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, ormestizaje, 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...

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...

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...

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 regardingla guerra fronteriza, orla invasión norteamericana, as it was also known. But herein arises a paradox. In the...

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...

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...

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 paradigam...