Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: New England and Puritan histories can no longer tell such a simple story of a complex continent or hemisphere. In The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948, the established literary critic and literary historian José F. Aranda adds to a growing body of scholarship on the Latino nineteenth century that includes works like A World Not to Come by Raúl Coronado, Letters from Filadelfia by Rodrigo Lazo, and The Latino Nineteenth Century, edited by Lazo and Jesse Alemán. These works seek to critically reinterpret the origins of U.S. literary history and displace the traditional areas of focus. But neither can the themes of conquest and resistance explain the contradictory histories and literatures of the nineteenth century, as settlers and agents of conquest were dispossessed and colonized.Aranda offers an analysis of people of Mexican descent between 1848 and 1948 as “settler hybrids,” that “represent both colonizer and colonized . . . a historic community whose members were agents of modernity, as well as targets of coloniality” (6). These tensions were manifest in competing ideas about place. Aranda shows the importance of the Latino long nineteenth century and its importance in complicating the canons of literary history. His work offers a nuanced addition to Mexican American intellectual history.The book's five chapters are roughly in chronological order, each covering the work of different authors of Mexican descent in different states of the American Southwest. The first two chapters explore California and the literary, political, and intellectual concerns of Californios. The conquest of California in the post-1848 years was central to the narrative of manifest destiny, but its connection to a previously unfinished colonial project posed a problem. Anglo-American settlers constructed a declension narrative of the Californio elite that reinforced the superiority of the American conquest and justified their presence. Californios, especially the elite Vallejo family, challenged this narrative of decline. The past, present, and future of California in these writings became a “semiotic battlefield” (46) where they charted “sovereignty through nostalgia” (52). Californios in the early twentieth century then used this colonial Spanish past to make a claim of contemporary belonging in the United States. They agreed with the exceptionalist understanding of the region, asserting that Californios brought “civilization” to California and laid the groundwork for democracy to thrive in the West. As settler hybrids, the Vallejos’ version of history fashioned “the cultural capital of a privileged, colonialist past into then nation-building apparatuses that were constructing California as the Golden State of the Union” (75).Next, Aranda travels to the territories of Arizona and New Mexico, via Geronimo's autobiography and Miguel Antonio Otero Jr.’s The Real Billy the Kid, to investigate his concept of “racial loyalty.” For Aranda, both Geronimo and Otero offer personal and territorial biographies that challenged and naturalized colonialist occupation. Chapter four covers the state of Texas through the works of Jovita Gonzalez in the 1930s. Like the Vallejo family of California, Gonzalez writes of a landed Spanish and Mexican elite. She uses nostalgia to turn personal experiences and de facto policies of statelessness in the twentieth century into stories and histories of settler belonging. The final chapter deals with the meaning and use of Spanish among the ethnic Mexican community in the first half of the twentieth century. Aranda intends to challenge English as the primary language of the field of American Literature. He also shows how the use of a hybrid Spanglish (the intermixing of English and Spanish) was used by Mexican nationals writing in the Spanish-language press in the twentieth-century Southwest to mark their feelings of statelessness. Eventually, many Chicanas/os/xs came to see their Spanish as “the soulful poetics of a pocho sensibility and a pocho language that locates its speaker as always, already home, somewhere between Mexico and the United States” (223).The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948 is an excellent example of the promising possibilities that lie between new historicist literary analysis and intellectual history. Its exploration of the literary archive of the Latino long nineteenth century combines the most productive understanding of the two fields. As a periodization and a concept, it is crucial in understanding Mexican American literature before it was connected to the narration of the nation, or before the civil rights paradigm was projected into the past as yet another narrative of liberal progress. José F. Aranda's monograph explains the important contestations over place through settler hybridity. It is a valuable and important contribution to literary history, intellectual history, and the interdisciplinary field of Latinx studies.
Source: The New England Quarterly
DOI: 10.1162/tneq_r_01067
Author: Aaron E. Sánchez
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4408177832