Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850

by Andrés Reséndez

• ISBN13: 9780521835558
• ISBN10: 0521835550
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780511252747
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-09-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book explores how the diverse and fiercely independent peoples of Texas and New Mexico came to think of themselves as members of one particular national community or another in the years leading up to the Mexican-American War. Hispanics, Native Americans, and Anglo Americans made agonizing and crucial identity decisions against the backdrop of two structural transformations taking place in the region during the first half of the nineteenth century and often pulling in opposite directions. On the one hand, the Mexican government sought to bring its frontier inhabitants into the national fold by relying on administrative and patronage linkages; but on the other, Mexico's northern frontier gravitated toward the expanding American economy.

Author Biography

Andres Resendez is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis.

Table of Contents

Part I: 1. Carved Spaces: Mexico's far north, the American southwest, or Indian domains?

2. A nation made visible: patronage, power, and ritual

3. The spirit of mercantile enterprise

4. The Benediction of the Roman ritual

5. The Texas Revolution and the not-so-secret history of shifting loyalties

6. The fate of Governor Albino Pé

rez

7. State, market, and literary cultures

8. New Mexico at the razor's edge.