Mexican border troubles: social war, settler colonialism and the production of frontier discourses, 1848-1880
Year: 2003
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This study analyzes the social war of the US-Mexico borderlands during \nthe second half of the nineteenth century. The more prominent conflicts, or \n“brushfire wars” –the Merchants War, Cortina War, Las Cuevas War, and the San \nElizario Salt War—are fully elaborated to show a more complex resistance by the \nMexican community. Mexicanos’ short-lived and often narrow victories in \nopposition to Anglo processes of domination not only reveal the ambiguity of \nsettler colonialism but the ambivalences of ethnic Mexicans and Indigenous \npeoples who played an integral part in frontier expansion and defense. The \nresearch allows for a thick description of the large-scale violence as well as the \n“everyday forms” of conflict, combined with social and structural violence, which \nconstitute the ongoing social war of the greater borderlands. Data derived from \nstate-sponsored investigations, military records, testimonies from a variety legal \nprocesses, and the urgent pleas for government protection documents the social \nwar as constituting and constituted by violent episodes that were as much \ndiscursive events as irregular warfare. The study challenges manichean \nconstructions of domination and resistance by complicating the rigid boundaries \nthat have been constructed as a “three cornered conflict” between Anglos, \nIndigenous peoples and Mexicanos. Frontier defense as a discourse formation, \nrevealing both the symbolic and material operations of violence, not only erased \nthe contributions of Mexicanos and Indigenous peoples to frontier settlement but \nalso invites a reinterpretation of capitalist transformation and state formation as \nongoing processes linked to the enduring consequences of violence. The \ndissertation concludes that the social war in the US-Mexico borderlands unfolded \nnot only as a struggle between alienation and accommodation to market, state and \ncultural forces, but also as a complex and shifting struggle for dignity.
Author: Manuel Callahan
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2120700953