A shift of global proportions occurred in May 1808. Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain and deposed the Spanish king. Overnight, the Hispanic world was transformed forever. Hispanics were forced to confront modernity, and to look beyond monarchy and religion for new sources of authority. A World Not to Come focuses on how Spanish Americans in Texas used writing as a means to establish new sources of authority, and how a Latino literary and intellectual life was born in the New World.
The geographic locale that became Texas changed sovereignty four times, from Spanish colony to Mexican republic to Texan republic and finally to a U.S. state. Following the trail of manifestos, correspondence, histories, petitions, and periodicals, Raúl Coronado goes to the writings of Texas Mexicans to explore how they began the slow process of viewing the world as no longer being a received order but a produced order. Through reconfigured publics, they debated how best to remake the social fabric even as they were caught up in a whirlwind of wars, social upheaval, and political transformations.
Yet, while imagining a new world, Texas Mexicans were undergoing a transformation from an elite community of “civilizing” conquerors to an embattled, pauperized, racialized group whose voices were annihilated by war. In the end, theirs was a world not to come. Coronado sees in this process of racialization the birth of an emergent Latino culture and literature. |
During the early 1970s, the nation’s turbulence was keenly reflected in Austin’s kaleidoscopic cultural movements, particularly in the city’s progressive country music scene. Capturing a pivotal chapter in American social history, Progressive Country maps the conflicted iconography of “the Texan” during the ’70s and its impact on the cultural politics of subsequent decades. This richly textured tour spans the notion of the “cosmic cowboy,” the intellectual history of University of Texas folklore and historiography programs, and the complicated political history of late-twentieth-century Texas.
Jason Mellard analyzes the complex relationship between Anglo-Texan masculinity and regional and national identities, drawing on cultural studies, American studies, and political science to trace the implications and representations of the multifaceted personas that shaped the face of powerful social justice movements. From the death of Lyndon Johnson to Willie Nelson's picnics, from the United Farm Workers’ marches on Austin to the spectacle of Texas Chic on the streets of New York City, Texas mattered in these years not simply as a place, but as a repository of long-standing American myths and symbols at a historic moment in which that mythology was being deeply contested. Delivering a fresh take on the meaning and power of “the Texan” and its repercussions for American history, this detail-rich exploration reframes the implications of a populist moment that continues to inspire progressive change. |
In Pesos and Dollars: Entrepreneurs in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1880-1940, historian Alicia M. Dewey tells the story of how a diverse group of entrepreneurs, including Anglo-Americans, ethnic Mexicans, and European and Middle Eastern immigrants, created and navigated changing business opportunities along the Texas-Mexico border and, in the process, remade South Texas from an isolated ranching society into a commercialized, urbanized outpost of the world economy in a little more than half a century. She traces the establishment and operation of their businesses, use of credit, management of risk, and methods of recovering from failure. Pesos and Dollars explores how some ethnic Mexicans and their descendants who had lived in the region for generations pursued new entrepreneurial opportunities and became the core of the rising Mexican-American middle class, despite losing ground both politically and economically in the increasingly Anglo-dominated entrepreneurial environment. Dewey further analyzes the region’s attraction for immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and the Middle East, as well as Jews from throughout America, identifying the fluidity of social and economic life along the border as an opportunity for greater mobility for groups that might be marginalized elsewhere.
Pesos and Dollars enriches the study of the US-Mexican borderlands by examining cooperation and collaboration in pursuit of profit, demonstrating that there was more to the region during this period than simmering conflict, class stratification, and racial prejudice. There was also the enduring pursuit of pesos and dollars. This work, representing a new direction in Borderlands history, is a fitting addition to Texas A&M University Press’s new series, Connecting the Greater West. |