Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   John Tutino
Publisher:   University of Texas Press
Imprint:   University of Texas Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.399kg
ISBN:  

9780292754300

ISBN 10:   0292754302
Pages:   332
Publication Date:   01 May 2012
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

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

Reviews

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.--David G. Gutierrez, University of California, San Diego Journal of American History (09/01/2013)

Mexico & Mexicans in the Making of the United States is long overdue [...] Beginning in the colonial era, this collection of essays successfully argues that Mexico and Mexicans have been a too-long ignored factor in the political, economic, and social history of the United States. Essays on labor history, American literature, racial categorization, and middle-class Mexican Americans all demonstrate that the United States has been made by Mexico and Mexicans in myriad ways. An ambitious work, Mexico and Mexicans engages with Western, American Indian, and Chicano historiography along the way. - Journal of American Ethnic History

Author Information

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.

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