Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States
Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States
Mexico and Mexicans have been involved in every aspect of making the United States from colonial times until the present. Yet our shared history is a largely untold story, eclipsed by headlines about illegal immigration and the drug war. Placing Mexicans and Mexico in the center of American history, this volume elucidates how economic, social, and cultural legacies grounded in colonial New Spain shaped both Mexico and the United States, as well as how Mexican Americans have constructively participated in North American ways of production, politics, social relations, and cultural understandings.
Combining historical, sociological, and cultural perspectives, the contributors to this volume explore the following topics: the Hispanic foundations of North American capitalism; indigenous peoples’ actions and adaptations to living between Mexico and the United States; U.S. literary constructions of a Mexican “other” during the U.S.-Mexican War and the Civil War; the Mexican cotton trade, which helped sustain the Confederacy during the Civil War; the transformation of the Arizona borderlands from a multiethnic Mexican frontier into an industrializing place of “whites” and “Mexicans”; the early-twentieth-century roles of indigenous Mexicans in organizing to demand rights for all workers; the rise of Mexican Americans to claim middle-class lives during and after World War II; and the persistence of a Mexican tradition of racial/ethnic mixing—mestizaje—as an alternative to the racial polarities so long at the center of American life.
This is a solid collection of essays that makes a convincing case that the past and present of Mexico and the United States are inseparable…In that way, this collection represents an excellent contribution to the ongoing public and academic debate.
This intriguing anthology provides a broad rethinking of the social, cultural, and economic intertwining of the vast territory that eventually became the southwestern United States and the Republic of Mexico…. Each of the volume's well-known contributors pursues a different angle in exploring Tutino's thesis. The result is an eclectic and provocative collection of essays on regional ecological and pastoral history; American literary and cultural depictions of Mexico; regional cultural carry-overs, conflicts, and exchanges; and cultural politics and the evolution of an overarching transnational political economy binding the region's numerous peoples.
Mexico & Mexicans in the Making of the United States is long overdue. It addresses a significant hole in American historiography: the extensive and influential role of Mexico…..Mexico & Mexicans in the Making of the United States is a dynamic beginning, which will hopefully inspire many more to add to this conversation.
John Tutino teaches the history of Mexico and the Americas in the History Department and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His previous books include Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America and From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940.
- Preface
- Introduction: Mexico and Mexicans Making U.S. History (John Tutino)
- 1. Capitalist Foundations: Spanish North America, Mexico, and the United States (John Tutino)
- 2. Between Mexico and the United States: From Indios to Vaqueros in the Pastoral Borderlands (Andrew C. Isenberg)
- 3. Imagining Mexico in Love and War: Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Visual Culture (Shelley Streeby)
- 4. Mexican Merchants and Teamsters on the Texas Cotton Road, 1862–1865 (David Montejano)
- 5. Making Americans and Mexicans in the Arizona Borderlands (Katherine Benton-Cohen)
- 6. Keeping Community, Challenging Boundaries: Indigenous Migrants, Internationalist Workers, and Mexican Revolutionaries, 1900–1920 (Devra Weber)
- 7. Transnational Triangulation: Mexico, the United States, and the Emergence of a Mexican American Middle Class (José E. Limón)
- 8. New Mexico, Mestizaje, and the Transnations of North America (Ramón A. Gutiérrez)
- Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index
