Description
Book SynopsisForgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts traces the existence of a now largely forgotten history of inter-American alliance-making, transnational community formation, and intercultural collaboration between Mexican and Anglo American elites. This communion between elites was often based upon Mexican elites’ own acceptance and reestablishment of problematic socioeconomic, cultural, and ethno-racial hierarchies that placed them above other groups—the poor, working class, indigenous, or Afro-Mexicans, for example—within their own larger community of Greater Mexico. Using close readings of literary texts, such as novels, diaries, letters, newspapers, political essays, and travel narratives produced by nineteenth-century writers from Greater Mexico,
Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts brings to light the forgotten imaginings of how elite Mexicans and Mexican Americans defined themselves and their relationship with Spain, Mexico, the United States, and Anglo America in the nineteenth century. These “lost” discourses—long ago written out of official national narratives and discarded as unrealized or impossible avenues for identity and nation formation—reveal the rifts, fractures, violence, and internal colonizations that are a foundational, but little recognized, part of the history and culture of Greater Mexico.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Trade Review"Excavates shards of an alternative U.S.-Mexico relationship." * California History *
"[An] intelligent reading...Kinnally does us a great service in dismantling a static Mexicano identity, inevitably rooted in antagonism and resistance. By further excavating the “forgotten futures” that she has brought to light, we will surely uncover some unexpected, stimulating pasts." * Hispanic American Historical Review *
"Excavates shards of an alternative U.S.-Mexico relationship." * California History *
"[An] intelligent reading...Kinnally does us a great service in dismantling a static Mexicano identity, inevitably rooted in antagonism and resistance. By further excavating the “forgotten futures” that she has brought to light, we will surely uncover some unexpected, stimulating pasts." * Hispanic American Historical Review *
Table of ContentsAbbreviations ... v
A Note on Translations and Terminology ... vi
Introduction: A Novel and a History “yellowed and tattered with age”... 1
One - Imperial Republics: Lorenzo de Zavala’s Travels Between Civilization and Barbarism... 63
Two - A Proposed Intercultural and (Neo)Colonial Coalition: Justo Sierra O’Reilly’s
Yucatecan Borderlands ... 132
Three - A Transnational Romance: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s
Who Would Have Thought It? ... 192
Four - Between Two Empires: The Black Legend and Off-Whiteness in Eusebio Chacón’s
New Mexican Literary Tradition ... 255
Conclusion: Remember(ing) the Alamo ... 313
Acknowledgements ... 326
Bibliography ... 329
Index ... 360
About the Author ... 361
