermore, Greenwood’s emphasis on Herbert’s deindividualization is associated with his (somewhat overdrawn) turn toward a spiritual—that is, universal—ideal that would supersede mere worldly concerns. The story affirms, in the end, how a focus on the actual history of the war—graphic details, in this case, about the bombardment of Vera Cruz, the Battle of Cerro Gordo, and then the storming of Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City—leads to a withdrawal from exceptionalist dogma. The tale itself echoes Herbert’s own experience in a way we, still in the aftershocks of the twentieth century, would find entirely unsurprising: actual war propagates disillusionment. The broad resonance between the quasi-history infusing the chivalric idiom and the action-packed record in campaign diaries and letters might be reduced to arguments about influence, as if Averill and Buntline, and perhaps Greenwood as well, took in the daily news reports from Buena Vista and “ripped” them into weekly dramas. Or, conversely, as if U.S. troops, at a loss for how to understand their experiences, picked up and recirculated a repertoire of tropes from the pulps. Both of these kinds of borrowings likely happened, but what concerns me here lies in the way battlefield accounts and novelette fantasies of chivalry both presuppose the challenge of capturing a historical record of reality—perhaps the ur-theme of all war stories, the impossibility together with the imperative of telling the reader what war is really like, obsessions that circulate not just in Tim O’Brien (The Things They Carried) or Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, the Children’s Crusade, A Duty-Dance with Death)—but also in the best war journalism, which is typically aware of the communicative barriers posed by real grief and brutality. That divide—between narratives halted at the wall of the inexpressible and those that imagine the possibility of meaning—cuts across the field of war writing and, in this case, draws out the affinities between chivalric escapism

5 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

and the complicating actuality of the U.S.-Mexican War, because chivalric narrative architectures contain within them the pressures of historical, contingent consciousness. Their concern for factuality, though certainly not at the intensity of war memoirs, nonetheless marks chivalric novelettes as already aimed at taking the chaotic material of war and transmuting it into the ore of national meaning. At the risk of ahistorical conflation, I draw here on Fredric Jameson’s notations about the modulation from medieval chansons de geste into “strong romance,” although in the novelettes, class and nationality intertwine into a more modern common denominator.59 That is, a certain set of pressures keenly felt in the United States at this particular juncture move against exceptionalism and isolationism and toward international equality and relationality. For all their hackneyed regurgitations of marketable plots, chivalric narratives stand apart because they isolate moments when presumably stable divisions between pure and impure, good and bad, member of the community and outcast—key assumptions within chansons de geste—undergo stresses from alterations both in internal demography and in external geography. Given the constant civil disputes and the apotheosis of change itself, no one period in U.S. history can claim to be the preeminent crucible of disruption, but social turbulence may be more visible in the wider collective during particular events, such as international wars. Even if we allow that the United States at midcentury was not undergoing a particularly intense crisis compared to others before and since, a desire for national identity vis-à-vis the rest of the world did infuse the national conversation. The perennial quandaries of just who was “American” and where the ideological and geographic boundaries of “America” would lie rose over the discursive landscape like brooding mountains. Chivalric novelettes circulated amid this agonistic search for identity, informed by a need to redraw the lines between the good and the bad to coincide with changing realities.60 The historical record of the war latent in chivalric tales, which specifically render Mexico as another American republic, constitutes a keen awareness of mutability and contingency. In essence, the war forces the United States into a self-consciousness about its own national construction; it becomes aware—momentarily, perhaps— of itself as a common nation among common nations. Chivalric novelettes, as defined here, emphasize a recognition of mutual affiliations distinct from more primal categories of known and unknown. They resolve a discrepancy between a primal binary and a newer configuration in which the unfamiliar is no longer an assumable and stable index of the foreign. Like class, national self-consciousness can function as a system of imagined identity that recognizes a paradoxical, reflective sameness together with difference. (Race may

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

51

function in analogous ways in that “whiteness,” unlike “Anglo-Saxonism,” may “manage” differences among various European groups, allowing for a perpetuation of simultaneous commonality and distinction. The most profound threat racial minorities may pose to white racists is that their absence—or the erasure of race as a category—might result in the fragmentation of a supposedly white community. Streeby makes the point in her analysis of “white egalitarianism,”61 but the machinery of collectivizing whiteness can be traced back at least to King Philip’s War, as Jill Lepore has amply demonstrated.62) At midcentury, the United States found itself on a global stage on which most of Spain’s former New World colonies had announced their own independence and inaugurated various nationalizing projects, staking claims for their own primal beginnings and making various attempts at utopian political reformations. When compared to the Old World, theoretically, if not actually, the United States and a (new) nation like Mexico pursued comparable projects of social reform at nearly the same time, and although the differences between the two countries are dramatic, especially when seen from an early twenty-first-century perspective, those distinctions could be provisionally suspended in fantasies of pan-American solidarity. The operative paradox inheres in the way an invasive, dubious-at-best war against Mexico upended the known universe of dichotomous stability. Within that scarifying horror, the United States and Mexico existed as simultaneously distinct and equivalent American republics. My allusion to French medieval literature for purposes of elucidation, and the claim that nationality can be aligned with class consciousness, stand on more than a casual conflation of Jameson’s point with my characterological framings, and on more than the notion that both interrogate forms known as romances. As R. Howard Bloch and others have noted, medieval French romances, or courtly love stories, already contained within them precisely the rhetorical pressures that would work against monolithic aristocratic consciousness and toward something of a nascent, precapitalist nationalism.63 An Averill novelette differs markedly from a poem by Chrétien de Troyes, but elements of the emergent existential subjectivity of the latter can be discerned in the former’s portrayal of contrasting points of view—alternating as it does between a heroic Rejon and an equally heroic Harold—in effect slipping off the blinders of a singularly defined essentialism. The usual separation made between epic forms that stress community and romances that emphasize individuality can be laid over Bloch’s analysis, because prenational romance is configured as a mode of thought that begins the reconciliation of individuality within a rising overarching, corporate, abstract government, a “large

5 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

body politic”64—a solution, in other words, to the incommensurable longings for self-actualization and collective meaning. Bloch, however, is describing a turn toward nationalism as a unifying paradigm, whereas in the nineteenth century one would have to claim, impossibly, that U.S. Americans and Mexicans were both on the verge of a pan-Americanist identity that would supersede nationalism. No such hemispheric unity arrived, but an antimonologic energy inheres nonetheless in the writings from the U.S.-Mexican War and in chivalric novelettes. To the degree that medieval social change and the U.S.-Mexican War both required a shift away from an externally established system of eternal law and toward a more internal mode of critical evaluation, both can be said to have initiated a heightened sense of relativism and contingency. The resemblance, then, between Bloch’s “internal” medieval gaze and the model of a nineteenth-century culture that recognizes itself self-consciously as symmetrical to another nation lies in the way both reacted to historical pressures that worked against assumed, monolithic, localized authorities. In Bloch’s analysis, the feudal consciousness that privileged loyalty to a local lord gave way to a more abstract notion of authority embodied in an all-powerful king, a shift that displaced older, rigid ties imposed from a traditional realm—such as those of one’s family—in favor of relationships of far more mutability, far less continuity.65 Nationalism six centuries later presents a different process, but to the extent that it demands a relational self-consciousness, a recognition of nationality itself as a broadly common denominator, it too requires a stepping back from a world in which all “others” are automatically and absolutely held in opposition to a world in which opposition and alliance continually depend on historical circumstance. Today, the mythology of a timeless Anglo America persists as a feudal daydream of a reliably unchanging world divided categorically between us and them. Despite the lingering racism and the always present stirrings of nationalist exceptionalism, chivalric novelettes adhered to more or less sympathetic portrayals of Mexico, and their characterological patterns ran counter, at least for a time, to a cultural arrogance on the part of the United States that cast Mexicans as doomed and corrupted remnants of an Old World, Catholic culture. In part this was due to the prevalence of debates about the justness of the war, but front-line reports also blurred national difference. When they promulgated a Mexican perspective, the authors of these stories relied on conventions of broadly American relational nationality that defined the United States as one nation among others rather than an exceptional domain set off

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

53

from the rest of the world. Thus, the stories—like the coding of gentlemanly warriors in front-line accounts—justify a regrettable conflict, or critique war itself, or portray Mexicans as heroic opponents, or exhibit various combinations of these three tacks. The nation-state ideal requires the assertion of mutual respect as well as mythic distinctiveness, and the war diaries and letters that issued from U.S. soldiers in Mexico often meditated on the prospect of congruences with Mexico, highlighting points of cultural contact that required a recognition of mutual nationality. Mexicans might be distinct from “Americans,” but in chivalric novelettes they inhabit a nation fully authorized to exist in the Americas alongside the United States.66 Today, U.S. Americans might have to struggle to conceive of “their” nation as a variant of a Latin American republic, or to envision Mexico as anything like the United States, but this merely testifies to the power and the success of U.S. American exceptionalism itself, a powerful social and political narrative that deemphasizes internationalism as it demands faith in exclusivity. Even if we subtract the obvious parallels between Latin America and the American antebellum South, we can still discern broad analogues across the Americas—Indian wars, democratic experimentation, the imposition of European languages and religion, civil strife between conservatives and liberals. The icon of American individuality, the cowboy, is himself not only a modernized medieval knight but an anglicized Latin American vaquero. Differences abound, clearly enough, between the United States and Mexico, but my objective here is to suggest that the disparities and the oppositions we take for granted were not always firmly embedded in the narrative imaginary of U.S. nationalism and that, under certain circumstances (such as war), they could be dislodged and questioned. As political and cultural discourse, chivalric novelettes were bound to be short-lived. The war—a real war of battles and casualties and victories—did not affirm U.S. American exceptionalist meaning but disturbed and refuted it, not because it was an act of imperialism but because it unleashed the demons of relationality. U.S. America had decimated and oppressed outsider peoples from the beginning, but it had never until 1846 made war on another American republic. Michael Warner in The Letters of the Republic undertakes to historicize the structures of reading and writing in the early republican period, and part of his argument hinges on a shift in consciousness from a republican to a later national period, the first being more abstract and “universalist,” the latter being, as he phrases it, “more at home.”67 To some degree, the chivalric form as configured here deemphasizes the materialities of nationalism in

54   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

favor of a more abstract domain of virtue, as if these tales argued in effect for the irrelevance of nationalism even as the nation-state began an unprecedented amplification of nationalistic fervor. Slotkin’s “some quality” that prevented the war’s mythic appropriation is actually that it was fought against another nation in the modern sense, a fact that today may be hard to recapture insofar as contemporary Mexico, as seen within the United States’ collective imagination, resides at the margins of national awareness as a paradigm of flawed nationality, or even of non-nationness. But the U.S.-Mexican War, rather than confirming John L. O’Sullivan’s manifest destiny, turned out to be incontestable proof that the West was not virginal or unbounded, and further, that the ideal of U.S. American republican government and democracy could be superseded easily by a turn toward violent acquisition and oppression. But, most unsettling, the invasion of Mexico established an international boundary that emphasized not the permanence of U.S. America but its artificiality, and hence its mortality. National failings of various sorts saturate the public forums in the United States, internal contradictions being the daily fodder for pundits and politicians. They did as well in the 1840s, probably with more intensity and urgency as abolitionism gained prominence. Fully as much as slavery, the invasion of Mexico opened to wide view a set of ideological inconsistencies, but the acquisition of Mexican land is a continuing act, ratified by political sanction and irrevocably woven into the tapestry of what it means to be a U.S. American. One response, the one discussed thus far, was to romanticize the U.S.-Mexican War as a chivalric event, to make it the site for the resolution of tensions between isolation and history. In effect, this is an act of demythification; it makes of America an américa. This, finally, is what chivalric novelettes try to market to their readers: a narrative system that comes to agreeable terms with Mexico and Mexicans as avatars for the facts of history, of time and change. The tales confront straightforwardly the presence of an inhabited western terrain that should have been empty, “virgin” land. Their answer reconfigures the foreign and the familiar as both essentially American, the italicized capital conflating the Spanish Empire with the English. It is, in itself, an effective, practical, and elegant solution to the problem of drawing a border around a previously unboundable geography. But from a certain perspective, the problem with it is that it works. It succeeds in transforming “America” from the nation to a nation. It strikes a deal with history, mutability, and relativism. That chivalric novelettes inclined to the incorporation of the historical war into

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

55

their plots—the matters and materials of internal debates about the war, key battles, famous war figures—manifests a turn toward history, paralleled by a characterological system that multiplies subjectivity and by narrative closures that strive for new syntheses of national identities. The frontier and western variants, on the other hand, abstract the war and begin to confine it to the far background, and achieve these tasks for the different goals of internal national myth. In reviewing the novelettes and dime novels to follow, I enter a realm far more familiar to students and consumers of U.S. American culture, for it would be the frontier and especially the western modes that would displace the chivalric variant. They exhibited in nascent form themes that would later run through dime novels, Hollywood westerns, and other mythologizing concoctions that collapsed Mexico into the West, producing narrative fields that remain vibrant elements in the U.S. American essentialist project. Americans have not actually forgotten the U.S.-Mexican War; rather, they remember it in an extraordinarily intense way. Mexicans and Mexican Americans in U.S. society are best understood not just as an ethnic or racial category but also as representatives of globalizing currents that threaten and simultaneously generate that mode of U.S. American identity most aligned not with the dream of the timeless community but with the hard awareness of national mortality. Despite the many ways that Mexican Americans assimilate into the contemporary matrices of life in the United States, they continue to make some Anglo Americans experience their identity as ephemeral and passing, self-evidently vulnerable to the play of time.

Act Two: Encounter on the Frontier

Woodland now knelt over his long-lost bride, who was lying prostrate on the floor. Oh, God! how his heart beat with joy, as he felt her soft breath upon his cheek, and saw her open those heavenly orbs of light. —From The Flying Artillerist; or, The Child of the Battle-Field

The Mexican Contaminant Chivalric novelettes stand out in part because they imagine a nationally equivalent Mexico, an empathic cast of mind resisted by a broad strand of U.S. American cultural rhetoric. Frontier novelettes, on the other hand, cast a Mexican villain more familiar today across much of U.S. American society— the sexually menacing, morally corrupt, and at times suspiciously Catholic male. But this more archetypal, moustache-twirling Mexican enemy goes only so far. Not quite the amoral terroristic menace of the western mode’s Mexican bandido nor the courtly chivalrous warrior, the Mexican villain in the frontier tale acts in an intermediate position between comforting chivalry and unalloyed brutality. Moreover, the frontier idiom has a commensurably complicated historiographic relationship with the U.S.-Mexican War, which it never entirely discards as context but also never implements as casually or as richly as chivalric tales do. Occupying a middle zone, these adventures exemplify how distinctions of formula must remain matters of degrees and propensities, in part owing to the way the frontier mode seems to revel in messy mixtures of chivalric and western models. The straddling takes other forms as well, for example in the way frontier versions depict historical events in a competing American republic with a degree of critical self-consciousness and self-reflection but then, like westerns, fix their moral systems through steadfastly polarizing Mexican antagonists, foreshadowing how these wartime stories participate in the evolution of the full-fledged Mexican bandit of dime novel infamy. The frontier novelette, in other words, attempts to synthesize the abstract, timeless bandit figure with the particularity, temporal and spatial, of the U.S.-Mexican War. Yet the frontier novelette’s lean toward mythology can nonetheless be understood as beginning to simplify a characterological paradigm, because frontier Mexican enemies diverge so strikingly from their chivalric cousins. One might then wonder why a U.S. America driven by notions of political and racial exceptionalism would not have retained frontier U.S.-Mexican war stories as part of its popular culture—why not, that is, have canonical U.S.-Mexican War dime novels or movies that,

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

57

somewhat like Alamo battle tales, pivot on an evil Mexican general? An explanation can be found in the way frontier novelettes, like the chivalric variety, configure the villain as a nationalized figure, meaning that these bad guys persist within an identifiably American Mexican state. Indeed, frontier tales work strenuously to reveal Mexican enemies as corrupt free agents, whose reprehensible actions delegitimize their claims to national equality, as if the real problem in these stories were precisely that Mexicans have presumed to invent an American republic of their own. An even more crucial anxiety in frontier novelettes swirls around the continuing worry about Mexican seduction. Anglo Americans in frontier novelettes constantly face pressures to change sides, to become Catholic, to alter their political and erotic allegiances, those audacious Mexicans now also presuming not just to have a nationality but also to believe in its supremacy. In these ways, frontier tales reckon with the idea of a Mexican nation, with the possibility of an opposing, equivalent, effective nationality. They will discount it, that being their point, but only after ambiguous victories. (The Alamo battle myth, it bears noting, succeeds precisely because it dissolves all ambiguity.) As I sum up my thoughts on the frontier novelette below, I meditate briefly on the iconic Mexican bandit, because, while we can discern with little trouble the generic links between chivalric and frontier tales—both forms appearing more or less during or shortly after the war—the western variant comes later in time and poses the key challenge of only gesturing toward the war itself, a gesturing, though, with critical ramifications.

Frontier Seductions As with chivalric tales, I begin with pretexts for violence and move to the conciliations of marriage, considering how frontier novelettes define their central crisis and orchestrate their conclusions. Both focal points resonate with an antebellum disquiet about national disunion, a brooding nervousness gaining intensity in the 1840s from a number of cultural and economic vectors, in addition to the roiling arguments about slavery. Furthermore, a fundamental tension pertains to the frontier category and cuts through a deeper stratum of U.S. American identity, one that requires continuing narratological work, that being the ideological, quasi-modern quandaries posed by exceptional freedom and universal community. Frontier novelettes attend to this problem by positing a rhetorical triumph against mutable time. The dream of America relies in part on a separation between America (your new self ) and the world (your old body). To be “a nation of immigrants” handily as-

58   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

serts an exceptionalist premise, for example, as if no other nation could claim long histories of immigration, when in fact immigration may be the United States’ most nonexceptional element in the time-space of the modern. In any case, one of the far-reaching consequences of the ritualized canonization of the “land of immigrants” narrative confirms a view of America as an ideal country where ideological, immaterial beliefs in democracy, liberty, and individuality supersede the materialities of culture, language, race, history, even one’s personal biography—a country where a perfect community is possible because what one is is less important than what one believes. But “America” is also a special country, so the story goes, because it allows each of its citizens freedom to be a true, independent self. One is expected, almost required, to achieve a full individuality in America—perfect community and perfect individuality at the same time. Indeed, you are required to relegate culture to second place, behind ideology, both to join the wider collective and to fulfill your own fullest potential as an independent self. The more abstract of a self you become, the more individualized you are and the more tightly bound to the national body politic.68 It’s a good story, a powerful accommodation with U.S. America’s modernist exigencies and therefore perhaps as well a necessary one, but it remains laden with a number of questions. Do I really have “Americanness” in common with the newest Mexican immigrant? Even if I do, is that enough for a community? Am I really free to believe whatever I want to believe? And so on. Such questions are really nothing more than the harmonics of modern national life in the United States—ever-present stress points that inform the dramas of daily action as well as those of identity invention. Frontier novelettes at their core are situated precisely within this nexus of ideological anxiety. Not surprisingly, given the way it emerges directly from matters of communal integrity and Anglo-American redemption, the frontier idiom survived the war and underwent a further distillation before emerging in western dime novels, which, though many of them also recall the war, do so evasively, with a kind of narratological allergy to the years from 1846 to 1848, an issue I elaborate in Act Three. The frontier novelette, however, as a specific variation of the novelette war tale, stands apart from its later dime novel cousin in the way it posits a Mexican terrain of nefarious seductions as (frontier) Mexico and Mexicans try to dislodge Anglos from their “American” national and religious beliefs, democracy and Protestantism, respectively—a thematic tendency that foregrounds how these tales worry about national cohesion. Perhaps the exemplary frontier novelette is The Chieftain of Churubusco; or,

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

59

The Spectre of the Cathedral (1848), by Harry Halyard.69 In a number of ways, Chieftain operates as a standard frontier evocation, but its most paradigmatic feature emerges in its reaffirmation of a national boundary, the raison d’être of the frontier mode. I sketch some of the plot features of Chieftain below, but I address first the title character’s striking entrance as a renegade in Mexico wardrobed as a stock Native American, who might therefore appear to inhabit Natty Bumppo’s idealized, interstitial borderland between civilization and nature. But the chieftain’s national loyalties are never really in doubt— we learn almost immediately that he is a U.S. American searching through Mexico for a wife kidnapped years earlier. When captured by Mexican troops, he dismisses their threats of execution if he does not join their cause against the U.S. invaders with haughty defiance and a boastful affirmation of his true Anglo American national identity. The scene quickly transforms him from an indeterminate mystery—who is this strange Indian?—to nationalist agent. To draw a brief contrast, the Rejon narrative arc discussed earlier aims in the opposite direction because its angry patriotism gives way to Mexican-Anglo hybridity. Halyard’s Chieftain, on the other hand, imagines an exuberantly dichotomous terrain wherein enemy Mexicans reassuringly remain monochromatic figures, attempting—but never succeeding—to undo the bonds of nation-state identity. No minor matter: to join the other side here not only abnegates one’s duty to one’s “true” self, but at the same time it presages the demise of the integrated community of other “true” selves, high stakes for the U.S. American body politic. Not far into the story, readers also discover the truth of the ghostly “spectre,” the chieftain’s long-lost wife, gothically imprisoned in the basement of a Catholic church, a structure built by the “Spanish Inquisition.” Her climactic rescue (never really in doubt, of course) will reaffirm her U.S. American identity and repudiate the Catholic domain. The tyrannical priest who has kept her locked away dies a deservedly ghastly death, par for the course for tyrannical priests. A virulent anti-Catholicism pervades frontier novelettes, and much has been written about anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States at midcentury, notably in Jenny Franchot’s Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. Even more can be written about the correspondence between religious bigotry and anti-Mexican vituperation swirling amid the war.70 Before leaving the issue, let me acknowledge that although the antiCatholicism in war-era novelettes would reward further scrutiny, my objective here is to investigate how the grounding fears about national disunity run through a different but no less important national conversation, one linked directly and immediately to the war and to existential questions raised by the

6 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

physical and cultural incorporation of Mexican land and Mexican people. The crux of the matter lies in the projection of a Mexican space as categorically corrosive to national faith. Above, I aligned war diaries and letters with chivalric novelettes in part to argue for the way the fictions capture aspects of the war’s historicality. If, as I argue, the frontier imaginary begins to distance itself from history, but does not yet achieve the near total abstraction from time found in war westerns, then what accompanying war discourse manages to be both about the war and about its denial? The answer, again somewhat paradoxically, resides in antiwar protest, most overtly in dissenting congressional oratory. Streeby situates this political discourse as an example of anti-imperialistic essentialism,71 as I do, but I align these speeches with a specific novelette imaginary and with one of the most central tensions in U.S. American ideology, because these often impassioned antiwar speeches tap into pervasive contradictions that inform the frontier experience. The oratory I discuss here, like the frontier novelette, evinces a desire for Anglo American national-ethnic exceptionalism and speaks self-consciously through the vocabulary of the Anglo American community. As in frontier fantasy, the congressmen voicing their opposition to the war relied on a resistance to change—specifically the fear of Mexicans becoming U.S. citizens. In effect, these congressmen were trying not to resolve the discrepancies between imperialism and democracy, denying, in effect, the history happening around them. This is not to say that antiwar senators and representatives did not also empathize with Mexico and condemn the wrongs inflicted on the country, but by and large their commentaries and speeches presupposed the Mexican population to be inherently inferior, and did so with essentialist performances that revealed less a recognition of Mexico than a heated Anglo American destinarianism, grounding their racism in trepidations about the future of a white race in the United States in ways intriguingly detached from the actual war against and inside of Mexico. Their political arguments, even when most against the war, displaced the gravitational center of the debate from the conflict itself to the physical and biological integrity of the United States, and the most virulent racism against Mexicans consequently corresponds to some degree with an incipient elision of the war. In his analysis of antebellum racism, Reginald Horsman notes that proponents and opponents of the war both continued to voice profoundly racist attitudes toward Mexicans,72 but the most intense xenophobia, because the most intimately integrated with burgeoning conceptions of exceptionalist identity, invigorated antiwar prophecies of doom, which warned against the acquisition of Mexican lands because these

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

61

would introduce into the United States a nonassimilating population of darkskinned and/or Catholic foreigners. This line of argument against the acquisition of land and incorporation of new citizens arose not from any respect for Mexico’s sovereignty but from forebodings about the future cultural integrity of the United States. Such protests gaze inward, existentially focused on a domestic domain, their unifying theme being U.S. America’s abrogation of its founding principles and its fall into an abyss of greed and corruption. Ohio Representative Columbus Delano, for example, foresaw an impending disaster if the United States incorporated land inhabited by Mexicans: But I desire to ask, sir, what is to be done with the people now inhabiting the country which you propose to acquire? . . . They embrace all shades of color, from the pure white of the Anglo-Saxon to the richest ebony of the unadulterated African. They are a sad compound of Spanish, English, Indian, and negro bloods; crossed and intermixed in every variety of form; and resulting, it is said, in the production of a slothful, indolent, ignorant race of beings. Will you make them citizens, give them the right of suffrage, and permit them, ignorant as they are of our institutions and form of Government, to control our elections, and, perhaps, our destiny? You must do this, or deprive them of their freedom. The sentiments of the age will not permit you to subjugate a people now free, and convert them into slaves. Humanity revolts at the thought; the world would unite in its condemnation; and we shall be compelled, if we take these people, to give them under our Government the benefits of that ever-living truth, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are born free and equal.” Think of this, sir; and let those who go for conquest think of it; and let them remember, too, that one of the questions which disturbed peace, and hastened the destruction of the Roman republic, was a proposition of Tiberius Gracchus to give to the people of the provinces the right of suffrage.73 I quote at length in part because the rhetorical moment here synthesizes racial anxieties and the dilemmas of political self-governance. These new Mexican citizens, Delano imagines, will take seriously the proposition that all people are created equal, and that must certainly lead, he believes, to the destruction of the country. To be sure, much of the debate about the war, both pro and con, cast Mexicans in derogatory terms that attack specifically darkness of skin, miscegenation, and other physical features, and Delano’s

6 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

unrestrained racism here makes him no paragon of tolerance, but antiwar speeches like this move from race to angst-ridden meditations on political ideology to the limits of the promises of freedom. One of the dangers of annexation thus inheres in the inclusion of people who will violate not exactly a pure race but a pure national ethos, because, being now free, Mexicans will think in nonsanctioned ways. Delano’s portents of doom are not about the dilution of whiteness alone but the ideological contamination of the democratic body by democracy itself. The speech of Representative C. B. Smith of Indiana makes the case with specific reference to political suffrage: But, sir, if we acquire these provinces of Mexico, what are we to do with them? Shall they be admitted as States into the Union, upon terms of equality with the other States? Shall their semi-barbarous population be entitled to the rights of suffrage and representation? Shall we admit them to participate in the deliberations of this Hall? Or shall we treat them as slaves, and deny to them the rights of citizens? These are practical questions, which should be answered.74 In these excerpts, both Smith and Delano mask their uneasiness about darkskinned people in fearful auguries about the future of the country, but they aim nonetheless to preserve an imagined political ideal from a “barbarous” population. They imply a racial base for that ideology, but as ideology, their object of devotion must be barricaded against nonbelievers, not just the nonwhite, even though, as is clear, the problem lies squarely in the seductive power of democratic belief. Similarly, frontier novelettes allegorize the threat, and its defeat, in part by casting even fair-skinned “Spaniards” as ultimate villains—a vibrant vestige of the Black Legend,75 undoubtedly—but also a characterological habit that registers how the stakes in the Americas extend beyond race, especially at the boundary between Mexico and the United States.76 The Mexican population, from the beginning of its encounter with the United States (before the beginning, in fact),77 triggered unsettling selfexaminations about political and national identity. Thus a constellation of ideological problems propagates a more or less steady beat of cultural anxiety regarding the presence and cultural power of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.78 Delano and Smith delivered the speeches cited above in early 1847 as U.S. officials prepared to expand the war with a large invasion into Mexico’s central valley, and it may be that the fears of large-scale political contamination rose from the critiques of the war’s dubious morality. Wars, however, bring enemies into the most intimate struggles of life and death, through

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

63

which combatants at times confront their enemy’s complexities. As we saw in the discussion of chivalric novelettes, U.S. troops could easily slip into self-criticality when regarding their Mexican experience. For congressmen back in Washington, however, contact with Mexico struck a more political existential nerve. I draw a final case in point from the same set of speeches, the argument of Mr. Solomon Foot of Vermont, who used “race” in the more archaic sense connoting “nation” or “people,” emphasizing, as he does here, “habits” and “languages”: With the territory you must take its mixed and semi-barbarian population—a distinct and dissimilar race of people—of different habits, and of different language from us, and feeling no interests in common with us, and having no sympathies with us but to hate us . . . What political rights, immunities, and privileges will you extend to the inhabitants of these new provinces, suited and appropriate to their wants, their character, and their new relation to our Government? I have only time to glance at, and not to enlarge upon, suggestions like these. They are fraught, nevertheless, with fearful import, and address themselves with irresistible force to the serious and earnest reflection of all American statesmen and patriots. Look at the subject as we may, it presents to our solemn consideration innumerable, if not insurmountable, difficulties.79 The misgivings shadowing these oratorical flourishes might seem distanced from the melodrama of The Chieftain of Churubusco, but both rhetorical systems affirm a political culture that cannot transform Mexicans into “Americans.” Mexicans are fundamentally “non-American” in a way that transcends race and penetrates into the ideological recesses of belief—habits, language, interests. This “America” does not, cannot, assimilate all the world’s immigrants or refugees or victims of dispossession. This is why when Mexican troops capture the hero of Halyard’s tale, initially identified by the vaguely Mexican name Mazarra, the ritual testing of his identity dispenses with matters of phenotypic race (his skin color is said to resemble that of a Native American’s) and places in its stead ideology: [Mexican General Zalisco asks Mazarra] “Then you will not consent to take up arms in favor of our cause?” “Sooner first should these stalwart arms of mine be suffered to rot out of their sockets.”

64   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

“Still that is the only alternative by which you can now escape an ignominious death,” replied Zalisco. “Death then, I choose,” answered the chieftain, “for I would ten thousand times sooner meet it in its most horrible and tortuous form, than think for a moment of deserting my country’s flag.” “D—n these North Americans,” muttered Zalisco, “their dispositions seem to be made up of courage and patriotism altogether. Were our troops composed of the same material, I should have no fears of their ever being whipped again.”80 The ideological trial, a nationalist auto-da-fé, recurs in other frontier novelettes, two notably in The Heroine of Tampico; or, Wildfire the Wanderer: A Tale of the Mexican War (1847), also by Harry Halyard. Here the Mexicans offer the Anglo-American prisoner Avaline her freedom if she consents to marry Captain Almonte, to which Avaline summarily declares, “Insult me no further, villain!”81 Not long after, the Mexicans capture her fiancé, Charles Wallingford, and propose an analogous deal: they’ll let him live, but only if he gives up his claim to Avaline’s hand. His answer matches hers in its offended dismissiveness.82 Another tale mixes in the complications of female cross-dressing. Newton M. Curtis’s The Hunted Chief; or, The Female Ranchero: A Tale of the Mexican War (1847) follows the exploits of a U.S. American volunteer captured by a ruthless ranchero who is actually the gender-bending aristocratic daughter of a wealthy merchant in Monterrey. However, unlike Isora de la Vega, the young “Pedro Guadaloupe” (real name, Maria Guadaloupe) only half-heartedly stands with Mexico at the start of the tale. When the Mexicans suspect her of treason, she flees and finds refuge in the arms of her former Anglo captive, now lover, and she happily abandons forever her leadership of her ranchero band, though she was hardly ever a loyal Mexican either in belief or in deed. Like the other tales alluded to here, The Hunted Chief stages a political inquisition, though its nationalist implications are muted. Still, the hero, Rainford, appears before a Mexican tribunal and undergoes an interrogation about his knowledge of the traitorous ranchero. Rainford’s evasive answers yield nothing except an angry insult from a Mexican who calls him a “false hearted heretic.”83 For her part, Pedro/Maria Guadaloupe, by relinquishing command of the rancheros and joining her new lover, joins the “American” fold symbolically as well as physically, able to do so only because from the start she hints at an inauthentic Mexicanness, as if her contact with Anglo America catalyzes the distillation of her true self.

Interior image from the novelette, The Heroine of Tampico, showing Avaline Allerton, in a man’s military uniform, dueling with a Mexican enemy officer while clutching the U.S. flag. In one of the more dramatic images from the early novelettes, Allerton appears dressed as a male officer immediately before she shoots and wounds a Mexican officer, Don Vicensio de Almonte, who has tried to seduce her. Such gender inversions are common in novelettes and usually entail women dressing and acting as men. The image parallels the nationalistic tenor of the plot, in which Mexican enemies are consistently villainous yet understood as national foes. Harvard College Library, Widener Library, Cambridge, Mass.

66   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Throughout these frontier variants, the authors maintain a bold line of national separation, the standard interrogation scene reasserting, rather mechanically, “American” loyalty. Even when depicted in positive lights, as is the female ranchero, Mexicans participate in dramas in which their national allegiances either transfer to U.S. America, the “America” of the dream state, or cling to an emasculated Mexico that recognizes the folly of its ways. When later Mexican dime-novel bandits threaten the Anglo American or the white female body, they imperil the community, which is why they have direct progenitors in the Mexican villains deployed in frontier novelettes routinely highlighting attempts to convert U.S. Americans into Mexicans. If successful, such foreboding Mexicanization would seal a future of corruption and moral dissolution more tragic than death. I do not diminish the importance of sexual and racial violence in these stories, but I want to spotlight how these tales resolve the unease about communal disintegration, how they formulate their world-stabilizing narrative counterpoints through domestic reconstitutions.

The Family, Once Lost, Now Found Just as Averill’s The Secret Service Ship models the chivalric response—crossnational, intrahemispheric foundational marriages—The Flying Artillerist; or, The Child of the Battle-Field: A Tale of Mexican Treachery, by Harry Hazel ( Justin Jones),84 epitomizes the frontier narrative’s characteristic closure, which depends on the reintegration of a U.S. American family. Shortly after the tale begins, the hero becomes separated from his wife in the chaos of a battle during the Texian rebellion of 1836. Both his wife and his daughter are rescued from the battlefield by a suspect Catholic priest with nefarious motives. After a number of adventures and close escapes in exotic locales, the family reunites and returns to a life of aristocratic ease in Boston. As in The Chieftain of Churubusco, Mexicans behave generally as one-dimensional bloodthirsty killers, perhaps in part because the Texian rebellion of 1836, and not the war against Mexico itself, frames most of the narrative’s setting. But what makes The Flying Artillerist appropriate for a discussion of domestic versus national resolution in frontier narratives rests on its obsessive concentration on the fracturing and reknitting of the family unit. The U.S.-Mexican War itself has no more than a peripheral connection to the plot, kept at a distance, as it is typically in frontier novelettes, even though the critical action takes place during the war. Significantly, the story begins with the capture and later infamous execution at Goliad of more than four hundred Texians

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

67

under Colonel James W. Fannin’s command shortly before the fall of the Alamo—this being the prairie battle that will temporarily rupture the central protagonist’s family. The summary executions ground the tale’s propagandistic argument against Mexicans, whereas the subsequent, and complicating, invasion of Mexico scarcely makes an appearance, suggestive of how the war works against a unitary logic of Mexican evil. The point is not only that the General Santa Anna of 1836 can be demonized but also that Alamo defenders themselves can be abstracted into non-national—that is, nontemporal—actors in an eternal drama. The Alamo battle myth pits good against evil, rather than one nation against another; not for nothing does the Alamo today quasi-religiously sanctify the trinity of Crockett-Bowie-Travis. Whereas the conflicts with Mexicans in the conceits of the frontier drama affirm a stable division between the “American” and the Mexican, the reunifying endings resolve to a corollary: the isolationist fantasy of a pure world untainted by the exigencies of intercultural or international contact. To wrap up a story with felicitous marriages invokes the fantasy of an accomplished tranquility, and by extension, of timelessness. But to foreground reunions of couples who are already married identifies a disturbance in a previously established domestic perfection. We have here not a new unity, a more or less generic dream of an escape from earthly complications and limitation; these tales, rather, terminate with utopias regained. Myra Jehlen’s musings on the incompatibility of novels with American exceptionalism provides an analytical doorway into the fracturing narratological dimensions of the frontier tale as she explores the threatening possibility of innovative stories that, by implication, compete with an overarching universal narrative.85 Domestic reintegrations push back the complications of time with marriage closures that reclaim what was already projected as a coherent whole. The same dynamic informs the aforementioned Chieftain of Churubusco, where the essential arc of the tale reunites the hero with his family. At climactic peaks, Anglo Americans neutralize an external, cultural danger and resecure “America” against the corroding effects of the world. One could argue that these tales contain and dissipate broader sectional anxieties that preceded the war, those that were intensified by the debates regarding slavery in the newly acquired lands. But domestic reunifications in frontier novelettes do not typically reintegrate, say, an industrial North with an agrarian South, pioneering Yankees with southern belles, or Virginian cavaliers with New England schoolteachers. Alternatively, a different but useful analytical context would situate the frontier novelette’s fascination with domesticity with the economic dislocations following the Panic of 1837.86 If the preservation of families had narrative efficacy in the

68   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

popular literature, it might have been because the stresses of antebellum America forced many families to move and fracture. But rather than search for historical correspondences in somewhat removed sociological domains, we can find them again at the heart of fears about national existence in antiwar congressional speeches, where many worried that expansionism into Mexican territory would lead to disunion—indeed, to the end of the American dream. Momentary victory at the expense of eternal defeat. To see best the affinity between the frontier mode’s narrative resolution and the inwardly turned opposition to territorial aggrandizement, it is necessary to recognize how national fragmentation signaled the greatest possible national failure, the acquisition of Mexican lands, less as a terrible loss for Mexico than as a horrendous error committed by the United States, leading to the dissolution of the American covenant. Admittedly, an impending civil war between North and South overshadowed these agonistic prognostications. The already noted speech of Representative Smith elaborates his objection with a conventional, and now prophetic, warning: I have shown that if the territory is acquired, the great controversy between the North and the South, whether it shall be slave or free territory, must be met. Where, then, I would ask, is the ground upon which the patriot should stand? Sir, the only ground of safety—the only ground which will secure the peace and harmony of the country—the welfare and prosperity of the Union, is to keep the territory, with all the distracting questions connected with it, out of the Union. . . . Any further extension of our territorial limits, while it must greatly increase the expenditures of the Government, will weaken the bonds of our Union, and increase the dangers of its dissolution.87 Today, the Civil War, both as history and as myth, dominates the nineteenthcentury landscape of U.S. memory, but Smith’s dissent exemplifies how even while it was being fought, the war against Mexico could be reimagined from an international contest to resolve a boundary dispute to a preface for internecine struggle. Such inward protests voice a nervousness about the continuity of “American” culture consonant with those of contemporary pundits, cable television talking heads, scholars, and right-wing politicians, who fear a dilution of U.S. American values resulting from the growth of Mexican origin populations in the United States. When frontier novelettes conclude by

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

69

happily reuniting the Anglo American family, they lay narratological claim to the immunities promised by a unitary culture. I wish to linger for a moment to make a distinction between sectional anxieties (North versus South) and those fears attending contact with a foreign country adjacent to the United States. The antiwar arguments against incorporating Mexicans rested on two propositions: (1) the already examined contention that Mexicans could not be transformed, or translated, into “Americans,” and (2) the grim predictions that vast new territories would divide the nation. Both arguments derived from the larger narrative of U.S. America as inviolate refuge from worldly corruption. Mexicans and Mexican lands became, in these internal wranglings, redefined as avatars of temporality itself, which is one reason why the novelettes under discussion do not provide romantic internal North-South resolutions, which could conceivably function like chivalric reconciliations with change. Instead, they regather an already perfected communal whole. To see the conflict as mainly intensifying tensions between free states and slave states keeps the discussion from grappling with an even more essential quandary, that of meaning and chaos. This collapse into mere worldliness is what frontier novelettes seek to neutralize. Whether the corruption comes from Mexicans or from the fragmentation of the Union, these writers and congressional orators ultimately fear that expansionism will reveal “America” as just another and nonexceptional country. The warnings in the antiwar speeches coincide with the domestic restorations that conclude frontier tales, because the various orations, when they warn of a sectional conflict, place a stress on how such a war would alter the already understood meaning of the United States for the hopes of the world. They view fragmentation as a potentially final calamity, an absolute failure, rather than, as in contemporary recollections of the Civil War, a redeeming test of national character and a cultural catharsis. After the North’s victory, the story became one of a great tragic dissension and an eventual reunification that reconfirmed the American Dream. Before the war, however, a great civil conflict could still hold the possibility of a permanent and fundamental loss, a catastrophic fall from grace, the eternal destruction, as Anthony Stewart said, of “this now happy and glorious Union.”88 Representative Delano echoed the words of many other antiwar legislators when he criticized Polk for his highhanded provocation of the war. “If by this war,” he said, “we succeed in annexing part of Mexico, we shall thereby stimulate a thirst for territory, which is now manifesting itself in the country, and which, like a cloud in the distant horizon, bodes a coming storm that may destroy the Republic.”89

7 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

The tone of doom aligns well with a belief that the progress not only of the nation but also of the world depended on the ideological homogeneity of the community. The boisterous rhetoric of Representative Foot also sounded the familiar alarm about the abdication of basic principles: Sir, this is the doctrine of the Musselman, who propagates his religion by fire and the sword. . . . It is at war with the fundamental principles of this Republic, based as it is upon the recognition of the right of all people and all nations to institute their own forms of government. This Republic of ours, this boasted exemplar of civil liberty and religious toleration, this first-born child of rational and practical freedom, is to be instigated by the modern zealots of “Progressive Democracy,” to prescribe for other people, and for other nations, at the point of the sword and the bayonet, new forms of government and new modes of faith. Sir, if I had but a single formula of prayer to heaven for my country, it should be, from all these new-born, gigantic schemes of philanthropic villainy, of patriotic rascality, “good lord deliver us.”90 An apocalyptic vision shapes such warnings, the absolutism of good versus evil, as if “America” only had those two modes, eternal salvation or eternal damnation. One of the most infamous antiwar speeches, that of Ohio Senator Thomas Corwin, lamented and criticized the violence inflicted on Mexico,91 but then soared above such mundane matters to contemplate more lasting consequences: Oh, Mr. President, it does seem to me, if Hell itself could yawn and vomit up the fiends that inhabit its penal abodes, commissioned to disturb the harmony of this world, and dash the fairest prospect of happiness that ever allured the hopes of men, the first step in the consummation of this diabolical purpose would be, to light up the fires of internal war, and plunge the sister States of this Union into the bottomless gulf of civil strife.92 Satan’s own dark legions are the military and manipulate the people’s will, in Corwin’s impassioned argument, and, overwrought though it may be, his jeremiadic crescendo demonstrates how antiwar rhetoric tapped into interior trepidations regarding American survival and purpose, that is, maintaining the national mission as tantamount to national existence.

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

71

An unending battle against mutability, then, permeates antiwar protest and frontier novelettes that dissipate the qualms about time with a fantasy of family reunification, narrative dreams that assure readers that literal as well as metaphoric contact with Mexicans will not lead to fragmentation. It is not the killing of Mexicans or their political oppression or a racial utopia that is ultimately at the core of the frontier tale, although all these play roles. The governing imperative demands the preservation of an inviolate national and communal vision—expansion without alteration. At first reading, frontier novelettes might seem detached from matters of mutability—after all, doubts about expansionism rarely surface. Yet in many of these narratives, happy, redemptive, reunions precede journeys back home to the United States, if not specifically to New England.93 They move backward in time and space, as it were, away from the somewhat more complex mediations incorporated in chivalric forms. Writers of many conventional westerns have whisked away romantic pairings from the vagaries of the world with concluding escapist visions—such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902)—but the telltale frontier novelette summation propels the male hero and his wife not to some inviolate western hideaway, as in Wister’s novel, but back to an urban center. Both promise an impossible transcendence of time—the utopian western land, the inviolate New England town—but in the U.S.-Mexican War frontier novelette the retrograde return to a previous stability intimates the rejection of any alteration that might result specifically from adventurism in Mexico, and a recommitment to an ancestral domain. The Flying Artillerist exemplifies this inward concern through a drama that is at once entirely conventional—a daughter threatened with a forced marriage—and also intriguing, because the primary plot has little to do with a territorial boundary dispute with a neighboring country, or with the war that has resulted. Even when these frontier tales explicitly allude to the hostilities, as does in fact The Flying Artillerist, they reference them tangentially. The plot’s first complication arises from a deal between Sabra’s Anglo father and a Spaniard, Carlos Dumiger, one that would transfer Sabra to the Spaniard in an arranged marriage.94 Henceforth, Dumiger, who begins the tale as a genteel figure, “the son of the one of the wealthiest grandees of Spain,”95 defaults to monochromatic villainy, hot-tempered, untrustworthy, lewd, threatening to rape Sabra if she rejects the marriage. Applying the customary dose of parental pressure, Sabra’s father, a wealthy Bostonian and a convert to Catholicism, threatens to banish his independent-minded daughter to a nunnery if she resists Dumiger’s proposal. Because Catholic and “American” loyalties here conflict, he has in effect abdicated political as well as religious integrity, and

7 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

for this reason, the tale’s conclusion constitutes not just a comforting denouement but the reestablishment of a once good order: Woodland, with his family, returned to the United States with the victorious army. His father-in-law, Mr. Sherwood, having but recently died intestate, he in behalf of his wife, came into the possession of an ample fortune, which, we are pleased to add, they are now enjoying in a manner befitting their station. He has resigned his commission as Lieut. Colonel in the corps of Flying Artillerists, to which rank he had been promoted for distinguished service in the Mexican campaign. Reader, should you, in your rides or rambles in the vicinity of Boston, chance to pass by a large and noble mansion, of Gothic architecture, with beautiful grounds laid out with exceeding taste, with flowering shrubs and fruitful trees, with here and there a statue of marble or an appropriate group, with fountains and arbors, and every luxury desired about a country villa, you may rest assured that Henry Woodland is the proprietor.96 The culminating “assurance” drives home the tale’s point, a guarantee, in effect, that the war (five years in the past at the time of this tale’s publication) has not fragmented an inviolate domestic singularity. But because home and belief intertwine within U.S. American nationalism, the defeated threat has been both physical and ideological. As the tale staggers breathlessly to its climactic duels and rescues, Mexicans imprison Sabra in a nunnery, as her father threatened to do earlier. “The abbess herself is with the fair American to-night, for the purpose of persuading her to renounce the world,”97 reveals a fiendish priest to another Mexican villain, Olente, a menacing Mexican with designs of his own to either marry or rape the despairing Sabra. Throughout the tale, Jones rarely uses “American” as either noun or adjective, but he employs it here to highlight the national implications of religious conversion— that is, spiritual death. A few pages later the scene shifts to a melancholy Sabra despondent in her cell but resolute in her Protestant patriotism: A care-worn and sorrowful expression rested upon her transcendently beautiful features. Yet, hope gleamed in her lustrous, heavenly eyes, and courage was stamped upon her firmly compressed lips. She had been weeping, ay, praying, too—not before a crucifix—not before an idolator’s image—but praying to the one, invisible, omniscient, omnipresent Being.98

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

73

Not that marriage to Dumiger would knock Sabra down to lower economic ranks: his scheme would lead to a happy and aristocratic retirement to an estate in Puebla, “where we shall live, and love, and be happy.”99 The heart of the matter, literally as well, remains the ephemeral, invisible, insubstantial, but undeniable power of belief. Death never really looms as a threat because the paramount danger is the potential transfer of loyalty and nationality to Mexico, which would intimate not only the disintegration of the U.S. American union but, more essentially, the malleability, the worldliness, of “American” (and American) identity. Fittingly, Henry Woodland’s only major conflict in the tale crystallizes his rivalry with Dumiger for Sabra. Early in the tale, the two duel with swords, a fight that Woodland wins by seriously but not fatally wounding Dumiger, after which Woodland flees to Texas with his bride, Sabra. The tale then concludes with a climactic double contest: Woodland kills Dumiger, and a friendly Mexican colonel, Rodriguez Halsinger,100 kills the scheming priest who had absconded with Woodland’s daughter. Rodriguez Halsinger, a “good” Mexican, contradicts my frontier, generally dichotomous characterological system, but only up to a point. As a Mexican officer under General Santa Anna, Rodriguez Halsinger disobeys orders to execute the Texian prisoners under Fannin’s command, resigns his commission in the Mexican army, and for the rest of the tale partners with Woodland in various adventures aimed at rescuing Sabra and their lost daughter. Clearly a chivalric Mexican warrior enemy, Rodriguez Halsinger undermines any categorically negative definitions of Mexicans in frontier novelettes. On the other hand, his resignation from Mexico’s military erases the official, national commitment to Mexico’s cause (as in the case of the female ranchero noted above), a move that frees Jones to elevate Rodriguez Halsinger from dastardly traitor to loyal confidant. In any case, the tale’s ideological intensity becomes even more visible when we understand that, even if the only real fighting occurs over Sabra, Sabra herself never needs to make a choice between two men, as she never even remotely inclines to Dumiger, even as a darkly seductive antihero, nor can the novelette be considered a love story that culminates in marriage, as Henry and Sabra are married early in the tale by a Protestant minister in Galveston, an event that takes up all of one sentence.101 Sabra may be the target of a Mexican scheme for her soul and beliefs, but readers always understand—or are asked to believe—that she would die before converting to Catholicism or marrying Dumiger. Instead, the story concentrates on a family broken apart by the interventions of anti-“American” villains—only nominally American, in the case of Sabra’s now-Catholic father, and Spanish, Dumiger and the priest.

74   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

In The Chieftain of Churubusco and The Flying Artillerist, the underlying narrative pulls hard toward reunification and pushes back, with no small measure of unremarked irony, against Mexican incursions into a previously perfect domestic space. Anglo Americans always spurn the ritualized Mexican promises of freedom offered in exchange for their prisoners’ transfer of national allegiance, a performance of national loyalty forecasting the requisite affirmative reunions. The authors stage Mexican captivities in part to verify the immutability of the Anglo American family at the narratological crux of the frontier novelette. Invariably, an enduring U.S. American identity withstands the contaminations of the Earth. Much like Indian captivity narratives, frontier novelette variants affirm Anglo American identity in the face of culturally fracturing pressures, deploying a mode of psychological drama to exemplify Mexican captivity as a failed challenge to the captive’s identity. Like captivity narratives, frontier novelettes become expression of cultural coherence, values, and beliefs. But unlike Indians, Mexicans are uncannily like their U.S. American victims, with their own American nation, European language and religion, class system, history of slavery and anti-Native violence, racism, and so on. To define such Mexicans as uncivilized might cut too close to home. The problem requires an answer beyond the validations of redeemed captivity; it requires the subjection of time.

Remembering to Forget the War Earlier I noted Jameson’s elaboration of “strong romance,” a conceptual paradigm congruent with chivalric novelettes, but he also specifically noted, more in passing than as a point of emphasis, that medieval chansons de geste resemble the iconic U.S. tale of the West in their concentration on stable definitions of morality. Frontier novelettes similarly accord with the medieval pre-romance because they more or less map a consistent world of good versus evil. Although like their chivalric counterparts in many ways, frontier novelettes neutralize the contradictions of the U.S.-Mexican war not by drawing out similarities between Mexican and Anglo aristocrats but by making categorical boundaries that affirm that the nation can simultaneously undertake imperialistic adventurism (change) and return to a domestic utopia (stay the same). Characterological definitions do not tell the whole story, however, because, as with the chivalric imaginary, the frontier form displays its most significant quality in its depiction of the war as history, or in historicity as an index to its awareness of Mexico as a viable American space. As I have been claiming, frontier novelettes make few and largely periph-

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

75

eral allusions to the war itself, relegating it to a distant background before which primary characters act out their dramas of domestic reunions. In The Chieftain of Churubusco, for example, the plot rarely integrates the war’s events, as almost the entire tale deals with private struggles to free captive maidens or reunite sundered families. The Flying Artillerist opens with a strongly historical allusion to the Texian rebellion, but the 1836 war survives as recoverable memory because it pits abstract freedom fighters against an equally metaphysical tyranny, a “history” already transmuted into a mythology. After the early references to the fight for Texas’s “freedom,” the only other conflict in The Flying Artillerist features characters who wish to disconnect the captive female from her U.S. American context struggling against those who want to return her to it. In the background, almost off-stage, the U.S. army proceeds to invade Mexico and defeat its disorganized military, but the tale mutes or denies the historical consequences. Writers of frontier tales rarely mention new lands taken from Mexico, preferring the triumphant journey home with recovered wives and families made whole. The frontier novelette’s key distinctiveness, then, lies in the way it hardly glances at the potential of international marriages. Instead, as I have shown, these tales wind their ways in reverse, back toward the reunification of Anglo American families, regathering domestic spaces broken apart either before the narrative begins or early in the narrative. A concomitant of this process underscores another distinguishing feature: the way Anglo Americans in frontier novelettes undergo set-piece tests of their fidelity to the United States. Yet, to be tempted by Mexico or Mexican seducers, even if only to reject them, is not too far removed from succumbing to their aristocratic and sexual charms. The permeability, the historical contingency, of “Anglo American” is thus typically at stake in these tales, a possibility to be interpreted, understood, dealt with—always turned away, but necessarily considered nonetheless. The critical issue here, however, concerns time, specifically how the war itself now takes the stage infrequently and elliptically as historical context. Even though writers produced frontier novelettes during the war years, their plots tend to deny the disturbing complications of the war itself. Frontier tales thus share important attitudes and predispositions with bandit (Western) dime novels, which are far more rigorous in excising the complications of history regarding the southern “sister republic.” Generally, in both frontier and western novelettes, the Mexican enemy catalyzes a narrative of a special people acting outside the normal boundaries of time because he menaces

76   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

a domestic-national paradise with the threat of earthly contaminations. He (sometimes a she) embodies an array of corruptions, biological, moral, and ideological, portending generally a threat to meaning. The ritualizing killing or containment of the Mexican villain in frontier tales prohibits earthly incursions into utopic “America,” not by excluding the Mexican villain but by allowing him passage as barbaric and transgressive. Despite the Mexican military uniform he often wears, the frontier Mexican antagonist evinces the recognizable features of the bandido of previous and later decades. Indeed, the frontier form’s elaboration of history remains caught between the chivalric’s exuberant historical footnoting and the western’s nearly total abstraction into metaphysical timelessness. For all its harshness aimed at Mexico and Mexicans, the frontier narrative never manages to completely reduce the Mexican enemy to a mythic outline. My final thoughts here, then, contemplate the interiority of the frontier mode as a contradictory domain in which the war becomes momentarily visible in the act of disappearing. The first bridge to cross is back toward the chivalric mode. How might such contrasting narrative projects—the first suspending the valency of national identity in favor of class status, the second adamantly insisting on nationality’s overarching significance—be conceived as sharing temporal consciousness? Both forms, though typically racializing poor Mexicans or mestizos, also elevate “white” or fair-skinned Mexican aristocrats to roles as primary antagonists or villains, and one might be tempted to assume that the most significant commonality lies in the way both forms project white, aristocratic Mexican antagonists, with a concomitant racializing of Mexicans natives and “mongrels.” From a contemporary vantage point, most fictional Mexicans in U.S. America’s mainstream film and literature, not to mention news coverage of so-called “illegal” immigrants, appear as dark-skinned and shadowy agents of uninhibited transgression, and so it might strike one as interesting that many Mexican enemies in the U.S.-Mexican War literature are light-skinned—as opposed, again, to many racialized bandido villains of the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. Because race itself has so often encoded ideological systems, however, the racial markings have to be read in part in nonracial terms. In this case, these aristocratic Mexicans reference the way frontier novelettes retain chivalric nationality, meaning that frontier novelettes continue to deploy Mexicans as actually having a nationality to some degree analogous to U.S. nationality. Even though writers often denigrate Mexican villains in frontier tales, they never excise them completely from their national contexts, in effect ascribing to their antagonist Mexicans, no matter how vile, some measure of historical reality. One need

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

77

only contrast this with bandit dime novels, in which Mexicans are stripped of practically all references to actual Mexican history or culture. Exceptions to this rule can be found readily enough, and I explore a few in Act Three, but by and large, Mexican bandits ride, plunder, and murder in a stylized, often minimalist western terrain, bracketed from the effects of time and contingency. Frontier novelette Mexicans, on the other hand, still wear military uniforms. The southern sister republic cannot be assimilated, but neither, in the frontier fantasy, can it be erased. Heroic Anglos of course typically defeat and kill evil Mexicans, but Mexico itself remains—and by extension so do Mexicans, as Catholic, Spanish, barbaric, corrupt, but, most critically, as national entities. On the other hand, even uniformed Mexicans can function more or less like stylized bandits primarily because of the way they already link national difference with a moral hierarchy in which the United States reigns supreme. Western (bandit) tales, discussed in the third and final act, proffer the nearly complete sublimation of Mexican rivals as fundamentally amoral terrorists, something frontier narratives never quite achieve, perhaps because the war itself is still too present when they are being produced, even though the conflict rarely affects the story. Then again, I am reminded here of Jeff Shaara’s recent novel about the U.S.-Mexican War, Gone for Soldiers (2000),102 which, echoing with remarkable continuity the partial war evasion of frontier novelettes of the 1840s, manages to be a tale set during the war but focused on the careers of the young officers Grant and Lee. That is, Shaara’s narrative vision turns inward, away from the Americas at large and quite obsessively toward the mythology of “America,” the war here again being redefined as a prequel to the main attraction, the Civil War. Writers like Justin Jones cannot turn to the Civil War (still a few years in the future) to evade the complexities generated by Mexico, but they evince a commensurate lack of concern with Mexico and with the particulars of the war itself. Like Shaara’s, their tales conceive of the war as a remote stage for the more important tale of U.S. American national teleology. The frontier novelette hermeneutic insists on an “America” immunized against the messy realities of history—history here meaning precisely that which escapes final codification, reduction, and simplification—because in and through Mexico, history’s messy realities have become self-evident. What then? What of this paralysis, this abiding contradiction? This question lies at the center of the following chapter, but I wish to offer a few initial thoughts here as they pertain specifically to the frontier novelette. I commented earlier on what connects the frontier novelette to the chivalric, but

78   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

the chivalric also contains a key affinity with the stridently anti-Mexican western in that both provide resolving answers to the Mexican problem, workable mediations for the unpleasant fact that the United States took lands belonging to other Americans who had similarly utopian dreams of a redemptive national space. Chivalry solves the problem by discovering that Mexicans and Anglos share fundamental and essential supranational attributes, banditry discovers unqualified difference. Frontier tales remain stuck with the fact and the impossibility of Mexico, and thereby constitute a fundamentally distinct approach to the epistemological problems raised by the presence of an American republic already existing in the “West.” They attempt the impossible reconciliation between the history of the war, that is, the presence of Mexican national space, and a U.S. American mythology of ahistorical meaning, but the problem is not new in the 1840s, because “America” from the beginning has embodied the tension between broken time and stasis, has generated from the outset anxieties regarding origins and destinies. Yet when frontier novelettes withdraw their heroes and heroines from “the war” back to “the home,” they demonstrate how Mexico’s presence within the U.S. collective imaginary brings to the surface the critical rupture in history at the center of the Americas. Of particular interest as an especially energized frontier novelette is George Lippard’s Legends of Mexico (1847), which Streeby in her analysis has thoughtfully explored for the way it and Lippard’s other U.S.-Mexican War novelette, ’Bel of Prairie Eden (1848), attempt to resolve the sweeping contradictions attending the invasion of Mexican territory. Lippard’s writing, however, because it simultaneously drives toward destinarian myth as well as the collapse of belief, represents some of the most fascinating evocations of the frontier mode, both novelettes concerned with domestic cohesion and both radiating a deep lamentation for its loss. That is, the frontier mode in general exhibits a radical anxiety, my key concern in Chapter 2. Here I pause only to note that Lippard’s war novelettes exhibit a particularly vigorous dialogism precisely because they attempt the impossible synthesis of war history (time) with an ahistorical national dream (eternity). I find particularly poignant Lippard’s own critical treatise on the subject as he begins Legends of Mexico, where he claims openly that he is reaching for something more profound than mere history, a lifeless, vacuous domain to which “legend” responds by imparting the texture of universal, eternal reality, even if brazenly fictional.103 Lippard here senses how mere facts do not explain their meanings through self-evidence, but not far below this surface lies the unsettling encounter with

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

79

all meaning as contingent, which makes Lippard’s work an example of U.S.Mexican War literature, but only of a certain type. Embedded deeply in Lippard’s desire to infuse “legend” into history lies an intense and hemispheric unease, as well as a premodern anxiety stemming from the difficulty of fixing meaning amid the swirl of overwhelming change being continually and iconically brought to the fore by the conceptual space of Mexico. Acts One and Three refer primarily to narrative closures, and frontier novelettes also conclude with their own satisfying domesticities, but they retain nonetheless a sense of disquiet, in part because their primary characters have had to prove their ideological loyalties, a testing that implies, even if at a subsurface level, that loyalties can indeed change, can, in other words, fall victim to time’s passage. Time, then, lies at the crux of the frontier mode and intimates the high stakes in U.S. America’s construction of Mexico. To be clear, it is not that time and change are not in play in chivalric and western novelettes but that both these modes find their way to meaningful settlements, literally and metaphorically, with time. The frontier narrative, on the other hand, like Mary Rowlandson’s seminal captivity narrative, hints at how captivity may leave a permanent scar, at how easy it might be to change sides, become a Wampanoag native in 1676 or a Mexican (American) in 1847, at how being in America already creates a fissure from which there may be no escape. By dividing these novelettes into formulaic categories, chivalric and frontier, up to this point, I risk imposing a contemporary view retroactively, of seeing only what I want to see. It is true that history in the form of references to the war is never entirely absent in frontier versions, and anti-Mexican prejudice is never expelled completely from the chivalric mode. Similarly, a great deal of sympathy for Mexico and outrage at U.S. military adventurism flows through the congressional speeches quoted from earlier, and an intense bigotry frequently mars the journals kept by U.S. soldiers. Such complications abound; inconsistencies and ambiguities striate practically every discourse of the U.S.-Mexican War. Indeed, I have aligned the racist military journals with the more generous chivalric novelettes and the somewhat sympathetic antiwar speeches with the more virulent frontier models in part to exemplify how the war coincided with, and generated a volatile play of, ideological confusion. Furthermore, to what degree can we say that authors like Averill and Halyard and John Rollin Ridge, the key novelizer of the Joaquín Murieta legend, really thought about broad American contradictions? They wrote for profit, aiming at a mass market. Clearly, the genre of the novelette resists formulaic reductions. Yet the frontier versions discussed here, because they work to

8 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

synthesize a recognition of Mexico’s historical fact with a dream of eternal transcendence, establish a distinctively conflicted imaginative terrain. These divisions and analyses seek nuanced readings premised on the underlying claim that the U.S.-Mexican War was a supercharged national event in which the basic, telluric story of American isolation and the unique conjunction of individual and community were challenged by the threat of an awareness of history and change. Challenged but not defeated, for in the end the dream survived—reaffirmed, one might say, through its own opposing nightmare. Mexico receded as a viable alternative American nation to become an archetypal anti-America. The nobly aristocratic Rejon would return as Ridge’s Joaquín Murieta, who in turn would evolve into endless Murietas, forever riding across the deserts and mountains of Anglo American anxiety. Mexico’s mythic character, its role in the process of “American” ideological self-definition, becomes fixed within this mid-nineteenth-century crucible of violence, hypocrisy, and belief. The process required a dramatic elevation of a key figure that has been waiting in the wings, the solitary Mexican fighter, who goes by various names: ranchero, renegade, military general, mysterious savior, rogue, but most famously bandit. I devote Act Three to the Mexican bandit, at the risk of going over ground already well traveled by predecessors. But my approach offers a different perspective on the most dominant Mexican character archetype in U.S. western literature, seeing within him (usually a him) the narrative legacy of the U.S.-Mexican War. The Mexican bandit has a complex genealogy, evolving, in many versions by U.S. writers and filmmakers, partly from Mexican social disorders and economic upheavals predating U.S. military interventions, yet he nonetheless hints at a tenuous, distant connection to international conflict—a nebula of vague allusions obscured by narrative projects that delineate an imperialistic fantasy of domination, definition, and exclusion. The first scene in Act Three links the emergence of the bandit to the war, even though one of the bandit’s fundamental tasks is to suspend the march of time. The second scene shows how the Mexican bandit’s stereotyping defines more than a particular figure from a certain national domain. In U.S. American culture, bandit stereotyping coincides with global dynamics and pressures, the classic Mexican bandit having as much to do with how an essentialist strain in United States society comprehends both Mexico and the rest of the world. The final scene explores why authors render the deaths of Mexican bandits as sacrificial and revelatory in both Mexican and U.S. narratives.

Act Three: Fictive Facts

As the hammer fell, a bullet spun through the brain of Mosquera, and the flash and report were followed instantly by a volley from the carbines, that told with deadly effect on the outlaws. . . . —The Blue Band; or, The Mystery of the Silver Star

Whether as patriotic freedom fighter or as nefarious would-be seducer, the charismatic Mexican renegade chief drives the action in practically all U.S.Mexican War fictions, but he remains most familiar as the terrorist bandit criminal who takes center stage in western dime novels, the category perhaps best known and understood by the wider U.S. American public. These bandido figures are complex amalgamations of desire and repulsion, often blending together a mode of nostalgia and criminality, comedy and violence. They can be evanescent figures, spectrally hovering between social order and chaos, a liminality that triggers complicated responses such as those that attend canonical U.S. American frontiersmen heroes, from the fictional Leatherstocking to the historical Davy Crockett to Chicano heroes Gregorio Cortez, Juan Cortina, and Catarino Garza. Although outside the social order, they nonetheless emphasize their mastery of their own cultural definitions; dismissive of the law, they are a law unto themselves. Bandits and people misidentified as bandits thus invite nuanced readings of interstices and ambiguities. Until, that is, we place a classic bandit like Ridge’s Joaquín Murieta—who himself appears with the U.S.-Mexican War in the distant background— alongside Averill’s Rejon and Jones’s Dumiger. The familiar Mexican bandit when aligned in such a series now appears as a clarifying figure, because he acts on a decisively mythological stage. He never loses his complexity, but the array of fissures in his symbolic value becomes overshadowed by sweeping ahistorical abstractions that drive him toward reductive containment and definitional comprehension. Indeed, when former Texas Ranger Harry Love decapitates the fictional Murieta in Ridge’s novella, then places the head in a jar and labels it, we sense that the preceding narrative’s entire point has been to assert the possibility of definition, the comforts of existential certainty (as opposed to Leatherstocking’s unending liminality, or the way the folk ballad of Gregorio Cortez leaves its character strangely liberated and imprisoned). Chivalric and frontier novelettes drive toward certainty in their ways, too, but western or bandit tales typically begin with a problem of social disruption, where the task at hand is to kill a terrorist-criminal already identified and to

8 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

preserve a social order already established. Societal preservation, then, rather than the innovation of chivalric mediations or the reconstitution of frontier domesticity, distinguishes the western variant.104 I might have designated my third and final category under the rubric of “banditry” instead of “western,” but the questions that intrigue me have less to do with anti-Mexican stereotypes than with the reciprocities between U.S.-Mexican military conflict and U.S. American western fiction, perhaps a distinction more of emphasis than content. To that end, Act Three concludes this particular tale of the Mexican renegade by showing how dime novelists imagined Mexican bandits within U.S.-Mexican War contexts, but these now configured deliberately, and provocatively, as temporal lacunae. Indeed, these bandit stories may not read like war fiction at first, because the conflict itself plays almost no historical role in them other than as distant background or as time in the immediate future or the immediate past. Still, in the decades that followed the U.S.-Mexican War, many Mexican bandit tales reference, allude to, or hint at the war, or long-standing border disputes, or both. In other words, Mexican bandit stories more often than not have an embedded, though veiled, memory of international conflict, which makes the war’s absence even more conspicuous. A cautionary point: Act Three might seem to follow Act Two, and so it does in my analysis, but Mexican bandits should not be understood as evolutionary results of the war—at least not exactly. The fighting does not propagate bandits in the fictional border landscape, although the economic and political disruptions following the U.S. invasion did lead some Mexican leaders to undertake insurgencies. Dime novel Mexican banditry more accurately understood returns to a preexisting mode of cultural discourse that had already been demonizing not just Mexicans but also Native Americans and Spaniards as well—an imaginative domain combining anti-Native racism and Black Legend propaganda. Yet bandit dime novels, with their desire for and repulsion from the war’s actuality, forcefully illuminate the interplay of Mexico and history within U.S. essentialist identity. It is as if these writers had deliberately set out to capture the moment when essentialist narrative breaks free from contingency, when identity is rescued, and constructed, from the vagaries of actuality. In a way, the Mexican bandit defaults to his role as absolute villain in inverse relation to the war’s erasure, a double move comprising a single operation in which U.S. American writers and, later, filmmakers organize the past of the West in patterns that excise its contradictory aspects. Thus, to investigate the Mexican bandit means encountering the living, breathing ghosts of the U.S.-Mexican War.

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

83

Again, as with chivalric and frontier novelettes, I will deal with the western mode in a project of rhetorical comparison—although I must both confess and forewarn that western bandit tales will seem tediously predictable when placed alongside the previous two narrative dispositions. Whereas the chivalric and frontier modes often provide more suspense than might be expected, the writers of western dime novels telegraph almost everything in the first dozen pages, already pushing back against mystery, confusion, doubt, and ambiguity, squarely aiming their guns of inscription at the eradication of uncertainty—the commonplace blending of crime mystery with communal ritual. The following discussion, then, proceeds along already established methodological lines: a reading first of how these stories begin, what they proffer as their orchestrating conflicts; then a diagramming of conclusions, how they resolve their crises. Staying within my analytical architecture, I conclude by examining the crucial factor of time and history, or rather ahistory. Mexican bandits appear in many dime novels published throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and admittedly, not all of them mention the U.S.-Mexican War, but many do. A quick review of the Beadle and Adams dime novel catalogue indicates that many tales with Mexican bandits reference either the prewar Texas controversy or the war itself, or feature postwar “bandit” figures, such as Juan Cortina and the now canonical Murieta—who may have been in actuality a composite of several postwar raiders. But to emphasize a critical point: my claim is not that all Mexican bandit tales have connections to the war but that those that do exhibit a telltale evacuation of history. The challenge, then, was to find a U.S.-Mexican War discourse that very directly emerged from the field of battle yet was removed from it, a mode of war writing that would parallel the way war bandit stories simultaneously mention and obscure the war. Finding such contextual pairings for chivalric and frontier novelettes proved relatively straightforward, but U.S.-Mexican War writing by definition has to historicize the war, has to transact with it in a concrete way. On the other hand, John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854), probably the seminal U.S. American bandit tale, posed a classic fantasy as documentary reportage, which is simply to note that the homology between U.S.Mexican War journalism and western “bandit” fiction lies precisely where it should: in the paralleling functions of the bandit story and war journalism as agents of nationalist consolidation. Johannsen, in fact, begins his review of U.S. American literary culture during the war by reviewing how the era’s newspaper journalism shaped a “popular base” for the war, noting that “it

84   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

was through the ubiquitous American newspaper that the war achieved its vitality in the popular mind.”105 Because of similarly nationalizing imperatives, U.S.-Mexican War reportage and western tales both propose the suppression, or actually the erasure of the war’s temporal complexity. Whereas soldiers could be sympathetic at times, and anxious politicians could agonize about the war’s fracturing effects on the United States, battlefield correspondents—not averse, as Johannsen notes, to taking up arms themselves—often wrote news stories that celebrated Anglo America as being unproblematically in polar opposition to Mexico and Mexicans. They did so not only because they themselves likely harbored such attitudes but also because the war journalism of the era freely engaged in ethnonationalist production. To be a newspaper reporter embedded with U.S. troops in Mexico was often to be involved in affirming an already presumed boundary between Anglo America and a Mexican antithesis. The novelette form itself, it bears noting, spun away from openly nationalist publishing enterprises in the 1840s, even though their war-related issues found themselves entangled with historical exigencies.106 But when dime novelists later picked up the theme of the Mexican enemy, they reconnected to a nationalist hermeneutic that externalized Mexicans— reviving a view of Mexico momentarily complicated by the U.S.-Mexican War itself—but a way of seeing Mexicans disseminated to some degree in some of the era’s war journalism, as if the most jingoistic war correspondents had approached the war with preexisting narrative templates fashioned out of the mythological collision between General Antonio López de Santa Anna and Texian rebels at the Alamo ten years earlier. And again, like military memoirs that implied commonalities between Mexicans and Anglos, and like the antiwar political rhetoric that resisted the Mexicanization of the United States, war journalism wrestled with a critical problem deriving from the war, one now centered on “America’s” authority as a democratic beacon of hope. The war revealed that U.S. America could act like any other imperial power. Writers, intellectuals, and unabashed propagandists turned their rhetorical energies to squaring this hard fact with the nationalistic belief in U.S. America’s globally redemptive mission. The U.S.-Mexican War represents only one instance of this fundamental tension in the U.S. national self-image coming to the surface of the collective consciousness. All of this is to say that U.S.-Mexican war journalists tackled an unavoidable problem, that of national hypocrisy. It might seem counterintuitive. No other noncombatant writers had such intimate contact with the actual fighting as did war correspondents, documenting battles, casualties, military politics, and so forth. However, many of

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

85

these first war correspondents composed a kind of war romance, reframing the materiality of the war into a nationalist telos, as Johannsen’s comprehensive study reminds us. To be sure, not all composed in jingoistic declamations, but in general, they projected the war as a crucible for national identity, transforming the conflict into a large-scale national adventure story, and the exemplary figure here is George Wilkins Kendall of the New Orleans Daily Picayune. One of the best-known U.S.-Mexican War correspondents, Kendall produced reportage that stands as a quintessential paradigm of journalistic romanticism, and in the following analysis I compare and integrate his battlefield documentation as a representative analogue to the dime novel bandit tales that followed decades later.

The Problem of Ambiguity The Mexican bandits in this review hardly ever threaten Anglos exclusively. In some dime novels they don’t menace them at all. Even when opposed by heroic Anglo-Saxon defenders of justice and the American way, the bandits embody a gathering of dangers to everybody and everything. A classic western film like The Magnificent Seven (1960) offers a standard example: “Americans” never merely invade; they bring the lights of freedom, redemption, and order, a tenet of U.S. American war making so deeply encoded into nationalist discourse that some may see resistance to such “liberation” among the invaded as an index of their social dysfunction. The early bandit tales under review here, then, present as their chief antagonist either a Mexican villain who breaks the law in Mexico, or, if the tale is set along the border, a Mexican who disrupts and unsettles both Anglo and Mexican societies. These Mexican bad guys never threaten a singularly Anglo American world, swarming down from the mountains on heaving horses to trouble a lonely outpost of pioneering Anglo Americans, a point with larger implications, but for now it is enough to stipulate that these fantasies defeat the most abstract demons of social chaos. When George Kendall began covering the U.S.-Mexican War for the Picayune in 1846, he already knew and understood Anglo American–Mexican quarrels over territory, having himself been captured and held prisoner by the Mexicans after the ill-fated Santa Fe expedition in 1841. His anti-Mexican racism must be contextualized biographically as inspired in part by unpleasant recollections of his Mexican captivity. But although he took every opportunity in his dispatches to denigrate the Mexican enemy, a larger, more fundamental apology for imperialism breaks through the outer surfaces of his

86   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

racism, the invasion not only justified by imagined Mexican infractions but mandated by “America’s” redemptive role in the universe. Kendall’s particular approach, his narrative architecture, configures Santa Anna as the chief villain, a tyrannical dictator who had to be removed to liberate Mexico and restore the progress of civilization. The Mexican general takes the stage as Kendall’s foreshadowing manifestation of later dime novel Mexican bandit villains, Mexican elites, who command through a toxic blend of personal charisma, deception, and outright brutality. When we gaze through the frame of the tyrant-enemy, we discern how Kendall’s dispatches embody a resonating, basic conflict expressed in countless bandit tales both then and since—the invading U.S. army transformed into a heroic band of liberators sacrificing not only for the United States but for Mexico, and for all the world. In a typical editorializing aside, Kendall in the following June 1847 report describes Mexico as a lost cause: As regards the prospects of peace, they appear just as distant as ever. A peace patched up at the city of Mexico at this time will hardly last until the ink is dry with which it is signed; certainly not until the Americans are out of the country. Without doubt there is a large and influential part in favor of it, but they dare not avow themselves for fear of after consequences. I know not how it may turn up, but as I said in a former letter I do not at present see any other course than for the United States to hold and retain possession of the country—aye, and to govern it, too.107 Regarding Santa Anna more specifically, Kendall sees him as nothing less than an agent of chaos: “An anarchist himself, his very element is anarchy, and the only peaceful moments he probably spends are passed amidst confusion.”108 An imperative against complication and toward clarity here governs Kendall’s journalistic imagination. As might be expected, Western dime novels begin tackling the problem of ambiguity almost immediately. The plot’s centering concern erupts often within the first few paragraphs, as if the authors can hardly wait to get to the action. Mayne Reid’s The Captain of the Rifles; or, The Queen of the Lakes (1879) presents one of the clearest examples. The narrative’s first line announces a street crime: “‘Ladrones! Socorro!, Socorro! ’” Reid continues with a translation: “The cry reached my ears as I was sauntering home to my quarters in the city of Mexico. Though the words were Spanish, I knew it to be ‘Robbers! Help!’—a shout far from uncommon in the Mexican capital.” We learn in

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

87

short order that the story takes place during the U.S. occupation of Mexico City immediately after the defeat of Mexican forces in the fall of 1847 and that it features a heroic U.S. officer, perhaps the alter ego of Reid, himself, who falls in love with a beautiful Aztec princess, also the sexual objective of the tale’s villain, Don Hilario Dominguez, a former colonel in the Mexican army turned bandit chief. I pause here to underscore the time of the tale—immediately after the war’s final battles. However, though both hero and villain have direct connections to their respective militaries, Reid’s narrative disengages from the conflict to dwell on criminality. Dominguez controls a band of rancheros known as the Red Hats, ruffians who adorn their sombreros with an identifying piece of red cloth. One of the reasons The Captain of the Rifles exemplifies the bandit mode is because the Red Hats occupy a momentarily ambiguous domain of friend and foe, which underscores that these “enemies” are dangerous in part because their true identities remain half-hidden.109 At one point our hero must enter a den of thieves to gather information about the bandit leader, which allows him to make a series of observations: Excepting the officers, and not all of them, I never looked upon so many sinister faces—save once, when making my inspection of the Red Hats—and between those and these there was not much to choose. Nearly every one present might be taken for a bandit, nor would any great mistake have been made in so believing him, since a goodly proportion of them were professional robbers, highwaymen, and footpads, as I afterward learnt. This explained their ardent patriotism, or its pretense, as it gave them protection against the laws they had offended—for the time absolving them from the ban of outlawry. And who could blame the Mexican authorities for permitting this sort of thing? Certainly not we, the Americans, who at that moment had a band of these same salteadores in our service, receiving pay, even petted by our commander-in-chief!”110 “Certainly not we, the Americans,” who do not always bother to make moral distinctions, in effect employing the same men who were yesterday the enemy, and might be so again tomorrow. These Mexican bandits never threaten the United States, but they do menace Mexican society. Although published in 1879, thirty-one years after the war’s conclusion, no other tale better captures the ideological parallels between the standard bandit story and the rationalizations of the U.S.-Mexican War as a campaign of liberation. Reid even

88   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

notes in passing that the “policing” of the Mexican capital was undertaken by U.S. troops,111 these soldiers having had to modulate from mass destroyers to discriminating guarantors of civil law. The same elemental apologia runs through many bandit tales in which the central criminality afflicts not only Anglo Americans but Mexicans as well. In Frederick H. Dewey’s Will-O’The-Wisp: The California Trooper (1874), the protagonist, Roland Haywood, leads a band of Anglos in California during the war against a rival group led by Marcos Alvarez, who has been marauding California ranches and who has specifically attacked and pillaged Haywood’s ranch in California. Early in the story, Alvarez is sheltered by the hacendado Jose Diaz, who erroneously believes Alvarez to be a man of honor. When Alvarez attempts to murder Haywood in Diaz’s home, the elder Mexican rancher discovers the true nature of the Mexican renegade, and from that point on, the plot simplifies into a running duel between Alvarez and Haywood. Both are, of course, in love with Diaz’s daughter. Eventually Alvarez kills the elder Diaz, sealing his identity as a murderous fiend with no loyalty other than to his own unrestrained desires. The essential point needs little elaboration: the Anglo heroes must cleanse the land of bad Mexicans, while leaving good ones unharmed. Two 1861 dime novels by A.J.H. Duganne also fall into the U.S.-Mexican War narrative category, but this time they intriguingly intimate the conflict as a future event, cycling through a series of adventures that lead up to the war itself.112 The Peon Prince; or, The Yankee Knight-Errant and Putnam Pomfret’s Ward: A Vermonters Adventures in Mexico feature the titular Pomfret, a New England Yankee wanderer who becomes entangled in Mexico’s internal troubles, his role being to maneuver behind the scenes rather than to take any major action himself. The Peon Prince takes place before the war; Putnam Pomfret’s Ward begins as war tensions mount, but it does mention the early battles of Taylor and the fall of Monterrey. Both emphasize Mexico’s social instability and political revolutions, thereby delineating a Mexican state in need of a cathartic, reenergizing invasion from the north. Finally, Frank P. Armstrong’s The Prairie Pathfinder; or, The Lost Sister (1870) features Mexican robbers “who depredated alike on Mexican and American soil.”113 The tale takes place shortly after the U.S.-Mexican War and features a U.S. military detachment ordered to the border to quell the disturbances. The actual number of the band—that is, those who did the plundering—was supposed not to exceed thirty, but it was currently reported that they had confederates—men high in reputation among their

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

89

neighbors, men of wealth and settled position—on both sides of the Rio Grande, who aided the robbers in their escape from justice, and assisted them in disposing of their ill-gotten booty.114 Although these brigands sell their loot in Mexico, Armstrong, in keeping with many of these dime novel plots, depicts them as a threat both to Mexico and the United States, even as “in principle . . . [an independent] republic”115 which has battled Mexican troops. These dime novels appeared years after chivalric and frontier novelettes and might therefore have escaped juxtaposition with the war itself, and they can be also said to have direct lines of influence leading to the ongoing resistance by Mexican political strongmen that troubled Mexico’s northern territories throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.116 But war stories do not cease being war stories simply because of a gap in time or because they draw inspiration from an indeterminate field. In this particular case, Streeby has shown how Duganne’s tales contemplate cultural and political disturbances circulating around the Civil War and debates about labor and white identity.117 But why reference the war at all if the narrative will gravitate toward a meditation on the preservation of communal order? And if referenced, why now kept off-stage? One might say that these bandit tales are essentially not U.S.-Mexican war stories and thereby need not be expected to deal with the war. They are instead narratives that displace internal U.S. tensions, or more directly reference actual “border troubles” that disturbed the international boundary zone after the war. Such distinctions, however, rely on disconnecting dime novel bandits from their novelette ranchero cousins, as if the border troubles themselves arose with little or no relationship to the violent realignments of national and economic jurisdictions, or as if the social upheavals of the 1870s had suddenly sprung into being and had little or no ties to the 1840s. Most critically, however, the evasion of the war’s historicality begins not in the 1870s but, for example, in 1848, with the Chieftain of Churubusco; or, The Spectre of the Cathedral, or in 1847, with the The Hunted Chief; or, The Female Ranchero. Both of these tales, written alongside their more documentary chivalrous counterparts, already make only passing references to the war, which is to emphasize that my main concern is less with war references themselves than with the relationship between the dropping away of the war’s historical context and a concomitant intensification of antiMexican sentiment, a paralleling alignment between communal ahistoricality and increasingly abstract Mexican bandits.

Cover image from The Prairie Pathfinder, original in color. In a work no longer focused directly on the war, the cover image, like the tale’s plot, tends toward abstraction, here referencing one of the most common plot features in western tales, a lone hero using his fallen horse as a barricade against a more numerous foe. Rare Books and Special Collections, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb.

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

91

The Execution of the Bandit, the Desire for Definition Western dime novels end with the death by execution of the Mexican villainterrorist, but unlike in frontier tales, which peak and resolve with similar eradications, the killing of the main western antagonist in western tales does not clear the way for the reintegration of an Anglo American domestic utopia. Instead, these endings restore a boundary, or a belief in a boundary, between time and stability, that the bandit has made it his business to transgress. In the scheme of my Bakhtinian approach, bandits, like rogues, are dialogic agents, spilling forth from rips in historical time. As such, the precise difference between frontier novelettes and western dime novels might seem hardly worth noting: do not both categories preserve the social order? Yes, and not exactly. The distinction between a domestic utopia and a social order begins to emerge when we sense that frontier novelettes never fit easily within the category of the bandit western. For all his evil, Dumiger above never quite looks or acts like the stereotypical bandido, in part because of his still strong aura of Mexican nationalism: He never quite gets rid of that Mexican uniform, nor does he trouble a larger social entity. Bandits, on the other hand, operate as extranational practitioners of death and destruction, the most obvious but not the most important distinction. No dime novel tale ever breaks absolutely free from its progenitor novelettes, frontier or even chivalric, and any argument making discriminations must proceed with circumspection. My review of the already thoroughly examined bandit genre rests on the most obvious thrust of bandit story plots— their concentration not on happy family reunions but on the death of the villain himself. These are not usually happily-ever-after romances, even when male heroes, typically Anglo, marry the leading ladies, because the sequence of emplotted events rarely emphasizes love affairs or sex or seduction. Rather, the conventional western mode stresses the criminality or terrorism of a Mexican archfiend, and then speeds quickly toward a final ritualized gunfight in which the hero or his men dispatch the troublesome Mexican. By contrast, a figure like Dumiger expresses at some level the possibility of mutability; Dominguez, on the other hand, stands not for change but for absolute chaos. I delve into this matter below, but let me acknowledge here that the typical western dime novel generally fixes the “American” psychic landscape in a nontime that neutralizes the existential trial of temporal awareness. The Mexican villain at the center of my discussion can easily lose his specific quality as a Mexican. He might as well be any other, abstracted social pariah sacrificed on

9 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

the altar of certainty. But the point of Mexican bandit tales lies precisely in the way they can be understood as effects of global dislocation, more or less public rituals of identity formation that speak less about actual conditions in the “West” and far more about the effects of industrialization, modernity, and urbanization. Indeed, this has been the methodological premise of a great deal of the western genre’s criticism, often unfolding in deconstructions of internal social fracturing. I am here only underscoring the way the Mexican bandido narrative aims to dissipate globalist anxieties of boundary rupture and identity disaggregation, because part of this operation entails containing the intensely globalizing energies of the U.S.-Mexican War. Yet no matter how forcefully dime novels authors erase these figures from the sacral space of meaning, Mexican villains—whether “bandits” or transgressive undocumented workers, supposedly nonassimilating Mexican immigrants, or suspiciously ethnic Mexican Americans—all continue to cycle through U.S. American society as mythological categories in journalistic narratives of intensifying global contact. From the outset, it seems, Mexicans and the Mexican space have stood not only for race or class difference but also, as they do today, for the loss of meaning, which is also to say that they (we) have been marked to a profound degree by the violence of war. These are broad concerns that foreshadow my concluding discussion, but my aim for the moment is to illuminate the lines of connection running from the U.S.-Mexican War to the Mexican bandit to contemporary nationalist anxiety as expressed in the pages of news publications and through broadcast airwaves. Although Kendall’s journalism appears at the infancy of what we today recognize as journalism, it too insists on narrative closures, but with parallels to generic Western mythology. Kendall sets out to cover a real war, and so it may seem that the doorway toward comparative analysis begins with the extermination of Mexican soldiers, but a more important correspondence resides in Kendall’s gradually increasing tendency as the war progressed to see Santa Anna as a kind of bandit-in-chief, a dark, duplicitous operator fighting a war against U.S. Americans and, at the same time, like all evil dictators, troubling his own house, literally an embodiment of “anarchy.” The solution, or resolution, necessitated a midcentury regime change, the removal of Santa Anna, but Santa Anna, annoyingly, kept escaping, even escaping the vast and lasting humiliations resulting from the U.S.-Mexican War to return briefly to the presidency. No grim and socially affirming hanging at the gallows or fiery shootout ends the life of Kendall’s preeminent brigand chief, and it would be facile to claim that the war ended with Santa Anna’s momentary fall from power and that that somehow constituted a satisfying resolution in Kendall’s

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

93

dispatches. And yet an abiding conclusiveness runs through his journalism even as he grounds his writing in an unfolding, day-to-day narrative of events in time. Nothing sells like victory, and Kendall understood that he had to fly high the flag of a racist, Anglo American imperialism, routinely documenting U.S. victories and matter-of-factly remarking on the superiority of brave, industrious Anglos Americans over lazy, cowardly, effete Mexicans. Similarly, dime novelists insisted not merely on Anglo American domination but on its automatic unspokenness, because in dime novels we read not about the emergence of Anglo heroism or the agonistic testing of the American character but about its proof in violence. Dime novels, even when they deploy a central mystery, rarely place uncertainty at the narrative center: we identify almost immediately the heroes, the villains, the female prize, the central sin. The only suspense involves the mechanics of violence and the point of death. Consequently, dime novels seem static. Like our contemporary television police procedurals, dime novels rarely create suspense or mystery because they concentrate on violence as a metaphor for social dislocation, communal fracturing, the social order as always at least in question, if not in actual disintegration. Here is where Kendall’s news reports and dime novels have their most fundamental commonality. In dispatch after dispatch for nearly two years, Kendall insisted on a nearly incantatory repetition. Different battles become cyclical confirmations, so that one has little sense of change or progress, or evolutions in characters. Kendall, ever the documentarian, provided a continuing stream of details, but such notations are overshadowed by a set of constants—Americans are always brave, outnumbered, and entrepreneurial, Mexican soldiers always cowardly. Mexican leaders can never be trusted. The Mexican people appear as always subservient. Battles are won in much the same ways: a small group of Americans charges and overpowers a larger force of Mexicans, who always break and run. Wounded Americans die after a few days. Some survive miraculously. Santa Anna is always rumored to be doing and saying certain things, but Mexicans are all liars and can’t be believed. One can take any two or three of the longer reports from Kendall’s early efforts and have a fairly reliable sampling of his entire correspondence. In effect, Kendall approached his war reportage with a singular master narrative—not unlike a formula—and proceeded to configure events and interpretations so that these accorded to the pattern. Because journalists often traffic in sundry template “stories,” even if they pose as beleaguered, unappreciated conveyers of the world’s realities, to in-

94   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

dict Kendall for being a closet dime novelist might seem a minor entry into a discussion of Mexican banditry. Like the dime novels with Mexican bandits, however, Kendall’s paradigmatic story also leads to the restoration of order in the Mexican lands under occupation, in part because, despite his intense bigotry directed against Mexico and Mexicans (from the outset, Kendall concerned himself with Mexican politics), one of his routine themes articulated a wish that “peace Mexicans,” those who wanted to deal with the invaders rather than continue fighting, would ascend to power so that both sides could end the fighting and come to terms, a desire that intimated the imposition of a stable, final boundary between Mexicans and “Americans.” Yet for Kendall, the stubborn resistance of the Mexicans called for an ultimate escalation of U.S. aggression in order to deliver a final blow. A “real war should be declared against Mexico,” he wrote in October 1847, even after the fall of Mexico City, so that it would be “understood that we are to get and hold all that we can . . . have no talk with the people or their leaders save that our intention is to overrun, destroy and conquer . . . follow up blows with blows [Kendall’s italics] . . . let every hard fought battle have a result, which has never yet been the case, and we shall soon have a peace.”118 Kendall’s particular narrative may not actually conclude with a restorative erasure of the villain, but as the war came to an end, he began insisting on an absolute finality. That dime novels end with defining closures perhaps needs little further illustration, but I address the matter briefly here to suggest the stakes of these conclusions. Reid’s The Captain of the Rifles ends with the death of Dominguez and one other of his henchmen, but also with the restoration of friendly Mexican-Anglo relations. Over and over again, the death of the Mexican bandit leads not just to Anglo American social stability but also to scenes of Mexican-Anglo comity. The Captain of the Rifles goes as far as to wrap up with an extravagant Christmas dinner in which former Mexican and Anglo military enemies enjoy luxurious food and drink around a common table.119 Similarly, in Will-O’-The-Wisp, the death of Alvarez sets the stage for the return to a “balmy peace” and the marriage of the hero, Haywood, to Isabella Diaz, his Mexican trophy wife.120 Isabella and Haywood have been in love from the beginning, it bears noting, so there is never really any contest for or doubt about her love. The treachery of Alvarez, who acts to temporarily disrupt the already prefigured conquest of Mexican territory, constitutes the core problem, his threat to abscond with Isabella being a simple way to comment on the continuing troubles along the U.S.-Mexico border that continued on into the early twentieth century as various “bandits” tried to preserve or re-

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

95

cover their land holdings or engaged in rebellions against central Mexican authority. Getting rid of a bandit, however, never means simply dealing with a criminal, as these authors must imaginatively also enforce the boundary between the United States and Mexico. To take another example, the ending of W. J. Hamilton’s Zebra Zack; or, The Wild Texan’s Mission (1861) features both Anglo and Mexican ranchers living on their new cattle empires side by side in Texas, a conclusion that not only restores peace and order to Texas but also highlights a Mexican who had anglicized his name fighting for the United States in the U.S.-Mexican War. The young men [including the Mexican Valdez Marco, who fights as Mark Stanley against Mexicans during the war] took up stock ranches near each other, and went three different ways, one to Tennessee, one to Mexico, and the other to San Antonio; but when they returned each brought a partner with him. . . . [T]o this day, the descendants of these three families are bosom friends.121 Such a character as Valdez Marco/Mark Stanley might point to the dynamism of border identities, but in this tale he stands firmly for the United States, not both, and certainly not for Mexico. In bandit stories, those with divided loyalties, or loyalties only to self, rarely, if ever, survive. This irresistible momentum toward national definition propels a highly antimodernist, nostalgia-infused dream, which means also that these bandit dime novels push back against history and historical context. Whereas chivalric tales routinely include the U.S.-Mexican War as a prominent aspect of their plots, and frontier versions include it to a lesser degree, the most telling aspect of western/bandit dime novels arises from their remarkable capacity to glance toward the conflict precisely as a temporal prohibition.

Abstracting the West from Time I have explored several general features of the bandit tale’s cultural implications and touched on the ways in which bandit dime novels of the later nineteenth century offer several junctures with the novelettes of the war years. However, the analytical arc becomes most defined when we consider how bandit tales complete the excision of history from the western landscape while routinely containing a direct reference to the U.S.-Mexican war. We can then label these bandit tales war stories of a sort, and see how they com-

96   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

An interior image from the dime novel The Captain of the Rifles; or, The Queen of the Lakes. Although this image repeats standard novelette fare, it goes farther in making Anglo American domination over Mexicans a nearly absolute condition. The titular captain here overpowers, emasculates, and defeats his Mexican opponent in full view of the Mexican female prize. Key here is the lack of Mexican agency, suggested by the fact that the Mexican villain appears without a weapon. Rare Books and Special Collections, Northern Illinois University, Dekalb.

pare with the novelettes of previous years composed in the heat of battle. I know that my categorization may be challenged; after all, just because an author mentions the Second World War does not mean he is writing about the Second World War, or needs to. But Mexican “bandits,” because so many of them in real life waged a counterinsurgency against Anglo encroachments, land thievery, lynchings, and other modes of oppression, emerge directly

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

97

from military aftershocks and territorial displacement. I set out to find, then, the war itself in Mexican bandit tales, and I did readily enough; the U.S.Mexican War and at times the Alamo battle figure routinely in the bandit fantasies explored here, but they figure pointedly by not getting in the way. The peripheral references to the U.S.-Mexican War thread through and link the dime novels to previous novelette forms, but the relationship is not thematic, because dime novels reveal the erasure of the war from Mexican bandit mythology. The discovery here is not that these tales reference the war but that they execute a mode of evasion along with the crystallization of a mythologically charged bandit villain. They capture the process through which the U.S.-Mexican War’s disruptive contradictions slipped into the pool of Anglo American amnesiac essentialism. A latter-day bandit tale such as Elmore Leonard’s script for Joe Kidd orchestrates a faintly critical echo in the wake of Sergio Leone’s anti-westerns, but by and large the bandit tale as most U.S.-Americans have known it in the preceding century and a half makes no reference to the U.S.-Mexican War, to geographic and cultural upheavals, to racial oppression against Mexicans, or to unmitigated injustices visited upon nominal citizens of the United States. Intriguingly, the dime novels under review keep circling around the war, making distant allusions, but conspicuously locating their narratives in the nontime of antihistory. For instance, Reid’s The Captain of the Rifles makes direct reference to the just recently ended war and to Mexican culture, but the conflict seems distant and remote, as if the gap between the war and the plot were years rather than weeks. Reid makes no mention of specific battles or even specific Mexico City landmarks around which key events and battles took place, even though, as Johannsen points out, Reid directly participated in actual combat during the U.S.-Mexican War,122 fighting during the landing at Vera Cruz, at Cerro Gordo, and at Chapultepec, where he was wounded in the leg. Moreover, he wrote numerous autobiographical sketches about the war. Yet, as Johannsen adds, in his writings generally “the intruders are not the American soldiers but the dark and scowling Mexican guerrillas, treacherous, brutally, fiercely jealous, and—when confronted with danger—cowardly.”123 Even a Reid dime novel set overtly during the first months of the war and dealing with the invasion of Mexico, The War Trail: The Hunt of the Wild Horse (1857), informed by an exuberant amateur, and often racist, quasi-ethnography, makes practically no mention of actual military combat. Dewey’s Will-O’-The-Wisp, expressly set in the middle of battles in California, goes out of its way to offer a glancing redefinition of the conflict in feudal terms, as if the fighting there was really only between local Anglos and Californios:

98   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

The warfare . . . was desultory and partisan. Men of local influence, out of love for excitement, or patriotism, organized small bands from among their friends or servants, and arming themselves as their vagrant fancies dictated, they styled themselves by some dashing sobriquet, and clattered among their hills and valleys seeking similar hostile bands, with whom they had but recently been on terms of amicableness and intimacy.124 The description is not exactly false, to be fair, but it quickly sets aside international politics and questions of democratic liberal principles in order to more comfortably pursue a tale of knightly actions. Duganne’s two Pomfret dime novels mentioned here similarly both avoid the war and make explicit reference to it, one setting the conflict in the future, the other making only peripheral references. Not only do authors skirt the war, they often go even further and resist temporality itself with stories seemingly frozen in time in which relatively nothing changes from start to finish except for the elimination of the Mexican bandit chief and his lieutenants. Stasis may seem an obvious constituent of a western myth, but it is nonetheless striking how these bandit tales insist on a level of synchronic control. Reid’s hero immediately falls in love with his Aztec princess, and at the tale’s end he is in much the same situation as he found himself at the beginning, though with new hope that he may someday marry her. Haywood and Isabella are already smitten with each other when the tale begins, but the tale hardly mentions the concluding marriage, preferring to linger on the death of the Mexican bandit. The story aims, in other words, at a particularly intense if commonplace moment of catharsis and expulsion, and whatever has gone before and whatever follows becomes deemphasized. The earlier confluence of Kendall’s journalism may raise questions of temporality. It might seem, for example, that journalism by definition opposes ideals of stasis. Do not reporters cover the day’s events, and in chronological sequence? Do they not traffic in what is new? The answer to that last question is complex, in part because journalism almost by definition acts as a crucible in which contingent ambiguities become transmuted into “fact” or “knowledge” or “truth.” (Although as a former newspaper journalist myself, I acknowledge the ways in which at times journalism can indeed break through the projects of deception and propaganda.) Kendall’s own war reporting, because it concentrates on supporting the mythology of Anglo American domination and superiority, remains locked within a single narrative imaginary, which is why

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

99

his daily reports quickly become repetitious and monotonous. Even the matter of the war itself seems placed at some distance in Kendall’s reportage, because, although he details troop movements and describes some battles with specificity, he indulges mostly in depictions of stylized U.S.-American victories rather than on details of the fighting itself. We learn little about Mexican culture, a bit more about Mexican topography, but almost nothing about how U.S. troops actually lived, what they ate, how they used their weapons, what actual damage is caused by a cannon, and so on. Instead, we get broad descriptions of unfailingly brave U.S. American soldiers overrunning cowardly Mexicans and quickly gaining the upper hand. From a reporter who wrote in the midst of battles, we get minimal on-the-spot detail. This is not to indict Kendall for his lack of awareness but rather to note how today we might be slightly more attuned to the way war reportage can differ depending on a reporter’s ideological approach and her or his use of media technology. For Kendall, the task was to represent battle in the terms not of realism but rather of romance, or epic. A brief sampling of his reportage reveals the elevated pitch of his prose. This selection is from an April 20, 1847, dispatch about the battle at Cerro Gordo in which Santa Anna and his forces were defeated and routed: Murderous showers of grape and canister greeted our men at the onset, and as they toiled unfaltering through a tempest of iron hail a heavy fire of musketry opened upon them. Not a man quailed—with loud shouts they still pressed upward and onward. At every step our ranks were thinned; but forward went the survivors. When within good musket range, but not until then, was the fire of the enemy returned, and then commenced the dreadful carnage of the strife.125 The paradox in Kendall’s reports emerges from the way his tonal absolutism disengages the reader from the battle even in those moments that would seem to be most directly involved in documentation. The chaos, pain, and fear of actual combat become suppressed, even erased, by a turn of mind that resorts to categoricals like “unfaltering,” “not a man,” “not until then.” Similarly, the dime novel authors discussed here dispense with detailed textures of time or place, preferring instead to concentrate on ritualized action—the good always defeats the bad, revalidating proper social values; the stories always invoke the already believed rather than investigate the unknown or mysterious. As in most action movies today, the suspense, what there is of it, comes usually from sporadic, punctuating scenes of escape in which the

1 0 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

hero manages to free him- or herself, and often a sexualized partner, from the clutches of a stylized villain. Should a hero die at the end, audiences and readers alike come away feeling as if an unspoken contract has been broken, because in fact it has. That agreement stipulates that the narrative will confirm the truth of what we already believe and the righteousness of our sense of justice. The real world may constantly challenge our preconceptions and beliefs, but in the world of pulp melodrama, chaos is to be held at bay. Even if a hero or heroine dies, the writer or film director can resurrect him or her in the next installment to bring the universe back to meaning. What does “meaning” mean in the case of Mexican bandit dime novels with glancing, peripheral, vexed allusions to the U.S.-Mexican War? It means, primarily, a fixed hierarchical division between Anglos and Mexicans. The bandit story responds to the U.S.-Mexican War because it resolves various contradictions, confusions, and boundary ruptures of the war itself, perhaps chiefly at the very crisis point where Mexico and U.S. America become equivalent, utopic, redeeming, and imperialistic American spaces. For example, one of the curious qualities of western bandit fictions inheres in the way they display charity to “peace Mexicans,” Mexicans who want to live with the United States as long as they do not embed themselves in Anglo American society as Mexicans. Thus, “good” Mexicans cheerfully submit to Anglo domination or assimilation, whereas Mexican bandits trouble the land with a fear-inspiring blend of anonymity and resistance. The tales center on a criminal band whose leader is usually a member of the Mexican elite who has taken to a life of crime, often for reasons of revenge (perhaps the inverse, say, of Batman— or Zorro, a wealthy aristocrat who masks himself behind the garb of evil in order to do good). The Mexican antagonist can never be trusted to be what he seems to be. He may walk among the mainstream as an upstanding citizen, but secretly, or somewhat secretly, he rides at the head of a criminal insurgency. This epistemological threat lies exactly at the heart of Ridge’s paradigmatic Joaquín Murieta tale, but it circulates in many other bandit tales, where a critical component of the terrorist’s terror is his ability to pass as a leading citizen and his secret alliances with Mexican ranchers who only seem passive in the face of Anglo incursion. This is why the key factor in Joaquín’s death lies in the “proof” that the corpse really is Joaquín, the act of execution being one and the same as the ascription of moralizing definition. Perhaps contrary to stereotypical expectations, these dime novel bandits rarely appear as the dark, swarthy, comically buffoonish figures, pot-bellied torsos crossed by bullet belts. They are often wealthy and coldly calculating—indistinguishable in outward appearance, in fact, from Mexican assimilationists. I might note here

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

101

that the class and racial complexity of these villains, coming as they do several years after the war, challenges claims that the U.S.-Mexican War racialized Mexicans. That they were demonized cannot be disputed, but racialist projects targeting Mexicans began circulating at least around the time of the Texian rebellion of 1836 and continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The anxiety lies rooted in the possibilities of a hybridity that ultimately defies any strictures of boundary making. Bandit criminality, because it exists outside and acts against Mexican and Anglo communities, erodes the definitional boundaries of both, but not exclusively the boundaries of race. These bad hombres owe allegiance only to themselves and might be viewed as embodying the supreme individualism possible in the American mythological West, but that kind of freedom in a Mexican poses special dangers, because embedded in such blurrings of ideological possibility lies the always possible erasure of difference between essential Anglo Americanism and essential Mexicanism. When they trigger the coalitions of Anglos and Mexicans against them, they also stage a mode of ultimate independence. Extrapolated to their furthest degree, Mexican bandits perform a non- or extra­national alternative, closely allied to frontier heroes, western gunfighters, even to their archnemeses, the Texas Rangers in their original evocation as trueblue paragons of “American” pioneer ideals. Most tales never explicate this boundary-crossing energy, content instead to focus on the bandit’s almost pure criminality or barbarism or ruthlessness—always the constituent facets of a Mexican bandit. The elimination of the bandit threat returns the world to a comfortable sense of rest in which “good” Mexicans live separate and submissive lives on haciendas removed from the more progressive and independent Anglo world. The issue circulating in these tales is not, fundamentally, that they distort history or that the Mexican bandit is a racialized Anglo American invention but that, in the final iteration, they paradoxically imagine the bandit figure as an agent of modernity—perhaps even of postmodernity—a force of cultural dynamism and thus of both war and psychological dangers. We should keep in mind that the image of bandit as freedom fighter circulates within Mexican American life as the embodiment of memory, nostalgia, and identity— ­practically the antithesis of the energies unleashed by dime novel villains. Yet one reason why Mexican bandits can be icons of Chicano resistance has to do with the way they can stand for a mode of resistance that rejects claims of national boundaries, and perhaps even of cultural strictures. Even Gregorio Cortez, in some corrido variants, displays his proficiency with the English

Cover image of The Blue Band, original in color. Like The Prairie Pathfinder’s cover image, this image too seems disconnected from historical details. The Mexican renegade appears on the defensive and without a weapon. Rare Books and Special Collections, Northern Illinois University.

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

103

language. The same point can be made if one reads about Joaquín Murieta, or Juan Cortina, or Catarino Garza, or Los Sediciosos in 1915 in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, all of whom in one way or another resisted both Anglo and Mexican governmental systems, albeit to different degrees. Thus, Mexican bandits in dime novel fiction, because they constantly cross governmental definitions of national identity, share a set of core qualities with their Chicano/a iterations. I want to return to the key question of why it is that these dime novelists elaborate fantastic fictions that always mention the war but also draw a rhetorical boundary between it and the plots of their stories. When twentiethcentury novels and Hollywood films dwell on the Alamo battle of 1836 and on later Mexican banditry, they parallel this particular evasion, because both these dramatic categories mediate the Mexican-U.S. tensions fully and forcefully deployed during the U.S.-Mexican War—which was not the fantasy of manifest destiny but the actuality of military contact with a neighboring American republic. The reason we still have Alamo stories and bandit myths, in other words, has to do with the way they mask the harsh facts always present in the history of the U.S.-Mexican War, which remains the ongoing, day-today, often messy and confusing time-space of the United States and Mexico. At its core, the “problem” of the Mexican space has to do with communal integrity and belief. “The epic past,” writes Bakhtin, “is called the ‘absolute past’ for good reason”: it is both monochronic and valorized (hierarchical); it lacks any relativity, that is, any gradual, purely temporal progressions that might connect it with the present. It is walled off absolutely from all subsequent times, and above all from those times in which the singer and his listeners are located. This boundary, consequently, is immanent in the form of the epic itself and is felt and heard in its every word.126 When we catch references to the U.S.-Mexican War in dime novels, we glimpse a view of that boundary, of that moment in time and space when meaning is sought from meaninglessness. We see, for a moment, the intimate coexistence of U.S. America’s western fantasy of virtue and redemption with the history of national aggression and racial decimation, but in this case also the specific, supremely disruptive and historical presence of military violence against Mexico, with its concomitant edifice of Mexican erasure. Narrative aims to organize temporal experience, to transmute the openendedness of time into meaning, and so it depends, as it were, on the presence

1 0 4   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

of chaos as a raw materiality. In his study of the First World War, Paul Fussell notes how that conflict generated legends and myths, “as if the general human impulse to make fictions had been dramatically unleashed by the novelty, immensity, and grotesqueness of the proceedings.”127 It may be that war and narrative are dialectically bound together. Certainly, bandit tales that instantiate the restoration of order have icons of disorder as their primary antagonists, but to write about a war is to come into contact with almost pure violence, pure chaos, pure devastation at all levels, which is why, with astonishing transparency, these bandit tales do not write “about” the war at all. Mexicans in western fiction bring to bear, even if indirectly, the history of the U.S.Mexican War, and can never be completely divorced from it. These writers allude to the war to signal a historical experience that always at some level underlies contact with a Mexican space. The end result effectively makes clear that the U.S.-Mexican War does not coincide with U.S. America’s ideological landscape, but not primarily because it traduces republican ideals, although guilt plays a role in the elision of a dubious invasion of a sovereign republic. More significantly, the U.S.-Mexican War violates “American” principles in a way that undermines the very possibility of those principles. This is why U.S. American discomfort with the war’s historiography extends beyond matters of national shame and into the domain of existential crisis. These dime novels footnote the war, narrativize its aftermath, and forecast its impending arrival, but they never quite enter into the particular time-space between 1846 and early 1848, as if it were a historical territory declared off-limits by the guardians of national coherence. Quite proficient they are, however, in imagining Mexico as a blighted landscape in need of redemptive cannonading.

Una Despedida Elements of each mode in my triadic orchestration invariably slip across into the other two, but it is the interpenetration of these modes that argues, somewhat paradoxically, for nuanced interpretation. The western dime novel relates to my novelette discussion precisely because its central figure, the Mexican renegade, has appeared before in war-era novelettes. A fundamentally similar set of characters and cultural anxieties—Mexican antagonists, Anglo lovers, national boundaries—becomes rendered through differing contextual frames. Chivalric novelettes map out a characterological system that blurs or erases differences between Mexicans and Anglo Americans.128 In these romances, the principal actors on opposing sides exude nobility, courage, and moral rectitude. The concluding marriages here imagine meaning through

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

105

cross-national unions. Never devoid completely of the flash of a purpling anti-Mexican bigotry, these texts nonetheless dissipate the problem of Mexican national equivalence. Frontier novelettes, published concurrently with the chivalric, occupy an intermediate position between chivalric and western tales. Primary characters by and large remain aristocratic elites, like those in chivalric tales, but they foreshadow the archetypal agents of destruction in the western Mexican bandit stories and the severe social and economic disturbances surrounding the U.S.-Mexican War. The key to the frontier variant lies in the various marriage resolutions, which are not international or interracial but decidedly Anglo-American. In this way they reconfirm national coherence against the centrifugal pressures besetting a rapidly expanding United States. What makes these stories profoundly unlike western Mexican bandit tales lies in their overt, perhaps even obsessive, concern with the denial of Mexico as a viable nation-state. In contrast, dime novelists spinning yarns about Mexican bandits have already discounted nationality as an overt organizing principle for their antagonists: such Mexican villains rarely identify with the Mexican nation-state. Indeed, almost as a matter of course, Mexican bandits oppose the Mexican government and attack Mexican society, which might be understood as a contextual feature of late nineteenth-century border troubles, but again, somewhat paradoxically, chivalric renegades brought to life in the late 1840s also often exhibited conflicted attitudes about the Mexican state. In a sense, later-era dime novels revise the frontier mode, extending the trend toward abstraction and ahistoricity to an absolute terminus. The western mode, then, featuring the Mexican bandit as an agent of crime and terror, devolves to an abstract morality tale in which real time and actual place are nearly absent as knowable markers. Instead, the terrains are mapped by dichotomies of good and evil, civilization and savagery, progress and anachronism, fair and dark, love and lust. They abstract geographic consciousness into a psychological landscape and erase historical context to make room for mythic repetition. Bandit stories have close affinities to bandit news accounts, the journalistic documentation of Mexicans who countered Anglo incursion, but the link depends on more than thematic concerns: journalism and bandit tales channel the open-ended uncertainties of daily life through a modernist conduit and toward a stable domain of cultural meaning. At their interior levels, the crime drama and the news page both seek to deny the powers of time and change. Clearly, however, journalism opens out toward narrative projects that stress disturbance, crime, transgression, and mystery, relying on spatial and temporal specificity. Bandit tales, on the other hand,

1 0 6   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

bring the reader to the death of the bandit, thus arriving at closure, resolution, and definition. Practically without exception, the bandit figure undergoes a dramatically staged execution either amid the community or in an official and sacrifical public space. Thus, whereas bandit news accounts agonize about a social disturbance, the fictional stories of bandits routinely dramatize resolution in a social setting. Much of the preceding analysis rests on an interpretive approach that views U.S. expansionism as a modernizing event, not necessarily because of technological breakthroughs but because of the anxieties about existentiality entailed by geographic growth, an analytical domain thoroughly examined by Hietala’s Manifest Design. Inherent in the belief of divine mandate lurks the nagging doubt about the nation’s purpose—the offensive stance of imperialistic conquest contains within it a defensive insecurity. For example, “manifest destiny” might momentarily resolve the paradox of the undeniably violent behavior by God’s own chosen people out there in their shining city upon a hill, but this same doctrine has a different tonality when it denies the coexistence of alternative worldviews. Seen from that perspective, U.S. America always faces threats from all that remains outside the ideological boundary, and cultural production must continually shore up the defensive walls against encroaching history to, in a further sense, preserve the mythic resolution embodied in heroes like Bumppoesque frontiersmen or military officers who accomplish profound domestic reunions amid battles in the West and then return to New England to live perfect lives in worlds of continuity. One can thereby expand the community without changing it, and the “American” landscape becomes a mythic crucible that demonstrates a mediation, or blending, or perhaps synthesis of diachronic and synchronic exigencies. The boundary cutting through these novelettes and dime novels runs not merely in two dimensions between, say, Anglo and Mexican (of both time and space) but also in at least one more dimension, between “America” and “nonAmerica,” not to mention a possible fourth field, divided into a consciousness of passing time and the compulsions toward meaning. The early mass-market fiction writers in the United States inscribed Mexico and Mexicans into this complex domain of agonistic conflict, a literary project informed and infused by what always threatens and had always threatened the “American” nation. Initially it might appear that each mode’s cultural work129 takes place in a fundamentally different zone of social contradiction, but the western bandit story, the frontier romance, and the chivalric tale all deal with a single underlying problem, the conflict between U.S. American identity and history. Where chivalric versions adjust themselves to contingency, the frontier nar-

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

107

ratives begin to reassert the illusion of an isolated, uncorrupted. and timeless utopia, achieved in full by the familiar western paradigm. My staging conceit of three acts implies linearity, but a better approach might be to envision all three forms as differentially available within the sphere of U.S. American identity, depending on time and situation. For example, the U.S.-Mexican War’s ideological and cultural problems continue today in writings that castigate Mexico as an inferior, failed, corrupt nation, in contrast to the supposed morality of the United States, or define Mexicans as somehow corrupting or polluting the “American” body politic. Any glance at the history of the Southwest reveals overwhelming challenges to that neat dichotomy, from patterns of intermarriage among elite Mexican Tejanos and Anglos, to the way “Spanish” was once a euphemism for “Mexican,” to the way some Mexican Americans themselves have at times insisted on being defined as “white,” to, finally, the way a legal definition such as “Hispanic” aims to integrate a complex population by eliding Latin America’s mestizo and indigenous history and identity. The U.S.-Mexican war settled the issue of where to draw a line on a map—but not much else. Slotkin rightly located the disturbance in a “historical” element; the problem, however, was not any specific history but history itself. With novelettes and dime novels that deal in various ways with the U.S.Mexican War, we encounter a domain of popular literature suggesting that for the United States, contact with Mexico undoes the premises of its hypernationalistic ideals. Those purists who worry about the destruction of “American” culture due to the growing population and influence of Latinas and Latinos have a point only because “American” culture, for them, means a fantasy of cultural purity. American identity for them has little to do with melting pots or salad bowls and everything to do with a sense of stability and continuation in a world that no longer offers such comforts and has not offered them perhaps since the so-called discovery of the New World. Within a certain Anglo American calculus of essentialism, Mexicans represent a nexus of mutability, death, and meaninglessness. The matter takes in, and goes beyond, racism. Anglo-Saxonists such as the late Samuel Huntington may or may not desire the preservation of whiteness, but they do have an unmistakably clear stance against cultural change. For people on his side of the argument, Mexicans and Mexican Americans stand for the loss of morality, justice, integrity, and democratic ideals, a threat to “Americanness”—an argument that, as I have explored here, has a long pedigree, Mexicans having always stood for more than a distinct, singularizing race; which is why to trace back, to excavate the antagonisms between Anglos and Mexicans, one must deal not just with

1 0 8   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

“whiteness” but with the integration of the individual in the Americas more generally. We have something else as well. We have a moment in time, the U.S.Mexican War period from 1846 to 1848, when Mexicans as portrayed in popular fiction ranged from positive defenders of their American republic, to devious seducers of nationalized “American” womanhood, to ruthless, barbarous bandit chiefs. Clearly, this says something about Mexicans and their complexity, but it also says something about American Anglos—or at least about the Anglo writers of these fictions, who could envision their U.S. American protagonists as worldly cousins—brothers and sisters to their fellow aristocratic Mexicans—or as defenders of Anglo nationalist identity, or as imperial killer redeemers, roaming the countryside with rifle and six-shooter deftly eradicating bandits as if they were little more than bothersome wolves. That is, we know that many Anglo-Saxons can be xenophobic; but we too often underestimate the globalist capacities that can also be found in mainstream U.S. America. It turns out that Anglo Americans, like any other group of people, can under certain conditions maneuver within a fluid, dynamic, adaptive, complex cultural arena. Given the right contextualizing parameters and pressures, they can be Mexicanized as readily as Mexicans can be anglicized. Like other fantasies of ethnic or national purity, Anglo American xenophobia always implies its opposite: the borrowing, the blending, the adaptations that go into all human organizations. We arrive finally at more than a dissection of western Americana. Ultimately, the real issue centers on the role and destiny of Mexicans in the United States. U.S. Americans elide the war against Mexico for the same reasons that the dominant engines of “American” culture largely ignore Mexican Americans today. True, under certain circumstances, Mexican Americans and other Latinas/os rise to the collective consciousness, as they do during presidential campaigns or the periodic convulsions about Mexican undocumented immigration, but in general, the history, the presence, the cultural complexity of Mexican Americans remain broadly ignored, if not deliberately obfuscated. The exceptions prove the rule, in a sense, the very fact that Latinas/os make only periodic appearances on the national stage testifying to their endemic elision. Within this cultural milieu, the invasion of Mexico paradoxically contradicts the comforting dogmas of race and class, but in so doing it disturbs the foundations of U.S. American exceptionalism, and that, in the final analysis, crystallizes the problem posed by the U.S.-Mexican War and the presence of Mexican Americans for Anglo American exceptionalists. The conflict undermines the very thing that it wants to assert, generating

Novelettes and Dime Novels  

109

a ferociously powerful counterclaim that Anglo Americans have no special identity, no teleological purpose, no divine mandate. With a certain turn of the imagination, the war leads down to depths of disaggregating despair, and perhaps no writer forayed farther down that path than James Russell Lowell, a Boston intellectual who in The Biglow Papers, the main subject of the following chapter, reframed the war as an agonistic field for belief, doubt, and national annihilation.

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War Two

The Mexican bandit dime novels in Act Three remind us how the U.S.-Mexican War remains a contradictory event, a military aggression that undermines its own propaganda and results in narratives that conspicuously mention and strictly avoid the war. In themselves, however the novelettes and dime novels do not fully articulate the narratological problem of the U.S.-Mexican War, the way the Mexican space can be construed as corrosive of meaning. As I noted earlier, an entry point into the core of the U.S.-Mexican War’s disruptive energy can be located in what I have deemed the frontier mode. The frontier novelette stands apart from the chivalric and the western because its general pattern affirms the presence of Mexico and the war, but already reveals strong tendencies toward the nearly complete abstractions of the bandit tale. Said another way, the frontier mode enunciates the U.S.Mexican War as an epistemological paralysis, caught between two conflicting modes of understanding the Mexican space. In this chapter I again organize my thoughts as a triad, but instead of tracking the iconography of the Mexican enemy I investigate the impact of the U.S.-Mexican War on U.S. American teleology, charting a course from belief to doubt to despair—which, as I noted earlier, can be understood as a dissection of the problems posed by the frontier novelette mode, as well as the western frontier itself. I identify what I believe remains the most basic quandary generated by the war, the issue to which the authors and speechmakers in Chapter 1 offer various writerly mediations and comforts: the problem of belief itself, or, more accurately, the potential loss of it.

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

111

I begin with an analysis of James Russell Lowell’s The Biglow Papers (1848), an anti–U.S.-Mexican War, antislavery satire that drew my attention in part because it seems unfinished, confused, and self-destructive. I have come to understand it as a work in which Lowell himself lays out a response that reaches for the certainties of belief, but remains grounded in despondent facts. I conclude with brief reviews of other war texts from Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, and James Fenimore Cooper, Jack Tier; or, The Florida Reef, and selected journal entries by Ralph Waldo Emerson, in part to note how the various circulating currents in Lowell’s text, as well as themes and patterns from the novelettes in Chapter 1, run through and complicate the work of these other, better-known writers, who have often been associated with U.S. American national development. Novelettes and dime novels share space and time not only with nonfiction but also with the works of writers enlisted in formal programs of national education who envisioned themselves as producing something more than entertainment. Those connecting bands, however, have less to do with writerly influence than they do with the U.S.-Mexican War. What Lowell, Emerson, and others I discuss share with novelette writers and dime novelists emerges from the unsettling effects of the war, Mexico, and Mexicans when these are understood as antithetical to the precepts of an enduring, unchanging Anglo American identity. Although never devoid of their own fissures and contradictions, the strongly racializing narratives of Alamo mythology and Mexican banditry alluded to in Chapter 1 remain far more stable, consistent, and enduring than the more self-conscious productions regarding the U.S.-Mexican War, which seem to emanate directly from crucibles of existential disintegration. While these somewhat more nuanced writings could be infused with virulent racism and ethnonationalism, they could also be revelatory of globalizing disturbances that make apparent a universe of uncertainty and change. Thus, my analysis relies significantly on a Bakhtinian approach that attends to the way texts, novels in particular, can be viewed as demonstrations of the dialogisms, the complexities and fissures resisted and denied by the centripetal energies of nationalism, racism, myth, and other boundary-making beliefs. Perhaps most characteristically, Lowell’s Biglow Papers is chaotically polyvocal, digressive, parodic, and carnivalesque. In fact, the work might be read as a Bakhtinian novel, because it exhibits the discohering energy that Bakhtin ascribed to that genre. I am not, however, making a case for Bakhtinian multiplicity as a celebration of democratic pluralism; I propose it instead as a hermeneutic for the disruptive agency of U.S.-Mexico contact and conflict. The U.S.-Mexican War’s literary significance lies not in how it shapes domi-

1 1 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

nant Anglo views toward Mexicans (it does not do so) or in how it establishes images or stereotypes of Mexicans (already in circulation before the war), but rather in how aspects of the conflict work against just such definitions and coherent narratives. In striking demonstrations of proto-postmodernism, the U.S.-Mexican War meditations of these writers gravitate toward dissipation, paralysis, aphasia, and aporia, as if in working through the meaning of the conflict, each writer found himself drifting toward a self-consciousness about the transience of human understanding, a common quality in a great deal of contemporary war literature (perhaps all war literature) but one that might have presented specific anxieties at a moment when the nation was reaching for a codification of its global identity.

L ow e l l’s U . S . - M e x i c a n Wa r : A Discordance in Three Voices One reading of the U.S.-Mexican War leads to a sobering conclusion: the United States of America is an ordinary country in an ordinary place, given to ordinary national ambitions, and typically violent expansionist methods. With few exceptions, most American historians of the war avoid this interpretation, preferring instead to chart the politics that led up to the conflict, the progress of battles, or the internal tensions that followed it. Rarely do they delve into its particular and massive contradictions, an elision attesting to the persistent narrative power of American exceptionalism. In the 1840s, U.S. American political mythology framed a dubious war against a sovereign country as an act of self-defense, justified by moral obligations and grounded in “America’s” putative role as a light of freedom, and many U.S. Americans of the era, energized by a surging nationalism, saw the conflict’s necessity and justice as self-evident. Jingoistic war supporters, a young Walt Whitman among them, unquestioningly declared Mexico’s European anachronism to be by definition opposed to U.S. America’s globally redemptive purpose. Yet even before the war began, contemporary politicians and writers were debating its morality and justice. Perhaps the war required an imaginative rearrangement into the framework of exceptionalist belief, as in Lippard’s Legends of Mexico, because it could so obviously demonstrate that U.S. America’s national mythology could mask greed and violence rather than affirm a master narrative of a democratic, redemptive republic. Intriguingly, the mythology so exuberantly deployed in journalistic screeds and jingoistic fictions and poems faded quickly into historical obscurity, U.S. Americans largely boxing away the U.S.-Mexican War’s narratives in the national attic.

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

113

The reasons for this stem from the way Mexico and Mexicans as national military antagonists foreground the historical and mundane origins of U.S. American exceptionalist identity (a key claim here) and thus show U.S. essentialism to be a denial of reality, a fabrication intended precisely to obscure the often murderous actions of Europeans set loose in North America. When historians and others do investigate the war’s more worldly causes and effects, they find themselves delving into a U.S. America at odds with prevailing notions of national supremacy, a nation of limitations and mutabilities. This is not to deny the power of national myths, only to note that “American” ideals are mortal constructs, enmeshed in quotidian realities and continually evolving into new forms. Such complexity rarely finds its way into U.S.-Mexican War histories, but it energizes much of that war’s imaginative literature, such as the novelettes and dime novels discussed in Chapter 1 that grapple with national mutability, ideological contradiction, and cultural anxiety. Fervent nationalist poets, musical composers, dramatists, writers of pulp fiction, politicians, and preachers all expressed optimistic variations of U.S. American triumphalism, but many others darkened their work with shadowing doubts and uncertainties, intense counternarratives wherein Mexico and Mexicans acted as equivalent Americans defending their republic from rapacious invasion. In the furthest extension of self-criticality, the U.S.-Mexican War, and Mexicans themselves, could be configured as agents of ideological dissipation, standing against the very possibility of meaning. They could, in other words, extend the anxiety of mutability located in the frontier mode and push it to extremes. One of the clearest examples of this kind of agonistic U.S.-Mexican War literature is The Biglow Papers, an antiwar satire by James Russell Lowell, who as a respected poet and literary critic occupied a leading position among nineteenth-century Boston literati. The Biglow Papers are complicated and complicating, shaped as they are by a military collision that redefined U.S. American ideals not just as veils for hypocrisy but as evidence of mass delusion. At its core, however, Lowell’s satire meditates somberly on national unease, a text situated perilously in the border zone between “America” and “non-America.” Moreover, its concerns about Mexico extend into the present because, seen from a particular point of view, the work sheds light on why Mexicans and Mexican Americans continue to trigger U.S. American national anxieties, problems hinted at in frontier novelettes but here brought to the fore. In Lowell’s satire, the historical fact of Mexico in the Americas rears up from the landscape to pose an unresolved challenge. As a conceptual field little altered since the 1840s, Mexico (also Mexicans, and now Mexican Americans) continues to

1 1 4   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

activate anxieties among those who see the United States as a special AngloSaxon culture. For them, “American” identity is not only a powerful narrative but also, and always, self-evident reality. Against such an assumed, unquestioned mythology, Lowell’s U.S.-Mexican War satire stages a play of belief, doubt, and despair. He juxtaposes and aligns a proto-postmodernist negation of singularity with the U.S.-Mexican War and the continuing presence of Mexico in the U.S. American imagination. At one pole, Lowell deploys a familiar Anglo-Saxonist ethnonationalism, but then presents a skeptical self-criticality, and finally, at the furthest point, displays—practically indulges in—a richly articulated, feverishly selfaware angst that questions the validity of nations, language, knowledge, and truth itself. He takes the anxious light of the U.S.-Mexican War and refracts it through a dialogical prism, the resulting spectral lines demarcating Mexico as (1) antithetical to the “American” nation, (2) a possibly equivalent American domain, and (3) a disillusioning national agent. The somber three-part analysis suggests that Lowell understood at some level that the ideal “America” was dialectically evoked by a confrontation with a destabilizing event, but also that he comprehended how U.S. American identity has been implicated in exclusion and violence against others. The Mexican enemy, however, raised the stakes even more. Mexican military antagonists forced U.S. Americans into an international arena that blurred the distinction between “America’s” sacred space and the mundane affairs of the world. Mexicans were at once supremely antithetical, and therefore evil, but also entirely familiar as another American people with utopian dreams. Today, many in the United States continue to define the expanding Mexican presence as a threat to U.S. American identity, and not chiefly as a figure of evil or barbarism. To grasp that distinction is to understand how U.S. American exceptionalists locate Mexicans and Mexican Americans in their narratives of national meaning. One of the curious aspects of The Biglow Papers in U.S. American studies is that scholars have done so little to place it in the context of the very war that inspired it. In Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form, Priscilla Wald explores how self-definition and anxiety are linked in nationalizing narratives. But she omits any sustained reference to the way Mexico and Mexican Americans generate precisely such anxieties about national identity, nor does she focus specifically on the U.S.-Mexican War or on Lowell’s text, all of which can be immediately and usefully approached through questions of national coherence. Even Streeby’s American Sensations and Johannsen’s To the Halls of the Montezumas, exhaustive studies that argue for the conflict’s formative significance, understand Lowell’s satire essentially as a problematic

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

115

text without considering how it might pertain both to the war’s own modernist and globalizing complexity or how it might be germane to ongoing anxieties about the Mexican presence within the United States. Gavin Jones’s 1999 study of dialect literature, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America, does indeed highlight the political implications of Lowell’s satire and its foundational importance for subsequent vernacular writings but does not delve specifically into the U.S.-Mexican War context or the interplay of language registers in The Biglow Papers.1 My approach attends to an array of literary cross-fertilizations running through Lowell’s text and incorporates the rhetoric of U.S. American uniqueness as it relates to the specific presence of Mexico. Heretofore I have used mainly the term Anglo American to refer to the population in the United States generally understood as white with European origins. Lowell’s text, however, relies on the more ethnocentric Anglo-Saxon as a marker for a cultural supremacism. Although not equivalent to U.S. American liberal ideology, anti-Mexican rhetoric during and after the war tended to erase that distinction, so that to be Anglo-Saxon meant to believe in democracy, civil rights, and economic self-determination, against a Mexican presence defined as fatally anachronistic. Thus, the cultural exceptionalism I allude to here means a particular mode of belief among people in the nineteenth century who identified themselves as a culturally and morally superior people of Anglo-Saxon lineage (although other groups, regardless of race, ethnicity, or class, including Mexican Americans, can appropriate the power of U.S. American mythology). Today, a less brazen, perhaps more nuanced AngloSaxonist American exceptionalism resists a vigorous Mexican migration into the United States, a demographic trend occurring at this writing within the global arena of a “war against terrorism.” The mythological historicizing of Samuel Huntington, among others, captures the way Mexican Americans can function, for some, as embodiments of international threats. If nothing else, the still important narratological architecture of “American” nationalism—a target of fascination, envy, love and hatred—makes Lowell’s Biglow Papers enduringly relevant because Lowell’s anti-war satirical verbal play explicitly brings under scrutiny the enabling fictions of “America” and “American.” Before proceeding, The Biglow Papers needs to be more properly introduced, because, like many other U.S.-Mexican War texts today, the work generally lies unknown and unread. Published in book form in 1848, The Biglow Papers presents a collection of verse and prose satires criticizing both the war and slavery2 and stands as one of the better works from an author who wanted his writing to participate in U.S. American national definition. As a

1 1 6   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

prominent Bostonian with designs on literary fame, Lowell was a moralist who believed in the possibility of linking literature to social reform.3 When he decided to write about the war, he became part of an unabashedly political literary reaction from writers who saw the conflict as a literary opportunity, a mandate, even, to outline and promote national and cultural values. As noted above and as suggested by the range of texts discussed in Chapter 1, literary imaginations of practically all kinds were fired by what can be justifiably understood as the United States’ first media war. Spanish words entered the American English lexicon, Mexican battlefields and city names found their way back to the states, and the public hungered for news and stories about the country’s first expressly international military campaign. The deluge of information and novelette entertainments coincided with “an age of poetry” in which Americans were experimenting with literary expression.4 Like formulaic novelettes, most other pro-war literature was numbingly predictable, lauding the war, celebrating U.S. soldiers and volunteers, and romanticizing “America” in terms that most U.S Americans today would likely find uncomfortably naive. Among these are Sheppard M. Ashe’s Monterey Conquered: A Fragment from La Gran Quivera; or, Rome Unmasked (1852), a self-consciously epic example of a sentimentalizing battle story, and Lays of the Palmetto: A Tribute to the South Carolina Regiment, in the War with Mexico (1848), by the more famous William Gilmore Simms. Other writers, however, countered the militaristic romances with writings critiquing slavery and indicting the invasion as a stratagem to extend the South’s slaveholding power.5 It was from this abolitionist perspective that Lowell penned a series of infrequent satiric dialect verses beginning shortly after hostilities broke out along Mexico’s Río Bravo (the Rio Grande in the U.S.). Although initially published individually in newspapers, The Biglow Papers appeared in late 1848 as a collection of six poems in Yankee dialect by the fictional Hosea Biglow, a Yankee farmer writing dialect verse in opposition to the war but expressing a sharp Anglo-Saxon isolationism. With Biglow’s poems, Lowell included three “letters” by a fictional Yankee U.S.-Mexican War volunteer, Birdofredum Sawin, letters that, in the imaginative conceit of the text, have been fictionally rewritten into dialect poetry by Biglow. Sawin’s contributions, harsh and ironic, dramatize how the war could unsettle belief in Anglo-Saxonist cant. Finally, in the book edition, the poems were framed by prose commentaries by an equally imaginary Parson Homer Wilbur, a country parson who composed in a pompous pedantic English but articulated the most decentering energies of the war, writing, as did others, in disillusionment’s minor keys.6

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

117

Fragmentary and diverse, works collected in The Biglow Papers range from antiwar critiques, to tongue-in-cheek pro-war rants by wildly immoral politicians, to agonistic, parodic essays about language and knowledge—all of this complicated further by a series of narrative frames within frames: Lowell invents Wilbur, who edits the poetry of the equally fictional Biglow, but the Yankee farmer’s role in the text is not only to write poetry but also to rewrite Sawin’s front-line letters into dialect verse.7 It takes some sorting out, but to best appreciate the stakes of Lowell’s linguistic play, we must attend first to Biglow, himself, and to the politics of plain talk.

Talkin’ Yankee in America Hosea Biglow opposes the U.S.-Mexican War, but not because he empathizes with Mexico or its inhabitants. Rather, like an antiwar national essentialist, he looks inward, speaking and writing in a Yankee dialect that circulates as the linguistic component of a larger cultural elevation of American AngloSaxon identity.8 The dialectological ethnocentrism accompanies programs of exclusion and bears a moment’s consideration apart from Biglow’s politics. At midcentury, Yankee slang reinforced cultural essentialism because writers routinely associated it with Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, a way of talking that marked an essential Englishness. Notwithstanding that in some cases educators taught Anglo-Saxon language courses in schools, its promoters claimed Anglo-Saxon authenticity as the inheritance of an untutored (therefore uncorrupted) common people, the “bold, free, and rude song of the bard which tallies strong nature.”9 Behind such visions of undefiled Englishness lay a utopian argument, a way of seeing Anglo-Saxon identity as set apart from the normal world and aligned with eternal nature. As Jones has explained, Lowell’s use of dialect “was part of a wider movement to keep culture ‘pure’ by identifying non-English elements as foreign to the American essence.”10 Thus the good farmer Biglow may seem culturally tolerant, but he actually gives voice to a mode of cultural supremacy not too different, if at all, from John L. O’Sullivan’s more infamously blatant vision of an expanding manifestation of racial destiny. To talk in country slang drew, and can still draw, a firm ethnonationalist boundary. Lowell’s use of Yankee dialect, or more precisely his construction of it, similarly interacts with a belief in an Anglo American pastoral essence.11 This rural domain, close to nature and undefiled by the world, has key associations in the text with the slangy vocabulary of authentic Englishness. To be clear, by pastoral I mean the conventional notion of a work of literature that

1 1 8   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

idealizes an agrarian or rustic region against the fallen worlds of cities and civilization. The pastoral ideal in Jacksonian America coincided and coalesced with the rise of an American populism that increasingly valorized the rhetoric of a free, democratic, common man as even elite conservatives voiced disingenuous expressions of solidarity with the plain folk.12 Anglo-Saxonism at midcentury centered on notions of simplicity, authenticity, and independence, and the U.S. American pastoralism to which Anglo-Saxonism corresponded confirmed the belief in a special, incorruptible, perfect nation. The mythic strains of Anglo-Saxon, as David Simpson has written, were “part of the vitalist energy of the democratic American language.”13 These three social currents—an undefiled authentic language, a pastoral utopianism, and the democratic elevation of the ordinary “Anglo-Saxon”14—were by the 1830s and 1840s intertwined strands of Anglo American identity. In its very assumptions, Biglow’s rustic speech already acts as a boundary-making language not easily given over to sympathy with others, especially others like Mexicans. White ethnicity, social coherence, moral purity—these are the rising harmonic overtones in Biglow’s New England drawl. Yet Lowell presents Yankee dialect so perfectly idealized that the entire project in The Biglow Papers may seem no more than flippant parody. It is, in fact, Parson Wilbur who opens the book with a preface to Biglow’s first poem, laying out the basic theory: “Yet, after all, thin, speculative Jonathan is more like the Englishman of two centuries ago than John Bull himself is. He has lost somewhat in solidity, has become fluent and adaptable, but more of the original groundwork of character remains.”15 Echoing Emerson and Whitman and other writers searching for a key to the American character, Wilbur adds that people who know dialect as spoken in Massachusetts “will not fail to recognize, in ordinary discourse, many words now noted in English vocabularies as archaic, the greater part of which were in common use about the time of the King James translation of the Bible. Shakespeare stands less in need of a glossary to most New Englanders than to many a native of the Old Country.”16 These celebratory semiotics raise an obvious question and problem: Is Lowell invoking these beliefs or lampooning them? If Wilbur becomes a focal point for national doubt, as I later assert he is, why does he here promulgate the cant of Anglo-Saxonist identity? It is worth noting that Lowell himself seems to have held conflicted positions about these views, aware of the illusionary within the projects of national authenticity. For example, in 1867 Lowell could offer an extended and tedious examination of “Yankee dialect,”17 echoing his pedantic parson through his own apparently sincere discussion of a Yankee idiom linked directly to the “Anglo-Saxon” language.18

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

119

Just one year later, however, he could express a critical ambivalence about an essentialist mythology, warning against attributing “special virtues” to a language.19 As Johanssen and others have noted, Lowell could echo conventional destinarian dogma or criticize its delusions.20 Indeed, in the words of one critic, Lowell’s evolving thoughts on the links between New England and an authentic “American” national identity amounted to a “politely phrased, Anglo-Saxon racism.”21 Lowell may have been undecided about canting rhetoric, but his good Yankee Biglow adheres to basic exceptionalist premises without hesitation. His New English drawl puts forward a fundamental distinction between an immutable Yankee voice of truth, on the one hand (not unlike Natty Bumppo’s, generally critical of social failings), and on the other, the speechifying of politicians, registered as deceptive, hypocritical, and self-delusional.22 Thus, Biglow’s first poem rings with confidence, immune to worldly deceptions, suffused with American democratic ideals. The war, he contends, is a ruse by southern slave-owners to expand their power: “Massachusetts, God forgive her, She’s akneelin’ with the rest, She, thet ough’ to ha’ clung fer ever In her grand old eagle-nest; She thet ough’ to stand so fearless Wile the wracks are round her hurled, Holdin’ up a beacon peerless To the oppressed of all the world!” “Haint they sold your colored seamen? Haint they made your env’ys wiz? Wut’ll make ye act like freemen? Wut’ll git your dander riz? Come, I’ll tell ye wut I’m thinkin’ Is our dooty in this fix, They ’d ha’ done ’t ez quick ez winkin’ In the days o’ seventy-six.”23 As the speech of a classic wise rustic, an untutored slang free of worldly corruptions, Biglow’s plain talk parallels the clarity of his moral compass. He establishes his ethical position in this opening poem, reminding readers that “America” stands for liberty and democracy. Divine providence has mandated the nation to guide the rest of the world into a future of freedom,

1 2 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

but the slave-owning South threatens to lead the nation astray. Acting as a truth-telling Yankee Jeremiah, Biglow aligns proper national action with high moral principles, excoriating the country for failing to follow the precepts of Christianity and foundational American ideals: “They may talk o’ Freedom’s airy / Tell they’re pupple in the face, — / It’s a grand gret cemetery / Fer the barthrights of our race; / They jest want this Californy / So’s to lug new slavestates in / To abuse ye, an’to scorn ye, / An’ to plunder ye like sin.”24 I have concentrated on these lines of Biglow’s, all of which come from the first main entry in The Biglow Papers, primarily because that first poem is the only one Lowell writes that directly expresses Biglow’s own opinions. Wherever there is Yankee dialect in the rest of the text, it mostly emanates from Biglow as he satirically voices the thoughts of others for purposes of ridicule, or rewrites the letters of Sawin into verse. If one adheres to the fictional conceits of The Biglow Papers, these first stanzas offer Biglow’s most direct views on the war. Significantly, this opening poem ends its argument with an isolationist solution: “Ef I’d my way I hed ruther / We should go to work an’ part, / They [the slave states] take one way, we take t’other.”25 The dream at all costs, even if it means a massive political bifurcation. In his critical edition of the text, Wortham notes that Lowell likely did not hold such secessionist views, though they were not uncommon in other quarters.26 Still, the call for detachment suggests how religious ideals and self-righteous proclamations of national destiny easily aligned within antiwar rhetoric. Biglow’s argument advances the utopianism implied in his dialect because both proffer the possibility—or the established fact, in the eyes of believers—of social perfection. The war and slavery stand as infractions because they violate the ideals of a special nation; they infringe on sacred “barthrights” and stain that “beacon peerless” that U.S. Americans should be holding up to the world just as they did in the “days o’ seventy-six.” That the war is unjust to Mexico, harms Mexico, and leads to the unwarranted deaths of Mexicans—none of that matters in this critique. Antiwar protests of this sort typically stemmed from an anxiety about “American” cultural purity, perhaps the unifying theme of antiwar congressional speeches in Chapter 1. Horsman in his study of race and U.S. expansionism notes that Whig dissent often worried about potential racial contamination following the inclusion of Mexicans in the United States. Their concern, he writes, was with “what aggression was doing to the United States, not what aggression was doing to Mexico.”27 The Biglow portions of The Biglow Papers echo just this cultural discomfort; no historical context here outlines previous troubles in Texas, and almost nothing in Biglow’s voice can

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

121

be said to express a Mexican case against the invasion. Like antiwar Whigs, Biglow spends most of his time critiquing the different evils of slavery and deceitful politicians. Even as he castigates warmongers in the opening poem, he derisively dismisses Mexicans as “poor half-Spanish drones.”28 The affinity between Biglow’s isolationism and the expansionism crystallized by O’Sullivan becomes even clearer through a contrast with other antiwar writing (a distinction Lowell actually makes himself, as I will show, but not through Biglow). Lowell might have written a dialect poem in Biglow’s voice that openly and directly critiqued the violence of specific battles in Mexico, traced the historical events that led up to it, or elevated Mexicans as worthy opponents—all of which were in fact aspects of other war protests in the 1840s. To cite a personal favorite, one of Theodore Parker’s antiwar sermons against the war, although marked by his own anti-Mexican racism, asks his Boston audience to adopt the Mexican perspective by fantastically imagining the Charles River as the Rio Grande, and then envisioning a border war between Cambridge and Boston (“instead of Charles say Rio Grande; for Cambridge read Metamoras [sic],” from “A Sermon of War,” delivered June 7, 1846) (p. 25). Other U.S.-Mexican War texts, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Jack Tier (1848), Albert Gallatin’s “Peace with Mexico” (1847), and even George Lippard’s Legends of Mexico (1847), all in various ways give some due to Mexican history, motives, and anguish. To look for Mexico or the U.S.-Mexican War in Biglow’s dialect passages is not to search for the unusual or eccentric but only to note that his verse elides the cost to Mexico, and instead, like many Whigs, he frets about the ideological consequences to the United States. Within Biglow’s protest lies a pastoral isolationism premised on a resistance to impurity and change and for that reason in paradoxical sympathy with the desire to take Mexico’s northern lands. Both Biglow and the expansionists rely on notions of utopian, and exclusionary, Anglo-Saxon qualities that aim teleologically toward a pure Anglo-Saxon democracy. In O’Sullivan’s 1845 “Annexation” newspaper column, for example, he envisions the “overspreading” of America as the substitution of Anglo-Saxons for Mexicans. O’Sullivan, who himself also opposed the U.S.-Mexican War, predicts that California will soon go the way of Texas as an “irresistable army of AngloSaxon emigration” takes over.29 The heady vision here leads not to colonialism but to an ethnic cleansing of the Mexican presence. This is one reason why the terms of imperialism never fully capture or explain the conflict with Mexico. The initial project in the U.S. American Southwest was not about governing Mexicans but about eradicating them from an Anglo-Saxon preserve. Thus,

1 2 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

when Biglow hopes for a pure nation unsullied by southern slave-owners, he expresses a fantasy of cultural purity much like O’Sullivan’s—and also like Walt Whitman’s infamous editorial jingoism, “What has miserable, inefficient Mexico—with her superstition, her burlesque upon freedom, her actual tyranny by the few over the many—what has she to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?”30 The key term is “race,” and in Whitman’s usage it means an Anglo-Saxonism moving beyond “white” to take in notions of cultural unity, ideological coherence, and nationalist belief. Like other dreams of ethnic essentialism, Anglo-Saxonism expresses an exclusionary proposition endlessly policing its internal domains. The distinctions arise along geographic terms, but both expansionism into Mexican lands and Biglow’s antiwar isolationism imagine an eternal boundary against alien others. Biglow may thus oppose the war, but he does so as a cultural essentialist, his Yankee dialect and his call for separation and purification denoting a mythology of an undiluted U.S. America. When Biglow drawls in his down-home Yankee talk, he appeals to a desire for Anglo-Saxon ethnic purity precisely at a time when the United States at midcentury is increasingly less “pure.” One might draw up a long list of parallels to the contemporary military collision in Iraq and the home-spun dialect identity markers in former President George W. Bush’s speeches, but such a digression (tempting though it be) would dilute the significance the U.S.-Mexican War has had for Mexicans and for Mexican Americans long established in the United States. My study extends less toward broad political criticism and more toward a specific cultural interrogation that examines why it is that to remember the U.S.-Mexican War is to shatter the illusion of timeless national continuity. Biglow resists that kind of interrogation, but another character in Lowell’s triad, Birdofredum Sawin, offers precisely the kind of Yankee dialect deeply informed by the Mexican national space. Buffoonish and hapless, Sawin is internally troubled by an effort to synthesize national essentialism and international contact. Like many combat veterans, he becomes self-reflective, his thoughts devolving toward the disturbance of definitions amid interruptions in the flow of time.

The Interstitial Moment of Birdofredum Sawin In the picaresque and often ridiculous Sawin, Lowell brings the U.S.-Mexican War’s particularity and Yankee dialect to an unsteady convergence. In his first letter from the Mexican front lines, Sawin questions the duplicitous Anglo-

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

123

Saxonism fueling the war, already in this way confronting Biglow’s exceptionalism. However, in Lowell’s fictional staging of the Papers, all of Sawin’s letters have been recast into verse by Biglow and thus employ the same Yankee speech of supposedly incorruptible truth. At one level, nothing much changes here, because both Biglow and Sawin indirectly affirm that speaking in downhome Yankee lingo yields unalloyed truth. Yet Sawin proves to be a fundamentally different kind of Yankee, a country bumpkin who has ventured into Mexico, has shot at and presumably killed Mexicans, and has had time to reflect on the experience. Biglow rewrites Sawin’s letters, but he does not erase a threading skepticism that emanates now not, as does Biglow’s, from a transcendental utopian ideal but from the messier, murderous realm of military violence. Although still a Yankee, still closely related to truth-talking Brother Jonathan or Uncle Sam figures, the fumbling war volunteer has undergone experiences that activate unsettling questions about the Anglo-Saxon ideal. Again, the superficial roughness of Lowell’s text demands nuanced interpretation. Only Lowell’s first Sawin letter, initially published in August 1847, tackles the U.S.-Mexican War and military aggression.31 The other two, published after the war, portray a figure who might as well be an entirely different character, a racist, politically cynical, opportunistic, mendacious figure stupidly unsuccessful in his attempts to use his military enlistment for postwar political gain. Whereas the first letter exhibits a degree of social criticism and empathy with Mexico, in the later Sawin offerings the country simpleton mutates into an imbecilic failure. Larger issues abound here, as Sawin’s collapse into brutish racism unmasks Biglow’s dialect truth-talk in all its essentialist horror. Despite the violence in their entries, of Sawin’s letters only the first deals squarely with the morality of the U.S.-Mexican War, making it the one instance in the work as a whole where Lowell’s Yankee dialect speaks directly about Mexico. Before he disintegrates into an amoral buffoon, Sawin attacks U.S. American hypocrisy with a lively, stabbing critique. With wry understatement, Sawin clarifies the ideological problem of an unwarranted, racist, imperialist war: Afore I come away from hum I hed a strong persuasion Thet Mexicans worn’t human beans,—an ourang outang nation, A sort o’folks a chap could kill an’ never dream on’t arter, No more’n a feller’d dream o’pigs thet he hed hed to slarter; I’d an idee thet they were built arter the darkie fashion all, An’ kickin’ colored folks about you know, ’s a kind o’ national;

1 2 4   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

But wen I jined I worn’t so wise ez thet air queen o’ Sheby, Fer, come to look at ’em, they ait’ much diff’rent from wut we be, An’ here we air ascrougin’ ’em out o’thir own dominions, Ashelterin’ ’em, ez Caleb [Cushing32] sez, under our eagle’s pinions, Wich means to take a feller up jest by the slack o’ ’s trowsis An’ walk him Spanish clean right out o’ all his homes an’ houses; Wal, it doos seem a curus way, but then hooraw fer Jackson! It must be right, fer Caleb sez it’s reg’lar Anglosaxon. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Thet our nation’s bigger’n theirn an’ so its rights air bigger, An’ thet it’s all to make ’em free thet we air pullin’ trigger, Thet Anglo Saxondom’s idee’s abreakin’ ’em to pieces, An’ thet idee’s thet every man doos jest wut he damn pleases; Ef I don’t make his meanin’ clear, perhaps in some respex I can, I know thet “every man” don’t mean a nigger or a Mexican; An’ there’s another thing I know, an’ thet is, ef these creeturs, Thet stick an Anglosaxon mask onto State-prison feeturs, Should come to Jaalam Centre fer to argify an’ spout on ’t, The gals ’ould count the silver spoons the minnit they cleared out on’t.33 The passage captures that moment when a soldier begins to suspect that what the war is really about has little or no relation to what he has been told about it. In this case, Sawin’s Mexican experience impinges on his Anglo-Saxonist supremacism. When Lowell has Sawin explore the terms of “every man” and then claim that it does not mean “a nigger or a Mexican,” he exposes hypocrisy just as forcefully as the other Papers do when they lambaste politicians. If the generals and politicians lie, then what’s the point of trying to do the right thing? To this extent, Sawin remains within the realm of moral certainty, from which Lowell’s plain-talking Yankees never travel far. And yet Sawin’s satire is discomfiting, because it illuminates how a national mythology can be used for evil ends, how simply having a conviction is never a guarantee of having the right one. Those “Anglo-Saxon” verities inherent in Yankee speech may begin to appear slightly suspicious, even a bit foolish. Lowell hedges his bet. Sawin never chastises Anglo-Saxonist belief itself but merely its incorrect, immoral appropriation, the sticking of an “Anglosaxon mask” on sheer criminality. Perhaps U.S. Americans just need a few authentically countrified prophets to speak the truth in twangy Anglo-Saxon dialect, a few “ain’ts” and “gosh darns” bubbling up in frothy witticisms. But if

“An gold wuz dug as taters wuz”: image of Birdofredum Sawin. Sawin is shown here as an optimistic and successful prospector. Although this and similar images were probably designed for a later edition of The Biglow Papers, they nonetheless capture Sawin’s buffoonery and wit. Illustration by Edward Windsor Kemble, undated. Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

1 2 6   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

“Anglosaxon” can “mask” the truth, then simply speaking in that idiom, playing that role, offers no assurance of following a righteous path. All this takes direct aim reflexively at Biglow and unsettles the powerful fantasy wherein to talk like an authentic Anglo-Saxon equals always telling the truth, an escape from the deceits of normal English, as if Yankee farmers simply could not think up lies. Thus, Sawin may sound like Biglow, but his role in The Biglow Papers subverts any easy reliance on the delusions of rustic authenticity and morality. He embodies both Biglow’s aggressive idealism and the radical doubt that permeates Wilbur’s manic musings, and like Biglow, he too has real-world counterparts in the surviving military memoirs referenced in Chapter 1. Although Lowell himself never saw military action, Sawin’s selfconsciousness corresponds with the writings of soldiers and volunteers who participated in the real thing. Before developing this point, let me emphasize that I am not recreating the comparative project of Chapter 1—not arguing that (Biglow’s) antiwar protest comprises a zone of essentialism (frontier) and then arguing that expansive (Sawin’s) contact with foreign territory leads to a broadening of empathic powers (chivalric)—to then close the circle by claiming that my third Lowellian figure, Wilbur, will have a relationship to the western tale. Wilbur will indeed be sequenced into a triad, but as a character who inhabits the zone fundamentally “outside” the three acts of Chapter 1, spinning away, in effect, in the opposite direction. In a sense, the discursive nexus I am developing for Lowell’s antiwar satire leads to an extreme intensification of the problem of the U.S.-Mexican War, to which the chivalric, the frontier, and the western all propose distinct resolutions. Significantly, Lowell’s characterological play does not present us with a bandit analogue, perhaps because in 1848, when he compiled the fragments of The Biglow Papers into a book, the war’s still fresh historical particularity prohibited elision or erasure, but more likely the answer lies in the way Wilbur aims us toward the antithesis of the bandit project. We can read The Biglow Papers, then, as a sequential triad that takes us from the desire for a domestic integration (Biglow) backward to a denationalizing shift in perspective (Sawin) to a third, Wilburian mode of radical antimythology. We are approaching the most disturbing imaginary projections of the Mexican presence—perhaps always implied, but never quite articulated in novelettes and dime novels, as if Wilbur emerged directly from the silent history so adamantly avoided in bandit dime novels. For the moment, I concentrate on Sawin, and I note here the popularity among the troops of composing action-packed reports from the U.S.-Mexi-

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

127

can War’s front lines, even if some of the letters were more invention than reportage.34 One estimate in 1848 claimed that between a thousand and fifteen hundred “printers” and reporters traveled with the invading army—a bit like contemporary “embedded” correspondents, though the two are not precisely the same. These mobile correspondents established newspaper operations along the way or sent dispatches to families and newspapers in the United States.35 One of the distinguishing elements in these accounts is their seemingly ethnographic interest in Mexican people and Mexican society, altogether to be expected in curious U.S. Americans who found themselves living among Mexicans when not attacking them. Sawin’s own experience with combat leads chiefly to disillusionment, but a corollary response can be an affinity for the territory being invaded. Indeed, the disenchantment depends on the ability to at least momentarily take on the enemy’s perspective. As I noted in my discussion of chivalric novelettes, many invading U.S. officers found themelves on cordial terms with their Mexican counterparts or members of the upper classes. Such alliances among aristocrats should not surprise, but occasionally rank-and-file members of the invading army, like Sawin, also expressed a burgeoning curiosity and empathy. In Chapter 1 I mentioned the dramatic example offered by Lieutenant Theodore Laidley, and similar gestures of understanding, admiration, and even affection can be found in other war memoirs. None of this is to claim that U.S. troops generally expressed sympathy for Mexicans, but it does argue that Sawin’s fictional first letter from the front lines, where he discovers that Mexicans are not “much diff’rent from wut we be,” parallels a real response to the Mexican enemy: a mirroring that broadens perspectives. By contrast, Alamo battle myths—to reference a widely known narrative—reestablish absolute boundaries defined by sacrificial death; in the Alamo’s final confrontation, Anglo Americans and Mexicans solidify in static, mythic opposition. Even in Texas, relatively few “remember San Jacinto,” because the point of the Alamo myth is not history, not the final victory that led to an alternative American republic in the slaveholding South, but rather the ideologically conclusive deaths that draw firm lines between absolutes: tyrannical (Mexican, in this case) and free (always “American”).36 It is not only that Sawin can objectify the United States but also that he threatens to erase the distinction between Mexican and “American.” And that tends to place U.S. Americans in their enemy’s place. Sawin, who begins as a Biglowian country swain, reverses the essentialist project. In contrast, the myth of the American West—endlessly promulgated by dime novels and

“This here’s about the meanest place a skunk could well diskiver.” In this sketch Birdofredum Sawin, surrounded by snakes, has lost his left leg and arm and his right eye. Disillusioned, he still has his pen and ink. Illustration by Edward Windsor Kemble, undated. Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

129

Hollywood—rejects any national encounter that valorizes the presence of a competing nation, the operative problem of the U.S.-Mexican War, a conflict that was then and remains now ideologically menacing because it continually challenges the broader and extant notions of a purposeful, redemptive U.S. American identity—“America” is not alone, not boundless, not “racially pure,” not really a global force for liberty, not actually God’s chosen, and not even very different from the Old World with its wars and empires. The claim of absolute difference dissolves under the high pressure of military facts. The United States are indeed different; U.S. Americans are not Europeans, to reference one contrast. But U.S. Americans have never been isolated from the currents of time. Against the illusions, Mexico and the U.S.-Mexican War make physical and visible what “American” mythology suppresses, in part because Mexico manifests the rejected Americas that U.S. exceptionalism elides in its rhetorical dramas of self-definition. A nationally defined enemy—an opposing nation—would allow for possible racial similarities, recognizably parallel class divisions, and a mutual boundary that separates not beliefs but the far more concrete and mundane territories of the Mexican North and the U.S. Southwest. God makes truth, people make maps. Seen from a battlefield perspective, the U.S.-Mexican War nationalizes the United States, turning it into a nonexceptional country with the most conventional motives and the most ordinary of people, people like Parson Homer Wilbur, the work’s editorial voice and its most intriguing character.

The Voice of Disillusion Wilbur’s opening musings in The Biglow Papers link Yankees and essential Englishness, and thus he would seem to challenge my contention that he vividly demonstrates the relationship between Mexico and epistemological uncertainty. But though Wilbur walks onto the stage declaiming conventional platitudes about an American “authentic” English, the rest of his meditations focus obsessively on the unreliability of language. If Wilbur can be said to stand for anything, he stands for a fundamentally suspicious attitude toward claims of truth. Said another way, Wilbur disavows the possibility of an essentializing Anglo-Saxonist language, the very theory of which he himself has elaborated. With almost ruthless straightforwardness, Lowell undermines the parson’s opening ethnic proclamations with a torrent of nervous commentaries about linguistic ambivalence. This alone would be enough to elevate Wilbur’s editorializing above Biglow’s linguistic jingoism and Sawin’s onedimensional redneck humor. The parson’s defining contradiction, however,

1 3 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

becomes apparent when we realize that though he doesn’t trust words, he uses them with great skill to demonstrate his doubts. He acts, writes, and thinks from outside the projects of national supremacy in part because of his selfconsciousness about his ability to invoke the propaganda. He may preach an Anglo-Saxonist gospel, but like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale he exists within a field of doubt, interpreting his own interpretations, predisposed to anxiety and paralysis.37 I focus here on two key and related features of Wilbur’s heretofore underestimated role in The Biglow Papers: first, throughout the text, the most frequent and pointed allusions to the U.S.-Mexican War appear in Wilbur’s musings, as if the zone of anxiety were best suited to the facts of Mexico, and second, Wilbur gathers and orchestrates an ensemble of multiple languages and linguistic registers to emphasize mutability and profound uncertainty. Lowell opposed the war for conventional abolitionist reasons, and I find no evidence that he consciously developed Wilbur with an eye toward linking Mexico and the U.S.-Mexican War with narrative disruption, yet whenever Wilbur criticizes U.S. America for national hypocrisy—the common argument—he typically concentrates on false appearances, false words, and false beliefs, and significantly, never proposes the ready options of U.S. American mythology. We find here no confident appeals to 1776 or to sacred “barthrights.” Instead, the agonized parson remains trapped in verbose self-contemplation, overwhelmed by the dilemmas of conquest and of the U.S.-Mexican War. Whereas Biglow, in full-throated Yankee drawl, concentrates on solipsistic satires of politics and journalism, and Sawin eventually self-destructs in a pathetically racist scheme, a far more cosmopolitan Wilbur obsessively compares the United States to other nations and histories. True, both Biglow and Sawin (Sawin more indirectly) criticize the war as unjust, but they do so mainly in their first entries. Wilbur, however, attacks the war from start to finish, peppering his critiques with asides about the global history of conquest— British imperialism, Spanish adventurism in the Americas, the Crusades. If anything, he intensifies his antiwar commentary in the latter entries, making it more self-reflexive and harsher, in the process becoming the most consistent voice in The Biglow Papers even as he indulges in linguistic fragmentation. To cite only a few examples, Wilbur critiques Protestant militantism in reference to the Naboth-Ahab story,38 which is pointedly about territorial theft; he ridicules those who would claim “Our country, however bounded ”39; and he tragicomically itemizes the sordid gains and terrible costs of the war.40 Then, in a particularly revealing passage late in the book, Wilbur collapses the dis-

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

131

tance between himself and the war volunteer, bringing together his critique of the conflict with a tough-minded foray into the traps of language: I find a parallel to Mr. Sawin’s fortune in an adventure of my own. For, shortly after I had first broached to myself the before-stated natural-historical and archaeological theories, as I was passing, haec negotia penitus mecum revolvens, through one of the obscure suburbs of our New England metropolis, my eye was attracted by these words upon a sign-board,—Cheap Cash-Store. Here was at once the confirmation of my speculations, and the substance of my hopes. Here lingered the fragment of a happier past, or stretched out the first tremulous organic filament of a more fortunate future. Thus glowed the distant Mexico to the eyes of Sawin, as he looked through the dirty pane of the recruiting-office window, or speculated from the summit of that mirage-Pisgah which the imps of the bottle are so cunning to raise up.41 Uncertain, self-conscious, and tending toward bitterness, Wilbur here voices the paralysis of his own musings, writing from an unwritable realm where signs are illusionary lures that mistakenly confirm speculations and falsely represent the substance of hopes. Wilbur is uncertain whether the illusion points to the past “or” to the future; the “dirty pane” alludes to a glass through which we see but darkly “or” a fantasy dreamed from the perspective of an illusionary mountain. The present moment undergoes a diffusion during a momentary pause at the sign of “distant Mexico,” which points the reader simultaneously to “past” and/or “future.” More ambiguously, Wilbur distrusts rationality rendered as “speculations,” with that term’s overtones of capitalistic opportunism, but also steps away from nonrational belief, the “hopes” and illusions from the imaginary summit. The ideal of the Mexican prize—whether it be glory, land, or economic advancement—is an illusion, but as illusion a negation of the comforts of both worldly gains and spiritual comforts. Mexico here is a place without exits. Nothing in Yankee dialect anywhere else in the work approaches the sustained self-criticism, self-reflection, doubt, and finally fear found in such critiques of military aggression against Mexico. Wilbur, to underscore the point, consistently speaks about worldly boundaries rather than boundlessness, and thus defines U.S. American actions in mundane, terrestrial terms. To see Mexico as a wealthy “neighbor Naboth” is to define U.S. America as an Ahab whose sin is rather pedestrian greed; to view Mexico from a “mirage-Pisgah”

1 3 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

is to indict manifest destiny itself; finally, to reduce the war to economic satire makes explicit its worldly gains as well as its costs. Wilbur’s criticisms of the war tend to see the United States as a mundane, flawed nation, not one nation under God but one nation among others, and just as mortal. Lowell’s ambivalence about expansion highlights a tension between U.S. American mythology and contemporary nationalism, which by definition implies a world of equivalent nations. A nation cannot be God’s gift to history and at the same time be outvoted at the United Nations—unless, perhaps, one redefines other nations in satanic terms, at which point UN votes would matter only as intimations of evil. Among recent literary and cultural critics, Homi Bhabha offers a useful interpretive strategy when he explores the conflicted, self-aware, always recurrent “performative” domain of national identity. If the nation, as he claims, is a mode of “disjunctive temporality,”42 then the strong, nationalizing effect of the U.S.-Mexican War may be discerned not so much in the claims of purity, tradition, and destiny as in the Wilburian writings that explicate the counter-anxieties of the “irredeemably plural modern space” of the modern nation.43 Wilbur speaks from within just such a conflicted zone of troubled nationality, emerging as a figure of nationalism precisely because he embodies tensions, contradictions, and pluralities. Far more than merely suggesting disjunctive open-endedness, Lowell makes it his work’s governing motif, and he most clearly locates this critical concern in The Biglow Papers’ most important topic, language itself. Wilbur might worry about Mexico, but he fixates on words. Indeed, through the parson, Lowell deploys The Biglow Papers’ most basic contradiction: the elaboration of a comedy based on an essentialist dialect surrounded by an array of pluralizing languages flowing forth from breaks in history and fabrications of identity. The linguistic play is intense and chaotic: Greek phrases, passages in Latin, ordinary prose, pedantic prose, Yankee dialect, voices impersonating other voices, real figures inventing fictional figures, fictional figures referring to the real or themselves inventing fictions, and moments in which the very nature of language and its relation to reality are brought forward for direct examination. The cacophony leads not to incoherence but to dismay, as the exaggerated abundance of voices and languages implies an agonistic self-awareness at the opposite pole from a Yankee farmer grounded in a belief that truth and reality can be manifested in an authentic dialect. Not long after his introductory spiel about the wisdom to be found in Yankee speech, the troubled parson turns to the unsteady relationships among words, knowledge, and truth. He postulates that Satan must be a “semeiologist the most expert.” He declares that a satirist should take aim at “Falsehood,” but adds that

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

1 33

“Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire.” He jabs at political speeches in Congress, claiming he has discovered that “nothing takes longer in the saying than anything else.”44 The constant, worrying drone suffuses almost every paragraph—all of them obsessed with the dangers and limits of words and accompanied by a posturing with Latin and Greek and an inflated English rhetoric. Just as the fictional Biglow and Sawin have real-life counterparts, Wilbur too parallels a component of actual U.S.-Mexican War discourse. Theodore Parker, for example, delivered a postwar sermon on the conflict in June 1848 that ran through a series of communal maladies similarly emerging from a corruption of social discourse: “The cost of the war in money and men I have tried to calculate,” Parker told his congregation, “but the effect on the morals of the people—on the Press, the Pulpit, and the Parties—and through them on the rising generation, it is impossible to tell.”45 As if he were taking his cue from Parker, Lowell’s targets in The Biglow Papers correspond exactly to “the Press, the Pulpit and the Parties,” that is, the immoral manipulation of rhetoric in newspapers, sermons, and congressional speeches. The haranguing warnings about the profoundly deceptive nature and corrosive effects of the invasion of Mexico bring to mind the way many antiwar protests turn to internal hand-wringing about the hypocrisy of the war, but a critical difference lies in the way the essentialist antiwar dissent depends on a fear of internalizing the Mexican other, whereas what Parker and others like him focus on has more to do with a fracturing in the edifice of communal belief—not entirely distinct from admitting Mexican nonbelievers, to be sure, but not quite the same thing either. In the first category, “America” still stands as something to protect, whereas now, in the Wilbur-Parker jeremiad, the viability of the belief itself comes into question, the feared corruption of public discourse constituting an example of Thomas Gustafson’s Thucydidean moment of social collapse.46 From a mythological perspective, from the perspective of narrative, the U.S.-Mexican War stands for fragmentation and dissolution against which the Civil War later would become the reconfirmation of true American identity. Many see the U.S.-Mexican War as a preface to—or even the cause of—the Civil War,47 but as a narratological domain, it is better to see it as an antithesis—Chapultepec being the fissure, Gettysburg the seal. Ultimately, what drives Wilbur’s semiotic trepidation, the historical Parker’s jeremiad, as well as the mass-market fictions of Chapter 1 in which Mexicans could be both heroic equals and corrupt anachronisms, is a selfconscious awareness of the fragility of U.S. American essentialism when placed against the history of the war against Mexico. To read into the war

1 34   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

or to travel into Mexico leads to a domain of self-doubt, a confirmation that the great national story is a lie—or perhaps might be a lie. For a nation that invokes a manifest destiny and a great order of history, the hand of God in its affairs, to call into question exceptionalist self-definitions risks awakening not to a new faith but to the loss of faith. The more Wilbur contemplates the war, the more he worries about knowing, understanding, and believing. Regardless of how one understands the flights of fiction within fiction, the sprinkling of Greek and Latin in English prose, and the countervoices of Yankee dialect used to express both noble (Biglow) and base (Sawin) sentiments, Lowell’s dialogism stands resolutely against the romances of dialect. Where dialect seeks to find a single authentic voice, multivocality emphasizes contingent beliefs and values. Where dialect charges a particular region with foundational authority, a plurality of voices declares any final authority to be elusive if not impossible. Where dialect stands for eternal verities and against “book learning,” Wilbur’s pretentious quoting in Latin and Greek works against unified stabilities as these languages accentuate differences in class and education. The impressive semiotic acrobatics are consonant with the very stresses of nation making. As Bhabha writes, “the political unity of the nation consists in a continual displacement of the anxiety of its irredeemably plural modern space—representing the nation’s modern territoriality is turned into the archaic, atavistic temporality of Traditionalism.”48 As the “nation” comes into being in the nineteenth century, culturally, geographically, and ideologically, the messy facts of ambivalent reality must be transmuted into eternal continuities. Is the U.S.-Mexican War particularly charged with disruptive energy? Do not all wars lead away from coherence? Or do certain specific qualities inhere in the conflict with Mexico that make this particular war specifically resistant to narrative resolution? Yes to both questions. Wars bring chaos, destruction and death, and, often, the annihilation of worlds, as well as words, the bitter truth Mark Twain’s messenger angel preaches to an uncomprehending congregation in The War Prayer. The U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846, however, features historical elements that intensify its disruptive potential, the dynamics of which can be brought to the foreground through Bakhtin’s analysis of genre and context. In Chapter 1 I explored how U.S.-Mexican War fictions draw away from history to the degree to which they cast out Mexicans from the imaginative sphere of America—a ratcheting up of abstraction, mythology, and “American” meaning requiring the increasing erasure of Mexico from the ideological as well as geographic landscape. That schematic alone, however, does not fully explain why Mexico and Anglo American identity

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

1 35

present themselves as a fundamental antithesis, but Lowell’s discursive experimentation in The Biglow Papers, I contend, offers a key, and does so most directly through his parson’s agonistic logorrhea. First, the novel’s polyglossia signals a world of multinational relations that Bakhtin identifies as a historical condition for the rise of the novel, a genre that in his view stands against genre itself. It is indeed possible to read The Biglow Papers—albeit eccentrically—as a novel drawn to the “spontaneity of the inconclusive present,”49 a text that cannot be labeled as poetry or prose and thus stands against form itself. In a passing note, Leon Howard, another Lowell biographer, comments that Lowell actually considered turning his satire into a novel, a signal that Lowell had begun to comprehend that his project had escaped the confines of poetic form.50 Novelistic linguistic play and national self-consciousness, Bakhtin claims, are linked; the disruptions of the novel can be seen as emerging from “a very specific rupture in the history of European civilization: its emergence from a socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society, and its entrance into international and interlingual contacts and relationships.”51 Ultimately, the parodic play on nearly every page of Lowell’s satire largely, though not exclusively, emanates from the disruptive contact with an “international and interlingual” presence, perhaps not exclusively as a result of Mexican contact but also as an effect of increasing immigration from other nations. Mexico, however, affords a paradigmatic contrast. Whereas previous enemies were culturally similar (tyrannical England) or viewed as uncivilized (terroristic Native Americans), and other immigrants could be defined, securely, as non-Americans, Mexico offered an enemy both culturally distinct and civilized, both foreign and American, simultaneously external and internal, the point being that U.S. America’s encounter with Mexico demands a reckoning with a perspectiveexpanding globalizing presence. Mexico certainly does not inaugurate an international consciousness in U.S. America, but it does bring into sharp focus a range of reflections about “American” identity in a global realm. Many saw victory in Mexico, for example, as necessary to prove to Europe that the United States had at last arrived as a mature nation. Yet, despite the protestations of O’Sullivan’s manifest destiny, “Mexico” destroys the illusions of isolation, purity, and coherence. It is not precisely the Spanish language or the Mexican people that are troubling; rather, Spanish and Mexicans as embodiments of that which Bakhtin describes as “verbal-ideological decentering,”52 a perspective that stresses hesitant resistance, doubt, second-guessing, caution, self-consciousness, circumspection. Bakhtin’s dialectic approach stresses how monologism and

1 36   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

heteroglossia are always both in play and present in every “utterance,” and thus it is a simplification to claim that there are monologic languages (mythic) and heteroglossic counterlanguages (real-world). The world is not necessarily improved by believing that all one need do is engage in heteroglossia, and specifically in Lowell’s case, the broad play of voices does not lead to a more optimistic, more democratic society. It enacts instead a persistent unease. A second Bakhtinian approach to the U.S.-Mexican War literature highlights the issue of time, specifically the presentness of the U.S.-Mexican War. Lowell’s Wilbur is the most critical of the nation’s teleology, but to question the national telos is to argue for a falling back into the stream of historical change. In this zone, Bakhtin writes, “time and the world become historical,” emerging into a “real future” in an “unconcluded process.” “Every event,” he adds, “every phenomenon, every thing, every object of artistic representation loses its completedness, its hopelessly finished quality and its immutability that had been so essential to it in the world of the epic ‘absolute past,’ walled off by an unapproachable boundary from the continuing and unfinished present.”53 For Bakhtin, the “present,” which he aligns with the novel, cannot be mythologized, because it remains by definition always moving into the future.54 Rather overtly, the U.S.-Mexican War in a work such as Lowell’s appears as not yet completed, a war in process, or too recently concluded, and therefore uncertain. Not at all fazed by theoretical constraints, dozens of writers of the moment set about writing epic poems and nationalist fictions, complete with eagles, star-spangled banners, references to Washington and 1776, and so on. Bakhtin might have advised them to wait if they wished to memorialize God’s country. The matter, however, corresponds more to U.S.Mexican War literature than to the U.S.-Mexican War, which, historians remind us, ended in 1848 with a treaty—unless one sees the border between the United States and Mexico as always in conflict, as Limón has argued in Dancing with the Devil, wherein he meditates on war as a metaphoric and historical key to the border violence and racial tensions of South Texas. Indeed, the U.S.-Mexico border has always exuded a threat from all that is foreign, has always been militarized, whether the troops are in blue (1847) or dark green (2010). Composing mythic war stories becomes especially difficult when the war isn’t quite finished. Finally, one other aspect of the U.S.-Mexican War coincides with Bakhtin’s sense of the double voice in language, the way words are scenes of contestation and argument, critical in the development of heteroglossic writing. In “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” Bakhtin claims that the Greek language already contained within it latent disruptive, parodic energies

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

1 37

rooted in the pasts of people who preceded the Greeks. “Behind these gross facts [of Greece’s own monologic history] a complex trial-at-arms is concealed, a struggle between languages and dialects, between hybridizations, purifications, shifts and renovations, the long and twisted path of struggle for the unity of a literary language and for the unity of its system of genres.”55 Analogously, the Mexican population in the U.S. Southwest deploys an always present prehistory, a prelanguage, that novelizes the concept “America” and dialectically generates the projects of unification and exclusion. The intensely critical parodic force in Chicanismo in the later twentieth century echoes in part this Mexican prehistory, a linguistic distancing grounded in the long echoes of cultural collisions, but already in Lowell’s Wilbur the awareness of the Mexican point of view grounds the sharpest national critique. Lowell does not Mexicanize Wilbur, but he clearly places his dissenting parson in a state of exile, always the observer, never a participant, keenly attuned to the fragility, the corrosiveness, of words.

Mexico as Metaphor The disruptive particularity of the U.S.-Mexican War should not be overstressed; I am thinking here of Lepore’s analysis in The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, regarding a conflict that in many ways parallels the U.S.-Mexican War, both being events wherein writers marshaled their literary productions into communal projects of meaning making, and did so precisely because events and time increasingly threatened the grounds of presumed coherent collectivity. Nor should the continuing power of essentializing nationalism be underestimated. The projects of nation-states continue to exhibit horrific acts of ethnic violence; any claims that epics are anachronistic or that cultural myths have dissipated into irrelevancy seem beside the point in the present age. But nationalism aims in two opposite directions, toward the internal, which excludes outsiders, and toward the external, to a world where all other nations appear as more or less equal to—though different from—one’s home nation. Nineteenth-century nationalism in the United States both troubles the myth of manifest destiny and prompts it precisely because of its relational aspects, arising from a sense that modern nations emerge interdependently with other nations. For Anthony Smith, nationalism is the modern iteration of an older myth of communal exceptionality, now circulating in a world of “polycentric uniqueness.”56 In this mode, every culture, “even the least developed and elaborated, possesses some ‘value’ that is irreplaceable and may contribute to the total

1 38   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

fund of human cultural values.”57 This is what nags Parson Wilbur in particular and The Biglow Papers in general: a dawning realization that not only do other nation-states exist in the world but, more troubling perhaps, that other North American nation-states with utopian projects exist precisely within the terrain supposedly set aside for a timeless U.S. America. Far more vexing than national hypocrisy or the encounter with the nation’s own propensity toward violence, the invasion of Mexico, as Lowell seems to have sensed, disrupts the very foundations of “American” belief, action, and identity. Anxieties persist. Mexico as a nation and Mexicans as a people continue to unsettle the U.S. social landscape because they continue to instantiate the passage of time. They disturb the solace found in a providential notion of U.S. American destiny, abiding within the collective consciousness as avatars of the real world, troubling the desires of the imagination. Within the current matrix of dominant U.S. American society, Mexican Americans, or more precisely the images of Mexican Americans, do not resolve as categorical others but as people who perform and exhibit the processes of change and reassessment, people who stand against the comforts of singular self-definition. Such simplified notions of Mexicans and Mexican Americans draw forth the language of U.S. American exceptionalism because they continually challenge its very premises, which explains why cultural debates about Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States worry less about race or class than they do about national destiny, about “what it means to be American.” Without question, race and class, as well as gender, all intertwine with the fantasies of nationality, but I am referring here to the general pitch and tenor of collective discourse in the United States. Mass media accounts about Mexican Americans, such as Huntington’s recent offering, are typically quasi-fictional, usually nervous, forays into U.S. America’s future, worrying less about who U.S. Americans “are” and more about who U.S. Americans once were and ought again to be. Huntington’s anxiety regarding Mexican Americans bears a moment’s consideration because it exemplifies the contemporary version of Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric, his anti-Mexican cultural analysis imposing precisely the separation it claims to fear between “Anglos” and “Mexicans.” With a characteristic drive toward closure that insists on strong definitions, his Who Are We? reconstructs a narrative of Anglo-Saxon Protestant integrity upon which the United States has been founded and which has remained largely unchanged across time, only to now, in the early twenty-first century, be seriously challenged by the growing presence of “Hispanics,” most especially those from Mexico or of Mexican origin. He claims that there is “no Americano dream. There is only the

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

1 39

American dream created by an Anglo Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”58 A great deal can be criticized in Huntington’s superficial argument, but suffice it here to point out, first, that the fragment seems to worry about a dichotomy between the “American” domain and that of Mexico, but it actually fears not the demise of Anglo Protestant culture but its alteration, its potential for hybridization, which would be evidence of its plasticity. To declare Mexican American culture as incompatible with the United States preserves, among other things, the premise of a distinct, eternal, utopian Anglo Protestantism that magically bestows the benefits of the American Dream on Mexicans as long as they learn English and convert to an American civil religion. History disputes this essentialist equation in too many ways to detail here (I am reminded of organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens, events like the George Washington celebrations in Laredo, Texas, and evangelical movements in Latin America, not to mention the speedy rates of English acquisition among contemporary Mexican Americans . . . examples proliferate . . .), but Huntington never really proposes history, or even a critique of Mexican Americans. Rather, he desires to bolster a strict division between “American” ideals and the rest of the world. Who Are We? projects Mexican Americans as signs of global pressures on the United States, forces both mundane and contingent. The Rio Grande is not just an international border, it is the international border. The problem, of course, is believing that one can construct a border between time and timelessness. Mexico from the beginning of its conflict with the United States has exerted pressure on Anglo American self-perceptions. Mexicans and Mexican Americans challenge essentialists like Huntington because they can, in a way, be viewed as protean actors who, by being “Mexican” American, already imply a global blurring of the U.S. American border. They resist also the bifurcations of race, class, gender, language, and finally nationality. Mexicans and Mexican Americans are, after all, diverse and economically and racially stratified, both immigrant and Native, African and European, and, in a broad historical sense, fully as American as “Americans.” This resistance to easy categorization constitutes the contact point between Lowell’s Biglow Papers from 1848 and the ongoing Mexican-U.S. experience; both raise questions of epistemology and meaning making. Through Lowell’s work we gaze into a heated crucible in which the U.S.-Mexican War acts against essentialist “American” identity. The war brought the United States into a dialectic with a world deemed antithetical, but it also yielded the complex terrains of variation and self-reflection. From Lowell’s prism beams a presumably singular light

1 4 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

breaking into a spectrum of illuminations, hazy shadows, and near total darkness. In the rhetoric of U.S. exceptionalism, Mexicans and Mexican Americans stand for the passages of nations. They appear from the unknown future, complicating race and class by questioning the viability of any identities that presume an escape from history. The stasis that characterizes Wilbur emerges from the shattering of national belief as U.S. America gazes across the Mexican terrain and sees uncertain boundaries and approaching mortalities. At its best, The Biglow Papers testifies to Lowell’s most daring vision, a work that questions national coherence with the U.S.-Mexican War’s shifting spectral reflections.

Canons versus Cannons in New Canaan I have concentrated on Lowell’s The Biglow Papers not merely because the work deals with the U.S.-Mexican War, but also because the abiding turn toward disillusion characterizes a surprisingly broad range of war literature of the period—so much so, in fact, that one might reasonably argue that the literature of manifest destiny contains the lamentation of manifest despair. Before leaving U.S. America in my own analytical scheme, I discuss below a selection of more widely recognized authors, each of whom tangled with the complexity of the U.S.-Mexican War and each of whom articulated one or more aspects of Lowell’s three-part characterological system, as if they too were trying out various approaches and imaginative paradigms with which to deal with the profoundly unsettling, faith-shattering conflict with a countering American republic. None of the authors I am about to discuss—Thoreau, Cooper, or Emerson—can be reduced to simplified categories, but each does exhibit certain tendencies in his war writing, and my comparative project aims at illustrating how these texts can be read as productions from the most contradictory aspects of the U.S.-Mexican War experience. In a way, they all have, like The Biglow Papers, affiliations with the frontier novelette mode, because all of them begin and also end with the nonresolution of U.S. identity. Bitter dissension, violence, looming contradictions—these are their uncertain end-points, echoing the mood and tone of Lowell’s own fracturing vision.

Thoreau in the Guise of Biglow First published as Resistance to Civil Government in 1849, based on an 1848 lecture, Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience inquires into the obliga-

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

141

tions of the individual confronting an immoral or unjust government, an enduring treatise of U.S. American political philosophy. It is perhaps the most canonical work of American nineteenth-century literature that also mentions the U.S.-Mexican War. In it, Thoreau eloquently demands that individuals remain loyal not to mere laws but to the highest ideals of justice. But the essay is not really about the U.S.-Mexican War. In fact, Thoreau evades the war’s historical reality in favor of a political idealism that obfuscates what the United States actually did in favor of what the United States ought to do. Thoreau opposed military operations against Mexico, but, like Biglow’s antiwar jeremiad and the Whig politicians Horsman describes, Thoreau aims inward, worried more about what a tacit, unthinking support of the war might do to the United States than what it was actually doing to Mexico. I do not claim that Thoreau’s essay repeats the same argument that Lowell voices through his Yankee-talking Biglow. Thoreau cannot be so peremptorily dismissed. Yet in Civil Disobedience he alights at times on ideas in parallel with Biglow’s pose of plain-talking truth. The comparison below indicates how a standard text of U.S. literary and political identity can deploy a desire for communal preservation instigated by the temporal disruptions of interAmerican contact. First, there is the basic matter of historical evasion, the denial of the way the U.S.-Mexican War severely undermines U.S. American exceptionalism as it involves the United States directly and forcefully in the territory and affairs of another American republic. The U.S.-Mexican War makes only the most minimal of appearances in Civil Disobedience, and to be sure, Thoreau’s project is philosophical, and perhaps necessarily turned inward and abstract. Further, his general silence about Mexico alone does not lead to an alignment between the essay and Biglow’s antiwar ethnonationalism, in part because Thoreau does acknowledge, minimally, that the United States is an invading force bringing death to Mexico, unlike Biglow, who seems to care almost nothing for the war’s impact on the invaded country. And yet early in the essay Thoreau offers a secessionist proposal closely related to Biglow’s ultimate solution of national separation: Some are petitioning the state to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves,—the union between themselves and the state,—and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? Do not they stand in the same relation to the state that the state does to the Union? And have not the

1 4 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

same reasons prevented the state from resisting the Union which have prevented them from resisting the state?59 Thoreau’s proposal involves a more radical threat, and in fact has been enacted by various figures throughout U.S. history. U.S. Americans have indeed dreamed of a complete, transcendent independence to live a more moral life, often with ambitious religion-based blueprints, from fundamentalist Mormon communes in West Texas to the Catholic-school-based community Ave Maria in Florida, and U.S. Americans have at times used violence in an attempt to achieve their utopian ends. Herein lies the point of contact between Lowell and Thoreau, the way they imagine a solution, even if as provocation, through a secession from the national government. If you cannot stop the U.S.-Mexican War through your powers of persuasion, then you can, perhaps even must, divorce yourself from the national government. Not only does Thoreau put forth the obligation to do so, he presumes the availability of the option, which restates the principles of enlightened rebellion. Just as the fantasy of complete independence frames Thoreau’s meditation, the equally seductive dream of an authentic, quasi-religious, democratic “American” character occupies the central role in Civil Disobedience’s narrative. The people, for Thoreau, represent true wisdom, or at least its potential. As he concludes the essay, he, like Biglow but more measured, gestures to the grand democratic dream as he takes issue with the quality of American lawmakers. “If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.”60 Earlier, Thoreau lapses into what can only be called a cliché, declaring that “Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue. . . . The opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called the ‘means’ are increased.”61 Taken at face value, poverty would be the reservoir of morality, and the logic would absolve the wealthy from responsibility for economic inequality. Thoreau, however, aims primarily at reinforcing the mythology of the “American” individual as retaining the possibility for absolute, class-neutral redemption, regardless of wealth, education, or, in a further extension, race. I use the word “reinforce” deliberately, because Civil Disobedience does not declare a new insight into American political thought as much as reinscribe it. It takes the Declaration of Independence as theme and performs a variation, because in the late 1840s, a set of undeniable facts was beginning to cast light yet again on the limitations of American utopianism. “In other words,”

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

1 43

Thoreau writes, “when . . . a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that . . . ours is the invading army.62 I linger on this point to introduce the final broad commonality between Biglow and Thoreau, how both react to the U.S.-Mexican War by reasserting U.S. American political mythology, precisely because the U.S.-Mexican War stands so obviously against it. The expansionism attending manifest destiny brings with it an opposite force toward isolationism and hypercathectic definition. Thoreau’s sense of the “American” mission differs, however, from Biglow’s in that Thoreau dared to say the almost unsayable. “This people,” he writes, “must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”63 Only the moral course—even if it leads to self-destruction. This kind of grandstanding echoes to a degree the secessionist solution, though now appearing as a kind of national death wish, which also raises the stakes to their ultimate, providential extension. I do not mean here to reductively conflate a work such as Civil Disobedience with Lowell’s partly racist Biglow poetry, but I do claim that they share nationalistic commonalities. In both cases, the U.S.-Mexican War catalyzes a reassertion of a set of U.S. American ideals: the dream of absolute independence, the quasi-divinity of the American individual, and the broad call for the perfect society. In exceptionalist U.S. America, however, precisely these notions also promulgate a nationalist arrogance that authorizes expansionism. In a sense, the way democratic idealism in the United States exalts the sovereignty of individuals and states depends to a large degree on a virulent form of national arrogance. The insistence on “American” morality, “American” justice, “American” democracy, and “American” liberty can function something like a narcotic, masking the terrifically critical historical facts of Native American genocide, African slavery, and Mexican dispossession. The ideals themselves open pathways for the dispossessed. The election of Barack Obama to the presidency can be traced to a variety of reasons, but among them is the radical potential in the reconstitutive ideal. Generally, however, U.S. American political ideology too often functions as an exclusionary existential narrative. It drives white Americans toward the negating extremes of what Birget Meyer and Peter Geschiere term the “fluw” and “fix” of globalized displacement.64 U.S. American ideology can seem contradictory because of its centripetal and centrifugal dualism, simultaneously declaring unending possibility but also barricading itself against all externality. James Fenimore

1 44   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Cooper, on the other hand, would set his U.S.-Mexican War novel on the high seas, in a zone, one might say, of suspended identity and fading belief.

Wherein Private Sawin Encounters the Mexican Captain It doesn’t take much digging to find a fictional analogue to Sawin if one defines his role in The Biglow Papers as embodying an unsettling encounter with the Mexican enemy. He performs this function in two distinct steps. First, Sawin undermines the supremacist fantasies of Anglo-Saxonism. Then he allows Lowell to momentarily gesture toward the presence of Mexicans as inhabiting their own territorial sovereignty, a construction more prevalent during the war than some might imagine. As noted in the previous chapter, many of the chivalric pulp fiction novelettes of the 1840s feature heroic and noble Mexicans defending their nation against Anglo invaders, although in almost all cases these Mexicans were of a particular kind: white, or nearly white, or “Castilian,” and often wealthy. These fictions altered the dynamics of the problem: the real enemy was no longer by definition “Mexican,” but usually, and somewhat counterintuitively, an Irish or British schemer, or a Mexican of mixed race or of the lower classes. In these stories, the war as an actuality always hovers near at hand, historical figures appear frequently, authors describe real battles, and depictions of the land proffer at least some semblance of accuracy. Sawin cannot be said to fit neatly into the chivalric category; he is far from aristocratic, and he limits any sympathy for Mexicans to a few passing remarks, flickering afterthoughts, brief strokes in Lowell’s erratic fictional canvass. He nonetheless blurs facile dichotomies: if Mexicans are immoral buffoons, as they often are in many other fictions of the era, so is Sawin, who can be interpreted as a claim that being a poor white person has no relation to righteousness, regardless of what the myth of the “American common man” might offer. Behind that assertion lies a corollary: being Mexican is no guarantee of moral duplicity, thievery, or mendacity. Rather directly, then, Sawin brings to the fore the contradictions, the fallacies, and the illusions of U.S. American identity, the cracks in the destinarian facade. The project inhering in Sawin in fact runs through a great deal of agonistic U.S.-Mexican War literature in general, and in a particular example that brings together an icon of U.S. literary nationalism and the war’s complexities: James Fenimore Cooper’s 1848 U.S.-Mexican War novel, Jack Tier: or, The Florida Reef. An obscure work not always found in library stacks, Jack Tier remains largely unread, but it too deserves attention. Predictably flawed

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

1 45

by Cooper’s stylistic convolutions and at times tedious in its formulaic plotting, it yet deals inventively with the U.S.-Mexican War. For the novel’s villain, Cooper cast a U.S. American sea captain, Stephen Spike, who sets out to smuggle gunpowder to the Mexican government and to force a marriage to a young, virginal girl, Rose Budd. The final pages offer up a surprising amount of terror and gratuitous violence, giving the novel’s formulaic happy ending a somber shadowing, reminiscent of George Lippard’s wide streaks of melancholia that darken the ending of both his Legends of Mexico and ’Bel of Prairie Eden. In both literary and historical contexts of U.S.-Mexican War literature, Cooper’s novel incorporates a large number of the era’s conventions, so much so, in fact, that one might discern all three basic novelette patterns I discussed in Chapter 1. Its overriding tonality, however, has most in common with the field of disturbance I have ascribed to Sawin’s skepticism. Thus, whereas Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience echoes the essentialism of Biglow, Jack Tier, despite its romantic chivalry, becomes an instance of pervasive disenchantment. Most obviously, the bandit in this tale, essentially a demonic, obsessive U.S. American pirate, is the proto-Ahabian Captain Spike. He functions as an Anglo renegade, firmly situating the novel in the zone of national critique from which Sawin emerges. Cooper does insist that Mexico is responsible for the war, but when he makes the chief villain a greedy, ambitious Anglo American sea captain, he also references the view of many that the United States had instigated an invasive war in an extreme moment of national overreaching. Rather than exploring Jack Tier’s broader implications (there are many), I concentrate here on the character who most gives voice to a Sawin-like critique, the novel’s main Mexican figure, the officer Don Juan Montefalderon y Castro, through whom Cooper voices his thoughts on the war itself.65 Indeed, the various appearances of Montefalderon constitute the only locations in the novel where Cooper offers political meditations. Indeed, as a fictional U.S.Mexican War Mexican, Montefalderon acts, thinks, and speaks with unusual thoughtfulness and eloquence, one of the few Mexican characters in U.S. American war literature who voices Mexican history, culture, and politics. Limited as it is by Cooper’s lack of any deeper sympathy for the Mexican enemy, Montefalderon’s presence in the novel becomes noteworthy for the way it interrupts and halts the narrative. Taken together, there are four of these prose monologues, soliloquies that present a developing sequence. The first allows Cooper to indict Mexico for what he claims are its provocations. Then, still early in the story, Montefalderon relates second-hand to Rose what he and Henry Mulford, the tale’s

1 46   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

hero and Rose Budd’s lover, have discussed about the war. Cooper aims here, evidently, to reveal Mulford’s chivalry in the clearest terms to Rose and to readers. Thus, Montefalderon actually quotes verbatim to Rose Mulford’s view of the conflict, and concludes with the gist of the issue: “I am sorry to see a nation that has taken so firm a stand in favor of popular government, pressed upon so hard by another that is supposed to be the great support of such principles.”66 A few pages later Cooper offers the first detailed commentary on the war. Cooper’s narrator begins by praising Mexicans for a sense of chivalry, then notes that Montefalderon, motivated by a love of country, could not understand arguments that blamed the war on Mexico, which the narrator says has “weakened her cause by her own punic faith, instability, military oppresson, and political revolutions.”67 The third episode, late in the novel, occurs as Montefalderon stands watch on the deck of Spike’s ship. Cooper here builds on the indictment of Mexico of the earlier passages, now adding to it a more generous view of Montefalderon’s actions. The Mexican officer is now a “soldier and a gallant cavalier” fired by a “patriotism” which would defend his home from the “ruthless steps of the invader.”68 The exposition here terminates with a self-reflective gesture: “we ought to respect in others sentiments that are so much vaunted among ourselves.” Cooper then dwells on the greatness of the Anglo-Saxon character, a mix of courage and boldness and civility and ends with a pointed admonition to respect the love of freedom in others.69 The fourth and final episode moves beyond the military courtesy of the previous passages and looks to the future. Montefalderon is speaking to Mulford, but there can be little doubt that it is Cooper who makes the point: “We are of a race different from the Anglo-Saxon, and it will not be easy either to assimilate us to your own, or wholly to subdue us. In those parts of the country, where the population is small, in time, no doubt, the Spanish race might be absorbed, and your sway established; but ages of war would be necessary entirely to obliterate our usages, our language, and our religion from the peopled portions of Mexico.”70 Cooper likely refers here to a move by some in Washington to annex all of Mexico as a U.S. victory became likely, but as a final essay on the war, the passage speaks sharply about national limitations, presciently hinting at a future of ongoing strife.

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

1 47

The interior narrative of Mexican commentary has moved from an opening declaration of chivalry—U.S. America as the invader—to a critique of Mexican faults, to an examination of patriotic equivalence between Mexico and the United States, to a final critique of U.S. expansionist ambitions. As with the Thoreau/Biglow juxtapositions mentioned above, my concern lies not with absolute parallels but with a resonating disposition. In this case, Cooper’s vision of the U.S.-Mexican War aligns with Sawin’s brief moment of internal critique that takes the entire project of “Anglo-Saxonism” and reveals it as a mask for violence and perfidy. Jack Tier never achieves that level of sarcasm or indictment, but Montefalderon’s appearances are always dual, Cooper always justifying the war, yet praising the Mexican officer for patriotic integrity. Just as Sawin functions as a reflecting mirror, momentarily engaging in an interior examination, so too Montefalderon functions to raise the more disturbing facts of the war to the narrative’s surface. Moreover, as I noted above, Cooper’s novel may end with a happy marriage (Henry and Rose), but its final scenes, in which Spike and nearly everyone else die, including Montefalderon, are so brutally violent, so marked by terror, that the final effect is not a promise of new stability but a more complex blend of unmitigated bitterness amid a domestic utopia not as hopeful as it is perfunctory. Although Jack Tier offers a simple case of escapism in many ways, it also at the same time begins to approach the existential paralysis found in Wilbur’s musings—and in the erratic journal notations of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Sage of Concord Meditates upon Arsenic and Chequers With Emerson, we confront a curious fact. Here is one of the United States’ most influential writers writing precisely during the most intense conflict between Mexico and the United States who nonetheless seems to have had little to say directly about the U.S.-Mexican War. Even the “Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing,” which comments on the “famous states / Harrying Mexico / With rifle and with knife!” seems detached and concerned more with broadly philosophical concepts of power and history. To find Emerson’s key thoughts on Mexico and the war, one must turn to his private journals,71 and one discovers there not a coherent point of view, or even the sense of a gradually clarifying perspective. Instead, the war against Mexico seems to have kicked up a jumble of confusing, chaotic, agonistic thoughts that have much in common with the searching, wandering, eclectic play of Lowell’s parson, Wilbur (although like Biglow, Emerson could be profoundly focused

1 48   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

on the war’s impact on the United States). In a previous analysis of Emerson’s journal entries regarding Mexico and Texas, John Q. Anderson noted that Emerson’s view regarding annexation emerged from an objection to “means, not ends,”72 but his study does not relate the abiding failure to resolve the ideological dilemmas raised by the conflict to the field of ideological disturbance created by contact with Mexico. I begin with Emerson’s most famous, perhaps most coherent, and certainly most internally focused pronouncement about the invasion of Mexico: “The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”73 I begin here—the passage is found in his journals—in order to quickly dispense with it. As sensational as the arsenic quote may be, it articulates only an aspect of the Emerson-U.S.-Mexican War story, and not, in my view, the most interesting one. When we examine Emerson’s journals further we find a far more compelling nexus of Wilburian disruption, confusion, and contradiction regarding the war. His notebook jottings suggest he believed simultaneously in the immorality of the war and in its inevitability, and thus it should not be surprising that the entries appear sporadic, unfinished, hesitant, at once jingoistic and reflective. The infamous arsenic quote commands attention because it exaggerates a perceived threat with an eloquent metaphor, but it does not capture fully Emerson’s inability to square the war with the logic of American identity. Consider the following entry: The question of annexation of Texas is one of those which look very differently to the centuries and to the years. It is very certain that the strong British race which have now overrun so much of this continent, must also overrun that tract, & Mexico & Oregon also, and it will in the course of ages be of small import by what particular occasions & methods it was done. It is a secular question. It is quite necessary & true to our New England character that we should consider the question in its local & temporary bearings, and resist the annexation with tooth & nail. It is a measure that goes not by right nor by wisdom but by feeling. It would be a pity to dissolve the union & so diminish immensely every man’s personal importance. We are just beginning to feel our oats.74 He looks forward to a day when the “strong British races” will overrun Mexico and Oregon, as well as Texas. On the other hand, New Englanders should

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

1 49

oppose Texas annexation, a “measure that goes not by right or by wisdom but by feeling.” Ultimately, the passage bifurcates along a racist endorsement of hemispheric conquest and an indictment of its dubious moral grounds. Emerson wants to insist that what really matters is a moral position relative to the “local & temporary” and that the secular matter—perhaps, following Anderson, he saw it as one of means as opposed to ends75—remains an issue of secondary importance. For Emerson, expressing opposition to the war as a grand act of national intemperance that threatens the future of the union becomes the necessary and moral stance, going so far as to imply that U.S. American expansionism expresses a specifically British penchant for imperialism. Thus, in true Biglowian-Whig spirit, the potential immorality lies not chiefly in an invasion of another sovereign American republic but in the corrosive effect the war might have on the United States. Like Biglow, Emerson aims his concerns toward the future of the Union, but the juxtaposition of “secular” matters of the world and the more eternal values of “New England” remains categorically unresolved. Why and how should one consider the local and temporary more significant, more morally pressing, than the inevitable? To claim that the means of expansion will be of “small import” in future ages seems at best a flagrantly duplicitous denial of the obvious injustice of the U.S.-Mexican War. Lurking just under the surface of the passage quoted lies a somber confrontation with confusion and moral relativism. I turn to two journal entries closely related in time and theme, both making reference to hostilities with Mexico: Things have another order in these men’s eyes. [Solid] Heavy is [light] hollow & good is evil. A western man in Congress the other day spoke of the opponents of the Texan & Mexican plunder as “Every light character in the house,” & our good friend in State street speaks of “the solid portion of the community” meaning, of course, the sharpers. I feel, meantime, that those who succeed in life, in civilized society, are beasts of prey. It has always been so.76 The distinction between speculative & practical, seems to me much as if we should have champions appointed to tilt for the superiority respectively of each of the Four Elements—except insofar as it [describ] covers the differences between seeming & reality. In this [dream] world of dreamers, it makes small difference whether the men devote themselves to nouns or to laying stone walls, but whether they

1 5 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

do it honestly or for show. In the neighborhood of the new railroad the other day, in Westminster, I found two poor English or Irishmen playing chequers on a little board where the spots were marked with ink, & the men were beans and coffee berries. They played on, game after game, one sure of beating, the other indignant at defeat, and I left them playing. Why not? & what difference? all the world is playing backgammon, some with beans and coffee, & some with Texas & Mexico, with states and nations.77 These passages could easily have been written by Lowell’s Wilbur, having as they do the same concentration of linguistic uncertainty and moral agnosticism that pervades the parson’s commentaries. Perhaps Emerson offers a wider field of view, whereas Wilbur’s concerns himself mainly with the U.S.Mexican War, but both critiques aim at the slippery boundary that seems to now appear before evil and good, right and wrong. There arises one large difference. Unlike Wilbur, Emerson seems to have turned to a brashly racist Anglo-Saxonism shortly after the war, as if the relatively easy defeat of Mexico could best be explained not by technology or economics but by a mystical quantum in the Anglo-Saxon/British bloodline. In this regard, Emerson repeated typical ethnocentrist propaganda. Consider the following excerpt illustrating a number of significant departures from previous journal entries. Here one finds Emerson’s tendency to engage in a racialist discourse about human progress, a dialogic process of self-definition by racial exclusion, and a heightened concern with democracy’s prospects on a world stage: Nature has made up its mind on one point, that races or men who can’t sustain themselves shall go to the ground. It is of no use to put arms into the hands that dare not use them. It’s of no use to give [good laws] Bills of rights [good] constitutions to Sicilians, or Mexicans, or South Americans, (if the minds of the people are servile) and it is of no use to give writs of replevin or jury trial or state sovereignty as means offset & balance to the federal arm, if we have lost the spirit which first enacted these defences of liberty. They who made them, made them for brave men only.78 Cold and sea will train an imperial Saxon race, which nature cannot bear to lose, and after cooping it up for a thousand years in yonder England, gives a hundred Englands a hundred Mexicos. All the bloods it shall absorb and domineer: and more than Mexicos, the secrets of

Antinarratives of the U.S.-Mexican War  

151

water and steam, the spasms of electricity, the ductility of metals, the chariot of the air, the ruddered balloon are awaiting you.79 The turn to Anglo-Saxonism as a key to U.S.-American success might seem to return Emerson to a mythologically secure vision of “American” identity and progress, but it actually reconnects U.S. America to the world by emphasizing that U.S. Americans do indeed have an ethnicity and history with roots in Europe. Anglo-Saxonism often has stood for a “true” America, but its material-culturalist implications always threaten to redefine U.S. America not as a unique nation of nations but as a colonial outpost of England, and that is why even Emerson’s racialism and ethnocentrism in these later journal entries can suggest the demythifying energy inhering in the U.S.-Mexican War. By catalyzing a relational cultural discourse—our U.S. America is Anglo-Saxon, as opposed to that Mexican America we’ve just invaded—the war brings the rhetoric of “American” identity down to the more worldly level of language, history, traditions, and culture. Emerson’s U.S.-Mexican War journal entries thus align with Wilburian commentary in two ways: they trigger somewhat agonistic but clearly resigned expressions of a moral relativism within the United States, and they relocate the idea of U.S. America back within a very worldly realm of cultures, languages, materialities. Few popular novelettes, even from the deeply agonistic frontier category, offer anything like Wilbur’s criticism, or Emerson’s confused journal entries. Emerson’s sketchings may be by definition zones of confusion, ambiguity, and doubt—they are, after all, rough notes, as it were—but it may be that the impact of Mexico on U.S. idealism emerges precisely in the fragmentary, the unfinished, and the uncertain. The antinarratological energy that inheres in moments of U.S.-Mexican violence may be visible only in a moment of crisis. Their writings understood as failures to arrive at ideological coherence, Wilbur and Emerson both present that which undermines borders, erodes boundaries, disrupts definitions. Emerson does default to racism as an answer, and thereby his journal notations might be aligned with novelette resolutions, but the racist Anglo-Saxonism that shadows his later writings reveals its anxieties just as forcefully as it claims its providentialism. I have taken Lowell’s The Biglow Papers as a model text to demonstrate the way the U.S.-Mexican War could generate confusion, doubt, and anxiety, all striking at the core of what it meant to believe in one’s own identity as a U.S. American citizen. I have emphasized specific dispositions in the above review of Thoreau, Cooper, and Emerson, but in fact all three authors pro-

1 5 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

duced works cut through with the same set of doubts and anxieties about U.S. American nationality, the same turn toward reflexivity, and finally the same drive toward an arrogant isolationism. Thoreau prefers the prison cell, Cooper fantasizes about a small island with a lighthouse off the Florida Keys, and Emerson dreams of an Anglo-Saxon eternity. All of them gaze into the reflecting mirror of the U.S.-Mexican War, only to see questions gazing back at them. They want to answer with the dream of integrity, but in the end, their texts fall silent amid the roar of the battlefield. In Mexico, it would be the violence of those very battlefields that would mark indelibly that nation’s own war literature. Mexican writers too would come upon aporias and silences, but such narratological difficulties would constitute the very foundations for a drive toward meaning.

Nation and Lamentation

Three

The Catalysis of Mexicanidad

Those dead, on their feet, let them stand, I turn to their shadows, like white clouds, With the ray of the sun resplendent, That with laurels they may crown Their immortal brows. I sing, and I sing to their glories, See, that if fortune wickedly robbed them Of the pomp that crowns victories, The tones of divine honor, Yet destiny bequeathed to us their bright names. —Guillermo Prieto, from “Poem, Read in the Forests of Chapultepec, Commemorating the Battles of the 8th and 13th of September, 1847” Angry and traumatized by a staggering military defeat, many Mexicans poured their recriminations, self-criticisms, and apologias into personal histories and essays about the U.S. American invasion. They blamed the United States, they blamed opposing Mexican factions, and they blamed themselves as they struggled to explain a profound challenge to their nation and to their own identities. Few, however, wrote war fiction or poetry. Compared to the midcentury publishing juggernaut in the United States, Mexico’s imaginative literary landscape offers relatively little regarding la guerra fronteriza, or la in-

1 54   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

vasión norteamericana, as it was also known. But herein arises a paradox. In the United States, the abundance and patriotic fervor of wartime novelettes and unabashedly nationalistic propaganda flared with a sharp intensity, but the war itself quickly slipped from the foreground of the U.S. American imagination. In the United States, the U.S.-Mexican War did not substantially alter or make permanent any new national meanings, in part because the war was preconceived, and then reconceived after the fact, as an affirmation of an already established national purpose; and it is worth noting also that the particulars of anti-Mexican thought and sentiment had been brought to a sharp focus in the mythification of the Alamo battle of the 1836. Instead, the U.S.-Mexican War’s elision from the collective U.S. American memory testifies to a denial of the war’s contingent particularities, which conflicted with an already established national ideal, details that characterized not just the war but also the presence of Mexico and Mexicans in U.S. history. In Mexico, however, the anti-essentialist disturbance that troubles texts like Lowell’s The Biglow Papers runs unchecked in war-era writings, indicating how the conflict troubled the national literary projects in the literatures in both countries. Moreover, Mexican editorials and other forms of agonistic expression fed directly into la Reforma, the nation-forming urgency that swept Mexico in the 1850s and established the liberal political ideology that would eventually overcome conservative-monarchist reactionaries.1 This is not to say that Mexicans remember the invasion in simple opposition to a U.S. American amnesia. In Mexico, the war gave full view to a failed national project, and thus precipitated the calls for and efforts on behalf of a new nationalism, a new narrative that would consolidate the Mexican state, which had, as Lomnitz and others have noted, lingered in a generally fractured condition following the revolution against Spain.2 But many Mexican writers have themselves elided the war in favor of a story that sees the beginning of contemporary Mexican liberalism in other events, such as the presidency of Benito Juárez, a Zapotec native who became president in 1858, temporarily lost control during an invasion by France in 1863, and regained it in 1867 with the expulsion of the French and the execution of Maximilian.3 Thus, in Mexico, writers have suppressed the U.S.-Mexican War’s role in fostering a desire for national belief, and I am here locating Mexican literary nationalism in works such as El Zarco, by Ignacio M. Altamirano, an author who emerges in the following analysis as having his own indirect but nonetheless germane link to U.S.-Mexican War literature. As Ernst Renan put it in 1882, nations become nations in part through the narratives of loss.4 Rather than a matter of historical awareness, the key difference between the United States and Mexico

Nation and Lamentation  

1 55

lies in that in Mexico, the defeat by the U.S. American forces acts as catalyst toward nationality, because nationality—and I draw again on a view put forth by Homi Bhabha—emerges from a perceived moment of dislocation, or disruption, the sense that one must reconstruct an identity amid the tumult and ambiguity of modernity. Although Mexicans may not today perceive the U.S. invasion as a crucible for Mexican national identity, the literary record indicates that the intense soul-searching during the war and following the defeat at the hands of the hated yanqui invaders led from a wrenching devastation toward national self-consciousness, the result, as Andrés Reséndez Fuentes wrote, of a “critical conjunction” that forced “different regions and localities, distinct social classes, diverse ethnic groups, and political factions to define themselves regarding the nation.”5 For example, as early as 1849 Mexican artists began presenting their work in an annually repeated national exhibition; by 1851 there were calls for an authentically national Mexican art.6 Beginning in 1850, the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística began producing new maps and geographic charts (cartas general ) precisely as a response to the felt urgency for a new Mexican national identity resulting from the loss of land to the United States.7 The search itself, “for such fixed essences,” proved instrumental in establishing the rhetoric of the nation-state.8 Not surprisingly, Mexican writers turned repeatedly and obsessively to national dreams as they wrestled with the agonies and losses resulting from la invasión norteamericana. Most of these yearnings circulated in nonfiction, of which there is a great deal, but a few writers wrestled the war’s traumas into imaginative poetic memorials and fictive narratives. In this chapter and the next, I focus on two key authors to show how Mexican literature of the period records the catastrophe of the war as a key instigator of a modern, though continually vexed and uncertain, Mexican nationalism. Reducing national identities to simplified terms—that is, to materialistic objects and ideological premises—risks obfuscating the complexities that constitute culture, itself an amorphous term, more approachable as fictive construction than as essential quantity. Nation-states may build upon ideas of a cultural integrity, but they remain fundamentally relational and rhetorical, the nation-state constituting itself through a narrative of exclusivity that depends on outsiders, a vision of a unique space and time and a distinctive story of distinctive origin and special destiny, and also, particularly in its nineteenthcentury moment of development, an equality amid a global domain. Mexican nationalism follows typical patterns. I am less concerned with whether or not Mexico actually has a coherent sense of nationality—a perennially popular subject of discourse—than in specific nineteenth-century efforts to construct

1 56   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

such a national narrative. I argue that a particularly important Mexican national story begins in Mexico in September 1847, when U.S. troops capture Mexico City, a moment of crisis I appropriate as metaphor and not as a literal coordinate. When Mexicans lost control of the city, the war effectively came to an end. At that moment, or rather in that agonistic rupture, the project of national unification began to take precedence over projects of cultural documentation. That is, the defeat made imperative the need to consolidate the diversity that characterizes many modern nation-states. It forced Mexican intellectuals to come to grips with the fact that Mexicans were not (always not yet) a single community, and that they now faced the difficult tasks of defining their nationality in a way that could accommodate divisions of race, gender, and class. Mexican nationalism presents a problem of definition. Unlike the United States, which disseminates a purportedly unique set of political ideals as national characteristics, Mexican identity defies easy labels, which does not mean that there is no Mexican national identity, merely that broad definitive statements can be readily challenged. I turn here not to Mexican cultural artifacts, such as Aztec legacies, or the Spanish language, or religious affiliations, or even historical rituals, all of which might be said to define, or construct, Mexican culture. Instead, I approach the issue by asking what values Mexicans feel their nation stands for. What national destiny do they imagine for the Mexican republic? When we encounter U.S.-Mexican War literature in Mexico, we see that it emphasizes not cultural materials but the very need for nationalist narrative, the desire for both uniqueness and acceptance, particularity and universalism, a dualism that in certain ways foreshadows the intensely global consciousness developed in later Mexican American writers in the United States. The war forced Mexican intellectuals and politicians to see themselves as either having, or not having, a specifically national story, or, rephrased, a national purpose and meaning. What would it mean, ideologically speaking, to follow la Virgen? What would it mean to be a Mexican in a world of U.S. Americans, English, French, and so on? To orient these questions, I have chosen two terms, righteousness and agony, around which to orbit two U.S.-Mexican War texts—not to claim that they categorically identify Mexican nationality but rather to illustrate how they illuminate the desire for national teleology. The sense of moral superiority and communal suffering that pervades these texts stems from writers who sensed that simply being geographically within a bounded state called Mexico did not of itself affirm what it meant to be a Mexican as opposed to, say, what it meant to be a norteamericano. A new,

Nation and Lamentation  

1 57

demonstrably “artificial” nation in the Americas without the underlying architectonics of narrative ran the risk of perpetual reinventions as well as reinvasions. One could live in Mexico, eat Mexican foods, speak Spanish or the vestiges of Nahua languages, dress in the appropriate national costume, and still not really be Mexican. The violent amputation of the northern tier of Mexican provinces, in the opinions of many, had raised stark questions about Mexican cohesion and integrity. In the following discussion, I locate my dual terms specifically amid the agonistic literature dealing with la invasión, which in some respects resembles the modes of aporia and paralysis already mentioned in the previous discussion of Lowell’s Wilbur. But Wilbur’s position dwells almost exclusively on a critique of the nation, whereas what Mexican authors wrestled with was the task of transmuting existential crisis into national purpose. From a particular perspective, The Biglow Papers drives readers to a confrontation with the historical within the mythic, whereas from a specific point of view, the Mexican writers discussed here struggle to free themselves from history. Not just any righteousness or agony, then, but righteousness and agony posed relationally against the invasive, destructive actions of the United States, the model democracy, now reconceived as a raging storm of temporality. A few preliminary definitions: righteousness refers to a greater, truer morality to be found in Mexico when compared to its northern neighbor; agony refers to the Mexican nation’s eternal punishment—and for that reason also redemption—made manifest through its proximity to the United States, a nation to be properly viewed not as a lamp of liberty but as the epicenter of worldly corruption. The expansive and abundant nonfiction of the moment frequently interrogates one or both of these notions, but two significant Mexican authors elaborate these views, one in poetry, the other in fiction. They are significant because both play key roles in the development of Mexican literary nationalism. Guillermo Prieto, a historian, politician, and poet, composed invasion poetry eloquently expressing the contours of Mexican righteousness; Nicolás Pizarro Suárez, another politician and writer, wrote a key novel, El monedero (1861), agonistically castigating Mexican society for its illiberal sins and proposing a utopian solution. National moralism and sacrifice figure as well in the literatures of other Latin American nations; what else could instigate nationalistic rhetoric more promptly than a national defeat? But losing a territorial war with the United States—the nation of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin—required more than the usual rationalizations, especially among liberals in Mexico who had elevated the United States to an exemplum of liberty.9 Among conservatives suspicious of democracy, the military conflict had also raised the stakes,

1 58   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

because it had pitted Anglo America against Hispanic America, and Hispanic America had lost. Not surprisingly, the war generated wide-ranging national introspection in Mexico. Like many other liberal politicians, both Prieto and Pizarro worked to transform the grief of the nation into a foundational moment. That is, they reimagined the defeat as a turning point in a larger story. In this, they wrote in accordance with a general sense in the 1850s that Mexico’s loss revealed the need to reform Mexican society and start anew. In effect, the poetry of Prieto and Pizarro’s massive novel (more than six hundred pages long) are literary analogues to a desire for political regeneration. Like the political triumph of Mexican liberals in the 1850s, their literary achievement would be qualified, but certain aspects would be enduring. Mexico would be occupied by the French from 1863 to 1867 as Mexican and European monarchists regained momentary control of the country, but liberalism—or more precisely a narrative of liberalism—would eventually triumph. I use “liberal” here only as a rhetorical marker, not as a description of Mexico’s actual politics. Any glance at Mexican society immediately makes apparent the massive injustices of its economic inequities.10 Dictators, such as Porfirio Díaz later in the nineteenth century, famously masked their tyranny with the language of democracy. But then, it is equally true that a Mexican Zapotec Indian president would eventually recapture the capital from the French and install, at least nominally, a liberal government, and that the rhetoric of liberal democracy, as opposed to nostalgic calls for Mexican royalty, would take hold in Mexico. To critique a nation’s hypocrisy might, perhaps optimistically, lead to an improved world, but no nation ever achieves perfect alignment with its own national fiction. Worth stressing is that the aftermath of the war presented Mexico’s leaders with a terrible defeat that literally dismembered the nation. Mexico after 1848 was, in a very literal, geographic sense, a profoundly different country. Gradually over the subsequent decades, politicians and writers began defining that new Mexico, building in part on the legacy of a catastrophic loss of land and the deep shame of military defeat at the hands of the United States.

Guillermo Prieto: The Agony of Righteousness I will delve into Pizarro’s fantastic, epic novel of political devastation and regeneration in Chapter 4, and begin here with Prieto’s invasion poetry, perhaps the most unappreciated writing by one of Mexico’s most famous nineteenthcentury political intellectuals. Prieto gained fame in his day as a national poet,

Nation and Lamentation  

1 59

a vatic bard who dedicated himself to the project of literary nationalism and who figured in the rise of liberal power in the 1850s. Although largely recognized today for other kinds of writing such as political essays and cultural documentaries, he began composing poems about the invasion from the earliest days of the conflict and, significantly, continued writing about it for the rest of his life, the war and the defeat perhaps constituting problems he never quite resolved. Not only did he write dozens of war poems during the second half of the century, but the stanzas inquire into national identity with striking, plaintive energy. They offer a range of analytical entry points—among them their formal qualities, issues of reception, and matters of Mexican national history. But I am most intrigued by Prieto’s repetitive naming of names, which foregrounds rituals of memorialization and denotes a community in the process of constructing a shared history, and, in this case, also a mode of composition invoking the ideological premise of righteousness. I begin with a typical invocation (all of the following translations are my own):11 And I with pride shall submit to your presence The names of your sons, oh! of those Who are no longer brightened by the sun of existence! Like sacred lamps, those names I shall offer at your altars, like incense Shall be the perfume of their virtues.12 These lines come from an 1849 poem, “¡A mi patria!” that Prieto read in public on the anniversary of Mexican independence; the subject is, explicitly, martyrdom, and it falls within a tradition of tribute poetry to military heroes. But Prieto’s specific focus on names in the passage above points to the imaginative field of his invasion poems, which could not celebrate military victories because the U.S. forces won all major battles, though one key battle resulted in a draw.13 Without battle triumphs to offer the community, Prieto offers the names of the dead. His emphasis will be sacrifice, as it is in every war memorial, and the public reading of names enacts a communal ritual designed to reanimate the sacrifice and make it always present as long as survivors remember the fallen. To what degree can a literary theme by one poet be a term of collective identity? Ultimately, we can make only qualified assertions because nationalism, like other fictions, results in uneven disseminations and varying interpretations. It never reflects perfectly an entire society, because no society exists as constant or unitary. But literature can capture certain broad aspira-

1 6 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Guillermo Prieto in his later years. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.

tions. It can serve to illuminate the give-and-take between historical events and the meanings such events begin to constitute through time. In searching for a social referent of Mexican righteousness, a connecting tissue between Prieto’s tormented poetry and subsequent Mexican ideology, I recalled the classic aphorism attributed to President Benito Juárez, the most significant national icon to emerge from the Reforma. In one of his proclamations, Juárez declared, “Entre los individuos, como entre las naciones, el respeto al derecho

Nation and Lamentation  

161

ajeno es la paz” (Among individuals, as among nations, the respect for the rights of others is peace). This is the narrative of righteousness condensed to basic terms. Righteousness is certainly not a specifically Mexican national quality; I claim rather that Juárez’s aphorism pertains to a remembered moment of invasion because it combines both the argument that Mexicans are a just people and an international consciousness, a public recognition of the imperative to define the Mexican position vis-à-vis other nations. Juárez’s speech actually deals with internal political stability after the defeat of the French in 1867, but the oft-quoted sentence assumes both a personal and political philosophy of moderation and independence. It constructs a principle of national solidarity and cohesion through a statement about international relations, as if Mexico can and must learn what it means to be a nation-state by remembering the facts of foreign interventions. Righteousness, then, does not merely figure in the solitary concerns of a single poet with nationalist ambitions but becomes a standing concern for a nation thrust violently into the domain of global relations. As with war novelettes by U.S. authors, I am interested in the close correspondence between fiction and nonfiction, or, in this case, the discursive field encompassing Prieto’s poetry and newspaper editorials. I will take a similar approach later with Pizarro, and I note here the crucial influence on my analysis of Jesús Velasco Márquez’s La guerra del 47 y la opinión pública, 1845–1848, which recovers precisely this kind of journalistic, public response to the invasion. A comprehensive survey of the period’s editorial writings lies outside the scope of this project,14 but a few telling examples will isolate a range of ideas that occupy Prieto’s more overtly literary endeavors. Even as the war raged, newspaper writers began to locate a republican ethos within the Mexican future, resting it upon the political ideal of Mexican moral supremacy, interpreting la guerra fronteriza and then Mexico’s defeat as proof of U.S. avarice and perfidy. Perhaps most strikingly, these texts chastise the United States for a grand conspiracy of deceitful, Machiavellian stratagems. Some of the more pointed of these come from El Tiempo, a short-lived conservative newspaper with monarchical sympathies that exemplifies the conservative suspicion of liberal “nortemanía.”15 Its writers, unhindered by any need to justify liberalism, leveled a barrage of enraged accusations (again, these are my translations): With no thought as to methods, possessed by an extreme pride in its power, and dominated by the same fanaticism that induced Rome to

1 6 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

conquer all those people it called Tartars, the American union believes it has a providential mission to occupy our lands and exploit them for the benefit of what it calls human civilization. . . . In modern times, perhaps only our nation offers the scandalous spectacle of having at its doors an inflexible enemy that makes war only for conquest, and that finds a party that smooths the path, hindering the government in its operation, taking its resources, diverting its attention, and sowing doubt, panic and disunion. . . . They have wanted to separate the New from the Old World, certain that the power of its nation, as regards the other American republics, would give them in turn an absolute dominion, that they would extend themselves to wherever they found it convenient, setting their sights first on possessing Mexico unto Panama, in order to then follow with the Antilles and become owners of the very heart of Mexico, and it can be said without a doubt, of the commerce of the entire world.16 These denunciations center on the basic, fundamental charge of U.S. American hypocrisy: the model republic reveals itself to be in fact just another tyrannical imperial power, not the great universal guide of liberty. As the victim, Mexico suffers abuse even as it attempts to uphold all that is good among nations. Often, both the risk to Mexico’s survival and the glory of Mexican culture appear together in the pages of El Tiempo,17 such national validation becoming profoundly linked to success against an invading infidel. Liberals, like conservatives, faced the undeniable fact of a U.S. American invasion and wrote similarly intense indictments of U.S. greed and hypocrisy. Though newspapers in the liberal camp frequently turned self-critically inward, their writers from time to time aimed their outrage directly at the nation they had so fervently admired. One editorialist in La Reforma, voicing a typical complaint, proclaimed that the North Americans were “full of insatiable greed,” regarding “as nothing the property and rights of other people. . . . [T]hey do not believe they will encounter a dam able to resist the torrent of its [the United States’] ambition.”18 By saying “and the rights of other people,” the writer here taps into a basic undercurrent in almost all of these protests. The United States had violated Mexican rights and Mexican sovereignty as well as Mexican territory. In essence, the Anglo Americans had failed to behave as the greatest nation among nations, whereas Mexico, a true republic, understood the importance of international diplomacy, respect, and temperance. One of the most dra-

Nation and Lamentation  

1 63

matic statements in this vein is from a July 4, 1847, editorial in El Monitor Republicano, in which the author conjures up George Washington’s displeased ghost to scold the United States on the anniversary of its independence. The two fragments below, taken from the imaginary oration’s opening and conclusion, show how this theme could become central in Mexican assessments of the invasion: The thunder of your cannons in Mexico have shaken me from my perennial repose, and I see with profound regret that you have fired them to support rash and criminal pretensions. In vain I said to you in my farewell address when I retired from public life: observe good faith and justice with all nations, cultivate peace and harmony with them, morality and religion demand this conduct. . . . Finally, if you want to return to the path of justice and happiness, keep present the maxim that never left my own heart: good faith is the best politics. Oh, I fear for you if you carry oppression and tyranny to foreign lands! You yourselves shall come to be oppressed and tyrannized.19 With only a minor shift, a revision transforms “good faith is the best politics” to Juárez’s “respect for the rights of others is peace.” Prieto did not invent these views, nor are they solely a result of the U.S. American invasion, as the dream of a tolerant, multiracial Mexican nation began taking shape with the break from Spain.20 Still, the intensity of these sentiments throughout the Mexican press suggests how the image of a righteous Mexico victimized—practically betrayed—by a ruthless and hypocritical northern neighbor had a poetically powerful and ideologically penetrating impact. It is worth noting that Prieto succeeded as a journalist as well as a national poet, one reason, perhaps, why his poetry exudes an imperative to preserve, record, and synthesize. My primary focus, however, lies not in documentary biography but in how the language of righteousness furthers an embryonic national ideology. That is, I explore how the ideas expressed above in editorial columns appear in Prieto’s poetry, how the claims of righteousness intersect with the methods of nationalistic poetry to signal a turn toward an ideology of Mexican nationalism. Specifically, I investigate two aspects of Prieto’s invasion poems: (1) the way they resemble traditional praise poetry in significant respects and (2) how they emphasize ideology over cultural materiality. Tribal praise poetry lies far from nineteenth-century romanticism, but the premise that a non-Western oral form can share qualities with modern Western literature aims not to close off discussion with a rudimentary structuralist

1 64   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

analysis but rather to open it with a juxtaposition. To be clear, I am not seeking to reduce poetry to eternal forms but to investigate a particular relationship between communal aspirations and poetic art, even if that relationship proves to be transitory. Praise poetry may seem to oversimplify matters; by definition, it centers on eulogy and operates through closure and grand definitions, which to contemporary readers may seem naive. Prieto’s invasion poems, on the other hand, though some are in romance or ballad form, dwell on fragmentation and anguish, their emotional honesty complicating their celebratory imperatives. Pain and loss shape these stanzas, even if Prieto composes many of them in ringing silvas and liras with expansive eleven- and seven-syllable lines, fluid rhyming schemes, lyrical in intent, in tone, and in theme. The lines might ultimately seem caught within the national paralysis they document, but viewed as praise poetry, they evince patterns of a gradually cohering, collective belief.21

The Desire for a Communal Voice The key similarity between praise poetry and the verses Prieto composed in response to the U.S. invasion is that both presuppose a base of assumed, collective knowledge, which implies a cohesive community. Traditional praise poetry sets out to praise a leader’s attributes not by detailing his exploits but through a metaphorical shorthand referring to events that a group of listeners already knows and remembers.22 A poet singing such praises seems to engage in cryptic allusions to events and persons, but actually draws on the already understood, and in that way reemphasizes social bonds. In this sense, praise poetry works through a double coherence: literally, in that the meaning of the poetry is held to be transparent, that is, it assumes that it speaks what is true; and more indirectly, in that it presupposes that no members in the audience need elaboration or instruction—which would be a sign that the community was not entirely self-contained or integrated. As part of this kind of memorial shorthand, praise poetry engages in a ritualistic naming of the person being honored. Prieto’s war poetry can strike us as obsessively repetitive in a number of ways, but no feature dominates it as much as his predilection for naming Mexican heroes. In Prieto’s naming project, the invasion poems assert and assume an integrated nation, but they do so because they mark the disunion that continued to trouble the Mexican body politic. To be clear: Prieto’s verses do not actually achieve in Mexican society what praise poetry probably accomplishes in its traditional setting. Mexican nationalism has had a long gestation,

Nation and Lamentation  

1 65

and internal divisions between liberals and conservatives continued after the war. Even today, to assert a broadly held Mexican identity can be risky, and an underlying premise of my analysis is that nationalism in Mexico must forever remain an unresolved state project. With entire populations of Mexican workers shifting to and from the United States and many of its wealthy elite residing in the United States, it may be that Mexico’s social matrix was long ago indelibly marked by the exigencies of twenty-first-century globalization. Nevertheless, Prieto’s naming trope does dramatize an incantatory desire as his poems strive for collective meaning. Not all of Prieto’s invasion poems evoke praise-poetry naming, but most do, and they do so in ways not found in Prieto’s other poetic projects, which, although they may also refer to national heroes, do so in ways more reminiscent of conventional narrative description than of communal tribute. I begin, in fact, with a contrasting poem with no relation to the invasion but which ostensibly also functions in a nationalistic and patriotic project. These passages are taken from “Caos,” a poem dated 1896, near the end of Prieto’s life. It is a standard romance form that alludes to the 1858 civil war between liberals and conservatives: In Morelia Pérez Gómez, Tenacious and rough Spaniard Inflicted gashes and defeats And attacked like a bull. Meanwhile, Huerta and Pueblita Oppress with fiery rage The people of Guanajuato .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Like a great storm Can be heard the hoarse echoes of the defeat of Garza In powerful Tampico. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . But fortunate Echeagaray Triumphs in Jalapa. . . . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . In Durango, Coronado Is the torch of patriotism And appears in the West Like an invincible colossus. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

1 66   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Miguel Blanco in Lagos plants His victorious banner; .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . And as it was Christmas Eve Time of tumult and revelry, To Miramón who was but a child, The church sang a lullaby.23 This series of heroic actors shows Prieto’s approach in many of his noninvasion poems. Unabashedly patriotic, they perform honorific naming duties,24 but the gestures remain straightforward, almost perfunctory. Prieto lists these figures with specific contextual markers, such as Pérez-Gómez in “Morelia” and Huerta and Pueblita acting in “Guanajuato.” All the rest— Garza, Echeagaray, Coronado, Miguel Blanco, and Miramón—appear in these lines with quick narrative reminders pointing toward the specific historical record of the military conflict itself. Compare now Prieto’s invasion poems that shimmer with a more intense sense of urgency. His praise of Mexico’s heroes during the war against the U.S. invasion drops any sense of leisurely reflection and searches breathlessly for the right adjective, the perfect metaphor, to document the very searching within the poems themselves. This often leads to dramatic associations between heroes and qualities that have nothing to do with la guerra fronteriza itself. To emphasize the point, Prieto’s other poems—about Miguel Hidalgo,25 for example, or other Mexican notables—often cycle through a known historical narrative. The poems retell a history of a famous event. The invasion poems retain much of the propensity toward documentation, but now the events—numerous, overwhelming, and painful—appear with far less historical detail. Prieto contents himself with ephemeral allusions to actions, events, and heroes in ways suggesting, no doubt with some justification, that his audience already knows the story and the context. The following lines are taken from a poem about the invasion, but not read in public, evidently, until 1872, a generation after the war. There Anaya and Rincón and you, poet Gorostiza immortal . . . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Peñúñuri (the) adored, . . . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . And you, Martinez, treasure of honor

Nation and Lamentation  

1 67

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . O great Echagaray! O noble elder .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . . . . dauntless Balderas . . . O sweet name! beloved craftsman, .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . And you, noble León, flower of the land Who rocked in the cradle of Juárez, .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Who to eternalize that memory Thinks he has the voice of Homer? Bravo, Gelati, Xicotencatl, Cano, Monterde and Pérez Castro . . . wide zodiac Of my fatherland’s beautiful stars.26 Remarkably for a poem celebrating key battles at the end of the war, Prieto makes almost no specific mention of la invasión norteamericana itself. Instead, the poem intimates and suggests with glancing references to battlefields and oblique allusions to the invaders, though also including one to the “AngloSaxon,” perhaps the clearest identifying gesture. Indeed, without the Colección’s subtitle, “Invasión norteamericana,” one might be hard-pressed to know precisely why any of these men were being honored or in which war they had fought. Even more striking, Anglo Americans themselves hardly make an appearance.27 Instead, we have a series of brief descriptors. Gorostiza: an immortal poet. Peñúñuri: adored. Martínez: treasure of honor, and so on. The appositives point to broad abstractions or to qualities not so much communicated as struck, as one might a string on a harp. Prieto’s invasion poems might commemorate particular battles, might at times mention key locations, but they do so elliptically, vaguely, often describing the war with metaphors taken from nature, such as rushing waves and crashing storms. That Mexico lost all its major battles and about half its territory presents the most obvious explanation, but the shame of defeat is ultimately less important than the communal desiring in Prieto’s stanzas: by rejecting detailed historical narratives, he assumes a collectivity of listeners already intimately aware of those narratives. Worth noting is that the communal wish embedded in his style functions as more than mere illusion, or self-delusion: in the aftermath of the war and in the years that followed, he, or perhaps someone else, read at least some of his invasion poems in public memorials and tributes, and as such they did have a vatic function. For example, the poem cited above was evidently

1 68   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Héroica defensa de la cieudad de Monterey [sic]. Although images of battle scenes probably did not circulate in Mexico as extensively as they did in the United States, images such as this one did provide a Mexican perspective on the fighting, in this case the defense of Monterey early in the war. Album pintoresco, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.

read in public at Chapultepec, the very site of a horrific late battle in Mexico City. Similarly a resistance to a straightforward historical review was in place as early as 1849 in another poem, “¡A mi patria!”, also apparently read as part of a public commemoration of Mexico’s independence from Spain but focused on the recent defeat: I shall invoke León, the noble Cano, Smiled upon by friendly science, And Balderas without equal, whose proud brow Ennobled by the sweat of work, .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . And you too, friend of my infancy, Jewel of honor, and of virtue model, Flower of youth, whose fragrance,

Nation and Lamentation  

1 69

The breath of death took to heaven, You, do you hear me, Luis? And you, Martínez, Exemplar of grandeur and nobility, Of your parents’ glory and honor, .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Such were you, Frontera, illustrious, Whose tomb radiates light in my country, Noble soldier, whom eternal fame Justly rescued from oblivion’s dust.28 Rather than on military prowess, these lines concentrate on qualities of beauty, intelligence, virtue, and honor.29 One might expect Prieto to at least refer in passing to a particular feat of courage in recent combat, as he indeed does occasionally in other invasion poems. Here, he does not because his subject matter is not the war, or the invasion, or the defeat, but the nation itself. I should not overstress the case: Prieto never avoids completely the war or the cascade of humiliating defeats; many of the poems do describe famous, often painful, events and significant places. Yet when Prieto turns to Mexican participants, the critical subjects of the dramas, he generally excises them from the invasion’s context. Why would national heroes appear in ways that celebrate qualities that have little to do with la guerra fronteriza itself? A key lies in the way praise poetry, just as it assumes a closed community of listeners, also presupposes a coherent and constant set of communal values. Like eulogies, praise poems confirm listeners’ ideals as much as they pay tribute to their subjects. Through such poetry, communities reconfirm what they believe. In Prieto’s case, the poems not only confirm but also propose. Mexico’s string of defeats generated heated national introspection and sweeping, deeply agonistic political debates about Mexico’s future. These debates centered on ideology, on the unseen but always felt architectures of values and beliefs by which a new republic would define itself and act in the world, whereas other attempts to define the nation dwelled on national customs, a kind of proto-anthropology that saw documentation as the key to self-awareness.30 Prieto’s tributes to Mexican heroes resemble praise poetry in this case precisely because they contemplate a set of moral values, the underlying focal point that links Prieto’s poetic method to the meaning of Mexico as understood by many of Mexico’s political writers. Thus, in these conflicted poems, we watch as Prieto’s imagination reaches toward an abstract depiction of Mexico as noble, kind, brave, courteous, and so forth, characteristics defining not just Mexico’s finest but Mexico itself.

1 7 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

The Coalescence of a National Faith Prieto’s invasion poems do more than desire a national collective; they also put forth a set of specific national ideals that constituted key parts of the liberal ideology that arose in the 1850s and survived a temporary monarchist invasion by France. One might argue, from a Bakhtinian perspective, that the project of poetry aims precisely against doubt and confusion, communal expressions through monoglossia becoming the ritualized statements of truth, justice, dignity, and freedom. Prieto does not invent rudiments of national value, nor do such arise only from the invasion’s trauma, locating any particular event as the inauguration of a collective identity being always difficult, if not practically impossible. On the other hand, as Mexican historiography has shown, the U.S.-Mexican War and Mexico’s defeat did lead to a national introspection of unprecedented urgency, and Prieto’s poems met the felt need for resolution with a defiant faith. Tellingly, Prieto kept writing essentially the same set of invasion poems until his final years, as if the catastrophe of war had converged with the felt absence of national coherence and had taken shape as a system of incantation. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, when Mexicans increasingly turned from asking who was Mexican to what did it mean to be Mexican, the kinds of answers they found had long been elements of Prieto’s poems, which confronted the hard task of finding meaning in the ruins of the U.S. American invasion. Many of Prieto’s other poems can be described as examples of Mexican costumbrismo,31 a form that sought to document the customs and manners of Mexico’s people, but his invasion poems fall nearly silent when it comes to describing anything like a “culture.” Instead, the imperatives in these poems lie in the realm of ideological value. The poems concentrate not on what Mexico is but on what it stands for, or what it should stand for. Perhaps all war poetry deals with trauma, and any discussion of how war poems invoke meaning will necessarily run into a common quandary: war literature is typically characterized by doubts, fissures, and the lacunae of the unsayable. Prieto, the war chronicler, speaks in a commensurately plaintive key, likely to commence a poem by questioning God about the injustices visited upon an unoffending nation. But to these ultimate questions Prieto almost always provides a set of answers that sing the praises of heroes and typically include grandiose but abstract statements about the virtue of Mexico. The excerpt below, from an 1847 poem, perhaps composed even as battles flared around him, shows how Prieto’s war poetry could easily slip from tributes to people to a lyrical definition of Mexico itself:

Nation and Lamentation  

171

God who spread a sapphire sky Like a canopy, over my adored country, Beautiful jewel of fertile America, Lovely and sweet, and rich, and admired: Of the fountains of crystal waters: Of rich and varied flowers: Of virgin treasures, fecund: The enchanting pearl of two worlds: Cradle of beautiful women, opulent: The august mother of renowned warriors. . . .32 The passage will strike modern readers as overdone, but it features the naming mode that runs through other praise poetry, and it captures the way that Prieto’s war poetry can concentrate on a singular (and thereby singularizing) focal point. Again, Prieto’s specific contributions as compared to other poets’ are largely matters of degree. One might even argue that utopian dreams and nightmares are part and parcel of the American experience, from Columbus to Gabriel García Márquez to the Christian fundamentalism in the Left Behind series. Yet instead of naming specific bodies of water, or flowers, or treasures, or even warriors, the passage locates perfection within the “beautiful jewel of America the fertile.” The argument does not sing of the preeminence of particular Mexican cultural facts; Prieto claims rather that Mexico embodies perfection in the abstract, a “pearl of two worlds.” More conventional nationalistic poetry, some written by Prieto himself, glorifies Aztec resistance in standard, materialistic terms, or sees a human culmination in the cultural blending of Spanish and Indian civilizations. But in the passage cited above, the mode of thought leading to praise poetry, which emphasizes assumed cultural continuities and communal values, shifts its object from hero to nation, from object to concept. Mexico itself is the fallen hero, dead, in a sense, and thus definable, and thus also open to the meaning-making potential of eulogy. I have concentrated on one passage, but the emphasis on ideals instead of cultural characteristics, runs through most of the invasion poems, a necessary feature, perhaps, of the turn toward communal ritual.33 Prieto’s invasion poetry certainly shares a great deal with other Latin American works from the nineteenth century. In particular, one might compare it with José Joaquín Olmedo’s classic 1825 tribute to Simón Bolívar, “La victoria de Junín: Canto a Bolívar.” But Prieto’s poetry seems more immediately rooted in the way war trauma can demand the resolution of words on a page, the act of writing itself not only therapeutic but at some level inescap-

1 7 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

able. Admittedly, Olmedo’s praise of Bolívar expresses a national vision much like Prieto’s invasion poems, and Olmedo concludes his poem with a gesture that recurs frequently at the conclusion of many of Prieto’s stanzas, a declaration that he wishes to win the praise and love of his brothers, a smile from his country, and “the hatred and rage of tyrants.”34 But there is a difference: Olmedo’s conclusion marks the end of a historical sequence, a specific narrative. Most of Prieto’s invasion poems linger on agony, loss, anger, pain, and when he ends a final stanza with a nationalist call to eternal glory, one feels the urgency of new beginnings rather than the repose of nostalgia. To get more specific, what does Prieto argue will be found within the cohering destiny of the Mexican nation? The national defeat and loss of nearly half its territory scarred Mexico, and Prieto’s elevation of Mexican ideals can be read initially as a reaction to the confusion and political vacuum that followed. When historians chart the stirrings of Mexican nationalism in this period, they often point to the political maneuvers of la Reforma which followed in the 1850s,35 or they note the publication of other nationalizing projects of the era, such as the Diccionario universal de historia y de geografía (The Universal Dictionary of History and Geography).36 Prieto’s invasion poems, however, allow us to gaze directly into the postwar furnace of Mexican state ideology. When we do so, we gaze upon an effort to reinvent Mexico as a realm of righteousness amid an unrighteous world. Mexico in this schematic comes to mean an American republic that has proven itself to be the actual refuge of the liberty, democracy, and the rights of humankind—against the false front of U.S. America’s manifest destiny. The optimistic vision remains a matter of narrative longing, but therein may lie its energy. Many of the invasion poems begin with anguished cries of pain and religious doubt and continue in this manner for extended passages, and they might give the impression that their greatest attribute inheres in their ability to capture the destabilizing impact of la guerra fronteriza. But time after time, Prieto insists on reaching for a defiant conclusion that defines Mexico as a nation of freedom. As a first example, I note the following lines, which conclude, “El día de la patria: A los veracruzanos,” from a poem dated 1850 in the Colección: Heroic Veracruz, sacred shield In all times the honor of the nation, Advanced sentry who guards Its glory, its dignity, its repose,

Nation and Lamentation  

1 73

Breathing liberty, pleasantly gathering, The gifts of knowledge and talent: With brotherly concord the nations See you with love and respect. While all oppressed people Have as hope the example, Offered by the courageous patriotism Of the sons of Hidalgo and Morelos.37 The poem pays homage to the people of Veracruz, who sustained a devastating four-day bombardment by U.S. troops after General Winfield Scott landed and before he began his (Cortés-like) march westward toward the capital. Here again, Prieto offers little information about the war, or any particular battle. In fact, only the collection edition’s chapter heading, “Invasion norteamericana,” and the poem’s title indicate that the poem deals with the invasion. But the poem’s emphasis on a campaign against tyranny leads to an imagined global role for Mexico, terms like “breathing liberty,” “brotherly concord,” and “tested patriotism” orbiting the key line, “While all oppressed people.” As a description of actual Mexico, Prieto’s poem is a fiction, but as a fiction, it ends by investing the nationalizing terms of Mexican and Mexico with moral supremacy. Furthermore, that the lines invoke Hidalgo and Morelos, two key revolutionaries of 1810, is less important than the implications latent in “sons of.” At one time, perhaps, the success of Mexican independence in 1821 might have confirmed a liberty already gained, the completion of a grand revolutionary project. But Prieto here describes a continuing struggle, conflating past and present. Said another way, Prieto takes Mexican history and uses it to define a Mexican destiny through the alchemy of national myth. These invasion poems search for meaning not in political rupture from Spain—indeed, other nationalist poems did just that38—but in the more complex negotiations between a specifically Mexican political ideology and communal mythology. Even years after the war, after the rise of new heroes such as Juárez, Prieto could still conclude tributes to the failed defense of Mexico City against the U.S. American attack by referencing, as in the following case, the “benedictions” of Juárez and General Ignacio Zaragoza,39 who were not themselves prominent in the U.S.-Mexican War. That is, for Prieto the war initiated a never-ending inquiry into national meaning, as if Mexico’s identity both before and after the invasion came into focus as the U.S. army completed its takeover of Mexico City:

1 74   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

You, the dead, stand! For I speak . . . your bones tremble within the dust, for I bring as an offering the fruits of the example, That you here planted with sublime valor; As ovation I render the heroic deeds of the East and of the West In a thousand brave campaigns; The laurels of Puebla and of Rosales, Worthy even for you; The expiation of the flag of tyrants, Dying far from their fatherlands; A peace among the worthy Mexicans; The benedictions of Zaragoza and Juárez.40 These lines from “Poesía leida en Churubusco” (Poetry Read at Churubusco) assert a retroactive moral connection between the victory over the French in 1867, in which Juárez and Zaragoza were indeed heroes, and the defense of Mexican sovereignty during the U.S. invasion. Churubusco, a site near Mexico City, witnessed one of the war’s most intense battles late in 1847 as U.S. troops closed in around the capital. Prieto’s use of tiranos, tyrants, for the Anglo American military shows how he could translate the history of the war into an abstraction of Mexican identity. They were indeed invaders, many of them plunderers, and even hypocrites, all terms Prieto uses elsewhere in these poems, but the Anglo Americans were never exactly tyrants in the context of the war. However, the diatribe against tyranny effectively and strategically raises the stakes from a drawn-out border war to a contest between the dark forces of authoritarian oppression and the bright hopes of progressive democracy. To a degree, Prieto’s gesture overlaps with a broad field of Latin American nationalist poetry that praised revolutionary leaders, but the difference is that to call Spaniards tyrants references history (Spain really did control Mexico, did tyrannize its native and mestizo peoples); to indict U.S. Americans on those terms, however, now calls on an ideal. The norteamericanos did not actually play the role of tyrants in the resulting Mexican state, but they could be reimagined as idealized representations of the abuse and the decimation of the civil rights of others. In Prieto’s invasion poems, morality rather than history dominates as the primary subject, far more important than costumbristic surveys of fertile lands and noble folk. The horror of the invasion itself lies at a pivotal center of Prieto’s imagined Mexican nationality, because the chaos of social disruption, territorial theft, and sacrificial death

Nation and Lamentation  

1 75

generates the dreams and desires of national identity, meaning, and purpose. In this ideological economy, moral supremacy supersedes military or economic power. I have been examining Prieto’s yearning for ideological coherence and have been suggesting throughout that much of the impetus for these calls for identity stem from rather basic traumas caused by national dismemberment and destruction. But another element figures into the tensions within Prieto’s poems. Prieto’s nationalistic moralism arises within a particular contact zone in which the United States plays a critical role. Specifically, Prieto’s poems amplify the tensions in the many early and conflicted Mexican accounts of the United States. Mexicans, especially those with liberal leanings, saw in the United States an ideal to be emulated, and a threat, an expanding, aggressive empire in the North to be kept at bay by any means necessary. After the U.S.-Mexican War, Mexican liberals like Prieto found themselves in the nearly untenable position of wanting to adopt the values of the nation that had just stolen nearly half of Mexico’s lands and had occupied and ravaged its capital city. Indeed, in one of the greater ironies that followed the war, the Reforma movement promulgated a liberal political philosophy that sought to make Mexico more like the United States, not less (an issue I pursue in the next chapter). One solution to Mexico’s existential quandary was to discover that Mexico would arise someday as the true realm of progressive democracy on the global stage. We can juxtapose this kind of ideological maneuver with Lowell’s Biglow Papers, in which the basic problem is that war promotes a national relativism informed by a consciousness of a world national system. Lowell’s Biglow suppresses that awareness in favor of an exceptionalist isolationism, although Sawin and most forcefully Wilbur first exert pressure against and then fragment the program of national belief. Prieto, on the other hand, begins by being already fully invested in national relativism and doubt—already a Wilburian figure, but one groping toward terms of Mexican distinctiveness and providentialism. He writes somewhat as Wilbur might, but now wishing to occupy the social and psychological landscape inhabited by Biglow, who dreams in the mode of denial, abstraction, and elision. The problem, obviously, lies in that one cannot remember to forget without remembering whatever one hopes to forget. Prieto understood that the answer to the crisis of the “northern colossus” was to situate Mexico as the true lamp of liberty, but the trauma itself, the lingering sense of despair and pain, would qualify—and perhaps prohibit—any easy assertion of national destiny. Prieto’s poems thus straddle the divide between the agonies of cultural extermination and the first inklings, literally as well as metaphorically, of a new

1 76   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

drive toward social and national reconstitution. I end this section with a paradigmatic example from “¡A mi patria!”, the 1849 poem quoted above and read in public during an Independence Day commemoration on September 15: The lowly bird is frightened by the thunder But the fierce king of beasts feels the wound In his vigorous breast And burning with rage he rushes to the danger, Shakes his mane, fire in his eyes, And his roar, like thunder, Presages his death, or his vengeance. Thus you shall take courage, oh my nation! Strengthened by your hardships, You shall feel the bursting in your veins, Of your ancient being indomitable with life. Lead your children as did Hamilcar, By the hand to the altars of your gods, Invoke ardently your shattered homes, Invoke the chiefs of Dolores; And, like Hannibal, swear upon your altars, Eternal hatred to tyrants and invaders.41 With such lines, Prieto offers national consolidation as an ongoing future, thereby transforming Mexican identity from received fact to open-ended process, from cultural materiality to cultural interpretation. He begins constructing a national mythology versatile enough to read the chaos of the everchanging present into the constituents of a standing identity and national teleology. Prieto never stopped writing invasion poems probably because the poems themselves mediate the vicissitudes of the world and encode them into a vocabulary of purpose and meaning, by which I mean such poems could never actually find an end-point, a resolving terminus. La guerra fronteriza becomes an abstraction not only of violent military aggression but of forces that threaten to annihilate individual meaning within a quasi-modernist paradigm. The final effect was a hard, forceful, but severely hampered turn toward Mexicanidad. I have spent some time on a relational tension with the United States because, although I would question that Prieto actually “articulates” or “defines” or “discovers” what it means to be distinctively Mexican, he does capture something of the way Mexicans continued to cast themselves against the

Nation and Lamentation  

1 77

United States. When Mexican intellectuals concern themselves with what it means to be mexicano, they often as not reach for utopian solutions that mark a contrast with the northern neighbor. Thus, in 1925, José Vasconcelos in La raza cosmica imagines Mexico as an agent for a global synthesis of “races” that pointedly condemns Anglo American racism—that is, to be a Mexican, in this fantasy, is not to be an essentialist Anglo American. Over time, racism and other forms of anti-Mexican sentiment in the United States prompted generations of Mexican writers and other artists to propose a mix of Mexican indigenous culture, religious iconography, liberal democratic ideals, communalism, and traces of European elitism to argue that Mexico, vis-à-vis U.S. America, stands for a higher moral authority and destiny. Not that such ideological programs are unique, or even all that notable. Nationalism tends to validate histories and perceived cultural elements in broadly similar ways. Further, nationalism may be a modern construct, but it retains echoes of ethnocentrism, often allowing for the definition of others as less than civilized. In some cases the rhetoric extends and labels outsiders as less than human, or as antihuman. But in the end, righteousness in Mexican politics refers to a lingering contrast to the nation north of the border. The U.S. invasion does not initiate this kind of political discourse—the rhetoric of the Mexican Revolution of 1810, to note only one example, rests largely on the distinction between immoral Spain and redemptive Mexico. But the U.S. invasion did force Mexican intellectuals to confront, and then internalize, two disturbing facts. First, throwing out or executing a European monarch does not grant a fledgling republic automatic entry into an American community of equally democratic republics. In other words, a more specifically “Mexican” ideology would be required to distinguish, say, a true republic, like Mexico, from the “mask” of republicanism worn by the United States. Second, despite the eventual success of the 1810 rebellion, that rupture never resolved the ideological debates within Mexico, which is why Mexican conservatives achieved a French monarchical takeover in the 1860s—and perhaps why even today Mexico remains profoundly fractured by race and class divisions, as well as by a hardened gender discrimination. Undocumented workers may cross the border not just to find work, but to escape Mexico’s cultural stratifications. Nevertheless, a more definitive sense of division, of differentiation, arose as the U.S. army returned to the United States, writers now casting Mexico as the nonracist, nontyrannical, nonaggrandizing, nation of tolerant mestizaje. To repeat a disclaimer: Mexican national identity has no precise beginning date, not in 1810 and not either in 1848, with the defeat at the hands of the Anglo Americans, and not in 1867, with the return of Juárez to the

1 78   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

presidency. The national ideals I have put forth here have various and at times indistinct origins. And yet the invasion by the norteamericanos forced a direct and unvarnished confrontation with the void of Mexican nationalism. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Mexican intellectuals of various political persuasions saw in stark terms a rudderless Mexico drifting amid violent historical currents.

The Horizon of Prieto’s Vision Much can be written about Prieto’s poesía de la invasión norteamericana, in part because it contrasts so sharply with his other poetic efforts. The invasion poems avoid the simplistic, materialistic calls for cultural pride found in his costumbrista sketches, for example, and they never present merely celebratory heroic praises of famous national heroes. Moreover, these poems reach for communal comforts without achieving triumphant closures. They claim to be more than they in fact are. One may admire Prieto’s drive toward affirmation, but his subjects—lost battles, traumatic invasion, awful death—force him, in Wilburian fashion, into minor keys from which he never fully emerges. And when he continued writing invasion poems in later decades, he repeatedly returned to the same content in the same tones, suggestive of both a lack of closure and a thematic paralysis. This is perhaps why his invasion poems burn with the aura of modernism. Even though they grope toward national mythology, they never entirely reach it, remaining firmly caught between doubt and belief. One might say that these poems describe what it might feel like to have a national ideology but do not in themselves express it. Qualified as Prieto’s poetry may be, it remains a sign of national desire. His war poetry is driven by the poet’s need to articulate an explanation for a nearly inexplicable cataclysm, and perhaps all belief must necessarily invoke its own mysteries. His poetry searches for meaningful narrative, and because it involves a quest—one for ideological principles rather than for cultural symbols—it manages to enunciate an enduring aspect of Mexican nationalism, its intense relational dependence on the United States. Crises generate projections of meanings, and the U.S. American invasion precipitated a paradigmatic moment of Mexican national agony. Successful as it may have been in surviving French and Mexican authoritarians, Prieto’s national dream can witness its own dreaming, can see backward from the domain of moral authority into the realm of historical construction. It succeeds only partially as a mode of social action because it

Nation and Lamentation  

1 79

cannot forget its horrific moment of artificiality. The forceful conclusions, when they assert moral supremacy or defiant protest, never transmute entirely into closure. The poetry always lives in pain and loss, a cataclysmic defeat that scars forever any easy claim of national mission. In U.S. America, to glance northward briefly, an ingrained, largely uncontested exceptionalism dominated a great deal of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography and nationalist rhetoric. U.S. America’s reliance on a quasi-religious political mission elides uncertainty in a grandly conceived act of amnesia and cultural delusion. U.S. Americans have a gift for self-hypnosis—born from the very horror of genocidal erasures of Native Americans, the violent deracination of Mexicans, and the unspeakable enslavement of Africans. Further, the very abstractness of U.S. American exceptionalism infuses its national story with the self-delusions of timelessness—not a nation, exactly, but more akin to an ethnic enclave in a prenational age. History, from within such a mythic sanctuary, fades into the easily forgotten or repressed, because it is allowed selective purchase on the national narrative.42 Prieto’s invasion poems, on the other hand, flow from a critical moment of recollection, of cruel awakening. The poems declare a unique Mexican identity and a special global role, but they cannot disengage entirely from their earthly, contingent, self-aware domains. The war and the loss of territory, the negotiation of an international boundary, the very presence of U.S. troops in Mexico City, the essentially boundary-making aspects of la guerra fronteriza all mark the contingent beginnings of nationality as a relational term. Because wars are complex events that often destroy belief and integrity, the U.S. American invasion reinscribes Mexico’s awareness of its mutable internationality, its existence as mortal in time. In these poems, the terms of such destiny are always being generated and debated, never simply, already known, or already assumed. Thus, even as Prieto valiantly struggled to define a Mexican ideological uniqueness, he did so within a context that by its nature stands for national relativity. This is perhaps why Mexicans today may prefer to remember la guerra fronteriza as one grand violation that blurs into other invasions of Mexico, why a museum in Mexico, the Museo Nacional de Las Intervenciones, concentrates not on one particular invasion but on a series of invasions (Spanish, U.S. American, French), the legacy of invasion as a general abstraction here becoming a foundational principle. This is also why scholars might neglect Prieto’s invasion poems, even though they intimate critical changes at the foundations of modern Mexican nationalism, the poems always knowing their own origins.

1 8 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

One further issue must be noted here. In the form of a question, it would be: What kind of nation does one invent when one decides to invent a nation that both stands opposite the United States and duplicates it? No simple task. For the Mexicans in the late 1840s and 1850s, the United States had turned out to be not a democratic republic but an invading, voracious, ruthless, insatiable empire that threatened to someday obliterate Mexico from the Earth and history. A noble Mexico could not, ideally or practically, emulate the actual United States. Instead, Mexico would have to be the true democratic republic, but this is, in essence, precisely the utopian neurosis afflicting the Americas in general. Prieto here confronts a fundamental problem in Latin American national inventions. The breakup of the Spanish Empire in the Americas led to nations inside a utopian landscape, but by the definition of modern nationstates explored throughout this study, to be an American nation contains a contradiction. To be a modern nation means to recognize global relationalities, whereas to be an American, un americano, broadly conceived as a free citizen of the New World, means to desire a rupture from past failures and to embark on journeys toward perfection. These always opposing forces lie behind the efforts to reunite all the Americas (the reexpression of the utopian dream) and the persistent civil conflicts throughout the region (the recognition of nationalist, particularist awareness). The direct U.S. influence in Mexico’s political ideology certainly repays sustained study,43 but for present purposes it is enough to note that Prieto’s invasion poems have difficulty with the historicity of the invasion because they aim not merely to declare nationality but to declare a supreme, redemptive American nationalism. Prieto envisions Mexico as both nation and as utopia, in and out of time, perhaps the most critical problem with Prieto’s fiction of Mexican identity. The war and the invasion provide the essential materials for modern nationalism—that is, for a collective identity that recognizes a Mexican sovereignty dependent on a world of other nations—but Prieto, as an American, aims to make of these materials the very thing which they negate. He loads the bow of myth with the arrow of time. One can understand these poetic ambitions. As a liberal, Prieto advocated the “North American” democratic, republican model. He had seen in it a paradigm of national progress, of economic, political, and spiritual advances. When the United States invaded, however, the crisis led not to the abandonment of the dream but, at least among liberals, to its survival in an ideal, future Mexico. In this national vision, Mexican isolation, perhaps even providential selection, arises not from leaving the Old World for the New

Nation and Lamentation  

181

but from a sense of being left alone in the New World—from sharp pangs of abandonment—because it is the United States that has returned to the ways of Old. Pervading all of Prieto’s invasion poems, then, is the unmistakable tenor of loneliness, a melancholy that recurs and expands to epic proportions in Pizarro Suárez’s El monedero, one of the most underappreciated works of Mexican literary nationalism and the subject of the next chapter.

Mexican Self-Consciousness

Four

El monedero and the Quest to Reform Mexico

“This is the promised land. God has wanted us to see it, just as the Holy Book says Moses saw the land of Canaan. We shall then go to our graves, hearing, instead of plaudits of no great import, the foolish shouts of those who call us impious and thieves; but we will be greatly consoled in knowing that we help and serve humanity, that in our country the ultimate effort is made to improve its moral and physical condition.” —Melchor Ocampo, upon seeing the New Philadelphia commune in Mexico, from El monedero (The Counterfeiter) Just as the war catalyzed a sense of Mexican moral superiority in opposition to the hypocrisy of its northern neighbor, it also led to an intense selfcriticism among liberal observers, but these writers often accompanied their inward excoriations with a call for a reformed, utopian, liberal solution. Such sentiments circulated widely in much the same way that protestations of democratic superiority wove through agonistic editorials, but while Prieto’s poetry promoted an idealist solution without self-recrimination, the liberal, reformist writer at the center of this chapter, Nicolás Pizarro Suárez, turned harshly against Mexican society itself. The hopeful duality between agony and redemption was never more explicitly linked to the U.S.-Mexican War than in his 623-page El monedero (The Counterfeiter), published in 1861. None other

Mexican Self-Consciousness  

1 83

than Ignacio M. Altamirano,1 a founding figure of Mexican literary nationalism in the last third of the nineteenth century, read El monedero, and, although absolute relationships are difficult to prove, at least one scholar has remarked on the numerous parallels and perhaps overt borrowings from Pizarro that emerge in Altamirano’s more recognized work.2 The possible line of influence should alone prompt a serious reconsideration of El monedero as a nationalist literary precursor in Mexico, but the novel speaks forcefully on its own terms about the Mexican nation in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion. At the outset, it must be said that Pizarro’s long and complicated work defies easy summary. Its most germane facet, however, can be stated succinctly: much of the novel’s action takes place during the years of the U.S. invasion, and a critical scene near the novel’s midpoint explicitly describes U.S. military violence in Mexico City. As with Prieto’s poetry, the significance of the narrative lies in its relationship to the war and to Mexico’s larger national narrative. Read in such contexts, El monedero reveals the connecting lines between the trauma of the U.S. invasion and military defeat and the critical Reforma period of the 1850s, during which liberals strengthened their investment in democratic ideology. One of the novel’s characters makes the case explicit: “We Mexicans are called to wage an eternal struggle; weak from our own discord, the majority of our people retarded in civilization due to a theocratic education and by the preoccupation’s they have imbued from it, it [Mexico] has nonetheless a glorious destiny because it is the protecting wall which must protect the threatened liberty and nationalities on the continent of Columbus.”3 An eternal sacrifice, but one made more painful by a self-scrutiny that reveals economic poverty and political fragmentation, a broad assessment that characterizes Mexico’s role in the universe, or at least the universe of the Americas. A lamentable geographic destiny, but a providential meaning. Much of this sounds like Prieto’s moralistic vision, but where Prieto struggles to find an affirming narrative, Pizarro will come to it with greater confidence (hence the self-criticism).4 Prieto’s invasion poems, even those written decades after the actual invasion, always feel as if he were composing amid the rising smoke of guns, whereas Pizarro’s novel reads like a Mexican jeremiad, a more or less relentless attack on Mexico through the assertion of a redemptive Mexican destiny. Pizarro’s offering, then, lies in the realm of critique and utopianism, a selfexamination that leads to redemption through the ostensibly clarifying, even

1 84   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

cleansing, effects of a military invasion. From this somewhat more hopeful perspective, Mexico’s trauma vis-à-vis the United States appears as national catharsis, and for Pizarro, the great sociological answer lies in a new elevation of Mexico’s indigenous population.5 Indeed, the common Mexican dream of Native and European synthesis will coalesce around the figure of Juárez late in the novel. Just as Juárez’s aphorism about international respect captures the gist of a national ethos emerging in Mexico, his personal history instantiates the mythology of Mexican racial and cultural hybridity in his personal narrative of a Native Zapotec Mexican who rises to the nation’s presidency and marries a criolla. The result of such a marriage can only be the children of a perfect mestizaje. Whether the iconic image appears as a dark-skinned Catholic Virgin or as a feminized angel delivering reformist laws in Petronilo Monroy’s La Constitución de 1857, or in any number of partially or fully Indianized figures in Mexican literature and painting, Indian-European integration portrays a Mexico that has discovered authenticity in the utopian dream of social mediation. Juárez, the Zapotecan who dresses in a conventionally Western suit and tie, embodies the Mexican synthesis of Old and New Worlds. But whereas his famous aphorism claims a Mexican ideological integrity, the iconography of Mexico’s indigenous past, and of the mestizaje that followed, also obscures a range of internal national conflicts and contradictions. The persistence of Mexican racism, classism, and gender discrimination shifts into the background before the narrative of Spanish invasion, a violent, tragic, and immoral rupture, but also, so the story goes, a crisis leading to a new people. As a narrative it seeks to unify a nation comprised of mostly poor, indigenous people and an elite class of fair-skinned, Americanized/globalized Europeans. Pizarro’s novel already at midcentury points in this direction, but its greatest strength lies in its own apostasy. The novel, in the end, perhaps as novels must, undoes its own romantic nationalism through a sober, at times bitter, acceptance of worldly limitation. El monedero remains fraught with an almost uncontrollable array of tensions and contradictions that undermine its utopian program, much as Prieto’s poetry never manages to forget the horror and dismay of the invasion. The moments of political critique act in concert with the destabilizing energy of the novel, somewhat as the moments of death and tragedy in Prieto’s poems work against his lyrical proclamations of national honor and redemption. I raise these points to make clear that Pizarro’s novel does not oppose Prieto’s poetry as optimistic vision against national lamentation. At least, not exactly. The novel reaches for a clearer statement of Mexican utopia, but with El monedero we are perhaps yet too close to the war as a

Mexican Self-Consciousness  

1 85

temporal break in the collective imaginary. The horror has yet to fade. Like Prieto, Pizarro’s writing attempts to forget the dissipations, the eradications of entire worlds that follow war, invasion, and defeat, but perhaps even more than Prieto’s poetry, Pizarro’s novel cannot will itself into amnesia, and instead dwells on remembrance. Thus, the following analysis will again detail the way this early work of Mexican nationalism express the trauma of war, an angry compulsion to put into words that which can never be put into words. More than simply configuring the novel’s plot in the time frame of the war, Pizarro infuses the narrative from start to finish with social concerns directly stemming from the invasion and defeat of 1847. Here again, I draw from the journalistic record, where a chorus of melancholic guilt erupted in obsessive editorial excoriations as the army of the “northern colossus” 6 approached Mexico City, then as the invaders captured the capital, and later after they withdrew in 1848. Journalism cannot be read as a direct gauge of a collective mind, but it can afford a view into the projects of nation making. In the case of the U.S.-Mexican War, the condemnations take on a special urgency in liberal periodicals, as if having once invested in the vision of the United States as a model republic to be emulated, liberal Mexican writers found it impossible to believe totally in an error of judgment. At least part of the problem, then, must have been within Mexico itself, and the invasion, viewed from such a perspective, had to have been a visitation of divine punishment for national sins. The following typical example is from El Siglo Diez y Nueve, one of the most influential and successful capital newspapers (and one closely allied with liberal politics): Our situation is in truth sad, but we can emerge from it. In our hands is the task to improve it, as we have all the elements for this change. Let us reflect on the causes that have brought us to this point: let us meditate upon them, doing away with our affectations and our party hatreds, casting aside illusory theories, divesting ourselves for a moment of our presumptuous aspirations, of our vain preoccupations, of our egotism and our apathy, and we shall persuade ourselves that our problem is not in things, but in men, in ourselves. . . . Let us not dismay, nor lose hope; faith in destiny shapes great men, and faith in destiny shapes also great nations.7 Such self-critique redirects inward the outrage and existential anxiety about national existence and lays the blame for Mexico’s losses not solely on the

1 86   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

United States but partly on Mexico, “in men, in ourselves.” But Mexico’s troubles could not be just of any typical variety. These writers turn away from the United States, but in so doing they begin to express a vision that defines Mexico in distinctive terms, even if those terms specify a unique national affliction. A writer for El Siglo Diez y Nueve opined that there were few other examples of “a nation so persecuted by misfortune like the Mexican [nation]: its own sons tear at its heart, strangers are ready to enrich themselves with its spoils . . . it is mocked in foreign lands, and when other nations remember her, it is to take advantage of her weaknesses.”8 A piece in El Monitor Republicano arrives at a similar interpretation of a war that began badly for Mexico and never got better. In a July 6, 1847, editorial, an angry writer describes the United States as a “false and insatiable enemy,” which “for our punishment Providence has made our neighbor.” Further on, the editorial claims that Mexico’s role is to resist U.S. aggression so that it “shall shatter against it, as against a bronze wall, and this is the grand role that has fallen upon Mexico.” As the piece concludes, the writer describes an ultimate catastrophe: That new population of which we have spoken [in the United States], shall allege new claims to advance further its usurpations, always making our people withdraw, until finally suffering the same fate as the Indians of the north, leaving the Anglo-Americans owners of all the territory we today know as ours, making vanish, together with the inhabitants, our glorious memories, our customs, our language and our religion.9 Mexico suffers through the very fact of the United States, but its grand destiny is to oppose U.S. American imperialism. If it fails, it risks losing its very existence. With such high stakes, little wonder that the war’s defeat left a profound scar on the Mexican national psyche, or at least on members of the intelligentsia. The lamentations are not entirely new. The specter of an aggressive United States already looms in colonial Spanish assessments of the former British colonies, and the United States was not the only foreign power to trigger nationalist anxieties and reactions in Mexico. But in retrospect, the hue and cry about the war being a new campaign for Mexican independence did not miss the mark by much. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo did inaugurate a different Mexico. A deterministic claim that the Mexico before 1848 differs completely from the Mexico that followed would exaggerate the

Mexican Self-Consciousness  

1 87

point, but for Mexicans living in the federal capital, the arrival and triumph of General Scott’s troops must have seemed like the impending loss of an entire universe. Such anxieties inform El monedero, which has two key interrelated plots, both of which suggest how the defeat at the hands of the U.S. Americans spurred reformist thinking and generated a literature of ambivalence, selfcriticism, and yearning. First, the novel describes a long, agonized romance involving the primary figure of Fernando Hénkel, a native Mexican, “the excellent type of the primitive Aztecs,”10 raised by a German merchant, who begins the novel by falling in love with Rosita Dávila, the fair-skinned daughter of a leading member of Mexico’s conservative elite. The U.S. invasion figures here as cataclysm, a terrible destructive force that overturns everything in Mexico City and interrupts the Fernando-Rosita romance. Thus, the invasion and defeat threaten to annihilate, to borrow from Doris Sommer’s key analysis, the “foundational fiction” of sexual and national union.11 Because war usually means disillusion (in every possible sense), it demands that an embattled society reconfigure its sense of order and continuity. The second narrative line deals with a utopian fantasy, the community of La Nueva Filadelfia, established in the Mexican countryside early in the novel by Hénkel and the cleric Father Luis, a friend and confidant. Pizarro never quite invests himself entirely in his utopian dream—one reads these scenes as literary musings rather than serious argument—but the polemic nonetheless underscores Pizarro’s position as a liberal who drew a direct connection between Mexico’s defeat in 1847 and Mexico’s internal faults, which Pizarro understood as stemming from the country’s conservative, reactionary factions. I begin below with the utopian project, which constitutes the most overt evocation of reformist ideals, and conclude with the romance plot, which somewhat counterintuitively emerges as the most discordant and contradictory.

Utopia in New Philadelphia Making clear that reformist, liberal ideals inform the novel’s preoccupations, Pizarro has his characters give the name of La Nueva Filadelfia to their utopian community, a village in the Mexican countryside where Native Mexicans live in dignity and peace, free from economic hardships. The reference does not necessarily point specifically to Philadelphia in the northern “model republic,” but it does place both the United States and Mexico in competition

1 88   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

for the mantle of democracy’s guiding light. Pizarro here, in an extension of the ideological argument in Prieto’s invasion poems, plays with the notion that a revealed hypocrisy in the United States demands a new American attempt at creating the ideal state. La Nueva Filadelfia thus instantiates a crosscultural political synthesis, a projection mediating at once a desire to follow the United States and an equally fundamental need to locate an authentic Mexican identity. Pizarro’s utopianism generates complexity because it requires distinguishing the actions of the United States from its ideals, writing from a sense of compulsion and urgency owing to two large historical facts. First, Pizarro published El monedero during a period of civil conflict between reformist and reactionary factions and near the beginning of the French occupation—that is, a time when the need for an effective national blueprint could not have been more urgent. Second, the 1847 invasion and military defeat had all but destroyed the moral authority of the nation that had been liberal Mexico’s ideal republic but which had now put into question the very existence of Mexico and Mexicans. These are discomfiting problems, but one resulting trajectory in El monedero leads to an idealized blending of political cultures located in a Mexican terrain ultimately (though not initially) immune to the maladies of the world. Utopia, then, is for Pizarro what Mexican democratic liberalism is for Prieto, a space in which Mexico emerges as the true standard for American political progress.12 Pizarro, however, perhaps due to the freedom of the novel form combined with just enough distance from the violence of the U.S.-Mexican war, borrows explicitly from U.S. American exceptionalist thought. One of the novel’s first major clarifying commentaries on the tension between the United States’ actions and its ideals occurs during an early discussion about La Nueva Filadelfia. Although part of a longer aside about the world’s failed societies, this particular critique of the United States by Father Luis repeats a typical Mexican assessment of the northern menace, redefining Mexico as the realm of true democracy: Apart from this, you do not realize that Mexico is without the doubt the country where there are the fewest obstacles to those who want to better themselves regardless of their race, recall how many priests, how many lawyers and how many doctors and how many famous artists of all types are in the capital and in all the Republic, that do not have even one drop of European blood. If you went to the United States, you would be shocked, you would die from the insults of being cast out of banquets for not being white. Truly, they commit this bar-

Mexican Self-Consciousness  

1 89

barism with blacks and mulattos; but Mexico counts among its greatest glories the establishment of equality among all the races.13 This admonition suggests mainly that La Nueva Filadelfia responds to the political disillusionment left in the wake of the U.S. American invasion, but it nonetheless asserts that Mexico’s idealized racial tolerance makes visible a fundamentally nobler nature. Pizarro does not assert directly an ideal mixture of Mexican-U.S. political ideologies, but the passage above comes relatively early in the novel, and it categorically indicts the United States for hypocrisy by foregrounding a critical liberal value—the belief that all people (chauvinistically men, in this case) can “better themselves.” Furthermore, it grounds its argument in a critique of slavery in the United States, emphasizing in that way that Father Luis uses broadening democratic ideals to judge the United States. The United States may have defeated us, the novel begins to imply, but at least we in Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. In the fantasy of Pizarro’s social engineering, liberal ideology emerges even more explicitly than this preliminary discussion might suggest. It moves from the early moments in the novel when Hénkel and Father Luis justify and give shape to their imagined community into an exposition of the specific details of its daily operation. They base their design on mathematical principles that simultaneously suggest Native American spirituality: a system of homes built as concentric circles around a central area of schools, factories, and community centers, the complex having four main entrances, each aligned with a cardinal point.14 Later they devise a schedule according to which both children and adults spend their days studying and working, and end their days with evening recreation enjoyed in “strict decency” and “pure morality.”15 Although Pizarro’s blueprint for La Nueva Filadelfia seems to have been made up of equal parts seriousness and self-aware wistfulness, a selfconsciously fantastic conceit, it nonetheless suggests the belief that the basic elements proposed—if not the daily logistics—were to some degree politically possible as well as moral. At their core, La Nueva Filadelfia’s governing policies, community schedules, and political philosophies combine democratic and mercantile values typically associated with the United States with a more Mexican contribution offered in terms of Catholic spirituality. To an extent, such grand syntheses occur routinely in utopian visions, but liberal values and religious spirituality are particularly significant in post-invasion Mexico, as the Mexican body politic tended to divide along precisely these same lines, with liberals persisting in their devotion to democratic reform and conservatives holding steadfast to their own reactionary loyalties to a church always

1 9 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

zealously guarding its power. Thus, Pizarro’s vision negotiates not just the external questions of whether to adopt, and on what terms, the U.S. model but also maneuvers to resolve an internal conservative-liberal conflict, a national fault line made unavoidable, and painfully tangible, by the U.S. invasion and victory.16 Utopias figure often in Latin American literature, and scholars have addressed them from a number of perspectives. The hemisphere’s legacy of discovery and disruption has deeply, perhaps permanently, ingrained the dream of worldly perfection, and a study centered on the subject would consider the United States not as an influence but as a nation with a parallel utopian premise. But not all utopias are created equal. The religious foundation of the U.S. national mythology—that is, the narratological projection rather than the history—stands in contrast to the more worldly vision of the Latin American republics that broke away from a totalizing imperial-religious authority with the intent, one might say, to move forward into time rather than to escape it. In The Puritan Origins of the American Self, Sacvan Bercovitch draws a distinction between a utopian vision and a millennial belief, the former a characteristic of the American South and the Spanish colonies in the Americas, the latter a quality of New England Puritan culture.17 He notes a historical awareness of cultural discontinuity implicit in Latin American utopianism, a rupture from identity that stands in contrast to the North American project, which stresses eternal continuity. But Pizarro’s ideal paradise in El monedero declares its utopian timelessness in almost millennial terms reminiscent of North American–New England religious mythology. Father Luis concludes his laying out of the basic scheme of La Nueva Filadelfia by explaining to Fernando the community’s basic purpose, its meaning: “Let us sow this precious seed, which perhaps has been reserved for planting in the Americas, God perhaps wanting that when the civilization which came forth in the name of Evangelism shall have become corrupted by its ties to interests no longer Christian, then the New World should offer its virgin breast for the true consolations of humanity to set down profound and everlasting roots, so that they should uplift, invigorate, and purify those generations born in manifestly false traditions, and having realized such a future, should then be watched over by all forms of tyrannies. Let us have the courage to tear away our veil, which in any case is transparent to all the world, without fear of being left alone, for it is enough for us to be armed

Mexican Self-Consciousness  

191

with the true doctrines of the Church, and to have our eyes and hopes fixed upon the Lord.”18 This description of the New World offering its virginal body for the conception and birth of an American savior nation echoes a U.S. American nationalism that sanctioned the dismembering invasion of Mexico and a future not only utopian but predestined: God has decreed that Mexico will one day “perhaps” become the source of the universal good society, but such a society must nonetheless come to pass somewhere in the Americas. Such utopian criticality merely brings forward the reformist energies embedded within the ideal. “As an unrealized possibility,” Ruppert notes, “utopia remains in constant opposition to existing society, an examination of the conditions of possibility that serves the essential function of making us aware of the distance that separates actuality and potentiality. By making us more conscious of the gap between what is and what might be, utopia performs the important task of increasing our awareness of the historicity of all social life and the tentativeness of all established systems of order.”19 Yet for all his optimism, Father Luis reveals a fundamental hesitation when he refers to the need to “tear away our veil,” suggesting that at some level the Mexican nation may not be entirely willing or able to accept responsibility for a providential self-definition. In such gestures, Pizarro signals that Mexico can never narrate essentialism as developed in United States, can never go back in time to anchor its nationalist rhetoric in an ahistorical vision, can never, in effect, ignore the “tentativeness of all established systems of order.” I may be reading too much into Pizarro’s hasty fantasizing, but it is already an admission of defeat to claim an essential truth obscured by a veil, ideology being most operative when unrecognized. In any case, within such built-in limitations, Pizarro imagines a new, Mexican Philadelphia, putting forward a new vision of American redemption that halts the corrosions of time. But the text never quite forgets the differences between the terms of actual Mexico and those of a millennial longing for Mexico. We begin to get a sense of Pizarro’s caution about unrestrained positivism from the way that even in the novel, La Nueva Filadelfia exists as a scene of perfection removed some distance from the novel’s main action. Indeed, not until the Epilogue does Pizarro actually describe the community in detail. Up to that point, Pizarro has kept readers of the novel very much in the position of its characters—reading about the village in letters Father Luis sends to Fernando to keep him apprised of the community’s progress. Even an attack

1 9 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

by the Mexican army that severely damages buildings and threatens to destroy the project appears in an epistolary aside. Moreover, the novel’s featured bandit, el Tigre, an Otomí20 native, clandestinely reads one of these letters and responds by stressing a fundamental—if typical—distinction between his world and the perfection of La Nueva Filadelfia: “If at the start of my life,” the Otomí said bitterly, dropping the letter, “I had encountered an Association such as this, I would not have lost my way! My evil instincts would have been corrected by good example, rather than being exacerbated, as it happened, by bad treatment.”21 That kind of commentary amounts to little more than banal propaganda, but it also serves to stress the large chasm between the actual world and the refuge of La Nueva Filadelfia. The utopian commune comes to seem phantasmagoric and self-conscious, a metafiction staging its own artifice. After he finishes the letter, a new vision energizes el Tigre, and he resolves to mend his ways: “Where? Where is this place where the poor man is no longer humiliated, where work is dignified and remunerated,” shouted el Tigre, rising. “I shall go, yes, I shall go immediately with my María [his daughter]. I shall be the last of its colonists; I shall give my riches to the directors, and I shall die in peace, because when I die, she shall have better parents than those which she has had.”22 El Tigre is shot and killed before he can achieve this romantic fantasy, a predictable demise given his villainy, but significant because through such moments the novel prevents elements of the unruly realm of the world from finding their way into the Mexican utopia, as if Pizarro’s perfect society cannot even communicate or interact with the real, outer world. Instead, La Nueva Filadelfia, like many utopias before and after, imagines a clean slate, yet distanced as a narrative outside possibility. In this and other ways, the novel never quite reconciles utopia and humanity, nor does it deploy a narrative about the inherent character of Mexico as a utopia. Even the love matches between its main characters—Fernando and Rosita, Father Luis and María— are qualified. As the novel progresses, we discover that it is María who really loves Fernando, and so his final pairing with Rosita comes to seem perfunctory and inconclusive. For a moment, we are convinced of an authorial pessimism.

Mexican Self-Consciousness  

1 93

And then we are witness to a narratological miracle: in the amazing Epilogue, Pizarro depicts both couples—Fernando and Rosita, Luis and María— living fantastically happy lives with perfect families in the perfect worlds of La Nueva Filadelfia (there are two such utopian communities by that point), as if Pizarro’s more complex ending and all its implications about the disillusioning effects of living in the real world had all simply been swept aside. For all that, the Epilogue feels more like an afterthought, and takes place ten years after the penultimate chapter, now separated not just by literary attitude and space but also by time, an unrelenting insistence on a boundary between utopia and reality. Indeed, as Pizarro begins the Epilogue, we see the community from afar, the reader gazing along with President Juárez himself, and a political and military entourage escaping from conservative forces that had in 1858 rebelled against the Reforma movement and seized power. “Let us go,” one of the characters says to the group: “This is the promised land. God has wanted us to see it, just as the Holy Book says Moses saw the land of Canaan. We shall then go to our graves, hearing, instead of plaudits of no great import, the foolish shouts of those who call us impious and thieves; but we will be greatly consoled in knowing that we help and serve humanity, that in our country the ultimate effort is made to improve its moral and physical condition.”23 The characters atop this Mexican version of Mount Pisgah view the promised land only to recognize the uncrossable boundary between their time and some future time of redemption. The passage could be construed as ironic, or even satiric, but there is nothing else in the novel to cast doubts on the need to improve Mexico’s “moral and physical” condition. But, somewhat transparently, a novel such as this that concludes with an epilogue signals its own irresolution, the coda acknowledging the main narrative body’s unanswered questions and loose ends. In fact, the problem that generates the need for a second ending is the basic problem of American nationality, where nationality—because it is of the world, the sign itself of modernity’s rupture (pace Bhabha)—contradicts and still requires utopia. Despite the hopeful presence of La Nueva Filadelfia, Pizarro did not write a novel about a utopia. He titled his book El monedero, which translates as The Counterfeiter. The title thereby points not to the utopian vision but to the novel’s main plot, a fundamentally antiromantic narrative dealing with the things of the world, emphasizing criticism rather than redemption. The novel will be, in the end, a lyric of Mexican

1 94   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

nationality orchestrated in the minor key of national introspection, concerning itself not with the problems of happy or even unhappy marriage unions but with an existential, agonized quest for political form.24 The conventional expectations are met by antitheses: the hero is an antihero, the conclusion is inconclusive, the Epilogue raises questions rather than provides answers, the marriages damn rather than redeem (until the Epilogue, that is), a belief in conventional love gives way to questions about Mexican destiny. Social failure rather than a utopian dream dominates the novel, surrounding it as Mexico itself surrounds the ideal village.25 By dwelling so intensively on Hénkel’s internal journeys and Mexico’s national problems, Pizarro weights his novel toward critique rather than reintegration. He thus gives his novel a particularly dark cast, emphasizing a search for meaning instead of projecting a successful social synthesis. As a writer of a national novel, he would have to deal with marriage, but it is equally clear that Pizarro sensed that romantic unions would remain dormant without a utopian sense of purpose. He failed to bring the two together, but not for lack of effort. El monedero is a long novel, the length perhaps being testament to Pizarro’s obsessive, meandering contemplations before settling on a tacked-on happy ending. That such an ending occurs only in the Epilogue means that he never quite found a center for the national project, but, a bit more optimistically, that he knew he needed one.

Mexico’s Earthly Trial It might seem that the negativity, hesitation, and deferral outlined in the above discussion of El monedero’s utopia would be enough to make the point, enough to convince us that Pizarro never quite buys into national fantasy. But a surprise awaits us. As the novel nears its conclusion, readers learn that the title refers to Fernando Hénkel, the book’s extravagantly troubled protagonist. We learn, moreover, that he financed La Nueva Filadelfia with counterfeit coins, which he manufactured by diluting gold he brought back from California immediately before the U.S. takeover of Mexico City. Hénkel justifies the scheme with a resigned pragmatism, arguing that ends justify means in a harsh world where the poor are robbed and exploited by the rich.26 The perfect utopian world in the Epilogue rests on a ruthlessly practical rejection of certain ideals—capitalism, state government—in favor of others—equality, humanity, generosity, community. The revelation acknowledges the world as a morally variable place that must be accepted as part of the permanent human condition, and perhaps also criticizes capitalism as antihumanist. It is

Mexican Self-Consciousness  

1 95

not an entirely dystopian vision, but it nonetheless caps the melancholy that runs through the entire novel and suggests, as Alba-Koch has argued, that the novel brings forward Pizarro’s own ambivalence about the native population, sentiments informed by a suspicion of unrestrained capitalism and a denunciation of racist hierarchy.27 I mentioned earlier the novel’s penultimate conclusion in which Hénkel marries Rosita, even though the narrative at this point strongly implies that his true desires lie with María. This is significant because the novel begins precisely, almost routinely, as a foundational romance should: with a young Mexican native, a businessman of relatively moderate means, in love with a fair-skinned, blonde aristocrat. Under less troubled circumstances the final marriage would enact a romantic conclusion, but one of the novel’s strengths is that it resists pat answers and customary resolutions. El monedero’s extended concentration on heteroglossia (a spectrum of social registers and voices, duplicitous language, multiple plots) continually flirts with a parodying of romantic conventions, a tendency I ascribe to the novel’s focus on national and psychological disintegration resulting from the war, a coincidence between a modernistic unsettling and the cataclysm of battles and the invasion that began in 1846. Pizarro’s narrative does not address directly the U.S. American occupation. Few details about battles or national motivations enter into the novel’s main action. On the other hand, the novel’s time span coincides almost exactly with the war’s duration, beginning shortly before hostilities commence and concluding in 1848—except for the Epilogue, set a decade later. But crucially, the violent occupation of Mexico City by U.S. troops occurs at a pivotal point in the narrative, when the world of the primary characters in Mexico City permanently fractures under the pressure of unmitigated violence and economic disruption. The most brutal, most dramatic scenes of military confrontation with the invading North Americans occurs midway in the novel as U.S. troops literally—and metonymically—invade and ransack the Dávila home in September 1847, forcing its occupants to flee. The invasion, though never the novel’s overt preoccupation in terms of page count, constitutes more than dramatic background. In the depiction of the capital’s occupation, Pizarro enacts his conception of the yanqui attack both as an international injustice and as punishment for Mexico’s past sins, its “horrible discord.” Like other liberals of the moment, Pizarro saw Mexico’s recent history as national failure. “What enthusiasm can the people feel,” he writes, “to defend themselves when for half a century they have experienced all manners of ills whichever party was in control.”28 The only real hero of the novel, Mauricio, emerges at this midway point

1 96   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

to kill several U.S. soldiers. In surprisingly affecting, and violent, scenes, U.S. Americans capture and execute Mauricio. The episode works because Pizarro successfully transmutes the raw ore of his ideology into drama. His liberal convictions have previously led him to criticize, predictably, the Dávila family patriarch as a monarchist clinging to the past,29 and so it is noteworthy, and initially surprising, that the most overt example of U.S. American violence during the city’s occupation is Pizarro’s description of the attack on the Dávila home. Melodramatic it certainly is, but the attack confirms Pizarro’s liberal views, namely, that monarchism cannot survive in the contemporary world. The elder patriarchal Dávila dies in his sickbed after an illness just as the invaders break into his residence. One of them—a key figure I return to below—rapes the young daughter of Dávila’s private nurse while other U.S. troops ransack the home. Rosita and her servant, Clara (also her best friend), escape to live a life of near poverty and great toil. Terrible as this attack is, Pizarro frames it as a punishment for Dávila’s arrogance as much as a manifestation of evil yanqui injustice. The invading U.S. Americans who overwhelm the Dávila home embody pure villainy, nameless and faceless, drunk, uncouth, and immoral, but Pizarro offers no lamentations for Dávila, who stands in for the white, creole, racist and classist oppression afflicting Mexican society. Indeed, when Dávila’s body is carried to a cemetery, the bearers are a group of men from the lower economic sector, decidedly unmoved by the aristocrat’s death.30 Although Pizarro does inveigh against the invasion, blaming the United States for its hypocritical aggression, even for causing Mexico’s internal fragmentation, he aims his heaviest indictment against Mexicans for what he understands as a predilection for dissension (perhaps a standard lament of those with universal dreams).31 Basically, Pizarro writes the attack against Mexico as a cataclysm sent by divine will, a punishment for national sins, and as a cleansing that prepares for new glories. However, the redemption is intimated rather than narrated. The attack on the Dávila home and the invasion of Mexico City remain essentially destructive. The domestic and civic collapse precipitates Rosita’s fall from aristocratic authority, and although it leads to a beneficial, uplifting change in her character from aristocratic arrogance toward compassion and generosity, it does not lead smoothly to a union with Fernando. Indeed, the tragic death of Mauricio and the fracturing of the Dávila household never yield romantic solutions; these episodes of death and loss remain discordant and disturbing, anathemic to the paradigm of redemptive romance. This is why, as a key event that alters so many lives, the violence in the Dávila home permanently dark-

Mexican Self-Consciousness  

1 97

Heroíca defensa de la garita de Belen [sic], from the Album pintoresco. Mexican troops are depicted attempting to hold a defensive position at a key entry point to Mexico City, the Gate of Belén. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.

ens the novel’s project, overpowering any earlier intimations of conventional closure. It must remain a matter of conjecture whether Pizarro intended this much, or whether his writing faltered at the need to bring the dismembering of Mexico into the confines of romance. We cannot dismiss, however, the way the novel’s utopian dreaming never forgets the war’s destructive energy. The invasion of Mexico City constitutes the most overt example of earthly annihilation, that moment in the novel when an entire world collapses. But the novel has been countering romantic illusions from start to finish. That is, the counterfeit coins alluded to above can come to seem the distillation of the novel’s lack of faith in potential redemption—the currency of romantic salvation tainted by the baser metals of contingency. Although the central plot concerns a young man’s search for love and an existential search for his own self, the narrative’s dominant characteristics are critique, doubt, social anguish, and political disillusion. Pizarro may have set out to write a novel about the absence of identity, but he gravitated toward the war as an event

1 98   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

that revealed fatal preexisting national fractures. The novel begins with an almost paradigmatic gesture toward convention—a garden party at which the dark-skinned Native Mexican Fernando attempts to claim the criolla blonde Rosita’s love. But no sooner does Pizarro set this stage than he brushes it aside by sending Fernando on an erratic, wandering, love-sick course that comes to its first resting point in the impoverished Mexican countryside. From this episode forward, the novel largely ignores the primary Fernando-Rosita love affair until the last chapters, turning instead to lost origins, the war, profound blindness, corruption, conservative oppressions, troubled utopian projects, and social criticism. The Rosita-Fernando romance may never entirely vanish, but so many other events and characters intervene that the main love story recedes to near irrelevance by the novel’s final pages. Romance has as one of its basic conditions the joining of oppositions, resolutions that mediate between contradictory social forces. Thus, to send the German immigrant–reared Fernando Hénkel on a journey into his own Mexican Indian past might well have been contained within the bounds of a predictable romantic narrative. By venturing momentarily into the mountains, he might have become the perfect Indian man for the ideal criolla woman in order to represent a hopeful, Juárez-evoking, blending of race, culture, language, and so on—more or less a conventional myth of Mexican hybridity. But Pizarro never defaults to this formula. In a clear example of his willingness, perhaps compulsion, to counter conventional expectations, he has Hénkel meet, or seem to meet, his real Indian father in a scene that is anything but hopeful. As part of the marriage festivities in a nearby village, the community asks Fernando to award free plots of land to the most needy of that area’s poor, one of whom is his father, or a man who Pizarro specifically suggests might likely be Fernando’s father. The moment of mystic recognition slips away, leaving readers uncertain as to the true nature of the relationship between Hénkel and the old man. The scene concludes as the older figure almost, but not quite, recognizes Hénkel as his own lost son: “. . . could this generous gentleman be my little Juan, who was left in Mexico when I was conscripted? That voice which moved me in my innermost soul! The resemblance to my other sons in the military! But no, old age has made me delirious; my poor little Juan, defenseless, without knowing the streets of the city, surely must have starved, or if he found someone to give him a piece of bread, he surely grew up and became conscripted like me, like his brothers, and now would be in a hospital, mutilated, or begging in the streets.”32

Mexican Self-Consciousness  

1 99

Under different conditions, a different writer would have converted the scene into a moment of recognition and recovered origins. After all, at this point in the novel, readers already know that, years earlier, Hénkel’s true father abandoned his son after, in fact, being conscripted, and Pizarro writes the scene to suggest that these two men do feel an undeniable psychic bond.33 But he does not unite them and, as in the passage above, he hints at rather than declares the connection. In fact, the moment serves as a crystallizing metaphor for Hénkel’s journey, which will repeatedly bring him close to redemption, only to deny him answers and resolutions. For the central character in a novel with nationalist intentions, Hénkel walks a categorically troubled path. For instance, we again catch Pizarro’s penchant for criticality through Hénkel’s idyllic, bucolic love for the native Mexican maiden María, the beautiful daughter of the bandit, el Tigre. María returns his love, but the two are destined to find other partners. Indeed, the key point about María is that Hénkel never accepts his true feelings for her, always myopically fixated instead on his romantic illusions of Rosita. Pizarro makes Hénkel’s lack of insight a conventional paradigm when Hénkel becomes blinded after he hits his head falling off a precipice in a dark cave. (El Tigre’s henchmen have left him in the cave in the belief he will die there.) Hénkel will remain blind for the rest of the tale until the fantastic Epilogue, by which point the loving ministrations of Rosita will have restored his vision (maybe only physiologically). The arc of the story would suggest an eventual redemption, a story of a young man made to face a series of ordeals that must eventually lead to triumph and regeneration. But a shadowy, deeply qualified morality darkens even Hénkel’s greatest accomplishment, the use of his gold to refinance La Nueva Filadelfia, when he admits that he has diluted the gold with other metals. The centrality of counterfeiting as metaphor becomes a bit too schematic, but it does remind the reader that this is a romance novel that is not actually romantic, about a hero who is not actually heroic, and ends in a resolution that is not conclusive, because the Epilogue occurs outside the rest of the novel. Instead, the novel comments on suffering and endurance, and above all on the slippery boundary between truth and falsehood. It is as if Pizarro never decides between the need for a new dream state and the dangers of self-delusion, as if the constant push toward national narrative coherence keeps resisting the centrifugal pull of historical crisis. Further, it is never clear what Hénkel’s basic crime or sin or fault has been. Pride? Alienation? An inability to know himself? All of the above? He suffers grandly just the same, and endures, although just barely. True, the tacked-on

2 0 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Epilogue shows him in domestic triumph, but until that moment, Hénkel’s narrative has described a descent into deepening pain and loss, a life pessimistically suggesting the condition of Mexican society in terms that see the hero as particularly and distinctively emblematic not just of a nation immediately adjacent to a rapacious United States but, even more abstractly, as a figure for the human condition in general. This is the turn toward abstraction that begins redefining the trauma of a particular war as an element of ahistorical identity. The United States comes to represent not so much an invading country as a manifestation of worldly evil, the abstraction of Earth’s demons incarnated in a nineteenth-century nation. Pizarro actually conflates the two as he describes Rosita’s return to her family’s home before it has been repaired: “The destruction caused in part by abandonment, and much more by the Americans, offered a sad example of the fast dissolution of the affairs of humanity.”34 I have been reviewing Hénkel’s interior crises because they will become, as the novel concludes, forcefully aligned with the U.S. invasion itself, when Pizarro Suárez unites both his image of a duplicitous United States and Hén­ kel’s martyrdom in the crucial figure of a supremely evil U.S. American, a veteran of the invasion who becomes Hénkel’s false confidant and who will prove to be a primary testament to Hénkel’s spiritual blindness. Several villains appear throughout the tale’s various turns and settings, but none acts with more nefariousness than Enrique (real name William) Walker, a tall and handsome American military officer who befriends Hénkel and claims falsely (thus another counterfeiter) that he wants to become a Mexican citizen. This norteamericano is important for a number of reasons: earlier he had personally led the charge into and destruction of the Dávila home by U.S. troops, and it was he who had there raped a young girl.35 Then he schemes to kidnap Rosita for Don Justo Amable, a sleazy businessman who desires the virginal prize for himself. Furthermore, Walker embodies fundamental U.S. American deception, because his claims of friendship represent nothing more than part of an elaborate ruse to win Hénkel’s confidence in a scheme to steal his money. No ordinary villain, Walker collects at a single point both Mexico’s national calamity and Hénkel’s private anguish. Walker dies in a gunfight, but because he has so effectively violated the perimeters of national and individual integrity, his death comes too late to do any good. Those familiar with U.S. aggressions in Latin America will also recall the infamous Texas “ranger” Samuel Walker, leader of a band of volunteers during the U.S.-Mexican War remembered for his and his men’s brutality, and will no doubt also note that perhaps the most infamous filibuster was also named William Walker, a renegade politi-

Mexican Self-Consciousness  

201

cal operative who met an untimely end by firing squad in Honduras. Perhaps Pizarro’s William Walker alludes chiefly to the historical version. Either way, this norteamericano brings a near annihilation. Perhaps again too obviously, Pizarro pairs Walker with Hénkel, so that Hénkel, as Mexico’s avatar, falls victim to the duplicitous norteamericano’s deceptions. But at one point, when Hénkel travels to the town of Tenancingo, Pizarro writes that he was “accompanied by Walker, who by mere custom had become a necessary companion,”36 a phrase suggesting not just victimization but complicity. Hénkel, always somewhat blind even from the novel’s beginning, has fallen into a trap, Pizarro here evoking a correspondence between naiveté and moral weakness. The narrative in effect asks readers to blame Hénkel as much as or more than they fault Walker’s manipulations and deceptions. Like editorial writers who struggled to condemn U.S. America and hold on to their liberal ideals, Pizarro senses he must balance his aspersions against U.S. American duplicity and against Mexican naiveté. Walker, in a sense, defines Hénkel. Pizarro casts the evil U.S. American as a greedy, immoral invader, but he brings into relief Hénkel’s inability to distinguish between the real and the false. If it were not for Pizarro’s final flight of fantasy in the Epilogue, Hénkel would end the tale in a permanent state of self-delusion, married to a woman he does not love, blind physically, but also ignorant of his own true desire and nature. Walker thus acts as a confirming agent, extravagantly clarifying Hénkel’s gullibility, pointing the reader toward Hénkel’s (Mexico’s) own interior faults, acting at the individual level as the U.S. army performs at the national level, a cataclysmic force destroying the dream of integrity and coherence. Like the invasion itself, Walker illuminates a problem more than he opens a path for renewal. The evil U.S. American shadows Hénkel, who, it turns out, is indeed very far from God, or at least far from any immediate salvation. Demon-like, Walker exposes Hénkel’s failing, a staggering innocence that will lead him into the cave of his own personal darkness, where he will wander lost until he injures himself and nearly dies, to be saved by María, a woman he later rejects in favor of a romantic illusion. Little here actually indicts the United States as a specific external, historical enemy, even if in the figure of Walker the United States stands for a bane of the Mexican condition, a figure who promises friendship and assistance only to seize on Mexico’s own innocence in order to steal and injure. To this limited extent, Pizarro manages to slightly rewrite Mexico’s defeat into a larger story of human frailty. Even if only in a brief glimmer, Walker’s evil shifts the meaning of the war. This is, finally, the basic point of El monedero. It is not primarily a novel

2 0 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

about utopian possibility but more about its related converse—quotidian reality.37 From the outset, Pizarro interlaces his novel with commentaries on the Church, the military, economic system, racism, civil war—in short, all manner of Reformista critique. Its greatest counterfeiting scheme is Pizarro’s injection of the diluting materials of nonfictive social commentary into the space of national romance. The novel thus has all the outer attributes of romance, but an internal core of meaning deeply critical of and antithetical to marriage and love as metaphors for social and national meaning. Pizarro’s integrity as a writer emerges most visibly in this contradiction between form and function. Given his propensities, it is not surprising that one of the most evil characters, the aforementioned Don Amable, renders a drunken diatribe at the end of the novel, excoriating businessmen, bankers, gamblers, and politicians for effectively destroying Mexico: The liberal who proclaims absolute liberty for the poor fulfills his vocation, and speaks at the same time an unpardonable stupidity, as there is no greater slavery than that of an empty stomach; the reactionary who dreams of turning things back to the year of eight [1808] is an idiot who also fulfills his vocation, wanting to make a river run back to its source.38 Such sentiments are significant because of their withdrawal from the pat answers of previous political paradigms. They signal a search for new modes, a critical temperament infused into the novel from beginning to end, an almost exasperated discontent with prevailing forms and mythologies. In a sense, Pizarro ultimately targets national romance itself, which is another way of inaugurating a search for ultimate ideological value, a position that might seem merely discordant and lost, but because it recognizes its nonresolution it also recognizes a need for meaning across a public collectivity. Pizarro demonstrates his courage as a writer most when he indicts and convicts Hénkel for his illusionary mode of life and never allows him any redemption, even after María saves him from the cave. Perhaps he can allow himself to be severe because, as a writer, and perhaps Hénkel’s alter ego, he has constructed a place to escape to, an idyllic village far from the day-to-day world. But even there, even in La Nueva Filadelfia, in this ultimate romance, Hénkel’s counterfeiting leaves a permanent mark of disturbance. We learn of the financial ruse not in the main body of the novel but, significantly, in the Epilogue, the very sanctum sanctorum of moral perfection. “Yes,” Hénkel

Mexican Self-Consciousness  

203

tells Luis in the novel’s concluding moments as he reveals that he made false coins, “from the very first days that I spent here helping you with the task of its [La Nueva Filadelfia’s] founding, I understood that the work we undertook would have to have money, and although we had enough for the [initial] attempt, the most minor setback would have been disastrous.”39 Even here within the triumphant final chapter, Hénkel’s role as protagonist never achieves heroic status. In crudely practical terms, Hénkel saves the day, but he lacks any truly exemplary qualities. He survives his fall and blindness and, by force of authorial will, finds true love, but Pizarro writes these moments not as indicators of Hénkel’s internal constitution but as fortuitous turns. The utopian conclusion validates the perfect villages but has little effect on Mexico itself. As romance, the tale fails. But as a more openly critical investigation it speaks forthrightly about Mexican society. It claims a mythic solution in a new blend of U.S. and Mexican values (the utopian community borrows freely from Enlightenment principles), but it also rejects a complete national commitment to such a vision, almost as if belief in a utopian mandate at some level was too analogous to the arrogance of the northern neighbor and therefore intrinsically suspect. For Pizarro as for Prieto, to be Mexican means to stand in permanent criticism of U.S. American expansionism and idealism—which also means to be eternally suspicious of national idealism itself. Pizarro writes from that space that desires nationness but also already desires a different alternative, the pressures of war and disruption having been too intense to alleviate with mere fantasies of national heroes. To be Mexican post-1848 in this narrative sphere means to be an American self-prohibited from inhabiting the New World of endless possibility. It is to be, like Hénkel, always burdened by self-consciousness and the deceptions of the earth. Thus, like Prieto, Pizarro finds himself drawn toward a national utopia, but again like Prieto, he must grapple with the disenchanting reality of the United States. Paradoxically, while Prieto’s grand lamentations actually contain the undercurrents of a bold declaration of Mexican supremacy, Pizarro’s romance of a successful utopian commune finally cannot escape a pervading sense of defeat. But it does enact a grand contrition and confession, rendered on an epic narrative scale. To explore and then discover an internal failing offers a limited hope for regeneration. In El monedero, Pizarro’s utopian community reminds readers of the ultimate objective, even as the novel concentrates on destroying Mexico’s prevailing beliefs—a narratological bifurcation that oscillates between radical doubt and belief. And even though the Epilogue’s redemption remains blatantly unconvincing, Pizarro has nonetheless

2 0 4   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

shifted the space of destiny from materiality to ideology, from a fantasy of cultural continuity to one of social invention. The way forward, Pizarro implies, requires radical breaks with the past—even if his own solution remains plagued by the real world. Pizarro always remains a nineteenth-century Mexican politician and writer, and so his idea of a radical break might seem limited to contemporary readers, but the basic impetus come through. What’s gone before no longer works. Pizarro deserves recognition above all for his awareness of the basic linkage between Mexican nationality and the United States invasion. By the time Altamirano took Pizarro’s materials and refigured them into what became a key work of Mexican literary nationalism, the U.S. invasion had receded against the more triumphant expulsion of the French. After the conflict of 1846–1848, both U.S. America and Mexico engaged in civil wars that reasserted unity and national independence. But to recognize a gap in the collective memory today is to sense how national identity in Mexico had a deeply agonistic and formative encounter with the United States. To read Pizarro’s sprawling work is to see into the national crucible of la invasión, to discern the elements of modern Mexico in disarray and in the unfinished process of reintegration. As we leave Hénkel in his domestic bliss, we sense that La Nueva Filadelfia remains isolated, cut off from Mexico, that deep down Hénkel might still long for a María, for a Mexico he senses is still possible but he is not yet able to imagine. The melancholy infusing Hénkel arises from a troubled relationship between the author’s nationalizing project and the clear awareness of the fragility, the artificiality, of the modern Mexican nation. Pizarro’s text illuminates the impossibility of forgetting within the Mexican nation, and, also, the irresistible demand for national fantasy, dream, and amnesia. Perhaps Mexican nationalism always remains self-aware of itself as a construction, a tradition cognizant of its own invention—hence the ever-present thread of irony in Mexican culture. The illusions of given, thus permanent, identity dissipate under the pressures of modern existentialism. Indeed, Pizarro’s novel reveals its deep conflicts in the longing to forget its own project, at once highly national, arguing for a Mexico within a realm of equivalent nations, and also resolutely exceptionalist, reaching for a utopian Mexican state unlike any other. What the contradiction resembles is in fact the tension found in the very stresses of globalization, which erode essentialist projects even as they generate projects of essentialist recovery. In Mexico, the nation-state as utopia may thus always remain caught between the forces of narrative meaning and those of historical, parodic erosion.40

Mexican Self-Consciousness  

205

The Agonies of Identity Lamentation, shame, anger, loss—these terms frame the first interpretations of la invasión norteamericana in Mexico. But under certain conditions, trauma can give way to reconstitution, or at least the impetus toward reintegration. What is re-formed never recovers the past, and so arises the nostalgic longing for what once was, nostalgia signaling the irrecoverable break with one social order and the living in present time in another. Or so goes the story, the new story, the conclusion that Pizarro wrote toward in his long, meandering, complex, grimly bitter novel. Then also, throughout my discussion of both Prieto and Pizarro I have avoided asserting definitive features of just what it meant, or now means, to be Mexican, beyond the general propositions about Mexican democratic idealism, in part because it is the hunger, the modernist longing for a stable, purposeful identity, that locates the national moment more than would romantically charged claims of essentialism. To study what Mexicans really are means concentrating not on the propaganda of the state but on the national and global conditions that generate national mythologies. The agonized response to la guerra fronteriza began the reinvestment of Mexican nationality with meaning, but a meaning informed, perhaps even constituted, by irony, satire, deferral, and self-consciousness. This mode of Mexican skepticism, self-referential and comic, resonates with global forms of awareness that suspend nation-state boundaries in favor of a range of identity parameters that range from the local to the national to the international, yet another triad that will center the following chapter, which focuses on the literary responses by Mexican Americans. But for Pizarro, and Prieto, the objective remained the nation-state, for them the preeminent frame for social meaning. Any study of Mexican social history must recognize the embryonic impetus toward nationality already coalescing before the nineteenth century. But Pizarro’s novel and Prieto’s poetry show that an energized, highly sharpened self-criticism, and a desire to unite conservative and liberal factions into a single nation-state, appeared immediately after the U.S. invasion and, in the case of El monedero, were located retroactively in the 1847 agonies of war and defeat. Because of its intensely disruptive impact, the U.S. American invasion invested national writing with new, ideological projections, partly because it required Mexican intellectuals to shape identity through narratological processes rather than relying as it had on celebrations of cultural materiality. In other words, the massive defeat itself had to be imbued with meaning, it had to be interpreted, literally rewritten, not merely memorialized; it had to be

2 0 6   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

consciously fashioned (minted?) into a national story, and it would have to be a particular story distinct from other Latin American stories because of Mexico’s unique geographic and political relationships to the United States. This is why la guerra fronteriza prompted meditations about what Mexico meant, in addition to what Mexico was. Modern nationalism inserts meaning into the imagined and geographic boundaries of nations, a fiction constructed to mediate reality and contingency; and the war with the United States precipitated at least the awareness of the need for self-definition as well as the hard truths of catastrophe. Indeed, before and during the war, triumphalist Mexican editorials occasionally described the conflict as a new war for independence that had to be won to preserve Mexico’s very existence. La guerra fronteriza, then, may best be seen, as some historians in fact have seen it, as a catalyst, an agent that reacted with existing materials. As a triggering agent, it stands as a crucial factor in the liberalism that would emerge in later years as a prevailing if always troubled constituent of modern Mexican nationalism. North of the new border, however, a population of disenfranchised Mexican Americans began confronting the complexities of dual nationalities, languages, and cultures—the buffetings of what today we may describe as a global condition of transgressed boundaries. In certain ways, these Mexican Americans, or perhaps more precisely U.S. Mexicans, found themselves already questioning nationality, inventing alternative identities, and making invention itself the locus of both despair and possibility.

Mexican American Visions

Five

Grief and Liberation in Global Time-Space

“You will some day be master of Rancho La Pama de Cristo,” she told the eldest, Santiago. “It was your grandfather’s dream, which he built into reality. It was my entire life. Santiago, be worthy of Rancho La Palma, and the things for which it stands.” —From Caballero Mexican American writing about the U.S.-Mexican War embodies the violence between the United States and Mexico. It emerges from the sorrows of destruction and voices the yearning for meaning generated by the terrors of war. Yet these texts also drive toward singularity within paradigms of multipolarity. The result brings together the seductions, definitions, and disillusionments that circulate in many U.S. American texts discussed in previous chapters—with the reverberating longings for form, memory, and meaning that infuse Mexican responses with a potent blend of grief and vision. The confluence arises not because these writers are both Mexican and U.S. American (U.S. Mexican might be a better term) but rather because border writing already requires a complex stance toward the dreams of coherence and the fears of dissipation. Said another way, Mexican American literature about the war brings into relief how writers from Charles Averill to Nicolás Pizarro Suárez were themselves imbricated in a border zone of their own, not one between the United States and Mexico but that nebulous territory between time and timelessness.

2 0 8   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

In Chapter 1, I posited that Mexicans and Mexican Americans constitute agents of incoherence because of their associations with a rupturing event, the U.S.-Mexican War, and this may seem to imply that disaggregation and fragmentation lie at the center of what Mexicans and Mexican Americans are about, as if there could be no way to incorporate them/us into a stabilizing communal narrative. Chapters 3 and 4 have shown that, from a Mexican perspective, it was the invading, violent U.S. American army that represented the agent of chaos. Mexican Americans would perhaps seem doomed to wander forever in the global desert of non-nationality, forever without a welcoming home. Unless, perhaps, the space of the nation takes on elements of the global desert itself. This chapter argues that Mexican American writing about the U.S.-Mexican War deploys a multicentric, globalist ethic that values the nation-state as only one effective source of identity, to be challenged and complemented by communal patterns of locality as well as by internationalist alliances. Understood thus, Mexican Americans embody not disarray but a particular instantiation of Arjun Appadurai’s “plural, serial, contextual and mobile” patriotisms.1 To rewrite the narrative of the U.S. American nation may then require not a new narrative but an ensemble of narrating strategies, and the complex, modulating harmonics of Mexican-American history and culture might then be understood as one chord, as it were, among many others. The difficulty lies in coordinating effective social and political action, in making meaning. Mexican American writing about the U.S.-Mexican War already emerges from precisely such questions and dilemmas. Moreover, when the matter of history, or time, is situated as the only operative agent within projections of Mexican Americans, what is actually being foregrounded is the way Mexican Americans bring forward Anglo American mutability and contingency. The reason, in other words, why Mexican Americans can seem disruptive to projects of “American” destiny is precisely because what is being isolated as their critical feature can be understood as more or less the given uncertainty, the discounting of the past, embedded within U.S. national life. Thus, the very issue at the core of the Mexican American presence in the United States emerges from the elision of our history—because constituted now as “our” history—Mexican American history simultaneously undermines Anglo American essentialism as it puts forth a counternarrative. Mexican Americans, like Mexicans and U.S. Americans, exist across a spectrum of narrative possibilities and like them are capable of powerful narrative strategies—even if these be at times circumscribed by selfreferentiality. Borders, as we know, produce their own centralities.

Mexican American Visions  

209

To explore the way Mexican American writers engage with the exigencies of writing from a certain kind of war zone, I will concentrate on the works of three Mexican American writers that deal with or have as critical background the U.S.-Mexican War: Jovita González, who along with her Anglo co-author Eve Raleigh (Margaret Eimer) wrote Caballero, a recently recovered historical novel about South Texas set during the war; Nash Candelaria, who published a New Mexican historical tetraology, the second volume of which, Not by the Sword, focuses on a ranching family near Albuquerque during the war; and, briefly, Maria Cristina (Mena) Chambers, whose Boy Heroes of Chapultepec: A Story of the Mexican War (1953) is another example of Mexican-American imaginative recovery that elaborates both non-national values and expressly national boundaries. In previous chapters I aligned nonfiction writing with more overtly imaginative projects, but with the Mexican American writers I have chosen I have had to deal with a particular dilemma. In a sense, the texts at issue are far removed from the war itself, having strong and direct ties to their own twentieth-century contexts. On the other hand, because their authors are Mexican and American, they may be said to be in some ways the most directly related to the war, springing forth from the very points of international and intercultural contact and conflict, generated as it were by the physical embodiments of the war’s effects. That said, twentieth-century Mexican American writers have critical parallels to a nineteenth-century domain of literature by Mexicans who experienced the war or other related conflicts and found themselves dealing with the dilemmas of complex national identity formations and undergoing a psychosocial shift from “Mexican” to categories of a greater ambiguity. In concluding this chapter I will suggest how these twentieth-century fictions offer points of critical comparison with, specifically, the memoir of Tejano revolutionary Juan Seguín, most famous for his participation in the Texian rebellion at the Alamo in 1836 but who survived that conflict, fought for Mexico during the U.S.-Mexican War, and still managed to remain politically active in Texas for most of his life. His memoirs offer a resonant analogue to the multicentricity explored here. However, as a transitional text between the Mexican writers discussed previously and the Mexican American writers that conclude this study, no text may better exemplify how the narrative iterations of U.S. invasion and territorial dispossession haunt the narrative fields on both sides of the border than María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s 1885 The Squatter and the Don. Before leaving the nineteenth century for the twentieth, I address briefly how Ruiz de Burton’s novel offers narratological comparisons that move from the agonistic zone of Mexico City at midcentury to the globalized arena of the early

2 1 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

twentieth century, in which Chicanas and Chicanos began producing literature that challenged, and at times reemphasized, national formations.

The Squatter and the Don: The Age of Chaos Change, or rather devastation, lies at the center of Ruiz de Burton’s novel, a text that manages to contain, just barely, a romance and a double indictment, three thematic centers that always seem on the verge of breaking apart. The main plot concerns the economic future of Don Mariano Alamar, who in the early 1870s is locked into what amounts to a death duel with Anglo squatters in Southern California. The titular squatter refers to William Darrell, also the father of Clarence, another leading character, who with the support and counsel of his mother has surreptitiously purchased the land William Darrell believes he has simply taken over from Don Mariano. In keeping with romantic conventions, cross-national sexual and political unions run throughout the work: Clarence Darrell and Mercedes Alamar anchor the love matches, but other Alamar men also have eyes for Anglo women. Further, some Anglos and Mexicans establish cooperative business projects, while others square off against each other over property ownership. As the novel concludes, Don Mariano and his Anglo business partner, James Mechlin, are effectively ruined when they buy land in San Diego, expecting to reap profits after the construction of a railroad, a scheme later foiled by rival railroad monopolists—an issue that focuses another of the novel’s thematic concerns, unrestrained predatory capitalism. The novel ends with the death from illness of Don Mariano, the suicide of James Mechlin, and the financial ruin of the Alamar family. Along the way, Ruiz de Burton pauses occasionally to excoriate U.S. American political institutions for their hypocrisy, which, in my reading, establishes a third narrative project—U.S. democracy as façade. The Squatter and the Don has drawn a great deal of scholarly interest since its republication in 1992 by the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, in Houston. One of the key debates has been whether it challenges hegemonic dominations based on race and class (Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita) or whether the novel participates precisely in systemic white racism and in class and gender oppression (José F. Aranda Jr. and Jesse Alemán). I return to this matter later, for my primary interest now lies in addressing the narratological parallels that might be drawn between the novel and the reformist writings of Prieto, and especially Pizarro, and then how

Mexican American Visions  

211

the novel might be understood also as a precursor to later Chicana/o writing about the U.S.-Mexican War. The clearest entry point lies through the novel’s recriminations against U.S. political hypocrisy, which sets the stage for an unsettled spatial landscape. The Squatter and the Don might seem immediately resistant, because much of it argues against governmental oppression and elision, continuing concerns for Mexican Americans today. In a sense, there are two familiar villains in The Squatter and the Don: a corrupt, ineffective, and myopic U.S. government and a corrupt, malicious, greed-driven business monopoly, the railroad, which corrupts that government. The novel concentrates on the first even as it begins and ends with a raging indictment of the second. Ruiz de Burton, the Californio daughter of an elite family, like the liberal reformer Pizarro frames her attack on the United States and its collusion with monopolistic enterprise in terms of hypocrisy. Early in the novel, Don Alamar offers to Melchin his thoughts regarding how the United States has treated the “Spano-Americans,” emphasizing that Congress does not pass laws that act retroactively to dispossess Anglo Americans of their properties. “But they do so quickly enough with us—with us, the Spano-Americans, who were to enjoy equal rights, mind you, according to the treaty of peace. This is what seems to me a breach of faith, which Mexico could never presuppose or prevent.”2 The charge parallels, at least to some extent, a basic Mexican tenet about the now exposed truth of the United States. A bit of Juárez’s aphorism might even be caught in the following passage, in which Don Mariano delivers one of his grim evaluations of U.S. laws that make it possible for squatters to claim land. “I shall always lay it at the door of our legislators,” he tells Clarence, “that they have not only caused me to suffer many outrages, but with those same laws, they are sapping the very life essences of public morality. They are teaching the people to lose all respect for the rights of others—to lose all respect for their national honor.”3 Such protests echo the utopian idealism that El monedero never fully adopts, or rejects. As in El monedero, the great light of liberty has proven to be something of a deception. Just as The Squatter and the Don can be read as a variation of a Mexican text about the war, it also intimates aspects of later Chicana/o discourse about the conflict through the way it remains caught between two temporal modalities, on the one hand seizing on the terms of change, evolution, and progress, and on the other hand beginning to deploy an ethnographic dream of bounded identity—whether it be as “Californio” or “white” or some other category, and now defining the desire for coherence

2 1 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

on regional terms, a particular place or set of places in Southern California. The alliance with Chicana/o writing, to turn northward now, remains limited, more of an intimation than a strong delineation. Yet, like Gonzalez and Raleigh’s Caballero and Candelaria’s Not by the Sword, Ruiz de Burton’s romance fantasy argues, or begins to argue, for a non-national accommodation to the nation-state, seeing the United States as a threat precisely because it bestows a national form that fails at the dream of integration. My sense, although these remarks must remain prefatory, is that the debate in contemporary Chicana/o scholarship about Ruiz de Burton’s own politics may stem from the way resistance to nationalist hegemony can take a variety of forms—at times pushing back against a threat to “order,” at others pushing back against a threat to “liberation.” The U.S. nation-state generates dreams of reconstitutions, already imbued with the tension between centering identities and rupturing possibilities. Although The Squatter and the Don appeared in 1885, it was already wrestling with the conflicting demands of the modern age, focusing its diatribes, for example, on a railroad monopoly—the default icon for modernity—and also insisting on a mythic integration of mercantilist and political ideals within the U.S. nation-state—the Alamars’ chief claim to authority lies in their capitalist skills. In the end, Ruiz de Burton’s dualism results in a bitter, angry ending. Like Pizarro’s novel, at least the novel without the Epilogue, Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don concludes on a minor chord, with the Alamar family in ruins and having to sell off its land and home near San Diego and move to San Francisco to be effectively taken in by the wealthy Clarence Darrell and his new wife, Mercedes. But also like El monedero, The Squatter and the Don concludes with two endings, “Reunited at Last” and “Out with the Invader”— conclusions that insist, rather schematically, on closure and inconclusiveness. It may be that both the lingering effects of war and the increasingly felt disorientations of modernity are at work in The Squatter and the Don, which would align it with Mexican national narrative fragmentation and with Chicana/o politically affirmative discourse, which recasts cultural invasion and violence as problems requiring not legal or military redress but reconstitutions. The Squatter and the Don does not quite approach the modernist call for self-fashioned subjectivity, but it already senses a permanent disassociation from history. In the twentieth century, when Chicanas and Chicanos began recovering a past always under threat, they wrote about the U.S.-Mexican War precisely as a disruption in both time and space, but they also saw it, at times, as a generative crisis that demanded narrative imagination. In Caballero, the war now becomes the stage for a daring inquiry into the values and prob-

Mexican American Visions  

213

lems of past time and a consideration of globalized modes of habitation that coexisted with the nation-state but could also move across a spatial-temporal continuum.

Caballero: Home and Infinity The historical novel Caballero wants to follow the rules. It desires to be known, recognized, deemed worthy, and assimilated. It is so obviously conventional, so intent on depicting a tyrannical, patriarchal father, his rebellious daughters, and the seductive foreign (Anglo) men who free them from their confinement, and so insistent on deploying a setting in which a feudal empire gives way to modernity, that any discussion of its plot risks reviewing the obvious contours of formula. But despite its efforts at typicality, Caballero never entirely persuades. The authors, Jovita González, an early Tejana folklorist from South Texas, and Margaret Eimer (writing as Eve Raleigh), of whom relatively little is known, seem at once committed to their project and detached from it. They write in a state of narratological ambivalence, oscillating between the play of broad romantic convention and an awareness of romantic illusion. The resulting contradictions pervade the plot, its characters, even matters of style, and suggest how Mexican war texts such as Prieto’s poetry and Pizarro’s novel anticipates aspects of Chicana/o literature. The approach pursued here concentrates more on a globalism that structures Caballero’s sense of space and time. The result is a highly flexible if fraught vision of life. In its drive toward closure, the novel opens outward toward alternative centers of identity, and in its drive toward meaning it dwells on a liberating fragmentation that breaks the strictures of masculinist conservatism. Rather than force the novel into a box of cultural affirmation or conservative assimilationism, I read it as a profoundly vexed work of art that despite —or perhaps because of—its troubled terrain illuminates key quandaries and strengths of the Mexican American experience, both the way a great deal of Mexican American culture has been shaped by the violence, dispossession, and trauma of war and other conflicts with Anglo America and the ways that living in non-national structures have required border dwellers to imagine flexible, permeable, dynamic forms of identity that move across multiple centering points, from the local-regional to the national to the global (universal) supranational. As I suggest above, my interpretation adopts the tensions within the contested field of globalization. One of the key paradoxes of globalization is that it both blurs differences and accentuates them, homogenization and heterogenization being the twin effects of felt dislocations. In Caballero, González and

2 1 4   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Raleigh write from within this dualism, activated in this case by the collapse of a feudal Tejano ranching culture under the pressure of Anglo farming and mercantilism in the early twentieth century. The loss of traditional identity, or what a community may deem traditional identity, catalyzes the search for that which is felt to be lost. In a sense, the romance genre itself offers its own starting point, because historical romance fiction is characteristically aimed at establishing fixed values amid uncertainty, already invoking the dialectical tension of global pressures that both erode and construct ideas of unchanging traditions. In this sense, Caballero’s ambivalence locates it within a literary dialectic between ethnic assertion and social disturbance. Because it is a reaction to the broad economic, political, and technological changes buffeting South Texas in the early 1900s, Caballero, probably written in the 1930s4 but not published until 1996, posits the dilemmas of Mexican Americanism squarely in the ongoing and irresolvable interplay between sub- and supranational identities that oppose the nation-state.5 In the novel, Mexican Americans—or, more specific to the present argument, Tejanos and Tejanas—emerge from their disrupted domain as global actors, both regionalists and cosmopolites. Not all Mexican American experience, then or now, fits this hermeneutic, but the cultural processes of globalization—admittedly a vague term, but here referring primarily to a process that neutralizes and also activates traditional boundaries—generate a particular and influential modality within recent Mexican American writing, and one critically central to Caballero, that of a multifarious play of dynamic identities. I argue two main points. The first is that Caballero expresses a paradox of globalization in its sense of history and its portrayals of marriage, corresponding respectively to time and space. Both are deeply marked by literary traces of what Roland Robertson has referred to as the “glocal,” those energies of globalization that generate local affinities at the same time that they promulgate international or transnational identities.6 Robertson’s wordplay (drawn, he notes, from a Japanese concept) foregrounds these energies of border crossing that generate the exclusionary notions of bounded space. The coin of globalization, as it were, has two sides. Second, the novel’s ambiguities emerge from an ethnographic project. Although set during the U.S.Mexican War, Caballero, like other historical novels, responds to the historical conditions of the authors’ own time—in this case about eighty years after the war. Other critics have read the novel in relation to broad economic and political changes and to the violence and other tensions between Anglos and Mexicans in South Texas (González, Limón, Kaup), but the novel’s narrative architecture also frames an ambivalence regarding the quandaries of living in

Mexican American Visions  

215

a zone of internationalism. It shows the effects of globalization, because early twentieth-century South Texas experienced the convulsions of the premodern—or the imaginary location of identity in a stable realm of tradition and memory—succumbing to the modern, the perceived loss of that stability; and it is this process that bears directly on González’s role as an ethnographer of her own Mexican Texan upbringing. Globalization is an elastic term, used at times to refer to a very new phenomenon of inexorably collapsing space-time, at others to describe broad historical trends in economics, politics, and other social formations. Regardless of definition, globalization encompasses more than a collision of cultures, because it configures traditional, local spaces and times in dynamic opposition to larger homogenizing structures. Societal changes threaten—and also promise—to negate and then erase local, traditional boundaries. Because of the sudden and often violent shift between feudal ranching and modern farming and business enterprises, early twentiethcentury Mexican South Texans felt keenly this kind of change and anxiety and participated in a global moment that both hailed and feared the perceived loss of a stable past. These disruptions led Tejanas like González to imagine a binational ranching pastoral domain, a nostalgic realm of stability shared by Anglos and Mexican Texans alike, and both dramatically giving way to an alien future. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a particularly intense moment of Tejano cultural disruption in a variety of ways. Anglo Texans have had a long history of anti-Mexican racism, charted by, among others, Arnoldo de León in his 1983 They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900. However, the late nineteenth century was also a time when elite Anglos and Mexicans were drawn together for a time by class; Anglo ranchers had adopted many of the ways of the Mexican hacendado, briefly preserving a long-standing, feudal ranching culture.7 Although the racism directed against Mexicans was intense, newcomer Anglos often distinguished between “ordinary” Mexicans and the more acceptable, wealthier, landed Mexican “Castilian” elites. As David Montejano has noted, “The well known aphorism about color and class explains the situation on the Mexican frontier—‘money whitens.’”8 These boundaries of elite identity began weakening in the early twentieth century as farming and merchant-class Anglos expanded the walls of racial demarcation to exclude practically all Mexicans, introducing severe forms of segregation and discrimination.9 The hardening and sharpening of anti-Mexican racism led to the construction of a “Mexican subjectivity as ‘subjugated Otherness.’”10 As Monica Kaup has noted, Caballero may be set during the U.S.-Mexican War, but its marital mediations of

2 1 6   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Mexican-Anglo conflict respond emphatically to the anxieties of González’s contemporary South Texas.11 Significantly, Caballero’s authors hardly mention the U.S.-Mexican War, which began with battles near present-day Brownsville and continued in Monterrey before shifting to Veracruz and then to Scott’s incursion into Mexico City. Instead, the tale’s scenes of violence between Anglos and Mexicans emerge from the kinds of flaring border raids that began in the mid-nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth, a narrative disposition that implies that the guerrilla attacks during the U.S.Mexican War were merely the first such hostilities in a decades-long border dispute. Indeed, José Limón in Dancing with the Devil has demonstrated how the architectonics of war continued to shape Tejana/o life and history throughout the late nineteenth century and on into the twentieth. Thus, even the novel’s gunfire between Anglos and Mexicans has more to do with the early 1900s than with the 1840s. I will complicate this assessment below, but here I consider González’s role as a Tejana folklorist, a recorder of border identity and history working against what she saw as the eroding effects of modernity and Anglo American intrusions. That is, the problems of ethnography drive the novel’s moment of composition and inform its blend of nostalgia and progressivism. Herein lies a difference worth underlining: although the war itself may have been an impossible terrain for González and Raleigh, as it was for dime novelists, the deracinations following the war became for them the central locus of their literary projects—which is to say, also, that the war’s direct and intensely historical political, cultural, and economic effects coalesce at the center of their novel. I conclude by briefly examining how the narrative can be read as heteroglossic prophecy rather than history, the kind of text embroiled in the “dialectics of difference” investigated by Ramón Saldívar in his study of Chicano literature, Chicano Narrative. The novel does not predict contemporary features of all Mexican American literature or life as much as it forecasts the more recent concerns of Chicanismo partially, if not essentially, grounded in a history of war and displacement. The legacy I refer to does not lead to a vision of incorporation but rather to an intensified sense of disconnection, destruction, and dehumanization, which is where I differ with critics who see the text as essentially oppositional. Kaup, for example, reviews the modernist tensions in the novel, but does so to argue that the text deploys a critique of the masculinist, anachronistic Mexican hacienda as the vestige of a political and cultural system that can proceed no farther along the path of liberatory progress. That the novel quarrels with patriarchy cannot be disputed, but neither can we ignore the way the writers seek to preserve the fantasy of feu-

Mexican American Visions  

217

dal, hierarchical stability along with the liberating and alienating energies of modernism. Chicana and Chicano artists invent within such dilemmas, and they have responded in part by searching for integration outside the boundaries of the nation-state. They have long dwelled in hybrid, multinational dyads in which to be at home is simultaneously to be in exile, necessitating an unending search for, and resistance to, a third alternative. To this deferring mode of life, Caballero offers a testament—not as documentary, precisely, but as a dialogistic precursor to the search for resolution.

Global Paradoxes in the Ranchos del Valle At first reading, Caballero seems confused about its loyalties. It argues for change, for the demise of an old, anachronistic, repressive, undemocratic Tejano patriarchy in South Texas, but it also records that same culture with ethnographic care, even nostalgic melancholy. The basic plot points are as follows. The novel is set in Rancho La Palma de Cristo, in what is now South Texas, and also in the Mexican town of Matamoros during the invasion by U.S. troops in the early stages of the war with Mexico. Young, blonde, and beautiful Susanita, the youngest daughter of Don Santiago Mendoza y Soría, falls instantly in love with the dashing, tall, handsome, and unfailingly courteous Lieutenant Robert Warrener of the invading army, which soon stations itself across the river from Matamoros in Fort Brown. However, this love affair never really centers the novel’s energy. That space is occupied by the traditionally patriarchal father figure of Don Santiago, who is cruel and unbending, every fiber of his being defiant against the Anglos and dismissive of all changes to his masculinist, racist, imperial order. Predictably, Santiago’s world crumbles and dissipates. Susanita, her father’s favorite, marries the hated gringo invader. His other daughter, María de los Angeles, marries Alfred “Red” McLane, a charming but opportunistic Anglo entrepreneur. His son Luis Gonzaga, whom the authors code as probably homosexual (he is stereotypically effeminate and given to drawing and painting), leaves the feudal, masculinist ranch for the U.S. East Coast with his new male Anglo friend and fellow artist, Captain Devlin. Santiago’s other son, Alvaro, violent and immoral, is shot and killed in a dispute with other encroaching Anglos. The novel concludes with Santiago’s solitary death atop a hill on his ranch, a moment meant to define the termination of an era. Critics have discussed the novel’s feminist, antifeudal, and antipatriarchal arguments (Garza-Falcón, Mendoza, Limón, Kaup), and there can be no doubt, as María Cotera notes in her Critical Epilogue, that the novel’s

2 1 8   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

concentration on the racist, chauvinistic father constitutes “an attempt, far before its time, to deconstruct traditional male-centered images of resistance and bring a multiplicity of voices to the Tejano experience.”12 Tejana women have been pioneers not only in shaping aesthetic expressions of resistance but, as Emma Pérez has shown, in establishing and supporting early political organizations that specifically countered colonialist hegemonic domination.13 However, subversive, antipatriarchal narrative arguments have been aspects of romance since the medieval rise of courtly love codes.14 Romance mediates the felt divide between old and new modes of life and puts in opposition both reactionary and progressive energies in order to argue ultimately for a continuation of social systems in the wake of change. Santiago may be an antiprogressive reactionary agent of xenophobia and racism, but, as Leticia Garza-Falcón has indicated, for all his faults he is nonetheless a tragic figure.15 Elsewhere in the novel the authors document Christmas and other religious and courtship rituals, linger over traditional cooking techniques, and review key points of Tejano history, all in ways that validate the South Texas border experience. The old ways are unquestionably anachronistic, yet they still seem to orchestrate meanings and stabilize life. It is not at all surprising that when Susanita marries in defiance of her father’s wishes, she ends up as the submissive wife of another aristocratic rancher, a handsome, liberating U.S. American who is also an elitist from a slave-owning Virginia plantation. With these conflicting crosscurrents of political investment, readers might begin to wonder how the authors actually perceive la cultura Tejana. The answer developed here lies in the novel’s deployment of time and space, the two critical terms in the dynamics of globalization. To approach these, it is useful to review the basic duality of tradition and progress, which can be mapped onto the paradox of globalization when globalization is understood as generating a consciousness of increasing homogenization and, also, a reactionary project toward the local or regional. Where romance values tradition, globalization generates local identities; where it values change, globalization hails a process of limitless opportunity for personal reconstitution, the dual tendencies being interdependent. “Tighter integration has thus paradoxically meant, and continues to mean, proliferation of asserted differences,” as Frederick Buell has phrased it.16 Stuart Hall sees the new internationalism as leading away from the nation-state: “It goes above the nation-state and it goes below it. It goes global and local in the same moment.”17 A psychological explanation is suggested by Meyer and Geschiere in their introduction to Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure, where they note that there is “much empirical evidence that people’s awareness of being involved in

Mexican American Visions  

219

open-ended global flows seems to trigger a search for fixed orientation points and action frames, as well as determined efforts to affirm old and construct new boundaries.”18 More abstract and lyrical is Zygmunt Bauman’s view of the global paradox within the sweeping emergence of modernity: “Order and freedom surged forth together, to become the two poles between which modern existence was plotted, two hubs of the axis around which modern mentality rotated.”19 What emerges from such studies is that the alarms about global homogenization are at least overstated, if not mistaken, because cross-cultural contact seems to both dilute and amplify difference. These examinations of globalization, positing a dualist turn toward, in the words of Meyer and Geschiere, both “flux” and “fix,” provide interpretive keys with which to read the contradictions of Caballero, infused as it is with the twin dreams of universal communication and local preservation. In a way, the entire novel itself, the sweeping act of historical recovery, can be seen as a response to the dislocating pressures of modernity. Yet Caballero succeeds more at articulating tensions than at resolving them, as if the authors felt a stronger imperative to pose the central problem of romance itself rather than to answer it through a clear teleological purpose or the crystallizations of cultural value. One might finish the novel thinking it is confused about its own principles, and perhaps the authors did see that the more conservative desires of romance clashed with their liberal argument. What is clear from the text, nonetheless, is that Caballero undoes any romantic integration by contradicting its own historical narrative order, and in this it is consonant with views of the postmodern, which see in it, as does García Canclini, not a “stage or tendency that replaces the modern world, but rather a way of problematizing the equivocal links that the latter has formed with the traditions it tried to exclude or overcome in constituting itself.”20 No aspects of Caballero demonstrate this more than the way its strong sense of linear history (its time) and its fantasy of all-inclusive marriages (its dreams of habitation, i.e., space) move toward both finality and inconclusiveness.

Time Conflicts between an oppressive, fading past and a liberatory future commonly frame historical novels, but Caballero’s version bears careful consideration because as the novel winds down, the authors begin to refer nostalgically to a particular moment immediately following the U.S.-Mexican War over and against a subsequent later moment in which a supposedly different kind

2 2 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

of Anglo invader entered South Texas. That is, two futures are imagined: one that follows the U.S.-Mexican War, and another that comes decades later as more and more Anglos move into South Texas. Up until these final chapters, the novel stresses the positive benefits of a single progressive future and an “American”—that is, U.S.—democracy, which is where interpretations such as Kaup’s begin. Time’s arrow has been moving toward redemption. The primary villain, Don Santiago, stereotypically anachronistic, refuses to change, and dies a death meant to break with the past and clear the way for progress. Historical novels of this type are never entirely comfortable leaving the past, and can suggest how futures are in fact imagined dialectically with their histories. Yet, by and large, historical romance narratives are grounded in an insistence on linearity and resolution in opposition to change and chaos; final chapters solve—or are imagined as solving—whatever wars or conflicts have been worrying the text. Intriguingly, however, the authors of Caballero emphasize that the U.S.-Mexican War’s disturbances do not actually end where the novel concludes, with Santiago’s death and Warrener’s suggested rise to rancher status. One of the first asides about the violent post-future of the novel comes about two-thirds of the way into the text, when Don Santiago’s ranch overseer, Tomás, in a violent confrontation shoots and kills an Anglo squatter who has refused to leave the Mendoza y Soría land. The squatter has revealed his identity as a “bad” Anglo by having shot at Santiago first, and missed. The episode occasions a polemical digression: It was a scene that was to be repeated in variation for many years to come, until an empire of state would rise on land that had scarcely a square yard of it that had not been wet with blood. The fugitive, like the man Tomás had shot; the land-greedy who justified their rapaciousness with the word “pioneer” and used it as a blanket to cover their evils—sullying the good word and the constructive men entitled to it; the trash, the “puerco,” like George and his sister, squeezed out of a community that refused to support them any longer; the wanderer, fleeing from nothing but himself; the adventurer, his conscience and his scruples long dead. All these, and more, came to Texas like buzzards to a feast.21 The passage momentarily warps the novel’s historical trajectory, deploying nostalgia not for the prewar Mexican feudalism being overrun by U.S. troops but for the hybrid Anglo Mexican postwar feudalism destined to be superseded by a future wave of unscrupulous Anglo “pioneers.”

Photograph of a young Jovita González. E. E. Mireles and Jovita G. Mireles, Special Collections and Archives, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, Bell Library.

2 2 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

In effect, the authors have inserted a deromanticizing sequel into their own novel, a dualistic sense of history that accentuates open-endedness. As they bring the narrative to a close, they redefine the object of their nostalgia, which is no longer the pre-1846 Tejano Mexican patriarchy but a “proper,” more tolerant form of post-1848 Anglo invasion, which is then to be overshadowed by a morally questionable, virulently racist future invasion. Slipping into prophecy, the novel presents a radically different narrative project, no longer a hopeful discussion of U.S. American democratic redemption but an attack on Anglo American racist exceptionalism. Several of these pessimistic asides occur in close succession,22 but the most sharply drawn begins the novel’s final chapter, which opens by confronting directly the artifice of historical narratives. “The war, said Washington, was over. Peace, said Washington, was here.” The next paragraph makes a pointed spatial shift: War, Texas knew, is a fecund mother whose children spring from her full grown. The war. Yes, the war was over. So said the record. Texas wrote its history with a scratchy, blotty pen, and called its southern line the “bloody border,” and strove for peace inasmuch as its poverty allowed—in a chaos that Time alone could bring to a semblance of order.23 The two futures stand for two contradictory war narratives, the “Washington” version of closure and peace and the “Texas” reality of ongoing violence, still waiting, evidently, for a concluding sentence. The contradiction is noteworthy from a narratological viewpoint, for the authors appear here to concern themselves directly with issues of narrative, authority, and nationality. The passage is also intriguing for the way “Texas” in the formulation combines the opposing energies of order and chaos. In the passage, the domain of “Texas” marks first, an opposition to the recordable national narrative coming from “Washington,” and thus it can be construed as evoking the “chaos” of empty time, a mode of awareness where nothing is yet resolved or fully known, where, moreover the repetitive circularities of formula fiction are neutralized. Because it can represent the always unresolved, it can also represent those positive energies that resist strict codification and tradition. That the final story has not yet been written also means that the final story might still be written in a way favorable to you. On the other hand, this “Texas” is also a historian (curiously like a folklorist), constructing a limited yet localized, specific border narrative (like González), writing a “bloody” history of its own.

Mexican American Visions  

223

As historian, this Texas drives toward the imposition of order. The critique of nationalism overflows at this point so that “Texas” can similarly register, as might a holograph, the tensions coursing through the novel. In terms of time, the novel wants to have it both ways, insisting on a broad temporal process that leads to a locally known history and a satisfying resolution of its plot, and also a different kind of time that is explicitly “chaos”— now emphasizing ongoing disturbance and violence. The bifurcation of pasts leads to other discussions as well, primarily toward an analysis of how “Texas” seems to be a complicated terrain of both regionality and universal value (going under and over the nation-state),24 but what makes the narratological play specifically “global” lies in the sense that the novel here undermines the project of historical recovery itself. At these moments, the “past” that the novel has worked strenuously to romanticize no longer leads to the “present” of actual South Texas in the early twentieth century; and thus, by implication at least, the “present” moment can have no certain bearing on what may come in the future. In other words, the time horizon of the novel, as in The Squatter and the Don, has been severely limited, if not actually confined, to a relatively small span of contemporaneity. Whatever navigational bearings of history and memory may have been available as the novel commenced have been to a great degree neutralized, and we gradually gain a sense of global time compression, or the emptying out of time that Anthony Giddens explores in Modernity and Self-Identity. As disjunctive as this may be, however, the novel performs an even more significant, literally unsettling, act.

Space Whereas the temporal paradox in Caballero emanates from an alternative future, the issues of space and habitation figure in its multiple cross-national pairings. Rather than offering only one marriage, or various similar marriages, González and Raleigh apparently believed that satisfying twentiethcentury readers required a more explicit recognition of modernity generally, and internationalism more specifically. Thus, they wrote a novel in which the Mexican patriarch’s three surviving children unite with significant Anglo others in expanding spatial horizons, locating each pair in an explicitly unique form of belief and action. Susanita marries Warrener, who takes over the role of local land-owning baron in South Texas; María, the dark-haired daughter, marries the merchant Alfred “Red” McLane and moves to San Antonio to inhabit an urban space; Luis ends up in Baltimore writing back to his sisters about an upcoming trip he will take to Europe with Devlin. The happy unions

2 2 4   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

move from the border-regional, to a San Antonio–urban both inside and outside the nation-space, to the denationalized cosmopolitan global realm. All of these pairings, the two marriages and the probably homosexual union, are successful; all are equally vital; all are available to the new generations. For a historical romance to be conservative, it must aim to preserve the belief in unified societies of undiminished cultural value, together with the countering linearity of history—stasis and progress contained in the same wedding. The conventional romance marriage thus enacts a rite of cultural integration, a resolution that brings together oppositional forces to reaffirm a bounded identity; “the tie of wedlock, so perceived, bolsters the myth of a tightly knit social order.”25 Given the romantic impulse to unite oppositions, the marriage between María and Red McLane might be the most ideal, most perfectly realized, because she moves to San Antonio to join the new merchant class and, also, inaugurates a life dedicated to helping the MexicanTexan poor in that city. She submits to a new political reality, but does not lose her traditional relationship to her gente. But when González and Eimer scatter the family across the globe, across sexual identities, across different visions of what a successful union actually can be, they qualify by addition the customary sense of a unitary restored order that romance marriages often deploy, or attempt to deploy. Susanita marries for true love but remains in South Texas to, in effect, reconstitute the patriarchal tradition with an Anglo explicitly described as an “hidalgo” and a “caballero.”26 (The union implies stasis so intently that it might as well have been an arranged marriage.) Luis pairs with Devlin in a homoerotic relationship clearly posited as the most defiant of patriarchal conventions, and one receding away from all national boundaries. María de los Angeles, significantly, marries not out of love but out of convenience, and moves to the Alamo city. San Antonio can be a quintessentially nationalizing space, and the Red/María marriage does imply a perfect equilibrium between progress and tradition, but what is most notable about the Red-María marriage is its lack of both romantic cliché and nationalist dogma. Both Red and María are economic opportunists, driven far more by financial concerns than by any adherence to “cultural” values. María’s chief aim is simply to have a chief aim, a higher purpose in life, which she discovers by deciding to use Red’s money and influence to help dispossessed Mexican Americans.27 Red aims at political power and wealth, and throughout the novel cheerfully adopts Mexican ways and the Spanish language when such means serve his capitalistic ends. At one point, enjoying a drink of tequila with Warrener, McLane lifts his glass and

Mexican American Visions  

225

says, “A true Texan, loot’nant, finds all liquor good regardless of its name and—ah, nationality’”28 At no point does either Red or María claim love for each other. Indeed, they marry in open defiance of romantic conventions, comfortably aware that each is using the other for ulterior purposes. Although the two marriages and the homoerotic pairing of Luis and Devlin are meant as resolutions, they address different levels of social disruption— at one end a nearly complete closure and cultural reaffirmation (Susanita in South Texas), and at the other the nearly complete boundary defiance of a probably gay artist out to see the world (Luis aiming for Europe). In the middle, at the point of equilibrium, the authors locate the perfect nationalizing match—which, however, can hardly be less nationalistic. No matter where a reader might be in the globalizing swirl, she or he can probably find a comforting scenario somewhere in the novel. For a reader too frightened by change, there’s Susanita; for one too confined by tradition, there’s Luis; and for one too torn by both, there’s María. Thus, in both time and space, the novel resists fixed resolutions and imposes them at the same time. It unfolds with multiple futures and a continuum of glaringly distinct, yet equally viable, pairings, each of which connotes a different geographic range. As I noted earlier, the loyalties of the authors are difficult to discern. Are they feminists when they criticize Don Santiago? Are they conservatives when they have Susanita marry Robert Warrener, a son of Virginia’s slaveholding aristocracy? Are they progressive when they align the U.S. army with change and democracy, or are they cultural essentialists when they document Christmas at the Mendoza y Soría ranch? Readers might have a difficult time settling on one view or another because the authors are writing from within globalization’s paradox. That they did so should come as no surprise. South Texas in the early twentieth century experienced a highly stressful moment of cultural conflict that generated an effusive rhetoric about equalizing cosmopolitanism and, at the same time, a strong search for unitary forms of culture and identity, or as Robertson has written, the “particular” and the “universal”.29 Caballero’s narrative insists on maintaining a tension between the resolution of paradox and the irresolution of multiplicity, between telling a story and the story-defying, meaning-resistant open-endedness of existence. As if keenly aware of its own artifice, Caballero instantiates Bakhtin’s notion that coherence and chaos are dialectical terms, that the novelness of actual existence can infiltrate romance, genre itself registering as the imposition of coherence where coherence does not exist. Ultimately, either indicting González and Eimer for being too conservative or hailing them as

An anonymous wedding party, from Jovita González’s personal archives. González was an accomplished researcher, and this photograph was apparently one of her found artifacts. Annotated only as showing a “wedding party,” the photograph may date from the late nineteenth century, and suggests something of the life and daily practices González and co-author Eve Raleigh endeavored to record in Caballero. E. E. Mireles and Jovita G. Mireles, Special Collections and Archives, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, Bell Library.

Mexican American Visions  

227

proto-feminist critics of antidemocratic Mexican patriarchy are both equally possible. So is, however, reading the novel’s tensions as an effect of the interrelationship between globalization and ethnography.

The Conquest of South Texas In the early decades of the twentieth century, South Texas experienced a dramatic cultural encounter together with the rapid introduction of new technologies, leading to a sociological transformation well documented by recent scholarship.30 New waves of Anglo Americans and railroads transformed the landscape, fundamentally altering the area’s politics and economy. At the same time, the world’s affairs intruded into the upheavals along the border, from the intimations of German meddling in Mexico to the way the infamous secessionist Plan de San Diego in 1915 projected the liberation of African Americans and Asian Americans and the creation of an independent South Texas, to the way many mutualista societies across the Southwest promoted a Mexican expatriate identity.31 Far from being a peripheral backwater, South Texas in the early twentieth century was the site of pronounced, at times violent, global contact. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had established the border in 1848, the economy had changed relatively little until the decades when González was growing up and becoming ethnographically interested in her own ranching culture, a moment when the modern was arriving with violent speed. Furthermore, as Boone has argued, the decades from 1840 to 1930 were a “fertile period of discontent” in which the hegemony of marriage novels began to falter and “the ‘uneasy’ schisms” documented in various key texts of married life were “reproduced in the narrational ‘unease’ of decentered, multivocal, and ultimately open-ended structures that refuse[d] to give pat answers to the unsettling questions that the dislocations in the prior narratives [had] raised.”32 These two impinging forces—the decentering effects of globalization in South Texas and the literary tremors foreshadowing modernism and postmodernism—play parts in the novel’s composition. Consequently, one might investigate how the novel makes direct or indirect references to early twentieth-century Tejano resistance and Anglo-American racism, or consider how it fits into the larger domain of United States historical romance fiction. More immediate, however—and a factor which combines context and genre—is González’s role as folklorist, an enterprise which contains within it tensions paralleling, if not coinciding with, those of globalization. That is, to be a self-ethnographer is already to be involved in mediating between a

2 2 8   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

drive toward local particularity—toward difference—and the countering imperative to establish the “humanity,” meaning the universality, of one’s own cultural matrix. In a particularly relevant essay cited frequently by Caballero’s readers, Jovita González expressly saw the arrival of Anglo Americans in South Texas in the early twentieth century as an “invasion of fortune-seeking Americans,” a process that, she predicted, would eventually erode and overtake a Mexican ranching feudalism.33 Such dislocation, because it drives a wedge between the Tejana and her Tejana experience, generates many of the compensations we can recognize within the ethnographic project, folkloric studies along the border, such as González’s, pushing back against the many large and small indignities of racism, discrimination, and economic displacement. The validation of a Tejano culture becomes the proof of generalized humanity. In this calculus, a certain subgroup may have a particular mode of dress, but all subgroups have particular modes of dress, and that, theoretically at least, might allow for mutual understanding and empathy in a pluralist world in which everyone respects the cultural values of others. And yet González is said to have remained distant, or detached, from Mexican American activism.34 This too might be seen as an effect of globalization’s tensions. The conventional ethnographic project implies a separation from its subject as it narrates a culture’s specific history and universal value. The observer, like the journalist, guards against bias by believing that neutrality, or the effort at neutrality, approaches truth. The globalized self also remains suspicious of totalizing structures, and, as Bauman stipulates, constructs identities only to question their construction in an endless cycle marked by a sense of bereavement.35 González finds herself oscillating between insisting on the values of Mexican Texas culture and looking forward to new modes of being. “So far as the self is concerned,” writes Giddens, “the problem of unification concerns protecting and reconstructing the narrative of self-identity in the face of the massive intensional and extensional changes which modernity sets into being.”36 For Giddens, modernity activates the search for identity in an age of increased insecurity; and we have responded, claims Giddens, by turning to the ethic of “emancipatory” politics, which constructs various forms of divisions such as class and gender, and also ethnicity.37 As Giddens puts it, “Modernity fragments; it also unites.”38 The turn toward ethnicity, then, is one response to modernist anxieties. Globalization and modernity are not precisely the same thing, but for Giddens, modernity contains “globalizing tendencies,” energies that work against

Mexican American Visions  

229

Unedited page 30, first page of Chapter 3 of Caballero, from one of two known typescripts of the novelette. E. E. Mireles and Jovita G. Mireles, Special Collections and Archives, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, Bell Library.

perceived traditional notions of time and space and lead to lives of increased risk and doubt existing inside the dialectic of the local and global. “We should grasp the global spread of modernity in terms of an ongoing relation between distanciation and the chronic mutability of local circumstances and local engagements.”39 Modernity, understood as crisis, collapses time and space in

2 3 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

ways that resonate with the way globalization collapses conventional notions of the near and far, and sets up both the projects of authentic validation and those of an exultant liberation from fixed forms. Ethnic documentation, as a response to the global moment, points in two directions at once: It recovers an identity, but that act of recovery always signals an irrecoverable loss. By relating the dualisms in Caballero to González’s career as a folklorist of her own border region, we gain a new appreciation of how Caballero precedes much twentieth-century Chicana/o literature as it arises from the modernist field, how self-ethnographic projects both lament and perform a lost or receding identity, and how Chicana/o literature often rides at the cutting edge of contemporary expression. Within this paradigm, the matters of international violence, invasion, deracination, and loss of worlds have played central roles practically since the first moments of Anglo-Mexican contact. Caballero’s exposure of Mexican American chauvinism and patriarchy constitutes perhaps the most visible display of self-critical cultural distanciation, but the novel enacts detachment in other ways as well. When I first read the novel, I was struck by Don Santiago’s incessant and exaggerated parroting of Anglo American cultural exceptionalism. At almost every turn, the Mexican patriarch expresses the kinds of thoughts, feelings, and words common in the most virulent expressions of U.S. American cultural essentialism and racism—everything from a sense of providential mission to a racial disdain for “barbarians.” From one perspective, Santiago’s destino manifiesto constitutes a reflecting counterargument against Anglo American discrimination—the authors here launching a covert attack on Anglo American bias and hypocrisy. If readers rejected Santiago’s mania, then they would, or might, the authors perhaps thought, also cast a critical eye on Anglo American manifest destiny. But, rather astutely, when the novel implies nostalgia for the old MexicanTexan order, it suggests also the centering power of such exceptionalist mythologies. Santiago’s death comes across as a loss, perhaps a necessary tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless, a center losing its hold. The rhetorical maneuver constitutes an ethnographic gesture, as if the writers had solved the problem of Santiago by discovering the essentialism that afflicts Mexican patriarchs just as much as it does Anglo-Saxon purists, in effect stipulating that cultural essentialism functions as another human universal. This is probably why the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States echoes in the dying words of Santiago’s mother in the novel’s foreword: “Santiago, “[she says] “be worthy of Rancho La Palma, and the things for which it stands.”40 This kind of critique claims a universal vision above all boundary-making projects, whether they

Mexican American Visions  

231

are parochial, local, or national. The authors—probably mainly González, the folklorist—assert their cosmopolitan status through the act of regional observation and comprehension. To describe Rancho la Palma is to be already outside it, fixed in the role of critical, global observer. But González’s detachment from the political struggles of the twentieth century may have arisen more directly from living in a state of political suspension. Or, said another way, the facts of her biography as a border Tejana already imply her life as folklorist. She never chose her career as much as the border chose her, and to be chosen by the border means to exist inside a globalizing nexus—always aware of the permeability of time and space. The criticality that comes from exile can be said to inhere in the liminal status of South Texas, which has found itself to be both outside Mexico and external to the United States. In “America Invades the Border Towns,” González offers a familiar lament: Tejanas and Tejanos, she says, are not exactly like ordinary Mexicans, but neither are they seen as “white” Americans: It is the struggle between the New World and the Old, for TexasMexicans have retained more than their brethren in Mexico, the oldworld traditions, customs and ideals. . . . Not that they are eager for the friendship of the American families, but they object to the fact that they are considered an inferior race. The word “white”, which the Americans use to differentiate themselves from the Mexican population, is like a red flag to a bull.41 Not really seen as “Mexican” or as “white,” but thinking of themselves as being both, González’s Tejanas/os find themselves adrift as bearers of a European feudalism locked in a struggle with the pressures of the New World. To be cast out in this way leads, as Hall has it, below and above the nation system. It emphasizes the regional and the international, the international in the case of González being not an overt cosmopolitanism—not, for example, a propensity to travel the world—but the act of ethnography itself, the intellectual distancing that purports to remove oneself as observer from the object of study and therefore to allow a definition of bounded culture. The early twentieth century in South Texas was a zone of ongoing displacement of Mexican Americans that led to a counterresponse that asserted a discrete Tejano culture, and Caballero is part of that response. Caballero moves inward and outward at the same time, probably because self-ethnography does the same. To observe one’s own culture for purposes

2 3 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

of valorization is to claim the subjective authority of the insider with the objectivity of the documentarian. González’s work as folklorist brought her closer to her Tejana roots, but closer also to the elitist, academic, critical intelligentsia looking down on the dynamics of boundary making and inventing the notion of definable cultures.42 More than simply a translation of early twentieth-century tensions to the historical field of the U.S.-Mexican War, Caballero exhibits González’s role as a believer in and critic of unitary culture. The attitude emanates from a desire for authenticity against modernity’s centrifugal pressures, but at the same time it knows also that cultures, especially patriarchal ones, can destroy individualities, especially and primarily those of women. Perhaps this is why, as Limón has noted, we can detect in her work the double vocality of assimilation and resistance, which reveals the presence of repression.43 The South Texas encounter with the disjunctions of time, like modernity more generally, illuminates a mythic, destructive past along with a fragmentary future of infinite possibility.

The Future-Past of Rancho La Palma I have been examining the way Caballero remembers the past in order to comment on its own present, how González and Raleigh write about their own early twentieth century through the U.S.-Mexican War, which occurred decades earlier. But another link can be made forward from the early twentieth century to the century’s later decades, when Chicano and Chicana artists began surveying Mexican American identity in the post–civil rights era. As other critics have shown (Garza-Falcón, Mendoza, González), the novel’s fissures lend themselves to postmodern analysis. Care must be taken when recontextualizing literature, especially in this case, in which the authors were clearly writing for their own marketplace. However, Caballero was never given a chance to meet the readers of its own moment; the record shows that González and Raleigh failed to find a publisher. In 1939, a New York literary agent with the American Authors and Artists Agency wrote to González in an attempt to explain the rejections. “It is difficult to say wherein lies the fault, as you put it, of the novel by you and Mrs. E.,” wrote an A. Thorne: As you say, the material is there, the characters are alive and yet the whole tale does not move sufficiently, to absorb a reader. . . . A very long novel like this one, must possess a certain great virtue. It must be a literary achievement, which this is NOT, or it must be timely, or it must be gripping from the first page to the last. . . .44

Mexican American Visions  

2 33

Page 49, unedited first page of Chapter 36 of the Caballero typescript. E. E. Mireles and Jovita G. Mireles, Special Collections and Archives, Texas A&M University– Corpus Christi, Bell Library.

Whoever Thorne was, she or he seems to have had trouble articulating a central problem, but the overall sense of the letter is that González and Raleigh had failed to anchor their novel in either their characters or their plot, to give the text a sense of definition. The terms of “certain great virtue” and “achievement” stand for closure and resolution. A more likely explanation is that Caballero, exuberant in its globalized times and spaces, is an intimation,

2 34   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

perhaps only dimly seen by González and Raleigh, of a mode of being that has more relevance, and more acceptance, in the later twentieth century’s global swirl than it could have had during the authors’ lifetimes. Limón has discussed the novel as a projection of Tejano incorporation into the national body politics in the twentieth century, and clearly the fantastic synthesis of Mexican and Anglo in the novel could be a metaphor for the dream of political emergence.45 Here, Caballero has a genealogical connection back to the chivalric novelettes, and even perhaps to Cooper’s The Prairie (1827), which envisioned the union of Spanish and English imperial projects. John González sees the novel as dramatizing an anticolonial resistance aiming toward empowered Tejana subjects and national liberation. The novel projects the “utopian ideal” of complete Tejano investment in U.S. democracy.46 The tale, however, is radically, even playfully, self-subversive. Limón insightfully emphasizes the critical role of the Red-María marriage, but this union is only one of several different viable options for the Texas of the future. Moreover, the “Texas” of the novel is an intensely local-global formation set in opposition to the space-time of a nation-state, a region that stands below as subordinate to the nation-state of “America,” but also a domain in which ultimate values of truth, morality, and honor all play out in ways that supersede the strictures of national boundaries. The twentieth century did witness the rise of Mexican American and Chicano/a political agency, but full acceptance into the U.S. nation-state has not been achieved, and Chicanas, even more than their male counterparts, have been excluded from large-scale empowerment. Furthermore, a corollary to the above discussion of Texas’s entrance into modernity is the way Anglo American nativism emerged in the early twentieth century precisely in a program to subsume the influx of immigrants into a homogenous whole. Mexican Texans may have gradually emerged as nationalized U.S. Americans in the early 1900s, but it is also true that Anglo racists in South Texas actively excluded, demonized, and lynched Mexicans and Mexican Texans. Cosmopolitanism may have been in vogue in certain quarters, but an essentialist nationstate dominated daily living, and the deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s testifies to the persistent racial and cultural anxieties circulating in Anglo American society. Given the era’s concern with an anglicized national purity, what is intriguing about the novel is how the writers portray whites, the representative Anglo redeemers. Whereas Santiago espouses the most virulent exceptionalist dogma, both Robert Warrener and Red McLane act more like border-crossing globalized elites than torch-carrying nationalists. Despite their roles as invaders

Mexican American Visions  

2 35

and sexual conquerors, they become Mexicanized to an extent by their erotic desires even as they set about anglicizing their trophy wives; McLane mimics Mexican customs and converts to Catholicism in order to marry María; and at one point, the authors claim that Warrener, an Anglo “caballero,” is so aristocratic in heritage and behavior that he could be a son to Santiago. These central Anglos are not entirely Mexicanized, but that is the point. The issue is not the selection of a particular “nation” but modes of identity that exist, here again, on a continuum, from local through national and into supranational. To illustrate: both men are bearers of U.S. power and domination, and are also partly defined by the local environment of South Texas, and they are also marked by their own supranational economies—Warrener’s plantation heritage links him to the Mexican father of his intended, and McLane’s cultureneutral capitalism emphasizes sheer power over national values. Were they Mexican Americans, they might be seen as globalist hybrids, able to live in different locations and adopt various situational identities. Even Luis Gonzaga’s artist friend Captain Devlin interacts with the Tejanos in Matamoros because he is Catholic (from Baltimore) and because his manner is deemed genteel and therefore unlike those barbarous americanos. Rather than singularities, these men project multiplicity, a kind of white Chicanismo, in which a boundary exists only to be crossed, though not necessarily erased. Anglo Americans such as these were not likely to enjoy wide reader approval in early twentieth-century America, nor are they likely to find a warm reception among contemporary U.S. American essentialists, for whom the English language, Protestantism, and the American Revolution constitute nonnegotiable elements of meaningful “American” identity. But for many Mexican Americans, transnationality, hybridity, and postmodernity are familiar constituents of the humdrum everyday and have been so for decades, perhaps for more than a century. Again, no single hermeneutic explains, defines, or predicts all Mexican Americans. Even a self-referential argument that Mexican Americans are multifaceted has to concede that for many Mexican Americans, “home” is defined by conventional “American” mythology—the account of many people forged into one community through a set of ideal principles established in a mysteriously fortuitous series of events involving British American colonists in the late eighteenth century. Yet for many others, “home” is indeed a complicated affair. Ramón Saldívar’s “ideology of difference” offers a vantage point from which to see such self-consciously ideological projects as integral to the Chicana/o literary record, synthesizing “its paradoxical impulse toward revolutionary deconstruction and toward the production of meaning.”47 “Nar-

2 36   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

ratives by Chicano men and women,” Saldívar states, “represent that what appears ‘natural’ in the ways individuals live their lives in society is the result of identifiable cultural matrices.”48 To challenge the patriarchal government of Rancho La Palma is to expose the artificial framework of narrative belief, coherence, and, in this case, patriarchal ideology. But when the authors sum up the narrative with marriages and a transitional death (Santiago’s), they drive back toward meaning. Saldívar adds that ideology hardly need be unitary, that “no single map” of race or gender or class offers the cultural key for “the Real.”49 In a sense, a commensurate dispersion of ideological systems configures Caballero across the local-national-global spectrum, but they are systems nonetheless. The irony of Caballero is that the foundations of this nation-resisting global-local dichotomy, and the double turn toward tradition and the exuberantly inauthentic, are found precisely where González and Raleigh thought they would find a national romance for an Anglo American audience. The U.S.-Mexican War did lead to a national border across northern Mexico, but it left Tejanas and Tejanos more or less where they had been before the war, in a relationship to nationality that combined exile, suspicion, and desire. The resulting dislocation and the literary response are hardly unique to the U.S.-Mexico border. As Anthony King has written (citing David Harvey), the postmodern markers of “irony, pastiche, the mixing of different histories, intertextuality, schizophrenia, cultural chasms, fragmentation, incoherence, disjunction of supposedly modern and pre-modern cultures” were already features of colonies on the “global periphery (in Calcutta, Hong Kong, Rio or Singapore) decades, if not centuries before they appeared in Europe or the USA.”50 King might have added South Texas in relation to the metropolitan centers of Mexico and the United States. If the novel seems conflicted about its politics, it is because globalization itself is a contradictory process that erupts not in the capitals of empire alone but in multifarious global contact zones reckoning with severe disjunctions in time and space. Caballero emanates from several border zones, but perhaps most poignantly from that intermediacy between modernity and postmodernity, a longing for history energized by the creative destruction of the past. González and Raleigh tried to write the most conventional historical romance, so much so that in places the novel seems self-referentially parodic. But in constituting a narratologically coherent history of the Tejanos in South Texas in the nineteenth century, they found themselves undoing the foundations of their narrative—interjecting alternative histories of chaos and marriages that defy romance, that defy even the ritual of marriage itself. The result is a fiction

Mexican American Visions  

2 37

both of place and nonplace, of temporal linearity and temporal possibility, time as certain and known and time as empty and unapproachable. The novel may falter as a conventional romance, which would posit an ideal marriage as a solution against the fracturing of previous social orders, but that may be because its authors lived too much in their moment, too aware of change, of mutability—and of the need for the occasion of narrative as a gathering against the exigencies of change.

Not by the Sword: The Challenge of Time Like Caballero, Not by the Sword concentrates on a ranching family with long ties to Spanish immigration, this time to the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico, to a large spread of land near Albuquerque. Published in 1982, the novel is the second of a trilogy focusing on the Rafa family, which has owned the land for several generations. As the novel begins, changes are afoot. Rumors circulate that a Yankee army approaches to take control of the territory, and the narrative seeks to render that conflicted moment when the Rafas go from being Mexican to being U.S. American, at least technically, a saga not of immigration but of the different kind of national transition that swept across the southwestern landscape in the nineteenth century. In the novel, the response to such signs of change from New Mexicans ranges from various levels of acceptance to indifference to outrage. Although deploying a large cast of characters, the story centers on the fates of twin brothers, José Antonio Rafa III and Carlos, who embody different stances toward the world, tradition, and history. As the novel opens, José Antonio has returned to the ranch as a newly ordained Catholic priest. Carlos, who has remained on the ranch, has been primed to take over the Rafa lands after his father. Much like Santiago’s favorite son in Caballero, Carlos is prone to violence. Early in the tale he murders an Anglo settler who had won the heart of a young Mexican woman whom Carlos had also had eyes for. Not content to rely solely on jealousy or sexual inferiority, Candelaria complicates the murder with an earlier scene in which Carlos, in a moment of rashness, loses his inheritance to the very same Anglo in a barroom card game. Carlos then arranges for a private meeting with the winner, and the Anglo, not knowing that Carlos hates him for having a secret affair with the woman, agrees to the meeting, ostensibly to discuss the gambling debt. In an act of uncontrollable rage, Carlos stabs him to death, then convinces himself that the murder was actually an accident and rationalizes that the americano deserved to die. He escapes discovery as the murderer, but the debt and the guilt will haunt him for the rest of the novel.

2 38   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

José Antonio, nicknamed Tercero, spends most of his time ministering to the poor but becomes disenchanted with the Catholic Church. Corrupt priests and church laws that oppress the poor bother him and will, in due course, lead him to renounce the priesthood, marry, and return to live on a small patch of the ever-dwindling Rafa ranch. Before that happens, however, Carlos will die in an ill-advised battle with the invading U.S. army. As with other historical romances, love and marriages signify varying levels of redemption or, by their absence, tragedy. Andrea, the Rafa brothers’ younger sister, marries Miguel Dalton, an immigrant Irish deserter who has made his way to New Mexico and found refuge with the Rafa family. Another Mexican girl, the one who drew the attentions of an Anglo American (thus provoking Carlos’ jealous anger at the Anglo whom he murders), marries another Anglo just the same, demonstrating perhaps Candelaria’s sense of the inevitability of U.S. incursion. By the end of the novel, Tercero’s grandfather has died and his father lies gravely ill, leaving Tercero, who is no longer a priest, to carry on the Rafa name. This sketch suggests how Not by the Sword follows the formulaic contours of the romance form in ways that parallel González and Raleigh’s earlier effort. Both novels oscillate between belief and doubt in the past, a dynamic that yields a problem with global resonances. Like Caballero, Not by the Sword never quite finds its way to any synthesis between the two poles, arriving instead at a familiar problem posed in narrative form: What does it mean to follow tradition? What does it mean to be free? For Mexican American writers, the abstractions of modernity are predefined by the historical memory of war and racial-cultural conflict.

The Allegory of the Two Brothers The basic concern in Not by the Sword can be reduced to a simple formulation: the tale focuses on those who cannot survive in the future, and those who can. Candelaria’s Carlos always violently opposes the incursion of the U.S. American army, and Candelaria writes his death, tinged by the shadows of tragedy, as an inevitability. Tercero, on the other hand, is the fluid, dynamic, critical mind, skillfully adrift and adroit in a grand transitionary moment. When he leaves the priesthood and marries, he confirms his ability to let go of tradition and to live in the present moment and, probably, in the future as well. Indeed, he breaks with the past in the most radical terms. Throughout the history of the Rafas in New Mexico, Candelaria tells us, there had always been twin brothers in every other generation; one of the twins had always been a warrior

Mexican American Visions  

2 39

and the other a priest. Tercero’s decision to abandon both paths emphasizes his independence and his freedom. His heroism emerges from his ability to question, to see things from different perspectives, and to change accordingly. Thus, Tercero will inherit the family’s severely reduced landholdings, but he will also display something of the family’s ability to adapt to the environment, to change, to let go of the past as deemed necessary. A similar theme runs through Caballero, Santiago’s various fixations contrasting with his daughters’ and Luis’s dynamic embrace of change. Unlike González and Raleigh, however, Candelaria does not write a story of true love overcoming traditional obstacles. Instead, more like Ruiz de Burton, he aims his prose toward apocalypse, the end of the Nuevo Mexicano universe. Tercero’s marriage at the end of the novel resists interpretation as a happy ending for a number of reasons, but mainly because it has come without much struggle. The real contest has been between Carlos and the winds of change, and Carlos loses that battle almost before it begins. Not by the Sword and Caballero both aim to accommodate the centripetal and centrifugal dynamics of modernity, but to apply the terms of globalization directly to Candelaria’s novel might push the argument a bit too far, given that the novel has little to say about global contact or extension. Unlike González and Raleigh, Candelaria’s novel seems hardly touched by the larger world—except, of course, the world as invading U.S. army, which perhaps would allow for a synthesis of the war with the local-universal discordances of globalization. Candelaria’s novel severely criticizes the past, the traditions of the Rafa family, and those among the Rafas who refuse to change. Basically, the New World destroys those who lack imagination, or so the story always goes. A brief summary suffices: The Rafa family abuses the Native American house servants—Candelaria writes a shocking scene in which the elder Rafa hangs an Indian worker on the mere suspicion that he has stolen a jewelry box, a charge later proved unfounded; the Catholic Church reveals itself to be oppressive; Carlos’s patriotism destroys him; and finally, Tercero survives the upheavals only because he breaks with his apparent destiny as a priest. When Andrea’s mother cautions her daughter upon learning that she wants to marry the Irish deserter Michael Dalton, Andrea explodes in a rebellious outburst that parallels Susanita’s trajectory in Caballero: “You know the ways things are done. The customs.” “Customs al demonio! I don’t care about customs! Silly, stupid old rules that no one knows the reason for. It’s just habit, like scratching fleas.”51

2 4 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

In all these ways, Candelaria paints a dour, even pessimistic, view of elite Nuevo Mexicano society. No easy nostalgia awaits the New Mexican reader here. And yet, Candelaria’s novel seems to yearn for a sense of timelessness. First, Not by the Sword is the second in a historical trilogy. It thus constitutes part of a larger project of cultural recovery and validation. The story Candelaria tells aims to reconstruct a past not quite forgotten, but not fully remembered. The story may argue for the necessity of change through narrative events highlighting ruptures against tradition, the Church, the family, and so on, but Candelaria as author believes in the recovery of history as memory, even if, as in this case, that history is one of historical disjunctions. Second, and somewhat more to the point, the Anglo American invasion occurs at a distance. The U.S.-Mexican War seems a matter of faraway places, on the banks of the Rio Grande in South Texas, for example, or in Santa Fe. True, Carlos is involved in an ill-fated insurgency, but the Yankees never really figure as part of the story. The U.S. troops function as one more problem among others for the Nuevo Mexicanos, who have been warring for generations with Utes, Navajos, Apaches, and Comanches. And not all of them see the invasion as a problem to begin with, as they sense a chance for economic aggrandizement with the arrival of the Anglos. Whereas Santiago in Caballero feels the destruction of all meaning and purpose with the Yankee arrival, the Rafa family’s reaction remains subdued, except for Carlos’s violent outrage. Tercero, for example, at the novel’s end is planning a legal strategy to protect the remaining Rafa lands, because in the United States, he has come to understand, one needs good lawyers. For Tercero, one does what one must and moves on. My point is that this distancing of the war stresses continuity, as if New Mexico were so far away from Mexico City and Washington, D.C., that dealing with governmental structures constituted unavoidable but ultimately transient crises. The temptation here is to conflate Candelaria’s distancing with the avoidance of the U.S.-Mexican War in U.S. bandit tales. Any facile alignment must be resisted, but war stories, to the extent they really deal with war, deal also with the destruction of time and meaning, as well as life and limb. To tell a true war story (as Tim O’Brien might suggest) is to undertake an impossibility, outside the very horizons of language itself. Under such narrative constraints, perhaps it is no wonder that Candelaria’s historical trilogy touches only lightly on the business of invasion, death, and destruction. What I want to emphasize here, however, is that, while Caballero and Not by the Sword avoid the war in primary plot events, both posit a multipolar system of flexible iden-

Mexican American Visions  

241

tity. In some cases they offer Mexican-Anglo marriage as a solution; in others they explore strict allegiance to nation or region. On occasion the solution seems to be a withdrawal to a psychological space-time of stasis, such as Warrener and Susanita’s occupation of the rancho. Similarly, Candelaria explicitly valorizes the Rafa ranch as the ongoing central core of Tercero’s identity. National structures prove ephemeral—what is the Mexican state but a flimsy piece of paper?—but the land itself, the rivers, the pasture lands, the farms, the adobe huts, the physicality of one’s immediate surrounding, all of this has remained unaffected by the whims of time. Consider these two passages from the novel’s final pages: Instead of turning north toward the rancho, Tercero turned his mustang east toward the Sandía Mountains. It was early yet and he felt the need to be alone and out of his usual routine. The mountains beckoned, and he followed an old trail that he had ridden many times as a boy. In his mind’s eye he saw one of those times as a fusing together of all the good rides to the mountains. He was with his grandfather, old Don José Antonio II.52 Once again Tercero gazed toward Los Rafas. There is still home, he thought. Our land. One can still withdraw from the craziness of the world and survive in a manner almost the way it was in Grandfather’s time. One can then pass on what one has left to his heirs. Gently he patted his horse and headed him down the slope toward Los Rafas. Toward a small, weathered adobe house where Gregoria Sánchez would look up from her work and see him coming and say, “At last!”53 These internal musings stipulate a redemptive return to tradition, even though Candelaria has elsewhere challenged all the elements of the New Mexican past. Here, Tercero finds an escape from time itself, almost as if the events of the novel have occurred in a different history altogether, a different text. For a novel in which a key character is unable to survive because he cannot let go of the past, this ending may seem contradictory, but it follows the logic established by Caballero, because Tercero’s escape into domesticity accompanies the simultaneous disavowal of national identities. By going under the nation, he has gone above it.

2 4 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

The Sanctity of Region Candelaria needs to insist on historical rupture because in very obvious, concrete ways, an era did indeed come to an end with the U.S.-Mexican War. The United States did take over, and Mexicans did find themselves locked in a long, often losing, struggle to hold on to their lands and ways of life. But, as in Caballero, the turn outward figured in Tercero—his fluidity, his introspection, his ability to free himself from ancestral expectations—accompanies a turn, paradoxical as it may seem, toward the local, the regional, the very place of his habitation. To tear the Nuevo Mexicano away from his nationality results in more or less the same turn toward the universal and the particular. The U.S.-Mexican War poses a question: When national borders break loose from their moorings and begin shifting, what remains? What remains is the discounting of traditional boundaries and the insistence of an identity literally grounded in multicentric locality. Tercero allows himself to become an Americano because national terms never have the meaning for him that they have had for Carlos. Tercero defines his identity not through Mexico City or even Santa Fe, but through the ranch itself. He would understand Susanita, who marries her Anglo American redeemer but stays on in South Texas, inhabiting the space of the ranching class just as Santiago did before them. An alternative plot would send Tercero with his new wife out into the world, free of all constraints and limited only by the extent of his individuality. But Candelaria resituates Tercero squarely within the Rafa lands and refers to him by his given name of José Antonio, underlining his identity as a Rafa, no longer the “Third,” in a sequence, but now the sole heir of the Rafa history. Yet, like other turns toward the local, Candelaria’s also intimates universal values, because returning to the small adobe ranch house grounds José Antonio in ultimate meanings—land, mountains, family, the continuation of things that precede the nation-state and will survive it. In a sense, José Antonio’s journey from priest to rancher abstracts him into a symbol, a figure who stands not only for the particulars of the Rafa family but also for the universals of life, almost a life force, not far removed, if at all, from the world of nature. As abstract symbol, he translates easily, transmuting the story of an hacienda near Albuquerque into a nearly mythological account of human endurance and perseverance. These are global intonations to the degree that they circulate detached from the boundaries of state.

Mexican American Visions  

2 43

Patriotic Polarities: Boy Heroes of Chapultepec A similar turn toward multicentricity occurs in María Cristina (Mena) Chambers’s Boy Heroes of Chapultepec, but in this case the deployment of the regional and the universal seems less a deliberate contestation of the national than an unsettled longing. Still, and despite being aimed at a young adult market, the narrative project required Chambers, who was born in Mexico to wealthy parents, to wrestle directly with a somewhat unusual narratological problem: How does one tell the story so that the U.S. American invasion liberates Mexico and, at the same time, tell the tale so that Mexico appears as a fully valid, dignified national domain. Chambers solved the problem with an inventive, and ideologically charged, emphasis on Mexico’s lower economic class that imbues her narrative, which is about boy heroes in Chapultepec castle only in its very last pages, with an overt attack against racism and class inequality.54 The protagonist is a fourteen-year-old “indio” servant, Pedro, who lives on an hacienda about two miles from what became a key battleground, La Angostura, or, as it’s known in U.S. history, Buena Vista. From the novel’s opening pages we understand the hacienda’s owner, Don Luis Ramos Blancos, to be selfish, domineering, and unjust, a figure of class and racial oppression who already suspects young Pedro of wanting to “run away” from the hacienda, tantamount to an act of populist rebellion. With General Zachary Taylor’s U.S. forces almost at the hacienda gate, Don Luis, his wife, and their only son, Domingo, decide to flee, leaving their Indian servants to defend the estate against the U.S. troops. In a series of unlikely events, Pedro takes control of the property and persuades the other workers that the best course of action is not to fight the yanquis but to join them. “I’ve heard that the Americans are on the side of the workers and against the masters. I am a Mexican and love my country, but I am a worker and we here all are workers and. . . .” He stopped for a moment to look at his father, but decided to say what he felt he had to say. “I am fighting against the cruel masters on the side of the Americans!”55 Not long after, Pedro and his followers join the U.S. army, he specifically as a spy whose other chief aim, other than liberating his fellow workers, is to eventually make his way to Mexico City so that he may rejoin Domingo

2 44   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Ramos Blancos, the son and heir to the hacienda, with whom Pedro has established a genuine friendship. Unlike his father, Domingo is kind to the servants and treats Pedro with respect. After the battle of Buena Vista/La Angostura, which Chambers depicts with an unusual attention to battlefield history, the action eventually moves to Mexico City and the final assault on the castle and the Mexican military academy in Chapultepec, where Domingo has been studying as a cadet. Also needing mention is that Don Luis himself dies during his family’s escape from the hacienda, a plot feature intimating a change of political and economic systems not unlike that suggested by the death of Dávila in El monedero. Finally, as the plot shifts to the capital, the novel begins to approach the moment of its title, which refers directly to Mexican war mythology. According to the national myth, six cadets in Chapultepec refused orders to fall back from defensive positions and died fighting. The last of them, identified as Juan Escutia, purportedly wrapped himself in a Mexican flag and dove off a parapet to his death. Chambers may have been directly motivated to write the tale in 1952 when the remains of six youths were reinterred after having been discovered in an unmarked burial site. Today, a monument to Los Niños Héroes marks their internment site at the entrance to Chapultepec castle. Yet Chambers’s novel narrates the death of the boys only at the very end, and it is Domingo himself who becomes the national martyr by falling from the castle walls wrapped in Mexico’s colors. Pedro, at that moment charging with the attacking U.S. troops and trying desperately to reach Domingo in order to save him, watches his best friend from a scaling ladder. His horrified and unbelieving eyes saw Domingo deliberately walk to the very edge of the parapet, wrap the Mexican flag tighter around his body, then look down at the precipice below for a quick moment and throw himself off crying at the top of his voice: “¡Viva México! Long live Mexico!”56 Here we have a standard claim of Mexican national courage against an invading army, but Pedro’s own role in the tale is to represent a supranational ideal based on the rights of “workers.” His brotherly love for Domingo, on the other hand, leads to a remarkable final turn of events. Aware of his approaching death, Domingo has, a few moments before the final scene at the parapet, written a brief letter to his godfather, who is now in line to take over the hacienda:

Mexican American Visions  

2 45

There was something he wanted him (the godfather, General Bravo) to do for Pedro, in case anything happened to him. The letter ended with: “Don’t forget I promised that good muchacho that he would be the overseer of the hacienda and his father the manager. . . .”57 Nothing could be more contradictory, given that Pedro has effectively rebelled against the hacienda system, and yet here in the novel’s final moments, everything has been restored to a premodern feudal order, only now Pedro will be in charge of the other servants, under the presumably more charitable widow, Doña Rosa. Unlike Caballero’s direct appeal to multicentricity, and unlike the emphasis on identity based on practicality in Not by the Sword, Chamber’s tale seems undecided and unsatisfactory. On the other hand, her meditation on the war—and of the three novels, Chambers’s is most detailed when it comes to military maneuvers and battles—leads basically to the same expansive appeal to dynamic boundaries, from the local hacienda to national patriotism to a curiously internationalist appeal for workers’ rights. The appeal never defaults to a single nation-state, nor does it ever fully discount it. Like González-Raleigh and Candelaria, Chambers resists singularity but recognizes its imperative.

Children of War Caballero, The Squatter and the Don, Not by the Sword, and Boy Heroes of Chapultepec each arise at different points in the trajectory of twentieth-century Mexican American literary history. But like Caballero, Not by the Sword and, to a lesser extent, The Squatter and the Don, they exist outside the parameters of national identity, not Mexican, not U.S. American, but also never dismissive of memory as a source of action. These narratives never describe an arrival in America, nor do they express a desire to belong based on strictly nationalist terms. But at the same time, they do not engage in border crossings as ideal redemption, even when they insist that borders must be crossed. Their primary argument (perhaps too strong a word) lies in their insistence that Mexican American experience consists in unceasing movement between the anxieties of endless possibility and the confines of eternal stability. To turn to Seguín’s memoir as a consonant text means to bring forward the ways Seguín found himself after the Texian rebellion in a mode of perennial dislocation, inhabiting national spaces—Mexican, Texan, and later U.S. American—but also seemingly tied to a specific region in central Texas, and

2 46   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

then, from a more existential perspective, radically disconnected from all of these, a globalized figure to the extent that his life seems to have been an instantiation of the give and take—the “flow” and “fix”—of identity projects continually being undermined and reformed. At one point in his memoir he seems to strike contemporary chords of alienation and disconnection: “I had to leave Texas, abandon all for which I had fought and spent my fortune, to become a wanderer,” he writes, bitterly denouncing those who, driven by racial and ethnonationalist prejudices, became suspicious of his true loyalties shortly after the successful Texian rebellion against Mexico. But his first inclination is actually to the “interior of Texas,” which proves impossible after he considers that he would remain at risk there. He thus decides to move to Mexico to “seek refuge among my enemies.”58 These various terrains— Texas, a region inside Texas, then Mexico—all suggest a search, never quite completed, for an acceptable and accepting community imagined in various ways. Seguín, an early Tejano who was born in 1806 and died in 1890, would probably not have understood his life in modern terms, but his memoir does evince an intense desire for recognition and inclusion. Perhaps when Mexican Americans today carry U.S. flags while they march for immigration rights they are, at least to some extent, echoing Seguín’s efforts to coordinate his Mexican heritage with a new national space. In this, they parallel the dynamics of a global age. The connections and comparisons between these war fictions and other key works of Chicana and Chicano literature suggest that the displacements of war and the upheavals brought on by globalization share certain commonalities that circulate within the Mexican American experience, especially during the twentieth century. War and globalization differ in many ways, but the lexicons of both include terms of displacement, disillusion, and chaos. Wars often permanently disorient the warriors, much as globalization creates a lasting separation from all that was once known and predictable. Chicanas and Chicanos found themselves driving toward the establishment of identity while maintaining at the same time an intense ethic of criticality, questioning boundaries, neat resolutions, and easy morals. Much of this resistance emerges from a historical coincidence: Mexican American history begins to coalesce as a distinct project during the twentieth century, coinciding with modernity’s emphasis on doubt and reconstitution. Yet reading early Chicana and Chicano writing about the war leads to an encounter not with modernist lamentation for the loss of the center nor the exuberant play of pastiche or montage, the playful collapse of order, but rather to the U.S.-

Mexican American Visions  

2 47

Mexican conflict as catalyst for nonresolving personal investigations and recalibrations. Specifically, the writing I explore here brings into view the ways in which war and the trauma of war can persist and illuminate the fragility and ephemerality of human meaning—and the way the confrontation with radical destruction can itself be the ground on which humans erect new and effective modes of thinking and believing. This results not exactly in angst or fear or lamentation, nor is it an indulgence in utopian multiplicity. Rather, the effect is of a nuanced, serious encounter with the dialectical relationship between identity and destruction, the kinds of tensions expressed as globalized subjectivities, that is, identities fraught with the tensions between home and movement, between tradition and change. To be a Mexican American, in this sense, is to be always homeless and always reconstituting home. To some degree, my conflation of war, modernity, and globalization may stem merely from a desire to reduce a multitude of various fracturing to a single overarching system ruled by a dialectic of organization and disaggregation. Yet the cataclysm of war can in some ways be coordinated with the discordances of modernity, perhaps also with the self-conscious self-inventions attending the global moment. All three of these projects, war, modernity, and globalization, circulate within the Mexican American experience in the United States, which is simply to say that to begin assessing what that experience has been about, we must recognize the way all three of these terms operate to establish a psychological and social time-space that is both geographically between the United States and Mexico but also in that narratological liminality between time as felt experience and timelessness as compulsive yearning. Mexican American war literature about the U.S.-Mexican War, I am suggesting, speaks directly to a degree of complexity in Mexican American social life too often elided, ignored, or forgotten. What must also be kept at the forefront is the way Mexican American literature differs within itself, as if in the early decades of the twentieth century, Caballero’s three basic modes scattered and diffused across a broad range of imaginative possibilities, from varying forms of ethnonationalism, to vaguely apathetic concerns for the immediate and the knowable, to enthusiastic calls for endless multiplicity. Part European, Native American, and immigrant— black, brown, and white—Catholic, anti-Catholic, Protestant, and atheist— liberal, reactionary, and Marxist—Mexican Americans have long expressed the fractures of the New World. Not only are their ties to other Latin American–origin groups often tenuous—though variegated, depending on place of origin and immigrant status—but their ties to each other can break under pressures of class, language, points of origin, racial affiliation, and political

2 48   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

philosophy. To recognize the desire for identity in Seguín’s memoir, the conundrum of validating and overcoming nationalism in Boy Heroes of Chapultepec, the dream of and attack against history in Not by the Sword, the unfurling panorama of ideology in Caballero, and the contested drive toward crisis and hope in The Squatter and the Don means recognizing how hard it is for ethnicity, language, culture itself—the materiality of identity—to establish singularizing community in the moment of postmodernism, or perceived postmodernism, when centers do not so much fail to hold as proliferate across both time and space. When we read Mexican American literature we are by (paradoxical) definition reading against canon, and we may experience a falling toward ambiguity. And yet we return collectively to formula films, to the comforts and provocations of utopian narratives or the joys of endless combination. We are conscious of our consciousness. As we emerge from the cineplex, we know, or at least suspect, that the happy ending has lied to us, and yet we have enjoyed our flickering anesthesias. It is not, finally, that we ought to live in the past or the future or the present but that we already inhabit all three, and perhaps other time-spaces, in ways that do not crystallize in a final equation. Like our calendars, we are creatures of both syncretic cycles and diachronic linearity, always restoring our pasts and constructing our futures, alive in the here and now.

Epilogue

Narrative Arcs, Arrows of Time

The U.S.-Mexican War constitutes a moment of temporal dissipation. The border that runs from the Pacific down to the Gulf of Mexico Coast attempts to hold back mutability, but like all such attempts it fails—but fails with narrative implications. One result is a highly charged confluence of war, Mexican American identity, and the dynamics of narrative itself. Mexican Americans can never be merely another ethnic group in the United States, nor are they ever entirely removed from Mexican history and the larger domain of Latin America. I mentioned in passing that not all Mexican Americans fit the same paradigm as avatars of temporal disruption—some indeed are true redwhite-and-blue capitalists fully invested in the redemptive dream of an ideal America—but that itself is merely one indication of Mexican American global multiplicity and dynamism. As I am confessing my own desires for ordering story, let me offer three narratives as possible futures, each of which would likely necessitate a reimagining of the past. We Mexican Americans, Chicanas/os, Latinas/os many of us, have desired entry, acceptance, recognition. We have wanted to be visible in U.S. America, to belong. But U.S. America, or the mythic “America” we have petitioned, not only does not want to recognize us but is unable to register our presence, given that we contradict the narrative of an essentialist Anglo America. It may be that we will become visible only after we ourselves have revised the story, transmuting it from a special utopian rupture with the Old World to a somewhat mundane continuation of it, perhaps with specific conditions generated by racial and cultural collisions, but a story, nonetheless, of ordinary

2 5 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

time in an ordinary place, a section of an insignificant blue planet doing the best it can. This call for a renarrativization runs through other contemporary scholarship, but my thoughts have something in common with Kristen Silva Gruesz’s suggestion in Ambassadors of Culture that rather than trying to fit Mexican Americans into the story of “America,” it may now be time to rewrite the story so that it coincides with the inter-American exigencies of Chicanas and Chicanos, and other Latinas/os across the United States. Gruesz argues for a re-imagination of the contours of America, following here the path navigated by Carolyn Porter and José David Saldívar, among others. Or, as a second alternative, perhaps the matter is less about rewriting any particular national story and more about trying to better judge the actualities around us in ways that recognize our own human cognitive limitations while attending to the way those limitations generate ideas, stories, and nations, a way of being that already drives reformist calls in works such as those by Walter Mignolo, Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Gloria Anzaldúa, Emma Pérez, and others. Finally, the third possibility: a reconfiguration of the dreams of coherence toward a new identity, an “America” still situated in the field of the Americas, but nonetheless one again set apart from it and from other identities, a new revision of the accommodation between change and eternity. Perhaps a fourth possibility would blend all of these, and others still unarticulated. I wish to conclude by meditating on questions and implications. First, what do we discover by exploring the literature of the U.S.-Mexican War from a narratological vantage point? We learn that the war explains more about contemporary Mexican-Anglo tensions than, say, the codifications and reifications attending the myth of the Alamo, or, to skip forward in time, more than the spectacularization of Mexican bandits. What it puts before us is the way Chicanas/os, Mexican Americans, Californios, Tejanos, and so forth emerge from the war not only in a technical sense deriving from Article IX in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and not only as displaced foreigners in their native land, to borrow Juan Seguín’s formulation from his 1842 memoir,1 but as embodiments of the crisis of war itself, meaning that we move across space as avatars of temporal disruption and as generators of narrative meanings. Along the lines of Mignolo’s “border thinking,” the U.S.-Mexican War can be construed as a moment when the imaginary of the modern world actually “cracks”2—fissures, spilling forth people who both express and embody the rupture of time. This may look like a pessimistic outcome, until temporal disruption is redefined not only as an effect of war but also as a fundamental aspect of modernity. Perhaps Mexican Americans, because of our particular experience of deracination without actual exile and movement without dias-

Epilogue: Narrative Arcs, Arrows of Time  

251

pora (in some cases), emerge preglobalized from the Americas of the past as harbingers of the Americas of the future—or at least presaging certain facets of that future. I am reminded of recent poetry by the El Paso poet Benjamin Alire Sáenz in a collection titled Dreaming the End of War, itself marked by a panoramic sweep of global violence, a vision grounded in Sáenz’s home in the Southwest but taking in the Earth in its entirety. In the poem “Fourth Dream: Families and Flags and Revenge,” he writes, “I don’t believe a flag / is important / enough to kiss— / or even burn,”3 a postnational ethic, derived explicitly from the paradigm of national conflict, which underlies the collection and which flows across a great deal of Latina/o literature, art, historiography, and scholarship. Another question: How should we best understand U.S.-Mexican War literature? Critics like Streeby and Kazanjian often remark on the chaotic play of social tensions that seemingly defy interpretive categories, as if the authors of the era were investing their pages with practically every social anxiety their readers may have had, and perhaps they were. After all, we can find almost any node of fear within both Mexico and U.S. America at least hinted at if not exuberantly engaged in each nation’s respective war literature. What that means, I believe, is that U.S.-Mexican War literature, perhaps like all war literature, constitutes a crucible for interpretation, always charged by the violence that destroys words, and the human act of yet-defiant narration. By this I mean not that military conflicts by definition always undermine national values but that there might be an inverse relation between any particular war dream of manifest purpose and the degree to which the actual war undermines that dream, manifesting the contingencies of national destinies. War, in this view, becomes a violent opening into a nation’s failures. Thus, what we read “behind the scenes,” as it were, reveals how war’s horrifying experience cuts away the protective carapace of belief. War unleashes violence, death, uncertainty, and meaninglessness, and perhaps also makes visible that which drives us toward narrative in the first place. The novelette’s social chaos, then, is the point; the fantastic confusion of propaganda, idealism, pathos, poignancy, crassness, racism, all of it intimates the ferocious narrative energy behind the avenging angels of war. Final question: How is this relevant? First, we should read the U.S.-Mexican War literature as a cautionary tale, a warning, a reminder that wars rarely if ever confirm idealistic national dreams. It would be only too easy to apply this to the contradictory and disillusioning conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in which the United States finds itself embroiled at the time of this writing. Future wars will also be subject to the same tests and will likely yield the same

2 5 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

crises in belief. But the second point of relevance is that wars are profoundly seductive. As Lawrence LeShan explores in The Psychology of War, military conflicts do seem to collapse the gap between individualism and communitarianism, so that people involved in wars find themselves simultaneously feeling intensely alive and profoundly connected to the social matrix around them, an outcome never to be taken lightly, especially when it comes at the unimaginable cost of widespread death. Thus, to read U.S.-Mexican War literature is to sense something of war’s allure, of the way wars can generate a sense of transcendence, of larger significance. Chaos is only part of the story. One of the larger points to make about the U.S.-Mexican War literature, then, is that, as crazily outlandish as it sometimes seems, it does nonetheless delineate the connecting links between romance and violence, between redemption and meaning, and the risk of final annihilation. The novelettes occasionally indulge in propaganda, though less than one might expect. However, they all put forward the possibility of dissipating the chasm between nation and alienation, which is perhaps why personal triumph always attends national victory in these tales. And third, the literature of displacement has a long pedigree in the Americas, beginning with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación, and perhaps that legacy brings together the terms both of deracinating war and of deracinated Chicanidad. What have the Americas been if not the site of violence? It may be that Cabeza de Vaca was not the first Latino but rather that we Latinas and Latinos are latter-day wanderers across our own southwestern landscapes. This is why Chicana/o art and literature resonates powerfully with calls for a pan-American ethic, already in a sense a literature of the Americas both past and future. These intersections with other fields of inquiry suggest a potential rearticulation of Chicana/o and Latina/o literature. We should be attentive not only to global connections, not only to national histories, and not only to local particularities, but to all three, and to perhaps understanding the triad as an echo of the future-present-past. Indeed, the literature of the U.S.Mexican War in general requires that the national project be accompanied by questions of globalization and regionalism precisely because the nationstate aims to mediate between the two, the global and the local always already inhering in the national dreams posited by many of these texts and becoming visible in the Mexican American imaginative struggle with the war’s effects and meanings. I have endeavored in this book to reach a useful interpretation of the U.S.-Mexican War literature, realizing that the very premise of my project means—almost guarantees—that it will be superseded by future readings, a

Epilogue: Narrative Arcs, Arrows of Time  

2 53

prediction ameliorated by the recognition that invention and reinvention not only cast us in uncertainty but dialectically open up new possibilities. Even if we may not be fully in command of the future, we charge ourselves with the tasks of recreation—perhaps a hemispheric American fantasy, but perhaps also a delusion that has as its obverse a mode of reality. In the end, our hopes may lie not in stasis against time but in the interplay of myriad narrative dimensions—now grasped, now fleeting.

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Appendix

novelette titles

These titles represent the three categories as I defined them in Chapter 1. They constitute only a selection of U.S.-Mexican War novelettes. The groupings refer to general tendencies in the plots and characters, and therefore any particular novelette may at times seem to have aspects of a different category. In general, however, the preoccupations of these formula fictions divide along the lines I propose here.

Chivalric Characterized by cross-national marriages, heroic Mexican defenders, and clear references to historical U.S.-Mexican War details—names, dates, places, and so forth. The Secret Service Ship; or, The Fall of San Juan D’Ulloa, 1848, Charles E. Averill The Volunteer; or, The Maid of Monterey, 1847, Ned Buntline The Mexican Ranchero; or, The Maid of the Chapparal, 1847, Charles E. Averill The Prairie Guide; or, The Rose of the Rio Grande, 1850, Newton M. Curtis Inez, the Beautiful; or, Love on the Rio Grande, 1846, Harry Hazel The Vidette; or, The Girl of the Robber’s Pass: A Tale of the Mexican War, 1848, Newton M. Curtis Legends of Mexico (also a frontier tale), 1847, George Lippard

Frontier Characterized by marriages that emphasize reunions or the recovery of lost family members, or both. Mexicans are usually cast as seducers, either sexual, ideological, or both. There are some references to U.S.-Mexican War particulars, but these are usually in the background, often incidental or irrelevant to the story.

2 56   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

The Hunted Chief; or, The Female Ranchero: A Tale of the Mexican War (also chivalric), 1847, Newton M. Curtis The Heroine of Tampico; or, Wildfire the Wanderer, 1847, Harry Halyard The Chieftain of Churubusco; or, The Spectre of the Cathedral, 1848, Harry Halyard The Flying Artillerist; or, The Child of the Battle-Field: A Tale of Mexican Treachery, [1853?], Harry Hazel The Mexican Spy; or, The Bride of Buena Vista, 1848, Harry Halyard The Mariner of the Mines; or, The Maid of the Monastery [1850?], Arthur Armstrong The Light Dragoon: Rancheros of the Poisoned Lance, 1848, Harry Hazel ’Bel of Prairie Eden: A Romance of Mexico, 1848, George Lippard

Western (Bandit) Characterized by an emphasis on the killing of the Mexican bandit over marriages, which may or may not take place. Mexicans are clearly stylized as terrorist criminals, although they often have some association with the Mexican military, and often attack both Mexicans and Anglo Americans. The U.S.-Mexican War exists either in the immediate future or in the immediate past. Zebra Zack; or, The Wild Texan’s Mission, 1861, W. J. Hamilton Putnam Pomfret’s Ward: A Vermonters Adventures in Mexico, 1861, A.J.H. Duganne The Peon Prince; or, The Yankee Knight-Errant, 1861, A.J.H. Duganne Will-O’-The-Wisp: The California Trooper, 1874, Frederick H. Dewey The Blue Band; or, The Mystery of the Silver Star, 1872, J. Stanley Henderson The Prairie Pathfinder; or, The Lost Sister, 1870, Frank P. Armstrong The Captain of the Rifles; or, The Queen of the Lakes, 1879, Mayne Reid

Notes

Introduction 1. The U.S.-Mexican War draws interest from some historians, but when compared to the regular dramatizations of the revolution against England, the Civil War, or the Second World War, the U.S.-Mexican War remains collectively elided. 2. “Presentism” in the sense I am using it here refers to a mode of historical analysis that suppresses knowledge about a particular historical context in order to make past events comprehensible primarily in terms of contemporary, or present, conditions. 3. Garber, “Historical Correctness: The Use and Abuse of History for Literature,” 65 and 49, respectively. The Walter Benjamin quotation is from “Literary History and the Study of Literature,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2 (1927–1934) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 464. 4. The war has been a continuing subject of documentary investigation from 1848 forward, largely through efforts to romanticize and justify a controversial invasion. A more critical, twentieth-century examination of the U.S.-Mexican War can be said to have begun with John Douglas Pitts Fuller’s The Movement for All Mexico, 1846–1848 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936), and then gained new relevance with John H. Schroeder’s Vietnam-era study, Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973). More recent histories include John S. D. Eisenhower’s So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848 (New York: Random House, 1989) and Richard B. Winders’ Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997). Also crucial to U.S.-Mexican War studies is Eyewitness to War: Prints and Daguerreotypes of the Mexican War, 1846–1848, compiled and introduced by Martha A. Sandweiss, Rick Stewart, and Ben W. Huseman. Recently, Mexican and Latina and Latino scholars have produced new historical studies; among

2 58   

Notes to Pages 10–22

these are the works collected in Myths, Misdeeds, and Misunderstandings: The Roots of Conflict in U.S.-Mexican Relations (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1997), edited by Jaime E. Rodríguez O. and Kathryn Vincent. Mexican historiography has been highlighted by the work of Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, including Mexicanos y norteamericanos ante la guerra del 47 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1972) and La intervención norteamericana, 1846–1848 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 1997). Cecil Robinson’s translations of Mexican writings in The View from Chapultepec: Mexican Writers on the Mexican-American War are an important resource. 5. “I am saying that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War” (Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory, 35).

Chapter One 1. General Zachary Taylor, “Ol’ Rough and Ready,” in command of the first U.S. troops to engage the Mexicans, near present-day Brownsville, Texas, was known to dress rustically, at times wearing a plain brown overcoat and a straw hat ( Johanssen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 115–116). 2. The Associated Press news service got its start during the U.S.-Mexican War, and recent documentary findings indicate that, instead of the AP forming relatively late in the war in 1848, correspondents began organizing a collective news-gathering operation, which led to the AP, as early as May 1846, during the first weeks of the war (San Antonio Express-News, Feb. 1, 2006). 3. A more precise estimate is difficult to calculate, but the figure of thirty titles represents a minimum, based on a review of the holdings at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at Arlington, and Harvard University. For the University of Texas at Arlington’s holdings, a useful guide is Jenkins Garrett’s The MexicanAmerican War of 1846–1848: A Bibliography of the Holdings of the Libraries: The University of Texas at Arlington (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995). 4. “Story-paper fiction, while no doubt overlapping with domestic fiction’s readership in part, is known to have incorporated many groups situated outside such feminized ease: farmboys, soldiers, German and Irish immigrants, and men and women of a newly solidifying working class” (Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 79). Even if this early form of “low-brow” fiction was not read by all groups, its designs and successes were nonetheless driven by an expanding marketplace cutting across regional and social distinctions. 5. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 30. Cawelti offers four hypotheses about the art/culture dialectic in “formula stories”: they affirm the truths, reality, and moral system of a social group; they resolve ideological contradictions; they allow the vicarious exploration of the forbidden; and they assist in assimilating changes to the social order (35–36). 6. I capitalize the terms here to designate a specific and specialized usage. When they appear in lowercase throughout the rest of this chapter, they should be understood as referencing my particular categorizations, and not more general categories. 7. I borrow this elegant phrasing from Tino Villanueva’s title poem in Scene from

Notes to Pages 22–26  

2 59

the Movie GIANT: “Locked into a back-row seat—I am a thin, flickering / Helpless light, local-looking, unthought of at fourteen” (“Scene from the Movie GIANT,” 12). 8. Slotkin, “The Myth That Wasn’t,” 192. 9. Ibid., 191. 10. I differ from Streeby here in that I understand the conventional bandit story as speaking to the fundamental issue of the U.S.-Mexican War through its deliberate elision of the conflict. The “contradictions” of the war had to be effaced, perhaps, but bandit tales, in a sense, emerge directly from that effacement. 11. Streeby also begins with Slotkin’s provocative dilemma, but my analysis coordinates the questions about the elision of U.S.-Mexican War mythology and the erasure of Mexican Americans from much of U.S. America’s present consciousness. 12. An 1845 novelette by Harry Hazel, The Rival Chieftains; or, The Brigands of Mexico, concentrates almost exclusively on the presence of bandit characters in Mexican society, at least from the perspective of a pulp fiction writer publishing in Boston. And Karl Anton Postl, an Austrian American, in 1844 published The Cabin Book; or, Sketches of Life in Texas in 1844; like many other writings about the Texian rebellion against Mexico, this work portrayed the country as little more than a degenerate, failed state and described Mexicans in consistently pejorative terms. 13. A. Smith, National Identity, 84. 14. Louis Althusser’s insights into the relationship between ideological belief and subjectivity are certainly important to a study such as this one, which locates in narrative basic forces that strive to reconfigure belief systems under constant pressure. However, Althusser’s key assertion, that ideology “represents the imaginary relation” of people to their actual circumstances (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 162–170), suggests that the key commonality across ideology and narrative lies in their fundamentally interpretive demands. In a sense, human subjects are always already reading and interpreting. Further, a denial of reality, in Althusser’s formulation, is deeply dependent on the reality it denies. This is one reason why novelette fantasies cannot be dismissed so long as their writers search for and achieve nationalist and exceptionalist statements. 15. The tensions within the ultimately successful western novelettes, associated here with pre-romance forms, speak to issues other than exceptionalism. To consider the role of U.S. American ideology from this vantage point is to recognize first the social upheavals in the United States at midcentury. As Eric Hobsbawm argued in his still useful study, Bandits (originally published in 1969), bandit legends arise during moments of economic dislocation, moments of cultural uncertainty, much like the “times of troubles” Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious aligns with the chansons de geste (118). Within a specifically Mexican historical context, however, the crucial roles of Mexican bandits in the myths of the American West through the rest of the 1800s and all of the 1900s suggest how these figures served to enforce a basic ideological framework in which U.S. American exceptionalism and social anxiety were two aspects of a single dynamic. In other words, the Mexican bandit story—and the novelette from which it derived much of its form—are more usefully approached today as indicators of internal anxieties vis-à-vis Anglo-Mexican relations. Indeed, expansion itself can be approached as a cultural movement energized by various social fears. To study the western dime novel in this way is to explore the social mediations that the

2 6 0   

Notes to Pages 27–33

terms of Mexico and Mexicans perform within American cultural ideology, rather than stop the analysis at the point that it levels an indictment of racism. 16. What is villainous in Anglo American dime novels, the Mexican’s transgressive existence, becomes his most heroic quality in Mexican corridos and later in Chicana/o art, which suggests the key difference between both kinds of bandits. Said another way, the Chicano icon, whether he’s Joaquín Murieta or Gregorio Cortez, may have more in common with chivalric U.S.-Mexican War novelettes than with dime novels. 17. Ronald Zboray notes that the concept of the bestseller itself suggested an “experience of the text that they [readers] could share in common with other readers—an almost poignant emulation of people’s behavior to achieve some sense of community” (Zboray, A Fictive People, 191). 18. The terms Anglo and Anglo American here and throughout refer interchangeably to the belief in a distinctive “Anglo-Saxon” race, distinguishable from a nonwhite population. Unlike the term “white,” “Anglo” and “Anglo-Saxon” tend to emphasize culture and history along with racial categorization, which has a powerful application vis-à-vis Mexico, a nation with its own legacy of racial oppression. Although the bracketing, qualifying quotation marks that usually accompany these terms in contemporary analysis are used here only for special emphasis, the use of these terms in this chapter should not be considered as a validation. 19. Streeby, American Sensations, 104–111. 20. Ibid., 116. 21. In all quotations from the novelettes, the spellings of Mexican names follow those in the original texts, even when they are incorrect or suggestive of Italian or other forms. Rejon, for example, should have an accent over the “o.” 22. The well-known desertion of Irish Catholics, Germans, and men from other nationalities to the Mexican army, forming the San Patricio Battalion, attracts continuing interest and figures prominently in any discussion of Irish assimilation at midcentury. Streeby offers a clear analysis of the novelettes’ relationship to Irish immigration, a concern outside the scope of the present study. 23. Here again Streeby has persuasively shown how these fictions imagined a reformulation of whiteness to take in new Irish and other immigrants, as well as excising miscegenation. These boundary-making dreams (nightmares), however, do not begin or end in the conflict with Mexico. 24. Curtis, The Vidette: A Tale of the Mexican War, 8. 25. Ibid. 26. Recent criticism of American intervention in Iraq raises similar concerns, although the graphic reportage of Iraqi victimization and of atrocities committed by U.S. troops has likely led to a higher degree of empathy with the innocent than might have existed in the 1840s. 27. Terry Eagleton notes that imperialism by definition is a destabilizing project for the imperialist. “Imperialism needs to assert the absolute truth of its own values at exactly the point where those values are confronting alien cultures; and this can prove a notably disorienting experience. It is hard to remain convinced that your own way of doing things is the only possible one when you are busy trying to subjugate another society which conducts its affairs in a radically different but apparently effective way”

Notes to Pages 34–35  

261

(Eagleton, Ideology, 107). Perhaps Mexico’s various similarities to the United States intensified efforts to enforce difference. 28. General Antonio López de Santa Anna was perhaps the single most dominant political and military figure during Mexico’s first half-century, but today he is generally held in low regard. His turbulent career is marked by an impressive ability to regain political power after apparently having lost all support, but he ultimately proved ineffectual as a political leader. As a military tactician, he seems to have had a genuine talent, but the Mexican army’s internal divisions and its lack of resources proved disastrous against a better-trained and better-equipped U.S. military. 29. The complex responses to Catholicism varied, but fascination with the Church and Church rituals was a frequent theme in many war diaries and could itself be the subject of further study, given the complex national response to Catholicism documented by scholars, notably Jenny Franchot’s Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. 30. Quotations and episodes are from McCaffrey, “Surrounded by Dangers,” 57, 70, 75, 76, 92, 120, 128–129. Other military memoirs and front-line letters suggesting such varied attitudes toward Mexicans can be found in Beauregard, With Beauregard in Mexico; Coulter and Barclay, Volunteers; Curtis, Mexico Under Fire; and Dana, Monterrey Is Ours! 31. McCaffrey, “Surrounded by Dangers,” 88. McCaffrey, offering his own commentary on this particular passage, writes that “Laidley finally begins to draw contrasts among the different social classes of Mexican civilians he encounters, a practice that was quite common among the American soldiers” (89). 32. Watson emphasizes an elitist class component among army officers, noting that “conservative senses of class and social order were closely linked in the minds and actions of army officers on the border, who made a sharp distinction between Patriot rabble-rousers and the ‘respectable’ citizens whom commanders expected to uphold law and order” (Watson, “Uncertain Road,” 83). 33. Both soldiers recorded the event in their journals, but Barclay’s is the more detailed: “The funeral of a Mexican officer took place today. He died in consequence of wounds received at the Battle of Cerro Gordo. The ceremony was imposing. The body was first conveyed to the Church and after the rites of the Catholic religion on such occasions had been performed, it was taken to the grave. A band of regulars and a regular escort were in attendance. Genls. Scott, Twiggs and many of the American officers were also present. A train is looked for from Vera Cruz” (Coulter and Barclay, Volunteers, 94–95). 34. “I saw one of our soldiers, who seemed to be perfectly exasperated, about to run his bayonet through the neck of a young Mexican officer, who stood in front of him without hat or sword! I mechanically struck a heavy blow with my sabre upon the bayonet, which was about to perform its bloody and deadly deed, and had the good luck to parry the thrust so far as only to let it run through his military coat collar and cravat. I then rebuked the soldier, placed the officer in charge of a sentinel and ascertained that his name was Mr. Ximenes, a young lieutenant of the Corps of Engineers” (Beauregard, With Beauregard in Mexico, 82). 35. Matamoros, Mexico, is a port city on the southern bank of the Rio Grande

2 6 2   

Notes to Pages 35–44

opposite present-day Brownsville, Texas. The first battles were fought a few miles north of the river, and Matamoros itself was the first major Mexican city occupied by U.S. troops. From the Mexican perspective, however, General Zachary Taylor’s force was already in disputed territory when it crossed the Nueces River about 150 miles north of Matamoros. 36. Curtis, Mexico under Fire, 72. 37. Ibid., 85. 38. Kirkham, Mexican War Journals, 68, 80, 96. Also, in an entry dated July 17, 1847, Kirkham noted spending an evening with other U.S. officers “at the home of a Mexican officer who treated U.S. very agreeably” (37). 39. Averill, Mexican Ranchero, 13. 40. Ibid., 82. 41. Isora is the fictional daughter of a real General Rómulo Diaz de la Vega, who was captured at Resaca de la Palma and who gained a measure of fame in the United States after news reports claimed he had bravely remained at his artillery post as it was being overrun by U.S. cavalry. 42. No first name is given for this version of the U.S. hero, but he is evidently a highly fictionalized reference to a historical figure, Robert Rogers, who as a U.S. soldier was temporarily held prisoner by the Mexicans. 43. Averill, The Secret Service Ship, 64. Punctuation as in original. 44. Ibid., 88. 45. A reference to the real figure of General Pedro de Ampudia, who surrendered Monterrey to Taylor’s troops after intense street firefights and after his troops ran low on food and supplies. 46. Johannsen provides a concise summary of Buntline’s role in popularizing the U.S.-Mexican War novelette (To the Halls of the Montezumas, 189–190), and Streeby’s analysis offers important background detailing Buntline’s political activities, which combined often contradictory impulses toward democratic ideals and antiforeigner agitations. Judson also garners notoriety for being convicted of helping to incite the Astor Place riot in 1849, and serving a year in prison (Streeby, American Sensations, 139–158). 47. Buntline (Edward Zane Carroll Judson), The Volunteer, 75. 48. I discuss below how frontier novelettes focus on a reintegration of a fractured family, but certainly this same concern is evident in The Mexican Ranchero. The difference is that the family being reunited in the frontier mode is generally Anglo American. Different domestic regatherings speak to different tensions. 49. La Vega was actually captured twice during the war, the second time at Cerro Gordo in April 1847. In May, the Daily Picayune republished accounts of the battle from the American Eagle, a wartime English newspaper in Veracruz, noting La Vega’s capture and gallant behavior. “Gen. La Vega, who is again in our clutches, looked as dashing and fine as ever. He did not seem the least disconcerted, but rode in from the battle field, by the side of Gen. Scott, laughing and talking as though he was once more on his way to New Orleans” (“Further Details of the Battle,” 2). 50. Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army, 175–176. 51. Dana, Monterrey Is Ours!, 88–90. 52. Kirkham, Mexican War Journals, 15.

Notes to Pages 45–52  

2 63

53. Dilworth, The March to Monterrey, 19. 54. Averill, The Secret Service Ship, 12. 55. Ibid., 100. 56. Ibid., 9. 57. Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture, 55. 58. Greenwood (Sara Jane Clarke), “The Volunteer,” 106. 59. The theoretical premise depends in part on a reading of the novelettes through a comparison between these nineteenth-century fantasies and medieval narrative forms, specifically criticism emerging from recent studies of French medieval literature. It also draws specific inspiration from a brief passage in Jameson’s The Political Unconscious in which he contends that romances arose when the French feudal sector became self-aware of itself as a class and had to find a way to mediate an earlier, disparate, narrative form, the chansons, in which opponents were conveniently projected as enemies simply because of their unfamiliarity. With a growing class self-consciousness, argues Jameson, the formula altered into “strong romance” forms wherein opposing, unknown, knights became incorporated, made known, and thus situated in their appropriate stratum of a developing class society. That is, now knights by definition were aligned against a lower class. These romances, then, elaborated a particular type of narrative that signaled a change, or a destabilization, in the previous definitions of self and other: knights encounter opposing, unknown—and thus enemy—knights; but a knight defeated in battle could be spared once he identified himself. It is, as Jameson notes, the moment of ritualistic identification that prompts the victorious knight to spare the enemy, suddenly less an enemy than a worthy opponent, a moment that counters the alien with a recognition between knights, a communication that establishes a class identity (110–119). 60. I do not discount the language of nationality in earlier phases, or during the revolutionary era, but then it would be equally incorrect to assume, as some do, that U.S. American nationalism sprang up fully formed one summer day in 1776. 61. Streeby, American Sensations, 28. 62. Lepore’s The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity tracks the interplay between and among history, war, and literature in ways fully applicable to the U.S.-Mexican War. 63. “In contrast with Erich Köhler . . . we find that Old French romance and lyric promulgate an inferred model of social order that not only conflicts with the clannish interests of feudal nobility, but that is perfectly consistent with the political strategy of monarchy—the creation of a nation of self-governing individuals responsible for themselves to the state as opposed to a federation of clans accountable to each other” (Bloch, “The Ideology of Courtly Love,” 237–238). My emphasis here is on the way a “federation of clans” does not presuppose a higher ordering principle—a king, say— whereas a monarchy implies a value or ideal above the clan, thus allowing, presumably, people to substitute one feudal identity for another without violating their higher loyalty. In an older system of federated clans, changing loyalties from one lord to another would have meant a more profound shift of values and identity. 64. Bloch writes that courtly literature, because it deals with an internalization of values, favors the “creation of lateral social ties, mutual obligations, between even the most distant members of a large body politic—as opposed to local, personal ties

2 64   

Notes to Pages 52–62

of dependence between lord and vassal or between the members of the same warrior group” (Bloch, “The Ideology of Courtly Love,” 248). 65. “Henceforth, the world no longer consists of knowable phenomena waiting to be placed within a predetermined historical or metaphysical perspective, but of undefined objects and events whose symbolic meaning is dependent upon a single knower, the context of knowledge, and is liable to exhaustless interpretation” (Bloch, “Tristan,” 81). 66. I differ again here with Streeby, although there can be no question that many of these novelettes promulgated anti-Mexican, anti-mestizo racism. My analysis, however, disputes the claim that “international race romances” argue for incorporation of Mexico. Rather, I hold that in fact such texts more often than not continue to preserve the authority of the Mexican nation-state. This might be a distinction without a difference, given that Mexicans had to be, in fact, incorporated into the United States, to which Mexican brides may refer. But, as I develop in my argument, these brides are not typically cast as converts to “American” ideals, unlike the Mexican trophy wives in frontier tales, who often dramatically repudiate Mexican nationality. 67. Warner, The Letters of the Republic, 149. 68. My thoughts here have been shaped and informed by Sacvan Bercovitch’s The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Constructions of America. My specific concern, however, is to understand how the ideological categories of “Mexico” and “Mexican” interact with and generate nationalist discourse. 69. Johanssen notes that Harry Halyard is a pseudonym for a writer of whom nothing is known (To the Halls of the Montezumas, 188). 70. Robert Clark, for example, has pointedly remarked how Irish immigration would transform “Protestant Massachusetts into a Catholic state” (Clark, History, Ideology and Myth, 124). 71. Streeby, American Sensations, 168–188. 72. Horsman emphasizes that racist attitudes permeated practically every aspect of the debate, and notes that many Whig opponents feared racial incorporation. “The Whigs regularly emphasized what aggression was doing to the United States, not what aggression was doing to Mexico” (Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 240). Horsman’s book is important to this project also in his claim that Anglo-Saxonism is significantly related to the antebellum conflict with Mexico. “The catalyst in the overt adoption of a racial Anglo-Saxonism was the meeting of Americans and Mexicans in the Southwest, the Texas Revolution, and the war with Mexico. In confronting the Mexicans the Americans clearly formulated the idea of themselves as an Anglo-Saxon race” (208). Horsman’s point is well taken, but this assessment of a racial and cultural dialectic stands alongside the other, self-conscious and relativizing consequences of expansion. Further, my study makes a distinction between the historical ramifications of the Alamo battle and the U.S.-Mexican War. They both involve an Anglo versus Mexican conflict, but they differ fundamentally in how they configure the landscape, both psychological and ideological, of their battles. 73. Delano, Speech of Mr. Columbus Delano, 13. 74. C. B. Smith, Speech of Mr. C. B. Smith, 13. 75. “The Black Legend” is a term used to describe the propaganda aimed against Spain by other European powers, who, themselves guilty of their own imperial vio-

Notes to Pages 62–67  

2 65

lence in the New World, sought to project the Spanish Empire as particularly bigoted, cruel, fanatical, and evil. 76. Indeed, the conflation of ostensible “fair skin” with villainy demonstrates the flexibility of racial formation itself, as delineated by Omi and Winant. That is, Mexicans can be—and have been—racialized in different ways in different times, depending on shifting social circumstances. 77. None other than Cotton Mather, evidently anxious about Catholics in the Americas, taught himself Spanish in order to write an anti-Catholic diatribe, which he hoped to distribute throughout Latin America and thereby win converts. 78. The frequently noted and often criticized multiplicity of terms used to refer to Spanish-speaking people in the United States today might be better seen as a superficial sign of a disturbance within the domain of dominant America rather than solely a difficulty or concern among the Hispanic, Latino, Chicano, or Mexican American population. 79. Foot, Speech of Mr. Solomon Foot, 14. 80. Halyard, Chieftain, 71. 81. Halyard, Heroine of Tampico, 63. 82. Ibid., 71. 83. Curtis, The Hunted Chief, 60. 84. Johannsen notes that Jones also was a leading publisher of U.S.-Mexican War fiction in Boston. Jones published The Star Spangled Banner, while Frederick Gleason, also in Boston, published The Flag of Our Union during the war years, two leading story papers that primarily featured fiction (Johanssen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 187–188). 85. Jehlen is here mounting an analysis of the fundamental contradiction within an ideology that urges individuals to make their own new worlds in a rhetorical environment that closes off the possibility of change. “Build therefore your own world, Emerson urged the individual, for you are in yourself equal to any world; but (apparently) let it not be any world but this one” (Jehlen, American Incarnation, 128). Jehlen’s approach to American exceptionalism is fundamentally key to this analysis of the novelettes, as it highlights the resistance within American ideology to historical contingency made present within chivalric forms and powerfully dismissed by western versions. 86. Historian Thomas Hietala has made a forceful and comprehensive argument for the way expansionism was seen as a remedy for a variety of national anxieties, including that of impending modernization and industrialization, which neoJeffersonians resisted in favor of a maintenance, or return, to an agricultural utopia. “It is misleading, then, to place technology and democracy in double harness in antebellum America. For it was more an apprehension about the technological revolution sweeping the Western world than an acceptance of it that influenced the expansionists of the 1840s” (Hietala, Manifest Design, 97). Seen this way, the desire for Mexican lands is yet again another denial of change, time, and history. Rather than a progressive move into the future it is an escape, or a retreat, into the past. Of more immediate relevance to this discussion is the study of antebellum reading patterns by Ronald J. Zboray, who notes the disruptions of American families during these years as one factor leading to a widespread market for fictions that reasserted the integrity of families. “By 1860 more than a third of free Americans resided outside the state of their birth; probably an

2 66   

Notes to Pages 68–84

equal or greater proportion relocated within their home states. Those moving tended to be from lower on the social scale than those remaining and were, of course, less economically successful. This swarming, migratory population hardly broke down into neat, intact family units, but instead to a great extent consisted of individuals thrust away from kin and other loved ones by the shifting tides of economic misfortune” (Zboray, A Fictive People, 111). 87. C. B. Smith, Speech of Mr. C. B. Smith, 15. 88. Stewart, Speech of Mr. Stewart, 7. 89. Delano, Speech of Mr. Columbus Delano, 9. 90. Foot, Speech of Mr. Solomon Foot, 8. 91. Corwin is notable also because he delivered perhaps one of the most proMexico orations in Congress, avoiding almost entirely the customary racism of his colleagues. 92. Corwin, Speech of Mr. Corwin, 16. 93. The point bears emphasizing. In The Flying Artillerist, the intense concentration on the history of the Goliad executions merely serves to accentuate the near total absence of the U.S.-Mexican War as anything more than distant background to the rest of the tale. 94. Dumiger, actually, is the least negative villain. The others, all Mexicans, are categorically evil, except for Rodriguez Halsinger, a Mexican officer who resigns rather than carry out the infamous execution order. The cast includes an Irishman, Mickey Mahoney, who at a point before the narrative begins has joined the Mexican cause. Indeed, these tales often included Irish villains who joined the Mexican army, a narrative feature inspired by the actual defection of Irish soldiers to the Mexican side early in the war, and which no doubt reinforced the relationship, as Streeby has explored, between Catholicism and a theoretically fragile loyalty to the United States. 95. Hazel, Flying Artillerist, 12. 96. Ibid., 92. 97. Ibid., 70. 98. Ibid., 86–87. 99. Ibid., 87. 100. I drop the accent over the “I” in Rodriguez in accordance with the text’s spelling. 101. “No sooner had they arrived, than they went to the house of the only protestant clergyman in the place, and were privately married” (Hazel, Flying Artillerist, 19). 102. Jeff Shaara, Gone for Soldiers: A Novel of the Mexican War (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000). 103. Lippard, Legends of Mexico, 26–27. 104. The narratological disposition I am charting draws from sociological analyses, such as Hobsbawm’s seminal 1969 study, which situated the bandit as a figure of social disruption who maintains a weakening grip on a receding political and economic system. Bandits, whether fictional or historical, articulate a temporal predicament. 105. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 16. Moreover, Zboray notes how journalism surpassed a taste for fiction as reporters successfully adopted the narrative techniques of fiction (Zboray, A Fictive People, 128). 106. Johanssen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 186.

Notes to Pages 86–115  

2 67

107. Kendall, Dispatches, 284. 108. Ibid., 278. 109. The analogies and points of convergence between the U.S.-Mexican War and other similar invasions are too numerous to mention here, but I note how such parallels can be drawn, in particular with the ongoing conflict in Iraq. 110. Reid, The Captain of the Rifles, 6. 111. Ibid. 112. Streeby concentrates on these two dime novels in an insightful study of how Duganne’s political sentiments, like Buntline’s a mixture of reformist idealism and cultural essentialism, inform the narrative’s concerns about race, labor rights, and national unity. These are indeed vital analytical frames. My interest lies in matters of narrative logic, and thus my references to Duganne are designed to emphasize how he organizes temporal settings. 113. Armstrong, Prairie Pathfinder, 16. 114. Ibid., 16. 115. Ibid., 29. 116. Mora-Torres, The Making of the Mexican Border, 53–69. 117. Streeby, American Sensations, 189–213. 118. Kendall, Dispatches, 407. 119. Reid, Captain of the Rifles, 20. 120. Dewey, Will-O’-The-Wisp, 98. 121. Hamilton, Zebra Zack, 101. 122. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 191. 123. Ibid., 192. 124. Dewey, Will-O’-The-Wisp, 10. 125. Kendall, Dispatches, 217. 126. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 15–16. 127. Fussel, The Great War, 115. 128. It is tempting to employ the term American here, with the same understanding that attends America. However, it is useful for this study to foreground the cultural dimension to these racial categories, and in this regard the word Anglo demonstrates how the word Mexican in American rhetoric is a relational matrix of both racial and political-cultural values. 129. As many others have done, I take the term from Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. Another important contribution to a revaluing of the role of popular literature is David Reynolds’s Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination the Age of Emerson and Melville. Reynolds’s chief concern is to emphasize the influence of popular forms on canonical works. Clearly, U.S.-Mexican War novelettes and dime novels speak to their own contexts, but as I show in this chapter, they also reference matters of war and war discourse directly.

Chapter Two 1. Jones, however, does explore how dialect in Lowell’s satire can perform authenticity, and yet also, in Sawin’s usage, become a zone of moral fallibility ( Jones, “The Cult of the Vernacular,” 40–41).

2 68   

Notes to Pages 115–118

2. There are two series of Biglow Papers by Lowell. In this project I refer mainly to the first series of 1848, although I briefly mention the second, published in a collection in 1867. For most references I use the first series edition, edited in 1977 by Thomas Wortham, James Russell Lowell’s The Biglow Papers [First Series]. 3. Duberman, James Russell Lowell, 60–66. 4. Johanssen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 205–206. 5. Ibid., 214. 6. The Biglow Papers first appeared individually from June 1846 to September 1848 in the Boston Courier and the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Several pieces date from after the war’s conclusion (Lowell, The Biglow Papers (Wortham edition), xv–xxiv). Unless otherwise designated, references to Lowell’s text are drawn from the Wortham edition. 7. Another distinction must also be made between the first series and the second series of 1867, a similar collection of dialect poems and essays but constituting a Unionist response to the Civil War. The second series suffers in comparison with the first, but it presents a retrospective Introduction that captures Lowell’s own interpretation of his characters and country-rustic humor. Lowell explains that he had always believed the U.S.-Mexican War a “national crime committed in behoof of Slavery” and that he wanted to put his thoughts in the language of the common New Englander. The invention of Wilbur, he added, was meant to be more of a “complement rather than the antithesis of his parishioner” (Lowell, “Introduction,” 441). 8. Horsman, “Anglo-Saxons and Mexicans,” in Race and Manifest Destiny, 208–228. 9. Bernbrock, “Walt Whitman and ‘Anglo-Saxonism,’”71. 10. Jones, “The Cult of the Vernacular,” 42. 11. Lowell’s “Yankee” dialect that purports to correspond to a New England culture is one version of a more generalized white ethnic mode of speech opposing a supposedly civilized and thus disempowered form of elite English. The differences between Yankee and southern rural voices can seem slight or irrelevant because both value simplicity, rustic wisdom, and a durability absent from the “book learning” of the urban cosmopolite. 12. Simpson, The Politics of American English, 146. Years before Lowell’s Biglow appeared, Seba Smith was already publishing The Letters of Major Jack Downing in 1830. Smith is considered to be the inaugurator of New England dialect as a forum for rustic humor. Smith’s Downing, in fact, also wrote “letters” from Mexico City, notable for the way they avoid any sustained reference to Mexico or Mexicans. Constance Rourke’s study of American humor shows how the stock, plain-talking American Jonathan figure can be traced to Royall Tyler’s play The Contrast (1787), and as early as the 1820s, rustic Yankees began appearing in blue coats and red-and-white striped pants, evolving into proto-Uncle Sam characters who embodied essential Americanness. Rourke, “Corn Cobs Twist Your Hair,” 24–25. 13. Simpson, The Politics of American English, 251. 14. In this chapter I often use the term Anglo-Saxon, mainly to differentiate a specific, English-origin ethnicity among some people who might also be labeled white, or Anglo. When I rely on Anglo American as a descriptor, I am pointing to a more generalized notion of racial distinction opposing those typically cast as dark, or mixed, etc.

Notes to Pages 118–130  

2 69

15. Lowell, Biglow Papers, 40. 16. Ibid., 41. Bernbrock’s 1961 dissertation, from which I am drawing here, “Walt Whitman and ‘Anglo-Saxonism,’” offers a useful guide to Whitman’s fascination with Anglo-Saxonist belief, and concisely notes the linguistic jingoism of many writers of the era, including Ralph Waldo Emerson’s. 17. Lowell, “Introduction to the Second Series of Biglow Papers.” 18. Bernbrock, “Walt Whitman and ‘Anglo-Saxonism,’” 82–83. 19. Ibid., 83. 20. Johanssen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 218. 21. Bell, “‘The Only True Folk Songs We Have in English,’” 150. 22. The emphasis on linguistic disturbance and war is explored in Thomas Gustafson’s Representative Words. A critique of national hubris and a sense of doom are in fact at the center of Lowell’s reaction to the war and most fully enunciated by Wilbur. 23. Lowell, Biglow Papers, 53–54. 24. Ibid., 52. 25. Ibid., 54. 26. Lowell, Biglow Papers, Wortham annotation, 190. 27. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 240. 28. Lowell, Biglow Papers, 53. 29. O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” 9. Robert Sampson’s recent biography of O’Sullivan explores the writer’s ideas regarding U.S. expansionism, and notes how O’Sullivan’s negotiated a disdain for war with a belief in a redemptive American mission; particularly relevant is the chapter titled “The Fall,” 194–207. John L. O’Sullivan and His Times. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2003. 30. Whitman, “Our Territory on the Pacific.” 31. I follow Wortham’s textual notes to track newspaper publication dates. Thus, the first Sawin letter appeared in the Boston Courier on August 18, 1847, when U.S. troops were preparing for the final, decisive attack on Mexico City. The second and third letter appeared, respectively, in the National Anti-Slavery Standard on July 6, 1848, and September 28, 1848, months after the war’s conclusion with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. 32. Caleb Cushing was a prominent New England Democrat who supported President Polk’s war effort and served as a volunteer. He articulated typical expansionist rhetoric that emphasized a U.S. destiny to conquer the Americas (Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 223). 33. Lowell, Biglow Papers, 62–63. 34. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 148–154. 35. Flag of Freedom, quoted in Roth, “Journalism and the U.S.-Mexican War,” 103–104. 36. The relatively slim box-office take from the most recent Alamo film, The Alamo, starring Dennis Quaid and Billy Bob Thornton (2004), can probably be explained by the producers’ decision to end the film by recreating the San Jacinto battle, which actually cracks open the sacred wholeness of Texan mythology by pushing viewers back onto the mundane field of historical continuity. 37. In his introduction to his critical edition of The Biglow Papers, Wortham asserts that Wilbur’s commentaries are the “best prose [Lowell] wrote before the Civil War” and that the character of the wordy preacher is often dismissed because he is often mis-

2 7 0   

Notes to Pages 130–137

understood (Lowell, Biglow Papers, xxvi–xxvii). My reading similarly locates Wilbur at the critical center of the work, constantly present and perhaps closest to Lowell’s own voice and to a set of literary, philosophical, and political concerns regarding both language and writing. 38. Lowell, Biglow Papers, 66. 39. Ibid., 73. 40. Ibid., 127. 41. Ibid., 129. 42. Bhabha, “Dissemination,” 148. 43. Ibid., 149. 44. These brief but representative examples come from pages 64, 69, and 91 in the Wortham edition and suggest how Wilbur descends into a state of helplessness as he becomes aware of the relationship between language and human limitation. 45. Parker, “A Sermon of the Mexican War,” 45. 46. In Gustafson’s terms, Parson Wilbur is writing about a war marked by a “Thucydidean moment” of linguistic corruption and political demagoguery, a time when language is used for deception and oratory becomes a force for social chaos and moral collapse: “The moment in history that Thucydides describes . . . is that moment when first principles and founding words are hallowed in speech but violated in deeds, when an individual ‘I’ claiming to speak for a collective ‘we’ traduces the republican political grammar that subordinates ‘I’ to ‘we,’ when rhetoric becomes a debased form of political action—deceit or flattery—and when even a dialogue of deceit and flattery collapses into discord and separate monologues, and, finally when eloquence or logos becomes not the alternative to violence and the very power that distinguishes humans from the beasts but the inciter to or legitimator of immoral violence—the power that lowers us below beasts into the rungs of hell” (Gustafson, Representative Words, 78). Gustafson drives his analysis toward the Civil War, but the earlier U.S.-Mexican War equally makes unmistakable the contradiction between the United States’ actions and ideals; in 1846 the words were manifestly lies. Indeed, the link between imperialism and rhetorical fraud was openly visible to some in the process of expansion, as Gustafson notes: “More than one writer was provoked in mid-nineteenth-century America to repeat or echo Tacitus’ famous condemnation of the Romans for expanding their empire through the meanness of force and justifying their imperialism through the meanness of rhetorical fraud: . . . Eloquence, paired so often as the bride of liberty in the classical rhetorical tradition, must also be figured as the whore of empire” (98). 47. One of the most telling examples lies in U.S. Grant’s memoirs, in which he redefined the invasion of Mexico as an original national sin for which the United States paid through the violence and death of the Civil War. 48. Bhabha, “Dissemination,” 149. 49. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 27. 50. Howard, Victorian Knight-Errant, 240–241. 51. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 11. 52. Ibid., 370. 53. Ibid., 30. 54. Ibid., 30. 55. Ibid., 66.

Notes to Pages 137–154  

271

56. A. Smith, National Identity, 84. 57. Ibid., 84. 58. Huntington, Who Are We?, 256. 59. Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, 272. 60. Ibid., 285–286. 61. Ibid., 276. 62. Ibid., 268–269. 63. Ibid., 269. 64. Meyer and Geschiere, Introduction, Globalization and Identity. 65. We should resist the temptation to read fiction biographically, but with Jack Tier the tone and pitch of the narrative voice, often polemical and detached from the action, would at least suggest Cooper’s direct intervention. 66. Cooper, Jack Tier, 144. 67. Ibid., 153. 68. Ibid., 306. 69. Ibid., 308. 70. Ibid., 367. 71. I must acknowledge here a debt to John Q. Anderson’s 1959 essay on this same topic in which he noted that indicative though they may be of Emerson’s views on expansionism, his journal notations did not generally become material for essays or lectures (Anderson, “Emerson on Texas and the Mexican War,” 191). 72. Ibid., 199. 73. Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notesbooks, 9:430–431. 74. Ibid., 9:74–75. 75. Curiously, this suggests, despite Anderson’s insights, that Emerson was indifferent toward “secular” means. 76. Emerson, Journals and Notebooks, 10:29. 77. Ibid., 10:114. 78. Ibid., 14:417. 79. Emerson, “Fate,” 17.

Chapter Three 1. I note here the highly influential research of Josefina Zoraida Vázquez and Daniel Cosío Villegas, both of whom have noted the war’s positive impact on the development of Mexican nationalism. Vázquez, with Lorenzo Meyer, makes the most sustained case in The United States and Mexico in which Chapter 3 includes a review of the war. Villegas makes the case in passing in “El Porfiriato, era de consolidación.” Another historian who reviews the argument is Andrés Reséndez Fuentes, in “Guerra y identidad nacional.” 2. Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, 126–128. 3. Relatively few Mexican historians have chosen to examine the war’s ideological ramifications, but those who have often argue that the war precipitated a collective introspection and a renewed, and ultimately more successful, search for national identity. Jesús Velasco Márquez’s La guerra del 47 y la opinión pública (1845–1848) is an illuminating review of Mexican newspaper editorials and their political impact on

2 7 2   

Notes to Pages 154–159

public opinion during these turbulent years. A useful English-language anthology of Mexican writing about the war, beginning with contemporary accounts and ending with twentieth-century scholarship, can be found in The View from Chapultepec: Mexican Writers on the Mexican-American War, edited and translated by Cecil Robinson. 4. Ernest Renan’s classic 1882 lecture comes to mind here, particularly in his concluding thoughts, where he notes that nations put forward not merely a government but a belief system (Renan, “What Is a nation?,” 8–22). 5. “La guerra fue un parteaguas dramático, una ‘coyuntura crítica’ donde diversas regiones y localidades, distintas clases sociales, diversos grupos étnicos, y bandos políticos tuvieron que definirse respecto a la nación” (Fuentes, “Guerra y identidad nacional,” 413). 6. An excellent study of Mexican nationalism in art can be found in Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting. 7. Craib, “A Nationalist Metaphysics,” 39–42. The renewed concern for mapmaking in Mexico after the war constitutes only one aspect of a broad nationalizing response following the invasion, but it deals directly with the iconography of the nation, literally defining the state in both spatial and temporal terms. Craib’s essay provides an excellent background and elucidation of Mexico’s cartas generales following the defeat by the U.S. military. Jesús Velasco Márquez and Thomas Benjamin provide a concise overview of Mexican historiography about the war that tracks its various interpretations in “La Guerra entre México y Estados Unidos, 1846–1848.” 8. Craib, “A Nationalist Metaphysics,” 68. 9. Studies abound that describe the U.S. influence on Latin American politics and history, but I note here a particularly cogent statement on the role of the American Constitution as a model, Robert J. Knowlton’s “The Early Influence of the United States Constitution in the Western Hemisphere: The Cases of the Mexican Constitution of 1824 and Bolívar’s Ideas.” 10. A recent essay by Joshua Lund, who notes the continuing dominance of liberal ideology in Mexican politics, explores the contradictions inherent in Mexico’s liberal project vis-à-vis its native populations, especially as these surfaced in the late nineteenth century (Lund, “The Mestizo State”). 11. I wish to gratefully acknowledge assistance from Professor Victor Figueroa in offering advice regarding the first drafts of these translations. Any errors are entirely my own. 12. Prieto, “¡A mi patria!,” in Colección de poesías escogidas, 208. Yo pondré con orgullo á tu presencia Los nombres de tus hijos ¡ay! de aquellos Que ya no alumbra el sol de la existencia! Cual lámparas sagradas, esos nombres Acercaré á tus aras, como incienso De sus virtudes te será el perfume. 13. This was the Battle of Buena Vista, Angustura, in Mexico (south of Monterrey), in which Santa Anna’s forces battled Taylor’s, February 22–23, 1847. Most his-

Notes to Pages 161–163  

2 73

torians believe Santa Anna might have defeated Taylor had he stayed on the battlefield, but political dissent in Mexico City forced him to return to the capital. 14. The best study of the subject is offered by Velasco Márquez, La guerra del 47 y la opinión pública. 15. The term was a sarcastic jibe at Mexican liberals who saw the United States as the pinnacle of cultural and political success. An excellent review is provided by Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, Triumph and Tragedy, 205–206. 16. Excerpts from an editorial, “Parte politica,” published in El Tiempo on May 29, 1846. “Sin escrupulizar en los medios, poseida de un orgullo estremo en cuanto á su poder, y dominada del mismo fanatísmo que indujo á Roma á conquistar todos los pueblos que llamaba tártaros, la union americana se cree con una mision del cielo para ocupar nuestros terrenos y esplotarlos en provecho de lo que llama la civilizacion humana [. . .] En los tiempos modernos acaso solo nuestro pais ofrece el escandaloso espectáculo de tener á sus puertas un enemigo inflexible que solo pelea por conquistar, y que haya un partido que le allane el sendero, entrabando al gobierno en sus marcha, rebándole sus recursos, divertiendo sus atencion, y sembrando la desconfianza, la alarma, la desunion [. . .] Han querido separar el nuevo del viejo mundo, seguros de que la prepotencia de su nacion, respecto de las otras repúblicas americanas, les daria con el tiempo su absoluta dominacion, que ellos estenderian hasta donde les conviniese, fijándose como en primer término la posesion de México hasta Panamá, para seguir luego con las Antillas y ser dueños de todo el seno mexicano, y puede decirse sin temor, del comercio de todo el globo.” 17. An example comes from another editorial, “Parte politica: La campaña sobre El Bravo,” published in El Tiempo on May 3, 1846: “Nuestros soldados se baten por la independencia, por el honor de su país, combaten en defensa de sus familias, de sus hogares, de su religion: luchan por todo lo mas caro, lo mas digno, lo mas precioso, que puede hacer latir de entusiasmo el corazon del hombre. ¿Qué fuerza puede oponerse á esta fuerza?” [Our soldiers fight for independence, for the honor of their country, they fight in defense of their families, of their homes, of their religion: they fight for everything of the greatest value, the most worthy, the most precious, that can make beat the heart of man with enthusiasm. What force can oppose this force?] 18. “Mensage del presidente de Los Estados-Unidos,” an editorial published in La Reforma on January 20, 1846: “Lleno el pecho de insaciable codicia, los pueblos del Norte en nada estiman la propiedad ni los derechos de los otros pueblos, por arrebatarles y gozar de su bienes; é hinchado el corazon por el encumbrado vuelo de su constante prosperidad, no creen encontrar dique capaz de resistir al torrente de su desmesurada ambicion.” 19. “Aniversario de la independencia de Los Estados-Unidos,” an editorial published in El Monitor Republicano on July 4, 1847: “El trueno de vuestros cañones en México me ha sacado de mi perennal reposo, y veo con profundo dolor que los habeis disparado en sosten de temerarias y criminales pretensiones. En vano os dije en mi discurso de despedida al retirarme de la vida pública: observad la buena fe y la justicia con todas las naciones; cultivad la paz y la armonía con ellas; la moral y la religion mandan esta conducta [. . .] En fin, si quereis volver al camino de la justicia y de la felicidad,

2 74   

Notes to Pages 163–166

tened presente la máxima que nunca se apartó de mi corazon: la buena fe es la mejor política. ¡Ay de vosotros si persistis [sic] en llevar la opresion y tiranía á tierras estrañas! Vosotros mismos vendreis á parar en ser oprimidos y tiranizados.” 20. In The Origins of Mexican Nationalism, David A. Brading notes how the recovery of the Aztec past was already part of a search for a distinctive identity among Spanish American creoles. The presence of the Native Mexican in Mexico has remained fixed within the debates about national destiny. “The leading themes—the exaltation of the Aztec past, the denigration of the Conquest, the xenophobic resentment against the gachupines, and the devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe—all sprang from that slow, subtle, often contradictory change in emotional sympathies by which the descendants of the conquerors and the children of later immigrants, formed a distinctively Mexican consciousness based in large measure upon a repudiation of their Spanish origins and fostered by an identification with the Indian past” (3). 21. I draw here a comparison between significant elements in Prieto’s poetry and classical elegiac forms that, though often personal, exhibit a social dimension, a voice that addresses a community’s needs for affirmation. “The modern elegy which is a descendant of the traditional one is somewhat more personal than its ancestor, but it is basically in the same tradition. The elegiac poem, however, represents a mode, not a genre, and reflects a psychological state rather than a social or historical occasion. The purpose of the elegiac is the total expression of a personality, whereas the traditional elegy is rather an answer to a social and national need” (Bloomfield, “The Elegy and the Elegiac Mode,” 156). 22. “By way of its self-definition, the ainos is predicated on the ideology of an ideal audience, listening to an ideal performance of an ideal composition. . . . As a difficult code that bears a difficult but correct message for the qualified and a wrong message for the unqualified, the ainos communicates like an ‘enigma’” (Nagy, “Ancient Greek Epic and Praise Poetry,” 90–91). Gregory Nagy’s study of the similarities and relationships between epic and praise poetry is particularly useful in that, drawing on Opland’s studies, it examines the communal functions of praise poetry as compared to epic forms, which are characterized by a greater concern for narrative. One of Nagy’s basic points—that praise poetry presupposes a community already in the know—helps explain why Prieto’s poems can indeed seem enigmatic, even evasive, at moments. I have also drawn guidance from Jeff Opland’s “Eulogy and Ritual,” in Xhosa Oral Poetry: Aspects of a Black South African tradition, in which he notes the allusive quality of Xhosa praise poems. “The imbongi, or for that matter any other Xhosa oral poet does not tell stories in poetic form. Since the praises on which the poetry is based often commemorate events, however, izibongo do refer to actions, but they allude to them elliptically rather than narrate them explicitly in the manner of the epic, the lay, or the ballad. . . . The praises commemorate physical and moral qualities of the subject and events in which he participated, and they locate the subject in a geneaological context” (146). 23. Prieto, “Caos,” in Colección de poesías escogidas, excerpts, 1:213–215. En Morelia Pérez Gómez, Español tenaz y bronco Daba tajos y reveses Y embestía como toro.

Notes to Pages 166–167  

2 75

En tanto, Huerta y Pueblita Sojuzgan con fiero enojo Los pueblos de Guanajuato .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Como tempestad tremenda Se escuchan los ecos roncos De la derrota de Garza En Tampico poderosa. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Mas Echeagaray dichoso Triunfa en Jalapa [. . .] .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . En Durango, Coronado Es de patriotismo foco, Y aparece en Occidente Como invencible coloso. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Miguel Blanco planta en Lagos Su estandarte victorioso; .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Y como era Noche Buena Tiempo de gresca y holgorio, A Miramón que era el niño, La Iglesia le canta el rorro. 24. The poems’ accuracy may be debatable, however. The copy available in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas has numerous corrections penciled in by a reader who apparently had different recollections or knowledge of the same events. 25. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, 1753–1811, a priest and the most prominent leader of the early revolution against Spain. He was caught and executed by Spanish authorities and became a martyr and a revered figure in Mexican history. 26. Prieto, “Poesía,” in Colección de poesías escogidas, 121–125. Allí Anaya y Rincón y tú, poeta, Gorostiza inmortal, .  .  .  .  .  .  . Peñúñuri querido, .  .  .  .  .  .  . Y tú, Martínez, del honor tesoro .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . ¡Oh, grande Echagaray! ¡oh, noble anciano .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . . . . impávido Balderas [. . .] ¡Oh dulce nombre! menestral amado, .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

2 76   

Notes to Pages 167–169

Y tú, noble León, flor de la tierra En que la cuna se mecio de Juárez, .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . ¿Quién para eternizar esa memoria Piensa tener la entonación de Homero? Bravo, Gelati, Xicotencatl, Cano, Monterde y Pérez Castro [. . .] ancho zodiaco De astros hermosos de la patria mía. 27. Some poems do indeed offer more information, more narrative, more a sense of documentary, but even poems that make explicit references to battles seem to scant detail in favor of impression, mood, and tribute. 28. Prieto, “A mi patria” in Colección de poesías escogidas, 208–209. Evocaré á León, al noble Cano, A quien la ciencia amiga sonreía, Y á Balderas sin par, á cuya frente, Que el sudor del trabajo ennoblecía, .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Y tú tambien, amigo de mi infancia Joya de honor, y de virtud modelo, Flor de la juventud, cuya fragancia El soplo de la muerte llevó al cielo, A tí ¿me escuchas, Luis? A tí Martínez, Ejemplo de grandeza y de hidalguía, De tus padres la gloria y el decoro .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Tal eras tú, Frontera esclarecido, Cuya tumba en mi patria luz derrama, Soldado ilustre, á quien la eterna fama Justa salvó del polvo del olvido. 29. I offer a brief example of Xhosa praise poetry as discussed by Opland. The main point of comparison is the sense of private stores of knowledge behind both the tribal form and Prieto’s invasion poems. The following fragment is from a praise poem dedicated to a chief, in Opland, “The Structure of Xhosa Eulogy and the Relation of Eulogy to Epic,” 126: He’s the hero with armrings of ivory, The great aloe that stops children sucking. The overthrower, he depresses the grey stone, The cannon that thundered in the Mathole, So the cowards fled and entered this land, So the cowards fled headlong. He’s the dark one fit to remain in the Xhiba house, He shouldn’t be taken to Mxhamli’s place at Mnzwimi. He casts at a wagon and its ribs fall apart.

Notes to Pages 169–172  

2 77

30. A fascinating approach to the Reforma, which remains a bit outside my primary concern, is Donathan C. Olliff’s Reforma Mexico and the United States: A Search for Alternatives to Annexation, 1854–1861. Olliff undertakes a study of American involvement in Mexico in the 1850s, but he notes that the war did fundamentally alter the political debates in the country. “Ideological approaches to politics, which had often been shunted aside by the personalism of caudillo politics, now assumed a new currency as the active population coalesced into two groups or parties, liberal and conservative. Each had its own view of the nature, origin and remedy for the crisis confronting the country” (3). A general introduction to the development of Mexican nationalism within a Latin American context is offered by David A. Brading in “Nationalism and State-Building in Latin American History.” 31. Costumbrismo is a broad category of Spanish and Latin American nineteenthcentury writing that engages in the realistic, often laudatory, depiction of regional cultures. As such it has its own important relationship to a Latin American search for autochthonous identity. 32. Prieto, “Un momento de formalidad: A mi patria,” in Colección de poesías escogidas, 47–48. ¡Dios que tendiste un cielo de zafiro Como dosel, sobre mi patria amada, Joya hermosa de América la fértil, Bella y gentil, y rica, y admirada: ¡La de las fuentes de aguas cristalinas: La de las ricas y variadas flores: La de tesoros vírgenes, fecundos: La perla encantadora de dos mundos: La de beldades cuna, la opulenta: La madre augusta de ínclitos guerreros [. . .] 33. The difference between Prieto’s national abstraction and other expressions emerges plainly when one compares it with Bernardo de Balbuena’s encyclopedic Grandeza mexicana (1604), a tedious proto-anthropological documentation of the capital city’s landscape and inhabitants. I am referring particularly to his “Capitulo II,” which concludes with several stanzas of this kind of praise. 34. Olmedo, “La victoria de Junín,” 89. y me diré feliz si mereciere por premio a mi osadía una mirada tierna de las Gracias y el aprecio y amor de mis hermanos, un sonrisa de la Patria mía, y el odio y el furor de los tiranos. [I would call myself happy if I were deserving as prize for my boldness a gentle glance from the Graces and the praise and love of my brothers,

2 78   

Notes to Pages 172–173

a smile from my country, and the hatred and rage of tyrants.] 35. Given the turmoil following the invasion and the defeat, it may seem difficult to suggest any sort of national coherence emerging in the aftermath. Not only did liberal reforms in the 1850s lead to a civil war, but the French Intervention initiated a state of conflict at least until 1867. Yet the liberal ideology, the narrative of political reform, that gained prominence in the 1850s, proved enduring, and its leading figure, Benito Juárez, would take a place in Mexican history analogous in some ways to that of Abraham Lincoln in the United States. 36. The Diccionario was published from 1853 to 1856, but the decade also saw a wide range of nationalist projects, such as Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos (1853) and Mexico y sus alrededores (1855–1856). The Diccionario has recently received renewed attention, and an excellent introduction is offered by Antonia Pi-Suñer Llorens in “Estudio preliminar,” Catálogo de los artículos sobre México en el Diccionario universal de historia y de geografía. Pi-Suñer Llorens, incidentally, also notes the nationalizing impact of the U.S. invasion. 37. Prieto, “El día de la patria,” in Colección de poesías escogidas, 214. Heroica Veracruz, sagrado escudo De la honra de la patria en todo tiempo, Centinela avazando que vigilas Su lustre, su decoro, su sosiego, Respira libertad, grata recoge Los dones del saber y del talento: En fraternal concordia las naciones Te miran con amor y con respeto. Mientras todos los pueblos oprimidos Como esperanza tengan el ejemplo Que ofreció el esforzado patriotismo De los hijos de Hidalgo y de Morelos. 38. Latin American poetry in general may be seen as fusing nationalist and romantic aspirations, as do Pedro Barreda and Eduardo Béjar in “Romanticismo y poesía romántica en hispanoamérica: Una propuesta crítica”: “Es decir, el Romanticismo hispanoamericano es parte integral del empeño decimonónico de las naciones hispanas de América de fundar comunidades libres e ilustradas, según el modelo propuesto por los Estados Unidos de America” [In other words, Hispanic-American romanticism is an integral part of a nineteenth-century project among the Hispanic nations in the Americas to found free and enlightened communities, according to the model put forth by the United States of America] (11). Perceived in this way, however, each Latin American nation is still a residual, indistinct fragment of a now absent center, without, in effect, having a particular narrative that would explain its unique presence. 39. Ignacio Zaragoza is most famous for his successful if temporary defense of Puebla against the French in 1862. Zaragoza’s troops held off a much larger, superior French army before being forced to withdraw by a lack of supplies. Although the battle

Notes to Pages 174–180  

2 79

for Puebla only delayed the French takeover of Mexico City, it remains a focus of national pride. 40. Prieto, “Poesía: Leida en Churubusco,” in Colección de poesías escogidas, 100–101. ¡Muertos, en pie! que yo hablo [. . .] vuestros huesos Tiemblen dentro del polvo, que yo traigo Como ofrenda los frutos del ejemplo Que aquí sembrasteis con valor sublime; Como ovación os rindo las hazañas De Oriente y de Occidente En mil bravas campañas; Los laureles de Puebla y de Rosales, Dignos de vuestras frentes; La expiación del baldón de los tiranos, Lejos muriendo de sus patrios lares; La paz entre los dignos mexicanos; La bendición de Zaragoza y Juárez.

41. Prieto, “¡A mi patria!,” in Colección de poesías escogidas, 210–211. El ave ruin se ahuyenta con el trueno; Pero la fiera rey si siente herido El vigoroso seno, Ardiendo en ira al riesgo se abalanza, La crin sacude, su ojo centellea, Y su rugido, que semeja al trueno, O presagia su muerte ó su venganza. Tú así te alentarás ¡oh, pueblo mío! Tú así fortalecido con tus penas Estallar sentirás entre tus venas Tu antiguo ser con indomable brío. Tú á tus hijos conduce como Amílcar, De la mano á las aras de tus dioses, Invoca ardiente á tus vencidos lares, Invoca á los caudillos de Dolores; Y, como Anníbal, jura en tus altares Odio eterno á tiranos y á invasores.

42. Although César Graña in “Cultural Nationalism” delves into what he calls the “metaphysics of cultural frustration” (52) in Latin America vis-à-vis the success of the United States, he also explores the utopian element in Latin American and in Mexican history. 43. John T. Reid in Spanish American Images of the United States, 1790–1960 notes that Mexican political culture was informed not only by the United States but by France and Europe in general (3–4). Still, there is little doubt that since Mexico’s

2 8 0   

Notes to Pages 183–185

break with Spain, the United States has been intensely involved in Mexican political affairs. The United States’ incursions into Mexico have not all been in the form of troop movements.

Chapter Four 1. Ignacio M. Altamirano is considered to be one of the foundational figures of Mexican literary nationalism, author of two key works, La navidad en las montañas (1871) and El Zarco (1901). 2. I rely here on two essays: Luis Reyes de la Maza, “Nicolás Pizarro, novelista y pensador liberal,” and María del Carmen Millan, “Dos utopías.” Millan in particular makes a powerful argument for Pizarro’s direct influence on Altamirano. 3. “Estamos llamados los mejicanos á sostener una lucha eterna; débiles, por nuestras discordias, atrazada en civilizacion la mayoría de nuestro pueblo por efecto de la educacion teocrática y las preocupaciones en que se le ha imbuido, tiene no obstante un glorioso destino que cumplir porque es el antemural que debe sostener la libertad y las nacionalidades amenazadas del continente de Colon” (Pizarro, El monedero, 241). 4. The relationship between history and narrative closure has been examined by others, notably Hayden White, who has pointed out that history is comprehensible as narrative, that is, as something that is not so much explained as understood. White is key to this discussion as well, because he stresses that narrative forms with controlled beginnings, middles, and ends indicate the presence of moral systems. “Where, in any account of reality, narrativity is present, we can be sure that morality or a moralizing impulse is present too” (White, The Content of the Form, 24). 5. A more extensive treatment of Pizarro’s emphasis on indigenous political and economic rights against creole oppression can be found in Julie Ann Ruiz’s “The Boundaries of Conflict: The Mexican War in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.” Ruiz offers a thorough analysis of Pizarro’s liberal ideals and his critique of the exploitation carried out to practical slavery of Mexico’s indigenous population. Further, Beatriz de Alba-Koch’s “The Dialogics of Utopia, Dystopia and Arcadia” provides a thorough political contextualization and comparison with other Mexican literary utopias. 6. That the United States has from its beginning represented an imperial threat to Latin America is evident from an early use of the term “colossus” in a private memorandum from Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, Tenth Count of Aranda, to the Spanish court in 1783. At the time, Aranda was already predicting that this “pygmy” nation would soon grow to threaten the entire hemisphere. (The precise date of the famously prophetic letter is a matter of some dispute.) “Entonces olvidará los beneficios que recibió de ambos países y sólo pensará en ensanchar sus fronteras.” [Then it will forget the assistance it has received from both nations (France and Spain), and think only of expanding its frontiers.] Quoted in Orjuela, “Independencia, monroismo y formación de las nacionalidades,” 53. 7. “¿En que pararemos?” editorial in El Siglo Diez y Nueve, published June 15, 1848. “Nuestra situacion es triste en verdad, pero podemos salir de ella. En nuestras manos está mejorarla, pues contamos con todos los elementos necesarios al efecto. Reflecsionemos en las causas que nos han traido á este punto: meditemos sobre ellas,

Notes to Pages 186–189  

281

prescindiendo de nuestras afecciones y de nuestros odios de partido, haciendo á un lado ilusorias teorías, despojándonos por un momento de nuestras presuntuosas aspiraciones, de nuestras vanas preocupaciones, de nuestro egoismo y de nuestra apatía, y nos convenceremos de que el mal no está en las cosas, sino en los hombres, en nosotros mismos [. . .] No desmayemos ni perdamos la esperanza; la fé en el destino forma los grandes hombres, la fé en el destino forma tambien las grandes naciones.” 8. “Revoluciones,” editorial in El Siglo Diez y Nueve, published June 11, 1848. “Pocos ejemplos podrán presentarse de una nacion tan perseguida de la suerte como la mexicana: sus propios hijos desgarran sus entrañas; los estraños están en acecho para enriquecerse con sus despojos. Habiendo perdido con sus disensiones intestinas esa respetabilidad que no es sino el resultado del desarrollo de ciertos elementos en tiempos de paz y tranquilidad, se ve escarnecida en el estrangero, y cuando otras naciones acuerdan de ella es para sacar provecho de su debilidad.” 9. “Interior,” editorial in El Monitor Republicano, published July 6, 1847. “[. . .] nuestra opinion [. . .] es hija de la reflexion, de la esperiencia y del estudio de la historia y de las diabólicas tendencias de ese falso é insaciable enemigo que tenemos al frente, y que como para castigo nuestro, nos lo ha puesto la Providencia por vecino [. . .] Por consiguiente, no debe cabernos duda de que su ánimo es proseguirla con la misma inflexibilidad, en cuanto alcancen sus fuerzas, mientras no encuentren una nacion suficientemente ilustrada, que comprendiendo sus infernales designios, sepa oponer una fuerza tal de resistencia, que se estrellen contra ella como contra un muro de bronce; y este es el gran papel que le toca representar á México [. . .] Esa nueva poblacion de que hemos hablado, nos moveria nuevas querellas para adelantar mas sus usurpaciones, haciendo siempre replegar á las razas nuestras, hasta que por fin tuviesen que sufrir la misma suerte que los indios del Norte, quedandose los anglo-americanos dueños de todo el territorio que ahora reconocemos por nuestro, haciendo desaparecer, junto con los habitantes, nuestros gloriosos recuerdos, nuestras costumbres, nuestro idioma, y nuestra religion.” 10. Pizarro, El monedero, 21. “[. . .] en todo él se reconocia el tipo fino de los aztecas primitivos [. . .]” 11. Sommer’s analyses in Foundational Fictions established a critical architecture for understanding how nationalistic romance novels wrestled with racial, gender, and class complexities coursing through Latin America. 12. The utopian theme in Latin American culture is frequently explored. César Graña’s article on Latin American destinarianism has already been mentioned, but another useful source is Frederic W. Murray’s “The Image of Utopia as a Conceptual Determinant in the Structural Development of Spanish American Culture.” Murray’s short essay is a history of the idea of utopia in Latin America, in which he notes how even from the beginning of colonization, More’s Utopia had a direct impact on the visions of the Spanish New World. 13. Pizarro, El monedero, 141. “Fuera de esto, desconoces que Méjico es sin duda alguna el país donde menos se estorba la carrera de los que quieren elevarse, cualquiera que sea la raza á que pertenezcan; recuerda cuántos sacerdotes, cuántos abogados, cuántos médicos y cuántos artistas notables de todo género hay en la capital, y en toda la República, que no tienen en sus venas una gota de sangre europea. Si fueses á los Estados-Unidos te escandalizarías, te moririas por la afrenta de que te arrojasen de las

2 8 2   

Notes to Pages 189–192

banquetas porque no eres blanco. Verdad es que esta barbarie la emplean con los negros y con los mulatos; pero Méjico cuenta entre sus grandes glorias la de haber establecido prácticamente la igualdad civil de todas las razas.” 14. Ibid., 131–132. 15. Ibid., 223. 16. Liberals had to find a way to retain their allegiance to their ideals against counterarguments that condemned the United States, their ideological template, as a spectacular example of the failure of those principles. In the 1850s, Mexican monarchists ridiculed democracy as a sham, or at best a system doomed to failure in Mexico; liberals like Prieto and Pizarro, admirers of U.S. ideals, responded by working to suppress the influence of the Church in Mexican affairs in the name of rational progress. David A. Brading in The Origins of Mexican Nationalism notes how the liberal ideology itself was deeply influenced by the United States: “As much Arcadian as Utopian, they accepted the Jeffersonian dream of agrarian democracy. After an attack on the mercantile and industrial interests of the central region, Miguel Ramos Arizpe rhetorically exclaimed: ‘Agriculture! Worthy occupation for man, the school of a thousand civic virtues, the chief foundation of the surest happiness of the citizen, and the most certain wealth of the state’” (70). 17. Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 136–144. Bercovitch cites Simón Bolívar’s 1815 “Letter from Jamaica” to emphasize how Bolívar’s definition of Latin Americans as an “intermediate species” differed fundamentally from the postRevolution North American mode, which saw Americans as intermediate but in transit within a mythic process. The American dreamer in the Spanish colonies is “trapped between the loss of historical bearings and the need for historical renewal, at once a victim of and a rebel against the past” (143). 18. Pizarro, El monedero, 134–135. “Sembremos esa preciosa semilla que acaso ha sido reservada para que germine en la América, pues Dios ha querido tal vez, que cuando la civilizacion que brotó de la anunciacion del Evangelio se malease con la liga que tiene de intereses que ya no son cristianos, el mundo nuevo ofreciese su seno vírgen para que las verdades consoladoras del género humano echasen raices profundas é imperecederas, que levanten, vigoricen, ye depuren á esas generaciones nacidas en medio de tradiciones visiblemente falseadas, realizando un porvenir de dicha, velado ahora por toda clase de tiranías. Tengamos valor para romper este velo, que por fortuna es ya algo transparente para todo el mundo, sin temor de quedarnos solos, pues nos basta estar armados de la verdadera doctrina evangélica, y con la vista y la esperanza fijas en Dios.” 19. Ruppert, Reader in a Strange Land, 155. 20. The Otomí are native Mexicans concentrated mainly in the central plateau region of Mexico. 21. Pizarro, El monedero, 224 (misprinted as page 124). “—¡Si yo hubiera encontrado al principio de mi vida, dijo con amargura el Otomí, soltando la carta, un Asociacion como esta, no me hubiera descarriado! Mis malos instintos se habrian corregido con el buen ejemplo lejos de exacerbarse como sucedió con el mal trato.” 22. Ibid., 237. “—¿Dónde? ¿dónde está ese lugar en que el pobre ya no es humillado, en que el trabajo es distinguido y recompensado? gritó el Tigre poniéndose en pié. Iré, sí, iré inmediatamente con mi María, seré allí el último do los colonos, deposi-

Notes to Pages 193–196  

2 83

taré mis riquezas en manos de los directores, y moriré tranquilo, porque cuando yo le falte á mi hija, le quedarán mejores padres que el que ha tenido!” 23. Ibid., 607–608. “Vámonos, dijo mirando por última vez la campiña; esta es la tierra de promision; Dios ha querido que la veamos, así como dicen los libros santos que Moises divisó la tierra de Chanaam. Acaso nuestro destino es como el suyo, no llegar á ella en nuestra vida; bajaremos al sepulcro oyendo en lugar de responsos que no hacen gran falta, los gritos insensatos de los que nos llaman impíos y ladrones; pero mucho nos consolará el pensar que ayudamos y servimos á la humanidad, que en nues­ tro país hace como en otras partes un último esfuerzo, para mejorar decididamente su condicion moral y física.” 24. I draw this distinction largely from my reading of Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Sommer’s study of nineteenth-century national romances reveals the deep affinity between projects of national consolidation and erotic themes, but my point with El monedero is that one comes away from it sensing that its romantic theme has been redirected to a fundamentally different and pessimistic narratological purpose. 25. Much of my reading of El monedero is indebted to Peter Ruppert’s Reader in a Strange Land. Ruppert’s objective is to recuperate literature that might be dismissed as escapist. In his view, readers are activated as social agents by engaging with literary utopias. My own predisposition is to see the invention of utopias themselves as part of a mythic mediation in the face of very un-utopian realities. Utopias are crucibles of ideology, of political faiths—disconnected from variable, ongoing history and thus built on islands of closure and meaning. Ruppert’s focus on the readerly contradictions generated by utopias, however, can provide a useful adjunct to my focus on the specific ideological theme of Pizarro’s novel. Indeed, one might read the novel as a metanarrative of a utopian narrative. As Ruppert writes, “We recognize that, in situating the reader on the very boundary between an unacceptable social reality and an impossible utopian dream, utopian fiction seeks to have an activating effect—a continual engagement of the reader with social reality—that requires the reader to go beyond what is represented in the text and perhaps even to modify her own social beliefs” (52). 26. Pizarro, El monedero, 622. In their final conversation, Fernando explains to Luis his counterfeiting method, and acknowledges the moral dubiousness of his actions, but he reverts to a simple question: “¿Te parece que les digamos: señores, cese vuestra alegría; hasta aquí habiamos sido felices por un robo, vamos á restituirlo, y ustedes deben volver á sus antiguos sufrimientos?” [Would you like us to tell them (the villagers of La Nueva Filadelfia), gentlemen cease your festivities; we’ve been happy because of a robbery and we shall make restitution and you must return to your old sufferings?] 27. Alba-Koch, The Dialogics of Utopia, 25–26. 28. Pizarro, El monedero, 241. “¿Qué entusiasmo pueden sentir los pueblos para defenderse cuando hace medio siglo que experimentan toda clase de males sea cual fuere el partido que se haya apoderado del mando, cuando solo han cosechado como fruto de la libertad, levas, contribuciones inmoderadas, injustamente repartidas, obvenciones parroquiales y judiciales, aduanas interiores, concurrencia desfavorable de efectos extranjeros, ruinosa del todo para los pocos productos del país?” 29. Ibid., 14. “Por costumbre, por agradecimiento, y mas que todo, por ese espíritu

2 84   

Notes to Pages 196–202

de imitacion que suele desarollarse tanto en algunos mejicanos, D. Domingo Dávila afectaba todas las maneras de los españoles con quienes habia vivido.” [By custom, by way of appreciation, and mostly by that spirit of imitation which develops so much in some Mexicans, Don Domingo Dávila affected all the manners of the Spaniards with whom he had lived.] 30. Ibid., 255. “[. . .] unos pocos hombres del pueblo llevaban con visible repugnancia y solo por complacer á su gefe, el cadáver de Domingo Dávila, sin ataud, sin mortaja y sin dolientes.” [. . . a few men of the town carried (to the cemetery) with visible repugnance and only to please their chief (Mauricio) the body of Domingo Dávila, without a coffin, without a shroud, and without mourners.] 31. Ibid., 239–275. These pages, comprising five chapters, describe the capital’s occupation by U.S. forces and the actions and death of Mauricio. They come about one-third of the way into the book and set the tone and foundation for the rest of the plot and writing. 32. Ibid., 391. “[. . .] ¿será este caballero tan genereso mi Juanillo, que se quedó en Méjico cuando me cogieron de leva? ¡Esa voz que me conmovió en lo íntimo de mis entrañas! esa semejanza con mis otros hijos que están en el ejército! Pero no; la vejez me hace delirar; mi pobre Juanillo, sin proteccion, y aun sin conocer las calles de la ciudad, se habrá muerto sin duda de hambre, ó si encontró quien le diese un pedazo de pan, luego que haya crecido lo habrán cogido de leva como á mí, como á sus hermanos, y ahora estará tal vez mutilado en un hospital, ó pidiendo limosna [. . .]” 33. Ibid., 392. “—¡Allí va! exclamó el anciano al ver que pasaba Fernando delante de la cabaña, y levantando las manos al cielo en la actitud mas suplicante añadió: —¡Protégelo Dios mio! Aquella voz era la bendicion de un padre, y el eco de un pueblo agradecido.” [There he goes! exclaimed the old man on seeing Fernando pass before his home, and raising his hands to the sky in a manner most supplicant, he added: —Protect him, my God! That voice was the benediction of a father, and the echo of a grateful people.] 34. Ibid., 591. “Los destrozos hechos en parte por el abandono, y mucho mas por los americanos, ofrecian un triste ejemplo de la fácil decadencia de las cosas humanas.” 35. Ibid., 387. Pizarro is not explicit, but the insinuations are clear. The leader of the gang that attacked the Dávila home rapes the daughter of Dávila’s nurse. At this point in the novel it is Clara who recognizes Walker as that same soldier who has now befriended Fernando. 36. Ibid., 393. “Fernando dispuso sus negocios convenientemente, y á pocos dias emprendió la marcha para Tenancingo, acompañado de Walker, que por la sola costumbre se habia hecho ya un compañero necesario.” [Fernando conveniently disposed of his affairs, and in a few days began his journey to Tenancingo, accompanied by Walker, who by mere custom had become a necessary companion.] 37. Roberto González Echevarria’s theory about the development of the Latin American novel is resonant with part of my argument because he is careful to note the tension between novel forms and other discourses which project systems of order and stasis. “What do we learn about Latin American history in Cien años de soledad ? We learn that while its writing may be mired in myth, it cannot be turned into myth, that its newness makes it impervious to timelessness, circularity, or any such delusion”

Notes to Pages 202–215  

2 85

(Echevarria, “A Clearing in the Jungle,” 29). In Pizarro’s case, it is myth and science/ anthropology that interact in the space of El monedero. My point, however, is that the agitations and disturbances of the “science” of political positivism are fundamental components of the belief systems propagated by nation-states. To disengage from materiality in order to quantify a nation’s ideology is to begin to lay the groundwork for faith in the body politic. This is why the utopian community in the novel can be so disconnected from its major action and yet remain profoundly linked to it. Identity is never merely a mode of definition; it must always be also a form of action. 38. Pizarro, El monedero, 598. “El liberal que proclama la absoluta libertad del pobre cumple su vocacion, y dice á la vez una imperdonable tontería, pues no hay mayor esclavitud que la que impone el vientre vacío; el reaccionario que sueña retrazar las cosas al año de ocho es un estúpido que tambien cumple su vocacion, queriendo volver el rio á su orígen.” The “year of eight” probably refers to 1808, when royal convulsions in Spain began spurring calls for Mexican independence. 39. Ibid., 619. “Si, desde los primeros dias que pasé en estos lugares ayudándote en los trabajos de la fundacion, conocí que la obra que emprendiamos no podia tener otro apoyo que el dinero, y aunque se contaba con el necesario para practicar el ensayo, el menor contratiempo haria que fracasara.” 40. Timothy Anna in his recent study of the early Mexican republic emphasizes that Estados Unidos Mexicanos is too often mistranslated as “‘the United States of Mexico,’ in unconscious imitation of ‘the United States of America’ and [readers] thereby assume that Estados Unidos Mexicanos, a generic term in which Mexican is an adjective referring generally and quite loosely to the cultural identity of the hegemonic center of the country, is synonymous with the noun Mexico, establishing the certainty of nationhood” (Anna, Forging Mexico, 10).

Chapter Five 1. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 176. 2. Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don, 67. 3. Ibid., 174. 4. Garza-Falcón, Gente Decente, 79. 5. By sub- and supranational, I mean forms of identity that emphasize an immediate region or locality, and global modes of consciousness that emphasize international commonalities. 6. “More specifically, the terms ‘glocal’ and ‘glocalization’ became aspects of business jargon during the 1980s, but their major locus of origin was in fact Japan, a country which has for a very long time strongly cultivated the spatio-cultural significance of Japan itself and where the general issue of the relationship between the particular and the universal has historically received almost obsessive attention (Miyoshi and Harootunian, 1989)” (Robertson, “Glocalization,” 28). More generally, Robertson’s essay explores the interdependency of homogenization and the responses that lead to constructions of locality. 7. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 79–82. 8. Ibid., 84.

2 86   

Notes to Pages 215–227

9. The racist developments were nothing less than the introduction of “Jim Crow segregation to the Borderlands” (John González, “Terms of Engagement,” 266). 10. Flores, Remembering the Alamo, 11. 11. Kaup, “The Unsustainable Hacienda,” 565–568. 12. Cotera, “Hombres Necios: A Critical Epiloque,” 346. 13. Peréz, Decolonial Imaginary, in particular, Chapt. 4, “Tejanas: Diasporic Subjectivities and Post-Revolution Identities.” 14. Beer, The Romance, 23; Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition, 34–37, 62–64. For example, Beer’s assessment of courtly love forms can be mapped onto Caballero with little or no modification: “The courtly code was in its way revolutionary. It subverted the values of feudal society by its emphasis on love without bargains, its fantasy of female dominance, its individualism and its paradoxical legalism which piquantly appropriated the language of authority while undermining authoritarian assumptions” (Beer, The Romance, 23). 15. Garza-Falcón, Gente Decente, 120–123. 16. Buell, National Culture, 9. 17. Hall, “The Local and the Global,” 27. 18. Meyer and Geschiere, Introduction, 2. 19. Bauman, “Searching for a Center,” 145, 20. Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 9. 21. González and Raleigh, Caballero, 195. 22. Ibid., 302, 321, 327. 23. Ibid., 331. 24. I find Stuart Hall’s formulation useful as a shorthand for describing the contradictory forces of globalization. 25. Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition, 17. 26. González and Raleigh, Caballero, 108, 239. 27. Ibid., 310–312. 28. Ibid., 72. 29. Robertson, “Social Theory,” 75–81. 30. Richard Flores offers “Texas Modern” as a descriptive term that captures the way the moment was simultaneously like other turn-of-the-century arrivals in the modern age and something of the way South Texas offers a particularly intense example. 31. The Plan de San Diego was an ill-fated attempt by Mexican Tejanos in South Texas to resist Anglo American encroachment, in part by attempting to secede from the United States and creating an independent state in which Mexican Americans and other dispossessed minorities would find a haven of freedom. Mutualista societies across the Southwest were organizations made up mainly of Mexican Americans and Mexicans who advocated for their own civil rights in the face of increasing racial and cultural hostility. 32. Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition, 20. Significantly, Margaret Eimer, who in surviving letters to González indicates her desire to become a writer, also at least once offered the standard critique of marriage after a visit to a fortune-teller who predicted one of Eimer’s friends would marry and achieve “untold happiness.” Eimer adds, “I said how anyone can know untold happiness when they are married was some thing I would like to see!” (Eimer, Letter to Jovita González).

Notes to Pages 228–251  

2 87

33. Jovita González, “America Invades,” 470. 34. Garza-Falcón, Gente Decente, 96–98. According to former LULAC national president Ruben Bonilla, who was a student of González’s, in later years as a teacher González would stress the historical and cultural value of Tejano society but “did not identify with Mexican-American causes” (Garza-Falcón, 97). 35. Bauman, “Searching for a Centre,” 153. 36. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 189. 37. Ibid., 211. 38. Ibid., 189. 39. Ibid., 21–22. 40. González and Raleigh, Caballero, xxxix. 41. Jovita González, “America Invades,” 472–473. 42. Friedman’s global consciousness is in fact possible only in the supranational realm of cosmopolitanism. “The practice of cosmopolitanism,” he writes, “common to the self-styled global ethnographers of culture, is predicated on maintaining distance, often a superiority to the local” (Friedman, “Global System,” 78). 43. Limón, Dancing with the Devil, 68–75. 44. Mireles Papers, Coll. 44, Folder 1.7. 45. Limón, “Mexicans, Foundational Fictions,” 351–352. 46. John González, “Terms of Engagement,” 270. 47. R. Saldívar, Chicano Narrative, 7. 48. Ibid., 206. 49. Ibid., 211. 50. King, “Times and Spaces,” 120–121. 51. Candelaria, Not by the Sword, 171. 52. Ibid., 233. 53. Ibid., 235. 54. Garza-Falcón in Gente Decente offers a useful defense of what some may see as Chambers’s avoidance of more trenchant positions against racism and cultural oppression. She reads Chambers, or Mena in her references, as offering a complicated, multilayered, and at times sardonic critique of both Mexico and U.S. America. In my view, however, Boy Heroes of Chapultepec results in a spectrum of loyalties alongside its social criticism. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor Belinda Linn Rincón, who introduced me to this novel and whose own research illuminates its critically important dimensions. 55. Chambers, Boy Heroes of Chapultepec, 52. 56. Ibid.,181. 57. Ibid., 176. 58. Seguín, A Revolution Remembered, 96–97.

Ep i l o g u e

1. Seguín, A Revolution Remembered, 73. 2. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 23. 3. Sáenz, Dreaming the End of War, 31.

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Bibliography

Works Cited Alba-Koch, Beatriz de. “The Dialogics of Utopia, Dystopia and Arcadia: Political Struggle and Utopian Novels in Nineteenth-Century Mexico.” Utopian Studies 8, no. 1 (1997): 19–30. Alemán, Jesse. “Historical Amnesia and the Vanishing Mestiza: The Problem of Race in The Squatter and the Don and Ramona.” Aztlán 27, no. 1 (2002): 59–93. Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel. La navidad en las montañas. Mexico City, 1870. ———. El Zarco. 1901. Reprint, Mexico City: Editorial Concepto, 1977. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation) (January–April 1969).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, 127–186. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Anderson, John Q. “Emerson on Texas and the Mexican War.” The Western Humanities Review 13 (1959): 191–199. “Aniversario de la independencia de Los Estados-Unidos.” Editorial. El Monitor Republicano, July 4, 1847, 3–4. Anna, Timothy E. Forging Mexico: 1821–1835, 1–33. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Aranda, José F. Jr. “Contradictory Impulses: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Resistance Theory, and the Politics of Chicano/a Studies.” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 551–579. Armstrong, Frank P. The Prairie Pathfinder; or, The Lost Sister. New York: Beadle, 1870.

2 9 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Averill, Charles E. The Mexican Ranchero; or, The Maid of the Chapparal: A Romance of the Mexican War. Boston: At the Flag of Our Union Office, 1849. ———. The Secret Service Ship; or, The Fall of San Juan D’Ulloa. A Tale of the Mexican War. Boston: Office of Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, 1848. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Edited by Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Balbuena, Bernardo de. Grandeza Mexicana. Mexico City, 1604. Barreda, Pedro, and Eduardo Béjar. “Romanticismo y poesía romántica en hispanoamérica: Una propuesta crítica.” In Poética de la nación: Poesía romántica en Hispanoamérica (Crítica y antología), 1–49. Boulder, Colo.: Society of Spanish and Spanish American Studies, 1999. Bauman, Zygmunt. “Searching for a Centre That Holds.” In Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson, Global Modernities, 140–154. Beauregard, Pierre G. T. With Beauregard in Mexico: The Mexican War Reminiscences of P.G.T. Beauregard. Edited by T. Harry Williams. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956. Beer, Gillian. The Romance. London: Methuen, 1970. Bell, Michael J. “‘The Only True Folk Songs We Have in English’: James Russell Lowell and the Politics of the Nation.” Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995): 131–155. Benjamin, Thomas, and Marcial Ocasio-Meléndez. “Organizing the Memory of Modern Mexico: Porfirian Historiography in Perspective, 1880s–1980s.” Hispanic American Historical Review 64, no. 2 (1984): 323–364. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. ———. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America. New York: Routledge, 1993. Bernbrock, John E. “Walt Whitman and ‘Anglo-Saxonism.’” PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1961. Bhabha, Homi. “Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” In The Location of Culture, 139–170. London: Routledge, 1994. Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Bloch, R. Howard. “The Ideology of Courtly Love.” In Medieval French Literature and Law, 215–248. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. ———. “Tristan, the Myth of the State and the Language of the Self.” Yale French Studies 51 (1974): 61–81. Bloomfield, Morton W. “The Elegy and the Elegiac Mode: Praise and Alienation.” In Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski, 147–157. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Boone, Joseph Allen. Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Brading, David A. “Creole Patriotism.” In The Origins of Mexican Nationalism, 3–23. Cambridge: Centre of Latin American Studies, 1985. ———. “Nationalism and State-Building in Latin American History.” Ibero-

Bibliography  

291

Amerikanisches Archiv: Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaften und Geschichte 1–2 (1994): 83–107. ———. The Origins of Mexican Nationalism. Cambridge: Centre of Latin American Studies, 1985. ———. Prophecy and Myth in Mexican History. Cambridge: Centre of Latin American Studies, 1984. Brodhead, Richard. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in NineteenthCentury America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Buell, Frederick. National Culture and the New Global System. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Buntline, Ned [Edward Zane Carroll Judson]. The Volunteer; or, The Maid of Monterey: A Tale of the Mexican War. Boston: Gleason, 1847. Canclini, Néstor García. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Candelaria, Nash. Not by the Sword. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1982. Cawelti, John. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Chambers, María Cristina (Mena). Boy Heroes of Chapultepec: A Story of the Mexican War. Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1953. Clark, Robert. History, Ideology and Myth in American Fiction, 1823–52. London: Macmillan, 1984. Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology: Journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology 9 (1994): 302–348. Cooper, James Fenimore. Jack Tier; or, The Florida Reef. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1876 (first published by the Riverside Press, New York, 1848). Corwin, Thomas. Speech of Mr. Corwin, of Ohio, on the Mexican War: Delivered in the Senate of the United States, Feb. 11, 1847. Washington, D.C.: Gideon, 1847. Cotera, María. “Hombres Necios: A Critical Epilogue.” In Caballero: A Historical Novel, by Jovita González and Eve Raleigh, 339–346. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996, 339–346. Coulter, Richard, and Thomas Barclay. Volunteers: The Mexican War Journals of Private Richard Coulter and Sergeant Thomas Barclay, Company E, Second Pennsylvania Infantry. Edited by Allan Peskin. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991. Craib, Raymond B. “A Nationalist Metaphysics: State Fixations, National Maps, and the Geo-Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Mexico.” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 1 (2002): 33–68. Curtis, Newton M. The Hunted Chief; or, The Female Ranchero: A Tale of the Mexican War. New York: Garrett, 1847. ———. The Vidette; or The Girl of the Robber’s Pass: A Tale of the Mexican War. New York: Williams Brothers, 1848. Curtis, Samuel Ryan. Mexico Under Fire: Being the Diary of Samuel Ryan Curtis, 3rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment, During the American Military Occupation of Northern Mexico, 1846–1847. Edited and annotated by Joseph E. Chance. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1994.

2 9 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Dana, Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh. Monterrey Is Ours! The Mexican War Letters of Lieutenant Dana, 1845–1847. Edited by Robert H. Ferrell. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Delano, Columbus Delano. Speech of Mr. Columbus Delano, of Ohio, on the Mexican War, Delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, Feb. 2, 1847. Washington, D.C.: Gideon, 1847. de Leon, Arnoldo. They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. 2nd ed. rev. New York: Verso, 1998. Dewey, Frederick H. Will O’-The-Wisp: The California Trooper. New York: Beadle and Adams, 1874. Dilworth, Rankin. The March to Monterrey: The Diary of Lt. Rankin Dilworth, U.S. Army: A Narrative of Troop Movements and Observations on Daily Life with General Zachary Taylor’s Army During the Invasion of Mexico. Edited by Lawrence R. Clayton and Joseph E. Chance. Southwestern Studies no. 102. El Paso: Texas Western Press, University of Texas at El Paso, 1996. Duberman, Martin. James Russell Lowell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Duganne, A.J.H. The Peon Prince; or, The Yankee Knight-Errant. New York: Beadle, 1861. ———. Putnam Pomfret’s Ward: A Vermonters Adventures in Mexico. New York: Beadle, 1861. Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso, 1991. Echevarría, Roberto González. “A Clearing in the Jungle: From Santa Mónica to Macondo.” In Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative, 1–42. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Eimer, Margaret. Letter to Jovita González, July 13 (year undetermined). Edmundo and Jovita Mireles Papers. Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi Library, Corpus Christi. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Fate.” In The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 6, The Conduct of Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. ———. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vols. 9 (1971), 10 (1973), 14 (1978). Chief Editor, Ralph H. Orth. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960. “¿En que pararemos?” Editorial. El Siglo Diez y Nueve, June 15, 1848, 4. Featherstone, Mike, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson, eds. Global Modernities. London: Sage, 1995. Flores, Richard R. Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Foot, Solomon. Speech of Mr. Solomon Foot, of Vermont, on the Character and Objects of the Mexican War: Delivered in the House of Representatives of the U.S., Feb. 10, 1847. Washington, D.C.: Gideon, 1847. Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994.

Bibliography  

2 93

Friedman, Jonathan. “Global System, Globalization and the Parameters of Modernity.” In Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson, Global Modernities, 69–90. Fuentes, Andrés Reséndez. “Guerra y identidad nacional.” Historia Mexicana 47 (1997): 411–439. Fuentes, Carlos. Prologue to Ariel, by José Enrique Rodó, 13–28. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. “Further Details of the Battle.” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), May 2, 1847, 2. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Gallatin, Albert. “Peace with Mexico.” In Selected Writings of Albert Gallatin. Edited by E. James Ferguson, 456–494. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967. Garber, Marjorie. “Historical Correctness: The Use and Abuse of History for Literature.” In A Manifesto for Literary Studies, 45–69. Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities Short Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. Garrett, Jenkins. The Mexican-American War of 1846–1848: A Bibliography of the Holdings of the Libraries: University of Texas at Arlington. Edited by Katherine R. Goodwin. Special Collections Publication 2. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. Garza-Falcón, Leticia. Gente Decente: A Borderlands Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. ———. The Nation-State and Violence. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. González, John M. “Terms of Engagement: Nation or Patriarchy in Jovita González’s and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero.” In Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. Vol. 4, ed. José F. Aranda Jr. and Silvio Torres-Saillant, 264–265. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002. González, Jovita. “America Invades the Border Towns.” Southwest Review 15, no. 4 (1930): 467–477. González, Jovita, and Eve Raleigh [Margaret Eimer]. Caballero: A Historical Novel. Edited by José E. Limón and María Cotera. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996. Graña, Cesar. “Cultural Nationalism: The Idea of Historical Destiny in Spanish America.” Social Research 29 (1962) and 30 (1963). Reprint, Berkeley: Center for Latin American Studies, n.d. Greenwood, Grace [Sara Jane Clarke]. “The Volunteer.” In Greenwood Leaves: A Collection of Sketches and Letters. 2nd ser. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1851. Gruesz, Kristen Silva. Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, University Press, 2002. Gustafson, Thomas. Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776–1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Hall, Stuart. “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity.” In Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King, 19–39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

2 94   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Halyard, Harry. The Chieftain of Churubusco: or, The Spectre of the Cathedral: A Romance of the Mexican War. Boston: Gleason, 1848. ———. The Heroine of Tampico; or, Wildfire the Wanderer: A Tale of the Mexican War. Boston: At the Flag of Our Union Office, 1847. Hale, Charles A. The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Hamilton, W. J. Zebra Zack; or, The Wild Texan’s Mission. New York: Beadle and Adams, 1861. Hazel, Harry [ Justin Jones]. The Flying Artillerist; or, The Child of the Battle-Field: A Tale of Mexican Treachery. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson (1853). ———. The Rival Chieftains; or, The Brigands of Mexico: A Romance of Santa Anna and His Times. Boston: Gleason, 1845. Henderson, J. Stanley. The Blue Band; or, The Mystery of the Silver Star: A Romance of the Texan Border. New York: Beadle and Adams, 1872. Hietala, Thomas R. Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985. Hobsbawm, Eric. Bandits. New York: Delacorte, 1969. Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial AngloSaxonism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. Howard, Leon. Victorian Knight-Errant: A Study of the early Literary Career of James Russell Lowell. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952. Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. “Interior.” Editorial. El Monitor Republicano, July 6, 1847, 1. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981. Jehlen, Myra. American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Joe Kidd. Directed by John Sturges. Universal City, Calif.: Universal Pictures, 1972. Johannsen, Robert W. To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Jones, Gavin. “The Cult of the Vernacular.” In Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. Juárez, Benito. Manifiesto of July 16, 1867. In Documentos, discursos y correspondencia. Edited by Jorge L. Tamayo, 272–274. Mexico City: Editorial Libros de Mexico, 1974. Kazanjian, David. The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Kaup, Monica. “The Unsustainable Hacienda: The Rhetoric of Progress in Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero.” Modern Fiction Studies 51 (2005): 561–591. Kendall, George W. Dispatches from the Mexican War. Edited and with an introduction by Lawrence Delbert Cress. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003 (first published 1983).

Bibliography  

2 95

King, Anthony. “The Times and Spaces of Modernity (Or Who Needs Postmodernism?).” In Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson, Global Modernities, 108–123. Kirkham, Ralph W. The Mexican War Journals and Letters of Ralph W. Kirkham. Edited by Robert Ryal Miller. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991. Knowlton, Robert J. “The Early Influence of the United States Constitution in the Western Hemisphere: The Cases of the Mexican Constitution of 1824 and Bolívar’s Ideas.” Center for Latin America Discussion Paper Series, no. 78. Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Center for Latin America, 1987. Krauze, Enrique. Porfirio Díaz: Místico de la autoridad. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987. “Latest News from the AP Really Is Late.” San Antonio Express News, Feb. 1, 2006. Lehnert, Pierre F. Album pintoresco de la republica mexicana. Mexico: Julio Michaud y Thomas (1850?). Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Knopf, 1998. LeShan, Lawrence. The Psychology of War: Comprehending Its Mystique and Its Madness. 2nd ed. New York: Helios, 2002. Límon, José. Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican American South Texas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. ———. “Mexicans, Foundational Fictions, and the United States: Caballero, a Late Border Romance.” Modern Language Quarterly 57, no. 2 ( June 1996): 341–353. Lippard, George. Legends of Mexico. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1847. ———. ’Bel of Prairie Eden: A Romance of Mexico. Boston: Hotchkiss, 1848. Lomnitz, Claudio. Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism. Public Worlds 9. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Lone Star. Directed by John Sayles. Los Angeles: Rio Duke and Castle Rock Entertainment. 1996. Lowell, James Russell. James Russell Lowell’s The Biglow Papers [First Series]. Edited by Thomas Wortham. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1977. ———. “Introduction to the Second Series of Biglow Papers.” In The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell. Revised by Marjorie R. Kaufman, 440–458. Cambridge Edition. Boston: Houghton, 1978. Lund, Joshua. “The Mestizo State: Colonization and Indianization in Liberal Mexico.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 123, no. 5 (2008): 1418–1433. McCaffrey, James M. “Surrounded by Dangers of All Kinds”: The Mexican War Letters of Lieutenant Theodore Laidley. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1997. Mendoza, Louis Gerard. Historia: The Literary Making of Chicana and Chicano History. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001. “Mensage del presidente de Los Estados-Unidos.” Editorial. La Reforma, Jan. 20, 1848, 12. Meyer, Birgit, and Peter Geschiere. Introduction to Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure, ed. Birgit Meyer and Peter Geschiere, 1–15. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

2 96   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Millan, María del Carmen. “Dos utopías.” Historia Mexicana 7, no. 2 (1957): 187–206. Montejano, David. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Mora-Torres, Juan. The Making of the Mexican Border: The State, Capitalism, and Society in Neuvo León, 1848–1910. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Murray, Frederic W. “The Image of Utopia as a Conceptual Determinant in the Structural Development of Spanish American Culture.” In Imagination, Emblems and Expressions: Essays in Latin American, Caribbean, and Continental Culture and Identity, ed. Helen Ryan Ranson, 29–39. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993. Nagy, Gregory. “Ancient Greek Epic and Praise Poetry: Some Typological Considerations.” In Oral Tradition in Literature: Interpretation in Context, ed. John Miles Foley, 89–102. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. Olmedo, José Joaquín. “La victoria de Junín: Canto a Bolívar.” In La victoria de Junín y otros poemas. Edited and with an introduction by Julio Pazos Barrera, 71–98. Quito: Libresa, 1988. Olliff, Donathan C. Reforma Mexico and the United States: A Search for Alternatives to Annexation, 1854–1861. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1981. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge, 1994. Opland, Jeff. “Eulogy and Ritual.” In Xhosa Oral Poetry: Aspects of a Black South African Tradition, 117–151. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ———. “The Structure of Xhosa Eulogy and the Relation of Eulogy to Epic.” In Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry. Vol. 2, ed. J. B. Hainsworth. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1989. Orjuela, Héctor H. “Independencia, monroísmo y formación de las nacionalidades 1776–1830.” In Imagen de los Estados Unidos en la poesía de hispanoamérica, 47–77. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1980. O’Sullivan, John L. “Annexation.” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (July 1845). Parker, Theodore. A Sermon of the Mexican War: Preached at the Melodeon on Sunday, June 25, 1848. Boston: Coolidge and Wiley, 1848. ———. A Sermon of War: Preached at the Melodeon on Sunday June 7, 1846. 3rd ed. Boston: I. R. Butts, 1846. “Parte politica.” Editorial. El Tiempo, May 29, 1846, 1. “Parte politica: La campaña sobre el bravo.” Editorial. El Tiempo, May 3, 1846, 1. Paz, Octavio. “Mexico and the United States.” In The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, trans. Rachel Phillips Belash, 355–376. New York: Grove Press, 1985. Peréz, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Theories of Representation and Difference). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Pi-Suñer Llorens, Antonio. “Estudio Preliminar.” In Catálogo de los artículos sobre México en el Diccionario universal de historia y de geografía, ed. Antonio Pi-Suñer Llorens, vii– xiv. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, 1997. Pizarro, Nicolás. El monedero: Novela escrita [The Counterfeiter]. Mexico City, 1861.

Bibliography  

2 97

Prieto, Guillermo. Colección de poesías escogidas: Publicadas y inéditas. 2 vols. Mexico City: Oficina Impresora de Estampillas, 1895. Postl, Karl Anton [Charles Sealsfield]. The Cabin Book; or, Sketches of Life in Texas, trans. C. F. Mersch. New York: Winchester, 1844. Raleigh, Eve [Margaret Eimer]. Letter to Jovita González, July 13 (year undetermined). Edmundo E. Mireles and Jovita González Mireles Papers, Special Collections and Archives Department. Mary and Jeff Bell Library, Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. Reid, John T. Spanish American Images of the United States, 1790–1960. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1977. Reid, Mayne. The Captain of the Rifles; or, The Queen of the Lakes. New York: Beadle and Adams, 1879. Renan, Ernest. “What Is a nation?” In Nation and Narration, trans. Martin Thom, 8–22. London: Routledge, 1990. “Retrospective View of the South-American States.” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 2, no. 5 (1838): 99–112. “Revoluciones.” Editorial. El Siglo Diez y Nueve, June 11, 1848, 4. Reyes de la Maza, Luis. “Nicolás Pizarro, novelista y pensador liberal.” Historia Mexicana 7, no. 2(1957): 572–587. Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf, 1989. Ridge, John Rollin. The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955. First published 1854 in San Francisco. Robertson, Roland. “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.” In Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson, Global Modernities, 25–44. ———. “Social Theory, Cultural Relativity and the Problem of Globality.” In Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King, 69–90. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Robinson, Cecil, trans. and ed. The View from Chapultepec: Mexican Writers on the Mexican-American War. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989. Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. Roldán, Otto Granados. “El nacionalismo mexicano: Una reflexión.” Universidad de Mexico 42.443 (1987): 1517. Roth, Mitchel. “Journalism and the U.S.-Mexican War.” In Dueling Eagles: Reinterpreting the U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–1848, ed. Richard V. Francaviglia and Douglas W. Richmond. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2000. Rourke, Constance. “Corn Cobs Twist Your Hair.” In American Humor: A Study of the National Character, 3–32. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931. Ruiz, Julie Ann. “So Far from God—So Close to the United States.” In “The Boundaries of Conflict: The Mexican War in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” 161–251. PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001. Ruiz, Ramón Eduardo. Triumph and Tragedy: A History of the Mexican People. New York: Norton, 1992.

2 98   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo. The Squatter and the Don. 2nd ed. Edited by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997. Ruppert, Peter. Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literary Utopias. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Sáenz, Benjamin Alire. Dreaming the End of War. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2006. Saldívar, José David. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Sandweiss, Martha A., Rich Stewart, and Ben. W. Huseman, eds. Eyewitness to War: Prints and Daguerreotypes of the Mexican War. Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum; Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989. Seguín, Juan. N. A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of Juan N. Seguín. Edited by Jesús F. de la Teja. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2002. Shaara, Jeff. Gone for Solders: A Novel of the Mexican War. New York: Ballantine, 2000. Simpson, David. The Politics of American English, 1776–1850: New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Slotkin, Richard. “The Myth That Wasn’t: Literary Responses to the Mexican War, 1847–1850.” In The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization. 1800–1890, 191–207. New York: Atheneum, 1985. Smith, Anthony. National Identity. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991. Smith, C. B. Speech of Mr. C. B. Smith, of Indiana, on the Mexican War: Delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, Jan. 6, 1847. Washington, D.C.: Gideon, 1847. Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Stewart, Anthony. Speech of Mr. Stewart of Pennsylvania, on the Three Million Appropriation Bill, and the Mexican War, delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, Feb. 13, 1847. Washington, D.C.: Gideon, 1947. Streeby, Shelley. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Thompson, Jerry D., ed. Juan Cortina and the Texas-Mexico Frontier, 1859–1877. Southwestern Studies 99. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1994. Thorne, A. Letter to Jovita González Mireles. Aug. 21, 1939. Edmundo and Jovita Mireles Papers. Special Collections and Archives Department. Mary and Jeff Bell Library, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi Library, Corpus Christi. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. Introduction and notes by Jonathan Levin. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Vázquez, Josefina Zoraida, and Lorenzo Meyer. The United States and Mexico. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Velasco Márquez, Jesús. La guerra del 47 y la opinion pública, 1845–1848. Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1975.

Bibliography  

2 99

Velasco Márquez, Jesús, and Thomas Benjamin. “La guerra entre México y Estados Unidos, 1846–1848.” In Mitos en las relaciones México–Estados Unidos, comp. by M. Esther Schumacher. Mexico City: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 1994. 99–154. Villegas, Daniel Cosío. “El porfiriato, era deconsolidación.” Historia Mexicana 13, no. 1 (1963): 76–87. Villanueva, Tino. Scene from the Movie GIANT. Willimantic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 1993. Wald, Priscilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in EighteenthCentury America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Watson, Samuel J. “The Uncertain Road to Manifest Destiny: Army Officers and the Course of American Territorial Expansionism, 1815–1846.” In Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism, ed. Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris, 68–114. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Whitman, Walt. “Our Territory on the Pacific.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 7, 1846, 2. Widdifield, Stacie G. The Embodiment of the National in Late-Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. Weeks, Charles A. The Juárez Myth in Mexico. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987. Winders, Richard Bruce. Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997. Zboray, Ronald J. A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Works Consulted Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991. Blank, Paula. Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings. London: Routledge, 1996. Bloch, R. Howard. “Naturalism, Nationalism, Medievalism.” Romantic Review 76 (1985): 341–360. Brack, Gene M. Mexico Views Manifest Destiny, 1821–1846: An Essay on the Origins of the Mexican War. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975. Brushwood, John S. Mexico in Its Novel: A Nation’s Search for Identity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966. Bushnell, David, and Neill Macaulay. The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Cortazar, Alejandro. “México y sus novelistas en el siglo xix: Hacía un ideal nacionalista.” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1997. Corti, Maria. “Models and Anti-models in Medieval Culture.” New Literary History 10, no. 2 (1979): 339–366.

3 0 0   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Dekker, George. The American Historical Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Dickstein, Morris. “Popular Fiction and Critical Values: The Novel as a Challenge to Literary History.” In Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, 29–66. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Ellis, William. The Theory of the American Romance: An Ideology in American Intellectual History. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. Henson, Margaret Swett. Lorenzo de Zavala: Pragmatic Idealist. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1996. Jehlen, Myra. “Why Did the Europeans Cross the Ocean? A Seventeenth-Century Riddle.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, 41–58. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993. Johnson, W. R. The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982. Lind, Michael. The Alamo: An Epic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Mather, Cotton. Le fel de Christiano: En veyntequatro articulos de la instituciion de Christo embiada a los Españoles. Boston, 1699. McDonald, Archie P., ed. The Mexican War: Crisis for American Democracy. Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1969. MacDonald, Robert H. The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880–1918. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1994. Nagy, Moses M. “The Myth of Columbus and the American Utopia.” In Christopher Columbus in World Literature: An Annotated Bibliography, 251–262. New York: Garland, 1994. Paredes, Américo. With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. 1958. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Prescott, William H. The Complete and Unexpurgated History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru. New York: Random House, 1936. Safran, William. “Nationalism.” In Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, ed. Joshua Fishman, 77–93. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Shell, Marc. “Babel in America: or, The Politics of Language Diversity in the United States.” Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 103–127. Simpson, David. “Destiny Made Manifest: The Styles of Whitman’s Poetry.” In Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhaba, 177–196. London: Routledge, 1990. Smith, Anthony. “National Identity: Modern and Medieval?” In Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson, and Alan Murray, 21– 46. Leeds, U.K.: Leeds Texts and Monographs, 1995. Turner, Frederick C. The Dynamic of Mexican Nationalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. Tyler, Royall. The Contrast: A Comedy in Five Acts. New York: AMS Press, 1970 [1790]. Williams, Stanley T. The Spanish Background of American Literature. 2 vols. Hamden, U.K.: Archon, 1968.

Index

Alamo: in film, 103, 269n36; mythology, 57, 67, 111, 127, 154, 250; villains, 24 Altamirano, Ignacio, 154, 183 Americas: domain of anxiety, xii, 13, 78, 113; Mexican-Americans, 251–252; neurosis, 180; U.S.-American exceptionalism, 129 Anglo-American: comity in South Texas, 6, 215; definition of, 9, 260n18; essentialism, xii, 11, 19; identity mutability in, 108, 139, 208, 234; views of Mexico, 4; villains, 201–204 Anglo-Saxonism: contingent culture, 151–152; definition, 260n18, 268n14; essentialism, 51, 107–108, 114–124, 126, 129, 138; mythology, 85 anxiety: globalization and, 1; Mexican presence, 4; U.S.-Mexican War literature and, x Anzaldúa, Gloria, xi, 250 Armstrong, Frank P.: The Prairie Pathfinder, 88–89 Averill, Charles, 51, 81, 207; The Mexican Ranchero, 29–30, 37, 41, 48; The Secret Service Ship, 37–39, 41, 45, 47–48, 66

Bakhtin, M. M.: Biglow Papers, 134–137; narrative, xi, 7–8, 103, 111, 170 bandits: class, 25; frontier mode, 59; hybridity, 101–103, 260n16; Mexican, 12, 23; renegades, 37; social disturbance, 259n15; stabilizing myths, 24, 77, 85, 89, 94, 105–108; threat, 66, 87, 91–92, 100; U.S.-Mexican War literature, 23–24, 32, 82–83; western mode, 81–104 Barclay, Thomas, 35, 261n33 Beauregard, Pierre Gustave Toutant, 35 ’Bel of Prairie Eden, 78, 145 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 190, 264n68, 282n17 Biglow Papers, The, 111–140, 154, 157, 175; Anglo-Saxonism, 117–120; compared to Civil Disobedience, 143–157; compared to Emerson’s journals, 147–151; compared to Jack Tier, 144–147; compared to Mexican literature, 157, 175; criticism of Anglo-Saxonism, 122–126; description of, 113–117; linguistic disturbance in, 129–134; Second Series, 268n7 border, U.S.-Mexican: globalization, xi, 10, 139, 214, 231–236; identity, 213,

3 0 2   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

222, 228; militarized, 1, 22, 136; tensions, 20, 89, 94, 105, 216; time, 113, 139; writing, 207–209 Boy Heroes of Chapultepec, 243–245 Buntline, Ned (Edward Zane Carroll Judson), 49, 262n46; The Volunteer, 38, 40 Burns, Ken, xii

Delano, Columbus, 61, 69 Dewey, Frederick H., Will-O’-the-Wisp, 88, 97–98 Díaz, Porfirio, 9 Dilworth, Rank, 44 Duganne, A. J. H.: The Peon Prince, 88–89, 98; Putnam Pomfret’s Ward, 88–89, 98

Caballero: and globalization, 222–223, 225 Candelaria, Nash, 15, 209, 237–242 Captain of the Rifles, The, 86–87, 94, 97–98 Chambers, María Christina Mena, 15, 209, 257n54; Boy Heroes of Chapultepec, 243–245 Chicanismo, 5, 216, 236, 252; discourse, xi, 10, 15, 137, 211–212, 217, 230, 250 Chieftain of Churubusco, The, 58–59, 63– 64, 66–67, 74–75, 89 chivalric novelettes: compared to frontier and western modes, 21; frontline accounts, 26; history in, 48–51; resolving contradiction, 47; women in, 41–45 Civil Disobedience, 140–144 Civil War, 68–69, 77 Clarke, Sarah Jane (pseud. Grace Greenwood): The Volunteer, 48–49 class: feudalism, 263n59; Mexican Americans, 215; war memoir, 32–35 congressional speeches and frontier homologies, 68–70 Cooper, James Fenimore, 31, 151–152; Jack Tier, 111, 121, 144–147; The Prairie, 41–42, 234 Cortina, Juan, 83, 103 Corwin, Thomas, 70 Coulter, Richard, 35 Curtis, Newton M., 64; The Hunted Chief, 64, 89; The Vidette, 31 Curtis, Samuel Ryan, 35

Eimer, Margaret (pseud. Eve Raleigh), 213, 224–225, 286n32 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 13, 111, 118, 152; journal entries, 147–151

Dana, Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh, 43–47

feudalism: romance, 263n59, 286n14; South Texas, 220, 228–229, 231; U.S. society, 25, 52, 97 First World War, 104 Flying Artillerist, The, 66, 71–75 Foot, Solomon, 63, 70 French romance, 51–52 frontier: ambiguity, 13; anxiety, 58; compared to chivalric mode, 76–77; compared to western mode, 78; key terms, 21–32, 56–58; political oratory, 26; resolutions, 66–75; time, 57, 70–72, 77–79; U.S.-Mexican War, 27, 55, 74–77; villains, 31, 56–57, 62, 66, 75–76 Fussell, Paul, 7, 10 globalization: anxiety, 10, 228; consciousness, 5; ethnography, 214, 216, 227–228, 230; Mexican American literature, xi, 208, 213–215; Mexican nationalism, 156, 204, 205; Mexico, 165, 204; modernity, 228, 232, 239, 247; mutability, x; paradox, 214, 218–225; South Texas, 215, 227; war, 246–247 González, Jovita, 15, 209; Caballero, 213–237 Greenwood, Grace (Sarah Jane Clarke): The Volunteer, 48–49 Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, x, xi, 47, 250

Index  

Halyard, Harry: The Chieftain of Churubusco, 58–59, 63–64, 66–67, 74–75, 89; The Heroine of Tampico, 64–65 Hamilton, W. J.: Zebra Zack, 95 Hazel, Harry (Justin Jones): The Flying Artillerist, 66, 72, 73, 265n84; Inez, the Beautiful, 31 Heroine of Tampico, The, 64–65 Hietala, Thomas: national anxiety, 7, 106, 265n86 High Chaparral, The, 47 history: context for novelettes, 3; elision of, xii, 17–19, 27, 89; frontier mode, 75–76; Mexican presence, 18, 54, 82, 154; in Mexico, 173–174, 179, 195, 205; rhetorical gauge, 27; trauma, xii; U.S.-Mexican War, 103–104, 133; western mode, 95–97 Horsman, Reginald: and racism during U.S.-Mexican War, 11, 60, 120, 141, 264n72 Hunted Chief, The, 64, 89 Huntington, Samuel, 107, 115, 138–139 identity: Anglo-Saxon, 11, 117, 119; chivalric, 37, 52; globalist, xi, 15, 225, 228, 230, 246; Mexican, xi, 15, 155–156, 159, 165, 173, 180, 188, 200–205, 271n3, 274n20; Mexican American, xii, 1, 10, 15, 213, 216, 227, 235, 247; national, 36, 50, 85, 132, 133, 155; nationalist, 6, 29, 135; U.S.-American, 1, 20, 25–26, 55, 57, 59, 62, 73–74, 106–107, 109 Inez, the Beautiful, 31 Jack Tier, 121, 144–147 Jameson, Fredric, 29, 50–51, 74, 259n15, 263n59 Joe Kidd (Clint Eastwood), 24, 97 Johannsen, Robert W., 11, 83–85, 97; The Biglow Papers, 114–115 Jones, Justin (pseud. Harry Hazel): The Flying Artillerist, 66, 72, 73, 265n84 Juárez, Benito, 154, 161, 163, 173–174, 177, 211; icon, 160, 183–184, 278n35

303

Judson, Edward Zane Carroll (pseud. Ned Buntline), 49, 262n46; The Volunteer, 38, 40 Kazanjian, David: and race and the U.S.-Mexican War, 11 Kendall, George Wilkins, 85–86; Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, 86, 92; journalistic stasis, 98–99; narrative closure, 92–94 Kirkham, Ralph W., 36, 44 Laidley, Theodore, 34, 127 Legends of Mexico, 3–4, 12, 78–79, 112, 121–122, 145 Limón, José, 3, 136, 216, 232, 234 Lippard, George, 3–4, 78–79, 146; ’Bel of Prairie Eden, 78, 145; Legends of Mexico, 3–4, 12, 78–79, 112, 121–122, 145 Lowell, James Russell: Anglo-Saxonism, 115–122, 268n11; Bakhtin, 135–137; The Biglow Papers, 13, 111–140, 151–152; language, 129–134; U.S.-American identity, 138–139 Mena, María Christina (Chambers), 15, 209, 257n54; Boy Heroes of Chapultepec, 243–245 Mestizaje, 1, 5; ideal, 177–184; inner corruption, 31 Mexican American literature: border zone, xiii; dialectics of, 15–16, 245– 246; and globalization, 246; and Mexican literature, x, 209 Mexican Americans, ix–xi; Anglo American essentialism, xii, 4–5, 55, 92, 107–108, 138, 208; anxiety, 20, 22, 107–108, 113–114, 138; assimilation, 115, 139, 235; avatars, x, xii, 6, 54–55, 69, 138, 249–251; Chicanismo, 216, 232, 235, 247, 250; compared to Mexican literature, 207; elided, xii, 1, 22, 108; globalization, 5, 11, 156, 206, 208, 214, 247, 250; hybridity, 1, 235; time,

3 0 4   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

139, 207, 247, 250; trauma, 9–10, 213; U.S.-Mexican War literature, 9–11, 15–16, 20, 208 Mexicanization, 4, 66, 84 Mexican Ranchero, The, 29–30, 37, 41, 48 Mexicans: anti-American, 20, 63; bandits, 12, 23–27, 57, 77, 82–84, 98, 100; class, 33–37, 76, 215; corrosive to U.S. identity, 60–61, 73, 92, 114; elided, 22, 103; equivalent to U.S.-Americans, 20–21, 28, 40, 53, 74, 127, 144–147; history, 48–49, 54–55, 75–76, 97, 113; literary reactions to invasion, 154– 155, 271n1, 271n3; mythology, 183–184, 244; nationalism, xi, 14, 155–158, 161, 164–165, 170–173, 178, 204; novelizing presence, 136–137; race, 4, 7, 34, 36, 60; racialized, 24, 28, 31, 35–36, 76, 101, 216; U.S.-American anxiety, xii, 2, 4–8, 20–25, 60–62, 101, 107, 113, 120–121, 138–139; villainy, 21, 28, 32, 56–57, 76, 81–82, 85, 91–92, 114; war historiography, 258n4; women, 43–45 Mexico: in the Americas, xii; antiAmerica, 80, 113–114, 139; challenge to U.S. exceptionalism, 112–113; comparisons to United States, 51–53, 135; crisis of war, 9; destined to oppose U.S. America, 186; globalization, 156; history, 48–55; nation of freedom, 171–173; relational dependence on U.S. America, 118, 204; search for national identity, 155–156; selfconsciousness in, 202–203; temporality, 3; utopianism, 14–15 Monedero, El, 182–206 Monitor Republicano, El, 163, 186 Monroy, Petronilo, 184 Murieta, Joaquín: as fictional character, 80, 82–83, 100, 260n16 Museo Nacional de Las Intervenciones, 179 narrative: frontier crisis, 79; globalist, 228–230; journalism, 92–95, 99, 105;

Mexican, 156–157, 179, 184, 203–205; mutability, 71; possibilities, 249–251; U.S.-American exceptionalism, 4, 58, 69, 114, 138, 143; war, 103–104, 134 nationalism: “American,” 7; contradictory, 137, dualism of, 137; equivalence, 25–26, 52; exclusionary, 155; Mexican, 14, 91, 154–156, 163–165, 172, 180, 204, 274n20; mutability, 6; nationality, 9, 26 Niños heroes, 244 Nortemanía, 161 Not by the Sword, 237–242 Olmedo, José Joaquín, 171 O’Sullivan, John L., 54, 117, 121–122, 135 Parker, Theodore, 121, 133 Peon Prince, The, 88–89, 98 Perez, Emma, xi, 218, 250 Pizarro (Suárez), Nicolás, 14, 157; Mexican editorials, 185–187; El monedero, 182–204; national crisis, 194–204; utopia, 188, 193 Plan de San Diego, 227, 286n31 Prairie, The, 41–42, 234 Prairie Pathfinder, The, 88–89 praise poetry, 274n22 Prieto, Guillermo, 14, 157; invasion poetry, 159, 166–169, 170–176; Mexican editorials, 158–164; nationalist abstractions, 170–178; praise poetry, 164–169 Putnam Pomfret’s Ward, 88–89, 98 race: R. W. Emerson, 148–151; fairskinned villains, 24; inter-racial marriage, 28; Mexican, 12–21, 31, 36, 92, 107, 139; U.S.-American culture, 34, 61–62; U.S.-Mexican War, 11, 50–51, 264n72 racism, 18, 31, 101; in The Biglow Papers, 121; Congressional, 60–62 Raleigh, Eve. See Margaret Eimer Reforma, La, 14, 154, 160, 172, 175, 183, 193, 277n30; ideals, 187, 191

Index  

Reforma, La (newspaper), 162, 172 Reid, Mayne: The Captain of the Rifles, 86–87, 94, 97–98; The War Trail, 97 Ridge, John Rollin, 80–83, 100 Rio Grande Valley, South Texas, ix Rowlandson, Mary, 79 Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo, 15, 209– 213; The Squatter and the Don linked to Mexican literature, 210 Saldívar, Ramón, 216, 235–236 Secret Service Ship, The, 37–39, 41, 45, 47–48, 66 Seguín, Juan, 209, 245–246, 248–249 Shaara, Jeff, 77 Siglo Diez y Nueve, El, 185–186 Slotkin, Richard: and U.S. Mexican War literature, 22 Smith, Anthony: and national identity, 8, 137–138 Smith, C. B., 62, 68 Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, 155 South Texas as contact zone, 6, 10, 214– 215, 225, 227–228, 231–232, 236 Spain: comparisons to the United States, 36, 42; racial projection, 35–36; Spanish villains, 62 Stewart, Anthony, 69 Streeby, Shelley: The Biglow Papers, 114–115; cross-national marriage, 29, 40; U.S.-Mexican War literature, 11, 19, 259n10 Taylor, Zachary, 17, 48, 258n1 Thoreau, Henry David, 13, 111; Civil Disobedience, 140–143, 145, 147, 151–152 Thucydidean moment (Thomas Gustafson), 133, 270n46 Tiempo, El, 161–162 time, x, xi, 7–8, 106–107, 139; The Biglow Papers, 136–137; Caballero, 222–225, 236–237; disruption, 15, 228, 233; Mexican Americans, 54–55, 138, 212– 213; El monedero, 190–191; Not by the Sword, 241, 247–248; novelettes, 2, 71,

305

74–76, 79, 104; U.S.-American, 58, 78, 122, 179; western, 82, 84, 89–91, 98–99, 104–105 trauma: continuing, x, xii, 8–9, 12; Mexican American literature, 213, 247; Mexico, 7, 153, 156, 170, 175, 178–180, 183–185, 187, 196–197, 200, 205; war, 1, 12, 171, 247 United States: affects on Mexico, xii, 9, 14–15, 155–158, 162–163, 175–177, 180–186, 200, 204, 282n16; agent of temporality, 157; Americas, 51, 112, 280n6; evil, 200; exceptionalism, 57– 58, 179; Mexican Americans, x, 208– 212, 231, 247, 250; Mexicans in, 7–8, 24, 52–53, 60–62, 68–69, 78, 107–108, 115, 120–122, 138–139; and Mexico, 12– 13, 29, 50, 54, 134–136, 139; national identity, 50, 74; parallels to Mexico, 36, 46–47, 127; war and identity, 85 U.S. America: definition, 9; exceptionalism, 53, 55, 112, 141, 143, 235; identity, 59–60, 74, 78, 106–108, 129, 143, 151, 208; imperial, 84, 186; Mexicans in, 22, 113–114, 121–122, 138–139 U.S.-Mexican War: compared to U.S. Civil War, 133; continuing conflict (U.S.), 22–23, 136; crisis for U.S. national belief, 110, 129, 251; disruptive effects (U.S.), 8, 13, 20, 25–27, 36, 104, 107–108, 111–112, 114, 122, 133–134, 139, 151; forgotten in U.S. America, xi, 1, 20, 97; histories of, 257n4, 271n3; turning point for Mexico, 158, 170; U.S.-American hypocrisy, 7, 84, 112, 210–211; U.S.-American mythology, 23; U.S.-American national memory, x; U.S.-American selfconsciousness, 33 Utopia, 191, 283n25; in the Americas, 171, 180, 190, 281n32; in frontier mode, 67; as neurosis, 180, 183 Vasconcelos, José, 177 Vidette, The, 31

3 0 6   

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War

Volunteer, The (S. J. Clarke), 48–49 Volunteer, The; or, The Maid of Monterey (Judson/Buntline), 38 war: catastrophic (Mexico) 185; catastrophic (U.S.), 69; community, 252; elided in western mode, 82; meaning, 247, 251–252; Mexican Americans, xii, 7, 92, 209, 213, 217, 246–247, 250–251; narrative, 7, 12, 33, 49, 78, 104, 134, 171, 240; unpredictability, 7–8; and women as trophy wives, 42 War Trail, The, 97

western: criminality, 87, 91; elision of war history, 89, 95–101; globalizing energy, 92; journalism, 26; key terms, 81–84; novelette mode, 21, 84–104; resolution, 91–95, 97, 100; villainy, 85. See also bandits Whitman, Walt, 112, 118, 122 Will-O’-The-Wisp, 88, 94, 97 Wister, Owen, 71 Zaragoza, Ignacio, 173–174, 278n39 Zarco, El, 154 Zebra Zack, 95