Competing American colonial modernities: Politics, publishing, and the making of a United States-Mexican literary culture, 1836--1939

My dissertation argues that Chicana/o literary history must be situated in a transnational context, between the literary and cultural histories of the U.S. and Mexico. In the late 1980s critics moved towards a more trans-American literary history, but they did so by comparing texts produced from such disparate parts of the Americas as New England and Argentina. More recently, critics have moved closer to uniting the fields of American, Latin American, and Chicana/o studies by focusing on the literary and cultural history of the U.S. Southwest. My dissertation develops this project further by narrating a third history of American literature that unfolded not over thousands of miles but in a specific geographical terrain, namely between the U.S. and Mexico, and I focus on Texas. It tells a story of melding, of clashing as well, but a story in which U.S. and Mexican literary and ideological cultures began to integrate in the nineteenth century to give shape to a uniquely U.S.-Mexican literary culture. I use "U.S.-Mexican" to describe a local, interstitial culture that emerges in what eventually becomes the U.S. Southwest, something that during the nineteenth century is not quite Mexican-American culturally but neither specifically U.S. nor Mexican.;My dissertation begins by offering an alternative to the current debate in Chicana/o literary history on whether nineteenth-century Chicana/o literature is postcolonial or not. While conquest and colonization have become the leitmotif of Chicana/o studies, the irony is that few have theorized how Chicanas/os were ever colonized, and I thus provide a theory of colonization. Part 2 is comprised of two chapters and focuses on the writings of the Mexican statesmen Jose Maria Tornel. I historicize the manner by which Mexicans used writing and the printing press to usher in modernity after independence in 1821, even while the United States began to focus its imperial gaze on Mexico's northern territory. Part 3 charts the development of a public sphere in Texas by historicizing the arrival of the printing press and focusing on the first, continuous Spanish-language newspapers published in Texas. I conclude with an epilogue on Caballero, the first Texas-Mexican novel known as of date.