Copyright by Alberto Varon 2012

The Dissertation Committee for Alberto Varon Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Enacting Citizenship: A Literary Genealogy of Mexican American Manhood, 1848-1959

Committee:

John Morán González, Co-Supervisor

Gretchen Murphy, Co-Supervisor

Phillip J. Barrish

Kirsten Silva Gruesz

Domino R. Perez Enacting Citizenship: A Literary Genealogy of Mexican American Manhood, 1848-1959

by

Alberto Varon, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin August 2012

Acknowledgements

To begin, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my dissertation supervisors, John Morán González and Gretchen Murphy. John’s laser-like insight and vast knowledge of multiple literatures constantly urged me to think big. Gretchen’s historical and linguistic precision, her rigor, and most of all her care for me and the project pushed me to think more carefully about the texts and my writing than I thought possible. Together, John and Gretchen’s mentorship shaped and enabled this project; they are the models for the kind of scholar I hope to become. I would also like to thank my committee members, Phillip Barrish, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, and Domino Perez. Each has contributed in different but significant ways. Since I was an undergraduate, Phil has taught me to slow down and read more closely; Dr.P constantly reminds me about the people behind the books; and Kirsten’s insight has, at key moments, reshaped the project. Thank you. I am grateful to the Office of Graduate Studies, the Department of English and the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas, which provided the financial and research support that made possible the writing of the dissertation. Wayne Lesser and Elizabeth Cullingford have been steadfast advocates for graduate students. My graduate education was deeply influenced by folks associated with the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. Under the leadership of Nicolás Kanellos and directed by Carolina Villarroel, the Recovery Project encouraged me from the beginning. It was acceptance to a Recovery conference that prompted my return to graduate school. Thank you for your support.

iv I have been extremely fortunate to have been taught, professionally and otherwise, by an amazing set of teachers and friends. CMAS, E3W, and the American Literatures Groups gave me an academic home while at UT. In both formal and informal venues, Martin Kevorkian, Coleman Hutchison, José Limón, Deb Paredes, Crystal Kurzen, Jeremy Dean, Emily Bloom, Yolanda Padilla, and countless others have inspired me to do what we do better. A special thank you to James Cox who, though not officially on my committee, provided invaluable feedback and mentorship throughout my graduate study. Thank you to the Native American literatures dissertation writing group– particularly Kirby Brown– through which much of the dissertation was written. The workshop profoundly shaped my understanding of nationhood. A special thank you to the current and former occupants of Calhoun hallway 335: Jon Lamb, Caroline Wigginton, Elizabeth Frye, and especially Lydia Wilmeth French, whose camaraderie was a steady source of motivation. Our regular conversations and commiserations helped remind me of what lies at the center of humanistic study. My wholehearted thanks to: Kathryn Hamilton Warren, whose friendship kept me connected; to Mark Goldberg, with whom I’ve been debating history from the beginning; and to Bill Orchard, whose four-letter word got me back in it. Collectively and individually, these people provided the community to make this project possible. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their unwavering support during this process. My sincerest thanks go to my parents. Throughout my lifetime, my parents have encouraged my love of reading and learning, and without their support I would never have made it to where I am. I thank my children, Helena and Jacob, whose pure joy daily renews my sense of purpose, and most of all, to my partner

v Rachel, who supports me in every imaginable way, and to whom I owe both past and future. You are the reason for all that I am and do.

vi Enacting Citizenship: A Literary Genealogy of Mexican American Manhood, 1848-1959

Alberto Varon, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2012

Supervisor: John Morán González and Gretchen Murphy

At the conclusion of the U.S. Mexican War in 1848, Mexican Americans across the United States found their disjointed communities struggling to adapt to a newly acquired national status. My project argues that Mexican American literary manhood functioned as a representational strategy that instantiated a Mexican American national public and that sutured regional communities into a national whole. Within a transnational, multilingual archive, Mexican American manhood served as a means through which to articulate multiple forms of citizenship and competing cultural investments in U.S. and Mexican national projects. Between 1848 and the 1960s– that is, prior to the Chicano movement– USAmerican writers looked to Mexican American manhood for this purpose because it was inseparable from a rival sovereign state, revealed an inconsistent racial hierarchy, and troubled gendered ideals of the civil participation, yet simultaneously contained such contradictions. For Mexican American writers Manuel C. de Baca, Adolfo Carrillo, Maria Cristina Mena, Jovita González, Américo Paredes and José Antonio Villarreal, manhood offered a tactic for imagining participation in national citizenship, unhindered by institutional or legal impediments, although each represented Mexican American manhood in radically different ways. Conversely, authors vii Gertrude Atherton, Stephen Crane, and Jack London turned to Mexican American manhood as a powerful tool for disenfranchising or assimilating Mexican American communities from and into the U.S. nation. For these authors, Mexican American manhood was instrumental in the dissemination of narratives of American progress because it facilitated claims to continental and imperial expansion, reinforcing ideals of Anglo American manhood and masking claims to whiteness. Through analysis of prose fiction in both English and Spanish, my dissertation explicates the cultural creation of Mexican American literary manhood as a constitutive category of American manhood and as a textual strategy that positions Mexican Americans as national citizens.

viii Table of Contents

Introduction: Mexican American Literary Pasts and Futures...... 1 The Chicana/o Canon...... 4 National Manhoods...... 10 A New Chicana/o Literary History...... 19 A note on terminology:...... 23

Citizen Outlaws: The Nation, Literary Banditry, and Mexican American Manhood ...... 25 Kings of Bandits: Joaquin Murieta and the Broader Chicano Bandit Tradition...... 30 Juan Nepomuceno Cortina: Cortina’s War to be Read...... 37 Bandit Societies: Manuel Cabeza de Baca and Vicente Silva...... 49 Conclusion ...... 67

Adolfo Carrillo, Mexican American Masculinity, and Competing California Literary Histories ...... 68 The Making of the Fantasy Heritage...... 69 Gertrude Atherton’s California...... 78 A Biography of Exile ...... 88 Cultural Haunting and Historical Revision: Carrillo, the Spanish Mission Tradition, and the Limits of Mexico de Afuera...... 92

National Borders and Bodily Boundaries: Stephen Crane and Jack London’s Mexican American Manhood...... 114 Stephen Crane’s Short Fiction and South/Western Frontier ...... 121 Jack London’s “The Mexican” ...... 137

Mediating from the Margins: Alternative Manhoods in Jovita González and Raleigh’s Caballero and Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gomez153 Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero ...... 157 Generic Mexican American Manhood...... 162

ix Caballero’s Alternative Manhoods ...... 170 Domestic Economies: Cross Gender Collaborative Manhood ...... 177 Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gomez ...... 183 Genre Battles: Bildungsroman v Corrido ...... 186 GWG as Novel of Assimilation ...... 188 GWG’s Multiple Manhoods: Economic and Geographic Citizenship...... 190 Textual Marginalization as Genre Critique...... 200

Works Cited...... 202

x Introduction: Mexican American Literary Pasts and Futures

By some accounts, the year 2011 was a watershed moment in the study of Latina/o literature. That year, W.W. Norton, a premier publisher of academic textbooks, released the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (NALL), the first anthology of literature by Latina/os published by a mainstream academic press intended for classroom use. The publication of the NALL makes accessible to a wide audience material previously unavailable or understudied, marking a significant moment in the canonization of Latina/o literatures and in the establishment of a Latina/o ethnoracial literary tradition. However, in a recent essay, Kirsten Silva Gruesz argues that the NALL “occupies the unusual position of presenting an authoritative canon for a body of literature that doesn’t yet have a literary history” (Gruesz "What Was Latino Literaturre?" 336). Building upon Kenneth Warren’s argument about African American literature being an intellectual project bound to a specific point in time (the Jim Crow south, in his case), Gruesz argues for the general absence of a literary history within Latina/o literature. Given the relative lack of “standards for the coherence” for the field, the NALL enters the academic world with the peculiarly vexed criteria of “Latinidad” as the defining standard for Latina/o literature (337). Gruesz’s critique of the NALL is that there is no existing periodicity, no sense of historical trajectory, on which to ground or organize the category of Latino literature; for Gruesz, “the satisfying heft of [the NALL’s] pages constitutes proof that Latino literature was. The unanswered question of what it was seems besides the point” (340).

1 Gruesz’s astute critique of the NALL is indicative of a problem facing the field of Latino studies since the late twentieth century. During the Chicano movement, the period of Mexican American civil rights activism in the 1960s and 70s, Chicana/o activists achieved numerous victories, among them institutional recognition for ethnic studies programs focused on Latina/o culture. While during this same period (and continuing to the present day, though with significant developments) the Chicano movement laid the groundwork for the study of Mexican American literature, the majority of its study focused on the late twentieth century. This contemporary focus was largely due to the flourishing of Latina/o literatures during this period, but also the general lack of available resources and scholarship about the historical archive. Thus, Latina/o literatures seemingly emerged spontaneously and subsequent scholars have sought to remedy the historical absence. This project follows these scholars and seeks to address Gruesz’s provocative question, “What was Latina/o literature?” Looking to the historical archive, this project recovers works by Mexican American authors and toward the development of a Mexican American literary history before the Chicano movement. This project emerges out of recovery efforts in Latina/o literature, but simultaneously locates recovered texts within American literature more broadly as part of a multilingual, multiethnic national culture.1 At the conclusion of the U.S. Mexican War in 1848, Mexican Americans across the

1 Arguably the most significant criticism on multilingual American literature is the anthology Multilingual America (1998), edited by Werner Sollors. Sollors argues that American literature is and has been multilingual, but that scholarship and the institutional powers which shape it have historically overlooked non-English language texts, much to the detriment of a national literature. Together with Marc Shell, Sollors went on to edit The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (2000). More recently, Matt Cohen has suggested how, “with its emphasis on intermethodological and intercultural comparison, American Studies might be more hospitable to the kind of imagination it will take to implement the multilingual literary archive,” but both authors demonstrate the relative lack of integration between English and non-English literary studies in the U.S. (45). 2 United States found their disjointed communities struggling to adapt to a newly acquired national status. One method by which both Anglo and Mexican Americans sought to understand their changing national landscape was through the production of literary manhood– textual, cultural representations of manhood that use gender to figure social belonging and to imagine forms of democratic incorporation and participation. This project approaches Mexican American literary history through representations of manhood because of the way that the Chicano movement privileged a masculinist subject, a point to which I return below. A study of Mexican American manhood helps explain why the Chicano movement and its literary inheritors took the particular form that it did. I argue that Mexican American literary manhood functioned as a representational strategy that instantiated a Mexican American national public and that sutured regional communities into a national whole. Between 1848 and the 1960s– that is, prior to the Chicano movement– U.S. American writers looked to Mexican American manhood for this purpose because it was inseparable from a rival sovereign state, revealed an inconsistent racial hierarchy, and troubled gendered ideals of the civil participation, yet simultaneously contained such contradictions.2 Within a transnational, multilingual archive, Mexican American manhood served as a means through which to articulate multiple forms of citizenship and competing cultural investments in U.S. and Mexican national projects.

2 In using the term “U.S. American writers,” I mean to suggest authors publishing within the geopolitical boundaries in the United States, but that includes authors from multiple cultural or national origins. Additionally, though at times I default to “American,” I want to acknowledge how the term has been deployed within American cultural studies and monopolized as U.S.-centric though the term should at least recognize its hemispheric associations, as in Latin America or the Americas. 3 THE CHICANA/O CANON

The Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s brought about monumental changes in the attainment of Mexican American social and political equality. Thanks to the efforts of countless community organizers and activists, and in tandem with other civil rights movements, the Chicano movement achieved a degree of governmental protection and institutional recognition as a racial and class minority. One outcome of the student-centered movimiento was the establishment of numerous ethnic studies and academic programs that focused on Chicanos and other Latino groups. Here, I want to summarize not the events of the Chicano movement, but rather the critical intellectual tradition it began with particular emphasis on literary history because of the close connection between Chicano literary history and manhood. To many scholars, Ramón Saldívar’s Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990) marks the first contemporary attempt at Chicana/o literary history and in many ways provided the inaugural framework for the interpretation of Chicana/o literature. In his important text, Saldívar contends that “the language of narrative, especially that of Chicano narrative in its place of difference from and resistance to American cultural norms, can best be grasped as a strategy to enable readers to understand their real conditions of existence in postindustrial twentieth- century America” (5). Reading Chicano literature as part of a global resistance literature and a “coparticipant in the broader struggles of national liberation and resistance movements,” Saldívar cogently argues for how Chicano narrative offers an alternative to Anglo-dominated accounts of literary and cultural history (25). Using poststructuralist theoretical methodologies, Saldívar’s work brought Chicano literature into conversation with the field of literary studies generally focused on 4 Anglo authored texts, but his paradigm of resistance is in many ways preceded by Américo Paredes’s foundational With His Pistol in his Hand (1958). Paredes examines the Mexican ballad tradition of the corrido to suggest how the folklore of Greater Mexico, the cultural space by Mexicans and Mexican Americans on both sides of the U.S. Mexico border, was written in opposition to Anglo American repression. Paredes’s study emphasizes the importance of borders in shaping cultural production, but it also emphasizes the Border Hero as a crucial element of the corrido and Mexican American culture more broadly. As the title implies, the Border Hero is valorized for his (the hero is typically male) resistance to Anglo American oppression and the resulting use of force is a necessary opposition to injustice. José Limón builds upon and expands Paredes’s study to argue for the corrido as the ur-text of Chicano poetry. His brilliant analysis of south Texas’s “war of position” between Anglos and Mexicans acknowledges that Chicano literature does not offer “seamless narratives of domination or resistance,” but nonetheless reads the literature as the product of conflict between Anglo and Mexican American difference (Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas 15). Beginning with Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America (1972), much of the best critical work in Chicano studies has elucidated the colonial conditions of Mexican Americans and coming out of the movement was a sense that Chicano identity was inherently a male legacy of resistance. At the other end of the spectrum lies assimilation, the loss of cultural integrity and absorption into national culture. For many, efforts at integration premised on anything other than resistance and repudiation of national culture are suspected of lacking cultural “authenticity.” For example, the League of United Latin American Citizens’ (LULAC) project of bilingual, bicultural integration was often 5 dismissed as assimilationist even as LULAC as a group sought to attain civil and social equality for its community. Through recovery work, recent scholarship has shown the complexity of LULAC and others objectives, but such projects still confront the legacy of the Chicano movement that insists on resistance. My dissertation argues how Mexican Americans lived and coped with the contradictions of American imperialism in ways that just as often required negotiation and adaptation as it did outright political resistance.3 Recognizing these lived negotiations through literary performances of manhood also helps account for differences in Mexican American regional, class, and political affiliation, but holding to an assimilation/resistance binary obscures the ways in which Mexican Americans were agents in their own historical trajectory, even if at times that participation diverges from contemporary literary and cultural histories. Furthermore, that participation unveils a long and productive dialogue in which Mexican Americans influenced and helped shape U.S. national identity. Noting the connection between el movimiento and postcolonialist nationalist movements, Rafael Pérez-Torres’s work on Chicana/o poetry goes a long way to dispelling notions of an essentialized Chicano identity and supports a developing Chicano aesthetic built on hybridity, inclusion, and movement. Pérez-Torres builds upon the contributions of Chicana feminism that uncovered the male-centered ideals of the Chicano movement. During the civil rights movements of the 1960s, Chicano authors such as Tomas Rivera, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, Luis Valdez dominated the scene, but by the late 1970s and through the 1980s, Chicana authors

3 In the context of Native American studies, Scott Lyons has argued that historical actors need not be dismissed as assimilationists simply because of their consent to forces outside their control. Lyons contends that the “x-marks” with which Native Americans signed treaties “were commitments to living a new way of life” when given little choice, but still a choice on behalf of the individual and tribe (Lyons 8). His rereading of the x-marks inscribe agency and present an alternative to doomed resistance. 6 and poets used literature to expose the patriarchal constraints promulgated by the movement. Where texts such as Armando Rendon’s Chicano Manifesto (1971) equated Chicano nationalism with a male resistant subject, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra Cisneros, Pat Mora, and others have put forth a Chicana identity in conversation with but not subsumed by Chicano male identity. Angie Chabram- Dernersesian pointed out “the saliency of the Chicano male subject within authoritative Chicano/a cultural production” and within the cultural nationalism central to the movement and how even the word “Chicano is written with linguistic qualifiers– o/os– which subsume the Chicana into a universal ethnic subject that speaks with the masculine instead of the feminine and embodies itself in a Chicano male” (82). Gloria Anzaldua’s widely influential work on borderlands at times overshadows her work with Cherrie Moraga, specifically the collection This Bridge Called My Back (1981) which helped pave the way for third-wave feminism by noting the differences among women feminists, that suggests how cultural nationalism was imbued with masculine bias. Maxine Baca Zinn has argued that the "cult of masculinity" associated with the Chicano movement "ill-equip[s] Chicanos (both males and females) to adapt successfully to the demands of modern society" by limiting the subject positions available to Chicanos (31). The Chicana critique helped identify the gendered bias of Chicano nationalism. Chicano male identity premised on resistance, violence, and patriarchy is often elided into the concept of machismo– often a hyperbolic, highly sexualized and authoritarian performance of manhood– though its meanings are variable. Offering a view of machismo as compensatory, one early Chicana critic states “Machismo is a myth propagated by subjugators and colonizers who take pleasure in watching their subjects strike out vainly against them in order to prove themselves still capable of 7 action” (Adaljiza 156). Ana Castillo’s “Xicanisma” attributes machismo to the macrohistorical product of colonialism dating to the Spanish conquest and recent scholars like Alfredo Mirande, Renato Rosaldo and Matthew Gutmann have tried to show machismo’s multiple meanings.4 The lingering ideal that links Chicano male identity to resistance, what John Alba Cutler succinctly calls the “the predominance of warrior masculinity—the drive to claim authentic manhood through aggression— in movement-era cultural production” (585), rests on a limited historical archive through which to stake its claims. Critiquing any notion of authentic or essentialized masculinity, Cutler finds in more contemporary accounts “not that Chicano literature has arrived at new, more complex formulations of ethnic and gender identities since the movement era but that those complexities have underwritten the movement from the beginning” (585). But exactly what did other notions of manhood that predate the Chicano movement look like and how did they get forgotten? My project answers that question through the recovery of Mexican American authored texts before the Chicano movement. On the whole, scholars agree on the link between Chicano cultural production and the historical, material circumstances that produce it.5 Yet, until relatively recently, few texts before the Chicano movement were accessible to scholars. In the 1990s, institutional programs developed to remedy this gap in resources, notably the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project.

4 See: Mirandé, Hombres Y Macho (1997); Gutmann, Meanings of Macho (1996); Rosaldo, "Notes toward a Critique of Patriarchy from a Male Position" (1993). 5 For example, Saldívar states “history turns out to be the decisive determinant of the form and content of the literature” and “is the subtext that we must recover because history itself is the subject of its discourse” (5). For Pérez-Torres, a cultural text “need only form a dialogue with issues pertinent to Chicano cultural identity. In part, this criterion implies that poetry [the object of his study] “is best read through a historical lens” (7).

8 Recovery of neglected texts has uncovered the vibrant cultural production by Latina/os in the nineteenth century, but recovery efforts have also challenged literary histories established since the Chicano movement. In a pivotal essay, José Aranda called on scholars to account for the “historic contradictions” in recovered texts that “challenge the usefulness of resistance theory when applied to writers who preceded the Chicano Movement” ("Contradictory Impulses: Maria Amparo Ruiz De Burton, Resistance Theory, and the Politics of Chicano/a Studies" 553). Aranda’s essay indicates the difficulty in constructing a literary history for texts whose circumstances of production were often at odds with contemporary understandings of Latina/o literature. Latina/o literature then faces the question, how do you make a canon out of an archive still emerging? Though Aranda’s call was made over a decade ago, the narrative of resistance has been equally productive and remarkably persistent, a challenge to recovering the archive of Latina/o letters. Similarly difficult in recovery work has been the multilingual nature of the archive. Given the demographic mobility of the Mexican origin population, textual recovery is inherently transnational and necessitates research across languages and discipline, which often impedes its incorporation into the American literary canon. By focusing on gendered representations, specifically manhood, this project seeks to connect periods and fields through a set of common social markers. Though problematic, citizenship in the mid-nineteenth to twentieth- centuries regularly relied upon heteronormative conceptions of gendered citizenship. While those notions changed over time, the Chicano movement seized upon many of those ideals, embracing a highly exclusionary gendered logic of national and cultural belonging. My project seeks to identify the origins of the Chicano movement through the connection of manhood and citizenship. 9 NATIONAL MANHOODS

At its most basic level, citizenship suggests a “relation among strangers who learn to feel it as a common identity based on shared historical, legal, or familial connections to a geopolitical space” (Berlant 37). Representations of manhood, in their performance of an imagined social relation, bridge the divide between the abstract, ideal citizen and the lived reality of everyday people. Citizenship during this era was conceptualized as implicitly masculine, and by making this explicit I show how representations of manhood were crucial for Mexican Americans imagining themselves as belonging to a national public. Following the U.S. Mexican War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted Mexican Americans legal citizenship, and authorities had to actively disenfranchise the Mexican origin population. The disenfranchisement of Mexican Americans was not the government’s failure to act, that is, it was not the failure to include Mexican Americans within the national politic, but rather an active effort to exclude and deny rights already granted through the social imaginary. In order to divest Mexican Americans of certain rights of citizenship, representations of manhood become a way to circumvent legal or civil rights; manhood suprasedes legal belonging because it appeals to an internalized or naturalized sense of a constitutive body. Enacting the political disenfranchisement relied on cultural rather than legal policy through efforts in the national imaginary, which ”is not a set of ideas; rather, it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society" (Taylor 2). Literary manhood as a mode of citizenship functions like what Banerjee has called, in a different context, the “textualization of citizenship, a mode of inquiry that is sensitive to the narrative constituents of its claims as well as its statutory prescriptions, both of which speak to the imaginative framings through which the category of citizenship consolidates 10 itself” (5). The textualization of citizenship makes claims to citizenship outside of but in conversation with legal frameworks; it enables a discussion of rights and equality beyond the nation-state. Representations of manhood textualize the relation between Mexican and Anglo Americans and imagines group belonging at national and transnational level. For Mexican Americans, manhood enabled belonging across regional communities and within a national whole. Literary representations of manhood by both men and women could traverse and reconcile regional, class, and linguistic variations, and spoke directly to the imagined homosociality of male citizenship in the United States. Citizenship in the nation assumes the character of abstract universalism where each citizen is formally equated with every other and each citizen equally holds the rights and the obligations of every other. David Kazanjian has argued that “racial and national codification forged a constitutive, if unstable relationship with universal egalitarianism. That is, the systematic production and maintenance of hierarchically codified, racial and national forms actually enabled equality to be understood as formally and abstractly universal” (5). The way in which universal equality is exercised, the way particularities are used to narrate individuals in and out of citizenship, is one of the underlying contradictions of modern national citizenship and I suggest that representations of manhood work to resolve those contradictions. Contemporary studies of American manhood have generally responded to a series of texts from the 1990s that came out of schools of feminism and that paralleled the shift from women’s literature to gender studies. Around the 1980s scholars critiqued a general though implicit tendency in feminism that assumed a middle-class white woman as universal. Akin to (and in fact part of) the work of 11 Chicana scholars cited previously, feminist scholars began to identify the ways that ethnic, cultural, sexual, and national difference were left out of many feminist projects.6 The development of “gender” as an analytic category appeared “to be more intellectually capacious than women,” and although no label can achieve the inclusiveness to which it strives, Robyn Wiegman “define[s] the impossibility of coherence as the central problematic and most important animating feature of feminism as a knowledge formation” (356). In part, the “impossibility of coherence” animates this study as well. One result of the shift to gender studies was a heightened interest in the social construction of men and masculinity, which previously were often critiqued as the presumptive normative category but had received relatively little sustained inquiry.7 Feminist critiques of male centered (literary) history enable this project, and I follow this lead by seeking to disconnect Mexican American manhood in the Chicano literary tradition from any normative sense of gendered belonging or naturalized subjectivity. Among the most compelling studies of manhood is historian Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization (1995). In her seminal work, Bederman argues that, in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, white men turned to discourses of manhood to manage the changing racial and social national landscape. One of Bederman’s strongest insights is that she positions gender at the center of power relations at the turn of the twentieth century. By linking male power and racial ideologies, Bederman shows how “late nineteenth-century Americans began to synthesize new formulations of gender, [so that] hegemonic discourses of

6 See, for example, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes" (1986). 7 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick helped set the terms for these studies by positing “homosocial” nature of male interaction. See Sedgwick, Between Men (1985). 12 civilization explained concisely the precise relation between the male body, male identity, and male authority” (42). In other words, the emerging emphasis on primitive manhood helped white American men understand their relationship to others through ideas of racial supremacy and the superiority of American “civilization.” For white American men seeing their economic and social power threatened by an industrialized, corporate economy, what Michael Kimmel has called the “unmaking of the Self-made man,” social ideals of manhood moved from Victorian-styles codes of self control (what Bederman terms manliness) to a more rugged, virile masculinity, a contrast between civilized manliness and primitive masculinity. While masculine primitivism had the potential to promote equality between races by positing a continuum from refined, self-controlled manliness to rugged, strenuous, unrestrained and animalistic masculinity, what emerged was a dialectic between civilization and savagery that relied on cultural narratives to manage difference and assert national whiteness. This was the paradox at the center of primitive manhood: white Anglo manhood needed primitive masculinity to assert its place at the pinnacle of civilization, but the very notion of civilization was threatened by the masculine primitive from which manhood’s power derived. Bederman develops the idea that manhood is a historical process with shifting standards and changing ideals, building upon the work in “masculinity studies” that emerged out of feminism. The notion of manhood as processual is at the heart of, for instance, studies by Michael Kimmel and Anthony Rotundo. Anthony Rotundo’s American Manhood (1993) argued for manhood as a cultural construct changing or evolving over time and focuses on passionate or primitive manhood as the predominant characteristics for manhood at the turn of the twentieth century. Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America (1996) charts several historical 13 developments in shared masculine norms and establishes several dominant “archetypes” of manhood, like the “Self-made Man.” As a history of dominant cultural values, Kimmel’s book takes as its subject the white male and focuses on the shifting masculine ideal for Anglo American manhood in the American imaginary; his is a history of homosociality and the assertion of authority.8 The understanding of gender as fluid and historical set these apart from previous understandings of national manhood, yet these three studies exemplify a tendency in “masculinity studies” to focus on dominant national manhood in which ideas of historical fluidity do not carry over to the understanding of race and nation. Even Bederman’s study, which focuses on African American and Anglo manhood, neglects the ways that the dialectic of civilization was engaged and disrupted in ways that were neither black nor white. Although their arguments are suggestive of how changes in the cultural understanding of manhood enabled men to adapt to the shifting social landscape of the United States, their focus on a black/white dichotomy stops short of examining how manhood also functioned as a cultural tactic through which to understand the nation as one of many nations. As the U.S. grew from continental power to hemispheric and global empire, questions of nationhood, both internal and external to the U.S., influenced U.S. manhood in ways not exclusively “racial.” This study of Mexican American manhood, consistently left out of studies of American manhood, moves to include national origin as a central problematic of U.S. national manhood, and in doing so, highlight the ways that

8 These studies complement each other in ways that help explain early twentieth century American manhood. For example, where Bederman sees dialectic between manliness and civilization fading in the 1920s, Kimmel attributes this to the increasing visibility of women in the workplace and in sites of recreation. In response, Kimmel sees heightened attention to parenting and the rearing of sons as a standard of manhood. 14 representations of gender manage transnational tension on the creation of a national subject. While gendered representations have always been central to conceptions of national identity, Mexican American manhood helps show how those conceptions, and the understanding of the nation as a whole, has always been determined by transnational currents of cultural production where the nation, as one in a field of nations, seeks to differentiate itself through discourses of manhood. While this function of Mexican American manhood is one focus of this dissertation, existing scholarship on Mexican American manhood typically regards it as a matter of stereotype. Stereotypes of Mexican Americans proliferate and have been the subject of debate since at least the Chicano movement.9 Raymund Paredes argues that stereotypes perpetuate ideas of all Mexicans as paradoxically violent and cowardly and thus the "disparagement of the Mexican is complete" (36) and Bill Nericcio tries to refute the “cultural practice” of stereotype as “the potential and likely lie or ruse of humanistic discourse– that by describing or prescribing we somehow control the object before us” (22). Some recent critics have sought to reinvigorate the stereotype as a more nuanced representation. Juan J. Alonzo tries to offer a “strategy for subversive reading” by “exposing the gaps between affirmation and negation” in stereotypes of Mexicans” (10). Alonzo finds ambivalence in some depictions, such as Stephen Crane’s, that lead him to suggest that some readers can embrace “a heroic Mexican masculinity” that subverts the stereotype (30). Charles Ramirez Berg has catalogued many of the predominant stereotypes and shown how they have subsequently been subverted by Latino filmmakers.

9 See, for example, Guillermo Flores, "Race and Culture in the Internal Colony" (1973) and Jose Limon, "Stereotyping and Chicano Resistance" (1974). 15 In this study, I eschew the concept of stereotype for several reasons. Even if stereotypes present the possibility of positive identification for the individual whose social group is being represented, they nonetheless ascribe representation to predetermined criteria that remain static.10 One of the assumptions of the study is that manhood is a process evolving with and connecting groups, and notions of stereotype limit analysis by divesting a cultural product’s ability to cut across other social terrains. Stereotypes function by asserting the fantasy of coherence and the disavowal of difference in the person being typed and as such suggest an essential identity, as if all forms of manhood contain a common characteristic. Even if stereotypes have points of positive identification or productive ambivalence, they nonetheless limit to preexisting categories the ways an object or individual can be interpellated. We must move beyond stereotypes as the category of analysis to dispel notions of an essential male identity. Furthermore, stereotypes assume a totalizing representation that seeks to subsume difference within predetermined narrative constructs. Stereotypes thus contribute to the fixed image of Latinos in the popular imaginary and do not allow for debate and diversity within Mexican American cultural production, something that archival recovery makes evident. Departing from stereotype as the interpretive framework also helps emphasize the vexed relationship to national manhood and nationhood that Mexican American manhood retained. On the one hand, geographic proximity enabled Mexican Americans to maintain ties to Mexico with relative ease. Thus, Mexican Americans were inextricable from questions of international relations but existed as reminders of the geographic limitations of U.S. sovereignty. For instance,

10 See Homi Bhabha, "The Other Question," (1994). 16 Mexican Americans were an essential part of the narrative of the U.S. westward expansion, but frequently seen only as part of a population to be conquered and unfit for citizenship. David G. Gutiérrez has noted how “ethnic Mexican residents of the American West have been involved in a protracted struggle to prove their importance, to prove themselves significant in American society” and in the history of the West ("Significant to Whom?: Mexican Americans and the History of the American West" 520). For Mexican Americans living in the U.S. southwest, “frontier masculinity” was not an available category of gendered performance and the rugged, primitive manhood sought in the west was not a culturally operative “archetype.” Thus, gendered performances of citizenship were adaptations to life within a new national body, a process of nationalization and naturalization. Given that, particularly in the late nineteenth century, the majority of Mexican Americans lived in what is now the American southwest, a good deal of the authors and writing I examines comes from that portion of the U.S. Yet the literatures and gendered representations therein circulated within a national culture and participated in a dialogue of citizenship and belonging at the national level that moves beyond regional literature. By focusing on gender and national culture, my study of these representations of heteronormative manhood in no way seeks to privilege this arguably more normative manhood in ways that suggest that other manhoods or sexualities were not marginalized, denied access to social and political equality, nor to deny the very real lived violence people of all genders and sexual orientation experience. Although sexuality is an aspect of the texts I examine here, this dissertation turns its attention away from sexuality to focus on citizenship. My project hopes to queer contemporary understandings of heteronormative manhood 17 in ways not exclusively limited to sexuality in order to further reveal the historic constructedness of gender identity. By examining manhood before the Chicano movement I hope to demonstrate possibilities for Chicano male identity that are not patriarchal nor dominative and that hold potential for gender and sexual equality. While fully acknowledging patriarchy and its Chicana critique, this project seeks to explain why late twentieth century Mexican American manhood was constructed as a masculinist narrative and to separate critical understandings of Mexican American manhood from the heterosexist positions associated with the Chicano movement’s cultural nationalism. There is in the study of heteronormative manhood, of course, the danger in replicating the very systems of patriarchy that the project seeks to critique. As Bryce Traister astutely shows, in the new field of heteromasculinity studies “the very men formerly associated with masculinist cultural privilege and projection re-emerge here as deviant, as other to the culture for which they claim to speak and which they criticize” (286). By viewing manhood as a cultural strategy, the object of my study is not to reify or champion manhood as the “correct” way of social formation, rather it is to demonstrate how precarious claims to any normative masculine identity were and are. Literary manhood was a strategy available to both men and women, and historicizing the presence of Mexican American manhood as an integral part of American manhood helps demonstrate the instability of any claims to normative manhood. Manhood provided a form of communication, but by no means the only one, nor the only representation of gender to do so. In ameliorating the critical absence of Mexican American men from American literary history this study hopes to demonstrate how representations of gender can provide an avenue toward social

18 inclusion for both men and women that positions Mexican Americans as agents of national identity.

A NEW CHICANA/O LITERARY HISTORY

This project is interested in the narrativization of gender as a particular relationship between individual, culture, and nation. It argues that Mexican American literary manhood becomes a primary vehicle for containing and enunciating Mexican American participation in the public sphere. In counterpoint to Anglo American manhood’s insistence on individualism, Mexican American manhood may be thought of as an enunciative act of community, contested and disputed, but as a site to engage in debate over a national presence. The process of integration saw masculine performance as a communal subject that could identify with a group outside the individual. As such, representations of manhood helped regional communities develop a national cultural consciousness in mid-19th to mid- 20th centuries and function as a communicative strategy that enables disparate communities to forge a shared national identity. Literary manhood is a relational category, a form of tethering social connections among individuals and groups. In the century following the U.S. Mexican War, a debatable but useful origination point for the category Mexican American, former Mexican nationals had to disconnect with Mexico as the national government and reimagine themselves as U.S. citizens. At the same time, strong regional identities often trumped national affiliation. For example, in both culture and material history, tejanos in Brownsville lived very differently from a Californio on the west coast, or from an expatriate Latino living in the urban communities of the east coast. Separated by geographic, economic, and political circumstance, these varied groups were suddenly collectively lumped as

19 “Mexican American” in the national imaginary. This dissertation suggests that literary manhood provided a common ground through which these groups could forge a collective identity. Manhood, and gender more broadly, can function as a narrative construction that enables, facilitates, and forces communication between members of and between social groups. Whereas Anglo men seemed to experience manhood as a crisis or in peril, Mexican American men and women saw manhood as a more grounded strategy on which to stake citizenship. Mexican American men looked to manhood as a way of asserting or fighting for their collective rights as citizens of a particular nation state, and used manhood as the shared cross-cultural identity through which to engage with civil discourse. While this approach is in line with the goals of Chicano movement, it also allows for multiple methods of civic engagement and cultural recognition. Rather than use major national conflicts or wars as historical markers, a common mechanism of literary periodization, this dissertation instead looks at gendered representations and their development over time as a means of classification. Each chapter provides overlapping moments in the historical archive and each focuses on a pair of authors or texts that interrogate a category. The selected texts often cross national or temporal borders, but the representation of manhood presents a historically situated engagement with national citizenship and culture. Structuring a literary history around representations of gender enables a history continually interrupting itself, that is, a history that is open to new texts and new forms of communal knowledge that can adapt to a developing archive. While a focus on national conflict can center literary history within the power structures of a particular nation sate, this project seeks other forms of organization that better 20 embody the history of movement and change of the people it seeks to represent. A literary history modeled on literary representations of gender is not reducible to chronological growth or teleology, but rather allows for asynchronous development and rearticulation. Each chapter constellates texts around a motif that mediates and enacts public involvement and that circulates portrayals of manhood to construct Mexican Americans as citizens in the national imaginary. The first chapter discusses the popular literature ubiquitous in the decades following the U.S. Mexican War that depicted Mexican Americans as inassimilable bandits, but inserts these fictions into a transnational, multilingual archive that more accurately reflects the Mexican American communities they ostensibly represented. Written by and about Mexican Americans, the bandit narratives, such as those depicting the exploits of Joaquin Murrieta, Vicente Silva, and Juan Cortina, utilized a particular form of outlaw manhood that privileges antinational violence as a form of colonial and cultural critique. In contrast to critics who regularly treat bandit narratives as anti-national, resisting or assimilating to national pressures, I suggest that the bandit narratives are best understood as a process of informal nationalization and naturalization that adopts literary violence as a means of disrupting U.S. colonialism and engaging with U.S. citizenship. The “bandit narratives” account for perhaps the most recognizable type of Mexican American manhood, and chapter two considers another dominant thread of late 19th century gendered public identity, although directed more at a middle-class readership– that of the Spanish fantasy heritage. I contend that the Spanish fantasy heritage emerged in response to the dual nature of American citizenship (federal vs. state) to claim California cultural history for Anglo America and to racialize Mexican 21 Americans. While Gertrude Atherton subsumed Mexican American manhood to a regionalist cultural-historical agenda, Mexican exile, politician, and journalist Adolfo Carrillo rewrote Californian cultural history to repudiate the social exclusion of and imagine a place for Mexican American manhood. Chapter three reads the short fiction of realist writers Jack London and Stephen Crane to argue that Mexican American masculinity influenced national conceptions of American manhood. For canonical authors Crane and London, Mexican American masculinity, because of its association with a rival sovereign nation, with inter- and national violence, and because of its cultural presence within the territorial United States, helped catalyze the transition in national male identity from domestic ideals to a global or imperial American manhood. Their short fictions posit a preoccupation with borders, boundaries, and bodies that reflect the national movement from settler colonialism of westward expansion to more neocolonial models of economic dependency. To disentangle Mexican American manhood from national violence, Jovita Gonzalez, co-author Margaret Eimer, and to a lesser extent Americo Paredes, revise generic conventions to create space for Mexican Americans in national identity. Reading these writings as national literature, I argue that Gonzalez and Paredes use a textual strategy of marginalization to offer a model of manhood that urges pragmatic integration through economic cooperation. Strategies of marginalization enable these authors to refashion Mexican American manhood in ways that imagine Mexican Americans as national citizens. This project, interested in recuperating the cultural contributions of Latina/os to U.S. culture, offers an alternative literary history by amending existing theories of the relationship between U.S. citizenship and Latina/o culture. Mexican 22 American manhood is a contested space through which communities can debate their role in the nation, allowing different regions to communicate and forge common alliances, as well as allowing Mexican Americans to engage Anglo American ideas of citizenship and nation. Although this project focuses on Mexican American manhood, it does not suggest that manhood and men are the only potential history for Chicano literature. Rather, this dissertation offers one model of hopefully many new iterations that show, like Marissa López suggests, “the value and potential of Chicana/o literature” in a continuing “global humanism” (12).

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY:

Throughout the dissertation, I use various terms to refer to the disparate peoples who share a common culture, language, or identity, derived in varying degrees by affiliation to Mexico and/or the U.S., or to the individuals and groups who identify with Latina/o culture. While any number of terms can be used, I privilege “Mexican American” for two reasons. Primarily, I rely on Mexican American as a chronological marker to indicate a collective identity that was emerging before the Chicano movement. While others have made convincing cases for the use of “Chicana/o” outside of the chronological period of the Chicano movement and some criticize the term as assimilationist, “Mexican American” maintains a more neutral political stance and distinguishes a cultural identity that precedes the historically specific Chicano movement. Additionally, Mexican American is sufficiently broad-reaching to include individuals and groups across a broad spectrum of the nation without specific regional variation, an important element of my argument. Though at times I use Chicana/o, Latina/o, Mexican

23 American, Mexican, Mexican origin, Greater Mexico, tejano, Hispano, etc., the context of the discussion should make clear why the specific term is being used. Generally, following the example of historian David Montejano, I use Anglo American to refer to a large swath of European American identities that share some investment in a national white manhood.

24 Citizen Outlaws: The Nation, Literary Banditry, and Mexican American Manhood

Perhaps no character is more closely associated with Mexican American manhood than the bandit. Since at least the Mexican American War, representations of Mexican American men relied heavily on the outlaw or bandit figure as narrative feature associated with both Mexico and Mexican Americans.11 One result of the U.S. Mexican War was that the United States confronted the offensive campaign as a challenge to its own notions of republican virtue and strove to reconcile republican ideals with the realities of an aggressive war. Echoed in the proliferation of print during and following the war, stories about Mexico, Mexicans, and the newly created Mexican Americans helped address the political, geographic, and demographic changes affecting the country. The bandit figure emerged as a ubiquitous formulation of the foreign or international population that the nation encountered in the wake of continental expansion. Since racial arguments “were invariably linked with republicanism and all that that concept implied,” the Mexican American bandit helped communicate the U.S. expansion and served as metonym for Mexicans and Mexican Americans of various racial categorizations (Johannsen 291). Consequently, for much of the late nineteenth century, Mexican American manhood was nearly synonymous with various forms of extralegal behavior collectively referred to as banditry. In her work on popular cultures, Shelley Streeby points out, “a discursive, inter-American battle over the meaning of the American 1848 is waged in this popular crime literature” produced between 1859 and the 1930s (American

11 For discussions of Mexican Americans and banditry, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents; Robert Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, especially pp. 186-203; Jaime Rodríguez, The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War; and Streeby, American Sensations. 25 Sensations 255). Streeby posits “that U.S. racial economies and class relationships were fundamentally transformed by the U.S. Mexican War” and that the ensuing social views “began to shift decisively in the postwar period to include previously despised groups of Europeans and to exclude many of the newly conquered peoples in the West” (256). Streeby’s excellent study shows how the racialization of former Mexican nationals in popular literatures shaped national perceptions of Mexican Americans by working to “redefine and restrict a white national identity [and] by identifying a community of people of Mexican origin and other Spanish-speakers with a ‘foreign’ criminality” that demarcate the limits of legality and illegality, the national and alien (256). Her analysis of Anglo-authored, English-only texts cogently demonstrates the ways that banditry defined Mexican Americans as national subjects. Yet despite– or perhaps because of– this popular characterization of Mexican Americans as bandits, Mexican Americans used banditry as a tropological strategy through which to engage a national public, to move local concerns into the national spotlight. Certainly, U.S. manifest destiny led to the rise of real, social and political resistance that was deemed either revolution or banditry, depending on each party’s perspective. Rather than face U.S. territorial acquisition as geographic expansion, Mexican American men who inhabited the U.S. “frontier” encountered U.S. manifest destiny as colonial encroachment. In such conditions, banditry surfaces as resistance against the neocolonial conditions threatening their way of life in the U.S. southwest. This chapter assumes banditry as a predominant condition of Mexican American manhood through the second half of the nineteenth century in order to interrogate the consequences, decision, options, and repercussions of banditry as a 26 particular form of national citizenship. Banditry took many forms and claimed numerous political and social ideologies, but here I want to distinguish between two “types” of banditry: armed resistance (against government and settler forces) on the one hand and literary renderings of banditry (the cultural formation of specific groups as bandits or outlaws) on the other. In the former, the disparity between powerless Mexicans and oppressive (Anglo) Americans “resulted in intense banditry […] an outgrowth of frontier conditions” that used violence to oppose social injustice (Acuña 46). Armed assaults by Mexican Americans against individuals and the state would occur through at least the early part of the twentieth century, but in most cases met increasing retributions by local and federal forces.12 While armed resistance and literary banditry are imbricated throughout the media and in the popular imaginary, it is important to separate the two. Where armed resistance uses force to combat oppression and often carries nationalist aims, I want to suggest that literary banditry in the Mexican American authored texts analyzed here served a different purpose– national consolidation. While authors of multiple racial and national allegiances use bandits, here I use the term literary banditry on the one hand to differentiate literary representation from actual resistance, but on the other to insist upon the ways that representations of banditry could work toward national consolidation. Literary banditry is a representative strategy, closely associated to ideals of manhood and citizenship (themselves intertwined during this period) that seeks to engage the popular imaginary and works toward social inclusion. In this latter sense it is more closely aligned with the

12 Many historians contend that armed resistance culminated with the Plan de San Diego and the Borderlands War of Texas in 1915, after which violence no longer seemed a reasonable alternative, but the model could be extended to the Brown berets of the Chicano movement. 27 Latin American bandit tradition, a point to which I return in the second half of the chapter. 13 In some cases, Mexican American literary banditry in the second half of the nineteenth century is less an impulse for nationalism, an ideology of separation, than an act of citizenship. Where other scholars have shown how Mexican American banditry demonstrated a separatist resistance to Anglo American incursion or how Anglo authored accounts of Mexican American banditry in the popular press sought to racialize Mexican Americans in the interest of U.S. imperialism, in this chapter I look at the literary performances of two Mexican American bandits to show how literary banditry could also serve to narrativize Mexican Americans within the U.S. national imaginary in ways that incorporated Mexican Americans within the body politic. Many accounts of Mexican Americans used banditry as a foil to champion Anglo American expansion or espoused violent opposition to the state, for instance, but the texts analyzed in this chapter suggest how literary banditry could also work to include Mexican Americans as citizens of the nation and located Mexican American authors within transnational circuits of cultural exchange. In the two accounts below, literary banditry becomes a narrative strategy of adaptation, of incorporation, and of inclusion. This chapter is about the ways in which Mexican American authors revise bandit manhood to create a space for Mexican Americans in the national popular imaginary and to inquire about the social, political, racial, and national implications of banditry as the originating identity of Mexican American manhood.

13 For a discussion of how romance novels linked heterosexual union and national unity in Latin American, see Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions (1991). 28 Here, I argue that literary banditry cleaved Mexicans Americans within national identity, both from and to their rights and obligations as citizens of the nation.14 Citizenship, the relationship between individuals and the nation state, is premised on the mutual obligation between a people and its government, and “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” (Declaration of Independence). In the United States, where “a ‘democracy of print’ had become indispensible to political democracy,” the relationship between a people and a government is narrated in ways that seek to draw boundaries between its subjects, to both include and exclude its members (Johannsen 176). Literary banditry serves that dual purpose, presenting the possibility of national inclusion even as it threatens to write Mexican Americans out of the nation. Citizenship, the relationship between individuals and the nation state, is premised on the mutual obligation between a people and its government, and according to the Declaration of Independence, “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The literary bandit’s use of violence placed him in opposition to the nation-state, but banditry could also serve a contrasting purpose. Through its literary performance, banditry could be transformed into acts of citizenship and the bandits rendered as citizens of a nation-state. For Mexican Americans during the late nineteenth century, the narrativization of citizenship as banditry was a textualization of the qualities of citizenship, a means toward recognition of formal equality. Banditry articulates a

14 Cleave can mean “to pierce and penetrate, to separate or sever by dividing or splitting,” but it also “to stick fast or adhere, to attach or remain steadfast” (OED). It is this dual meaning of the word that so aptly describes the process of literary banditry as citizenship. 29 fundamental question of citizenship: do the rights of citizenship derive from natural rights that precede a social contract or do they emerge from the duties that national privilege vests? Multilingual literary banditry reveals banditry not just as resistance or disobedience, but as a literary genre that straddles this dilemma. Accordingly, I juxtapose two bandits that demonstrate this movement: Juan Nepomuceno Cortina in Texas and Vicente Silva in New Mexico. Each bandit conducted illicit activities and was a prominent, recognizable figure in his respective state and nationally. In the former, a historical revolutionary used to literature to explain his actions to the nation and in the latter, a historical criminal was fictionalized for the purposes of regional development. These bandits move from historical actors to literary figures and their cultural dissemination through literary texts encodes Mexican American manhood within state and national citizenship.

KINGS OF BANDITS: JOAQUIN MURIETA AND THE BROADER CHICANO BANDIT TRADITION

According to Eric Hobsbawm’s classic but somewhat limited definition, social bandits emerge from agricultural or pastoral economic and social systems as precursors to organized political change. For Hobsbawm, the social bandit is a member of the peasantry, has no active ideology, and seeks to return society to the stasis that existed before the bandit was in some way wronged; the bandit’s main concern “is the defence or restoration of the traditional order of things” (26). Yet for many Mexican Americans, the traditional order of things often meant unequal social and political status. Banditry, then, particularly literary banditry, served to correct the status quo rather than return to it.

30 As a cultural figure however, bandits are most often discussed as stereotypes of Mexican American manhood, with scholars considering how closely a particular representation adheres to or deviates from the audience’s expectations of criminalized Mexican American behavior. Juan Alonzo “argues that Mexican male identity representation in American culture may be productively read in terms of its ambivalent or contingent status… [and] propose[s] that rather than seeing images as ‘positive’ or ‘negative,’ we should examine instead the ambivalent points of attraction and revulsion within representations of Mexican identity” (2). Regarding post-U.S. Mexican War novelettes, Jaime Javier Rodriguez posits “these bandido figures are complex amalgamations of desire and repulsion, often blending together a mode of nostalgia and criminality, comedy and violence [...] spectrally hovering between social order and chaos, a liminality that triggers complicated responses such as those that attend canonical U.S. American frontiersman heroes” (Rodriguez 81). These scholars and others such as William A. Nericcio and Charles Ramirez- Berg, look to the bandit figure and the myriad ways bandits can signify to a particular audience, but even as contemporary critics acknowledge the nuanced and multiple meanings that the bandit can hold, the bandit’s cultural value is largely assessed along a continuum of positive and negative valences within the accepted stereotype and not as agents engaged in national literary cultures and historical change.15 In another vein, scholars have found in the bandit a source for an “authentic” Chicano manhood. The model of warrior masculinity was a crucial, if problematic, pillar of el movimiento, which John Alba Cutler has fruitfully described as “an often

15 See Ramirez-Berg and Nericcio. 31 impracticable notion of ethnic identity as essential, and essentially masculine, inheritance” (584). For example, Americo Paredes states that the Greater Mexican Border hero adherers to a paradigm of masculine defiance and that the corridos “epitomized the ideal type of hero […] whose first model” had been Juan Nepomuceno Cortina (124-5). This concept of the hero as a man with his pistol in his hand becomes a central organizing principle of the late twentieth-century Mexican American civil rights movement, one that typically divides cultural authenticity as either assimilation or resistance. The movement looked historically to the bandit figure as a metonym for such ideals and texts are valorized to the degree to which they oppose national authority, and those that do not espouse violent protest are often discredited. Many texts of the Chicano movement, such as Corky Gonzalez’s “I Am Joaquin,” Oscar Zeta Acosta’s work, Luis Valdez’s Bandido, and even, to some extent, Sandra Cisneros’s portrayal in “Eyes of Zapata,” champion the bandit as anti-authoritarian and anti-national. Yet, in the late nineteenth century, Mexican American literary banditry could serve as a figure of both resistance and inclusion. The texts discussed below locate banditry within a transnational framework that shows how banditry, the archetype of masculine resistance, exceeds a binary of assimilation and resistance. Instead of seeing the bandits as static stereotypes or in opposition to the U.S. nation, a transnational literary history demonstrates how bandit narratives can function as a practice of citizenship, and illuminates the reciprocal relationship between manhood and the instantiation of a national Mexican American public. If banditry was to define Mexican American manhood in the second half of the nineteenth century, the narratives then provide a means through which to speak back to the nation. The bandit narratives provide what Michael Warner has, in a different context, called the 32 “political conditions of utterance,” the cultural structure through which to engage a national public (35). Any study of nineteenth-century Mexican American banditry would be remiss to not, at minimum, acknowledge the most famous, albeit largely fictionalized, of bandits, Joaquin Murieta. Beginning with the publication of John Rollin Ridge’s Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854), Murieta has circulated as a figure loathed, feared and revered, whose popularity crosses cultures and whose enduring cultural force persists into the present. His story has been told and retold countless times, beginning just five years after the publication of Ridge’s tale with an anonymous version that appeared in the San Francisco Police Gazette

(1859) and that included an account of Murieta’s supposed 1845 visit to Mexico.16 Joaquin’s popularity has not escaped critical attention with numerous contemporary critics engaging with the story. Joseph Henry Jackson’s introduction to the University of Oklahoma’s republication (1954) of Ridge’s original tale ardently argues for the Murieta legend to be a fictional account stemming from Ridge’s novel, attenuating its historical and cultural cache. In contrast, other critics have turned to the Murieta legend and Ridge’s novel as indicative of larger social

16 The constant and continuing revision of the Murieta story testifies to its longstanding cultural relevance. Among the more significant retellings, Robert Hyenne translates the story into French, Carlos Mora publishes a Spanish translation (1867), and Frederick MacCrellish publishes an authorized second edition, History of Joaquin Murieta, the King of California Outlaws, Whose Band Ravaged the State in the Early Fifties (1871). Subsequent authors expand the Joaquin lore, including Horace Bell’s Reminiscences of a Ranger (1881) that recounts Joaquin’s “first escapade”; Gertrude Atherton Los Cerritos (1890) recounting the life of Joaquin’s alleged illegitimate daughter, Carmelita; Hubert Howe Bancroft’s histories of California included an amalgamated version; Walter Noble Burns’ Robin Hood of El Dorado: The Saga of Joaquin Murrieta, Outlaw of California’s Age of Gold (1932), a novelized biography; and more loosely, many attribute to Joaquin the origin of the character of Zorro. In 1904, the famous Mexican publisher Ireneo Paz (grandfather of Nobel laureate Octavio Paz) publishes another Spanish translation in Mexico City. While this partial list accounts for some of the more recognizable versions, perhaps most famously, however, is Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez’s epic poem “I Am Joaquin” (1967), which helped galvanize the Chicano movement. 33 issues. Murieta’s legend of resistance has exerted direct influence on both Native and Chicano cultural production. Many contemporary critics read Ridge, a displaced Cherokee forced to flee the Cherokee Nation after intratribal conflict resulting from territorial disputes that ended in the murder of his father and his own killing of another, as using the novel to mask a desire for intra- and cross-racial vengeance.17 For Chicana/o critics since the Chicano movement, Murieta has come to represent hybridity of Mexican Americans and served as a cornerstone of the movement’s cultural nationalism as a figure of masculine, anti-national resistance.18 Murieta has been most influential and has been canonized within Mexican American cultural history as a figure of masculine resistance. But Ridge’s original telling of the now-myth shows a much more complicated relationship between Murieta and the nation. Through Ridge’s narrative, Murieta develops from a victim of race hatred to a bandit terrorizing the California countryside to a revolutionary organizing a large-scale campaign against the United States. About midway through the narrative, Murieta has an epiphany, choosing to harness his bandits for a larger purpose. Murieta gathers his: “‘fighting members’ as he called them, one hundred men, and explained to them fully his views and purposes. ‘I am at the head of an organization’ said he, ‘of two thousand men whose ramifications are in Sonora, Lower California, and in this State. I have money in abundance deposited in a safe

17 For instance, Louis Owens sees in Ridge’s novel a displacement of Ridge’s desire for intratribal revenge and James Cox states how Murieta “initiat[ed] in the Native novel tradition a critique of the way that texts function as tools of domination” (26, 18). 18 See Alfred Arteaga, Chicano Poetics (1997) and Perez-Torres. Luis Leal’s book history of the Murieta legend as part of Arte Publico’s republication of the Paz edition chronicles its widespread dissemination. Jesse Alemán cogently argues for the way Ridge’s life and novel offer violent allegories of assimilation that, far from advocating it, reveal its inherent contradictions, connecting the author Ridge to the character Murieta as a symbolic disassociation between head and body, between individual and the community, which needs “re-membering” in order to provide strategic force. 34 place. I intend to arm and equip fifteen hundred or two thousand men and make a clean sweep of the southern counties. I intend to kill the Americans by 'wholesale,' burn their ranchos, and run off their property at one single swoop so rapidly that they will not have time to collect an opposing force before I will have finished the work and found safety in the mountains of Sonora. When I do this, I shall wind up my career. My brothers, we will then be revenged for our wrongs, and some little, too, for the wrongs of our poor, bleeding country.’” (74-5) As head of a large number of men, Murieta expounds on his desire to rid California of the American presence, reversing statehood enacted just a few years earlier. His actions are motivated by revenge, eager to exact retribution not only for his personal loss but for the “wrongs of our poor, bleeding country,” presumably Mexico. Throughout, both Anglos and Mexicans regularly refer to Joaquin’s fellow bandits as “his countrymen,” locating Joaquin outside of the U.S. nation-state in which he was active and emphatically dividing Mexican and American.19 Although Joaquin never lives to see his plan through (he is captured and killed by a posse of men led by Captain Love), the novel suggests that Joaquin’s plans were sufficiently developed and partially implemented. Moreover, the novel suggests that the majority of the Mexican origin population of California supported his actions, since: “his correspondence was large with many wealthy and influential Mexicans residing in the State of California, and he had received assurances of their earnest cooperation in the movement which he contemplated. A shell was

19 See pages 8, 15, 79, and 157. Even Joseph Henry Jackson, in his introduction, refers to Mexican Americans as countrymen outside the United States, stating “nor is it surprising that such outlaws were aided covertly by sympathetic countrymen” (xvi). 35 about to burst which was little dreamed of by the mass of the people, who merely looked upon Joaquín as a petty leader of a band of cutthroats!” (148) Anglo Americans who read this would immediately have been alarmed by Murieta’s activities and intentions to pursue the national conflict in such a bloody fashion, though it is this impulse toward nationalism and self-assertion that is later taken up by Chicano activists. According to his statements, he does not intend to replace American with Mexican or Californio government, but rather “wind up his career” and retire in isolation, partially deflating his revolutionary zeal. The story frequently positions Murieta outside the nation-state, but at times his actions border on acts of governing. Ridge explains, “so burdensome were the tributes levied upon the citizens of the whole State by the robbers, and so ceaselessly did they commit their depredations that it became a fit subject for legislative action,” sanctioning the posse to pursue him (145). Although it is Murieta’s inability to govern that will lead to his undoing, Ridge uses the language of state to describe the relationship Murieta had to the “citizens of the whole state,” one of unfulfilled promise and excess. At other times, the relationship between Murieta and the Americans is rendered in terms of manhood. One American is willing to “stake my honor, not as an American citizen, but as a man, who is simply bound by justice to himself, under circumstances in which no other considerations can prevail, that you shall not be betrayed” (78). Facing death, the American invokes a sense of shared masculine camaraderie and male values that supersede national status, a plea to which Joaquin is ultimately sympathetic. Ridge’s complicated novel demonstrates how even Joaquin, the paradigm of Mexican American banditry, has an uneven relationship to the state and to ideals of 36 resistance, though the latter is privileged in subsequent literary history. As Mark Rifkin points out, “Ridge’s novel questions the process by which the country claims to have internalized various peoples and places. The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta uses its elaborate depiction of murder and mayhem to suggest that the Mexican-American War continues in an ongoing armed struggle in California,” but “expresses deep anxiety about and even hostility toward popular insurgency” (Rifkin 28, 29). Although Murieta stands as the most recognized Mexican American bandit, he is but one of a network of representations that had material consequences on the lives of Mexican Americans during this time. As an example of literary banditry, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta works both within and against national consolidation, seeking justice while never abandoning its revolutionary cause, though the complexity possible within literary banditry has since been forgotten.

JUAN NEPOMUCENO CORTINA: CORTINA’S WAR TO BE READ

In the decade after the U.S. Mexican War, the border between the U.S. and Mexico was anything but assured. From California to Texas, inhabitants of and immigrants to the border region struggled to adapt to the political and social changes impacting the region. The U.S. southwest was, to varying degrees, troubled by social unrest and open conflict between its Native, Mexican, and Anglo American inhabitants. In one effort to settle territorial uncertainty, the United States completed the Gadsden Purchase in 1854 to acquire territory in present day New Mexico and Arizona for the completion of the transcontinental railroad, to secure trade routes to California, and to appease Mexican concerns with Indian raids in the

37 area.20 But the territorial disputes did not end there. Just five years later, events in south Texas would rekindle the racial tensions that persisted since the war, resulting in armed conflict and the involvement of the federal army in an affair that solicited national attention. The escalating racial tensions between Anglo and Mexican Americans living along the border which, after a series of events in the fall and early winter of 1859, would convert Cortina from longtime resident of the border region into what U.S. public opinion would label a bandit. In a written proclamation issued on November 23, 1859, the rancher, soldier, and occasional cattle-rustler Juan Nepomuceno Cortina offers a scathing portrayal of South Texas. He states that the state was overrun by “flocks of vampires, in the guise of men("Pronunciamiento")” ("Pronunciamiento" 25). These vampires “scattered themselves in the settlements” across state, “without any capital except the corrupt heart and the most perverse intentions.” When Cortina chastises as corrupt “vampires” the relatively recent Anglo settlers who flocked to the frontier, he indicts them as a parody of manhood– a failure of these “vampires in the guise of men” to live up to dominative notions of male public identity, but in his proclamations also transforms the meaning of banditry even as he relies on its cultural significance. Born on May 16, 1824, in the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina moved to what is now Brownsville area at a very young age, spending much of his adolescence in Matamoros. During the U.S. Mexican War, Cortina fought under Gen. Mariano Arista in the Battles of Resaca de la Palma and Palo Alto, afterwards returning to Brownsville as a rancher and occasional cattle rustler on

20 See Richard Griswold del Castillo, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (1990) and David Potter, Impending Crisis (1976). 38 both sides of the border. In July of 1859, Cortina chanced upon Deputy Sheriff Bob Spears abusively beating a former family employee. Cortina intervened and, after Spears supposedly racially insulted Cortina, Cortina shot Spears in the shoulder. Fearing repercussion, Cortina fled to Mexico. Several months later, on September 28, Cortina, ahead of a group of approximately seventy-five armed men, returned to Texas, storming into Brownsville, Texas, to settle a feud with Adolphus Glaveke, a German immigrant and long-time resident of the area who in collusion with others, sought to despoil the Mexican origin community. Anglo American citizens used the raid to appeal to Washington for heightened security along the border, and the local police force, the Mexican military in Matamoros, the Texas Rangers, and the U.S. army under Robert E. Lee were all mobilized to repel Cortina from the area.21 The Cortina Wars, as this episode is usually referred to, is more productively understood as Cortina’s war to be read. Stories about Mexico, Mexicans, and the newly created Mexican Americans proliferated in both popular fiction and non- fiction in the decades following the U.S. Mexican War, and Cortina became somewhat of a regional hero and makes an appearance in several popular fictions.22 Yet in his proclamations, Cortina attempts to inscribe banditry within recognizable frameworks of national manhood. In the press, in official and in private correspondence surrounding his activities, Cortina was variously described as “robber,” “savage” (12), “brutal,” “ruthless,” “beastly” (20), “desperate, lawless, and licentious” (22), “cold-blooded” (31), his followers were “marauders” and “armed banditti” (33); the list goes on, but in short, he was described as a bandit. In his

21 The most thorough account of Cortina’s life and exploits is Jerry D. Thompson, Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas (2007). 22 See John Emerald, Cortina, the Scourge (1872), Gonzalez and Eimer’s Caballero (ca. 1936) and Americo Paredes’s George Washington Gomez (ca. 1939). 39 proclamations, however, banditry functioned as a practice of citizenship, providing a means through which to speak back to the nation. According to Rodolfo Acuña, Cortina “goes beyond the bandido model. Unlike the social bandit, he had an organization with a definite ideology and organization […] Cortina was a regionalist who identified with northern Mexico” (46). The Cortina War was a “resistance movement that grew out of Border culture and was limited by Border culture as well. The conflict carried two major themes: the tradition of community unity in the face of the international boundary and the personal nature of the undertaking” (Rosenbaum 45). For Cortina, the region included both the U.S. and Mexican sides of the Rio Grande, but his regional interests were in conversation with both national projects. Days after Cortina occupied the town of Brownsville, the first of Cortina’s Pronunciamientos circulated on both sides of the border in both English and Spanish. Cortina’s proclamations are typically written in the second-person, directly addressing both the Mexican and Anglo residents of Texas, the U.S., and Mexico. This rhetorical gesture is an essential part of his literary act, creating the community of readers as active, engaged political beings and urging them to likewise respond. It is “your beautiful city” he says, reiterating that he is “your humble servant,” and that “those guarantees which are denied you, thus violating the most sacred laws, is that which moves me to address you these words” ("Pronunciamiento" 24). Cortina’s conversational tone locates Cortina in fellowship with his readers, and heightens the sense of shared urgency in explaining the events. Emphasizing their shared involvement in the events transpiring, he implores the readers to take ownership of their part in the events, but does so by issuing not so much a call to arms or to action, but a call to “words.” 40 For many readers, concerned with an impending race war (Cortina’s raid happened within weeks of John Brown’s attack at Harper’s Ferry), it was easier to understand the racial tensions of the region as an unfortunate escalation of a duel, a common literary and cultural trope for southern manhood. Some tried to dismiss his actions as nothing more than a personal feud gone awry. The Southern Intelligencer described the raids as “private revenge,” a letter from the self-organized “committee of safety” to President Buchanan states it an attempt to remedy a “private grudge” (DSF 21), and the New Orleans Picayune contends the “quarrel is wholly a family one” (quoted in DSF 40). But Cortina’s actions and his proclamations explicitly shift the focus from the personal to the communal and national. Undermining the press’s characterization of Cortina as outlaw or personal vendetta is a tension about his manhood. The Anglo press must acknowledge that Cortina was “lionized by principal citizens there, we are told, as a hero” (DSF 39). Cortina’s behavior is “formidable and dangerous” (21) and he possessed “extraordinary influence” (DSF 21). The Southern Intelligencer states that “the man shows great skill as well as courage” nervously noting that “he seems to wait his time and opportunity, and this with a self-reliance and firmness of purpose which may well give a pause,” puzzling over the “enigma” of how he maintains his force ("Later from Brownsville. Another Fight– Cortina Victorious!! Full Particulars" 2). The author endows Cortina with many of the masculine ideals prevalent in the national imaginary at that time– he possesses “skill,” “courage,” and entrepreneurial acumen to maintain a large military force without the support of the state, but at all times his abilities are kept in check by his self-control and commitment to his goals. The author’s warning to “give a pause,” then, asks what it means when a racialized body possesses the very characteristics used to assert heteronormative privilege. 41 Cortina’s forces, whose numbers were estimated at anywhere from 100 to 1500 men, posed not only a military threat but as an example of his masculine performance, merging what Amy Greenberg has seen as often competing ideas, “restrained” and “martial manhood” (11). This appropriation of competing manhoods troubled many Anglos. Texas Ranger John “Rip” Ford complained of the “insecurity of life and property, the stagnation of trade, and most tellingly, the “disastrous effect upon our national character abroad, which this state of affairs has produced” (DSF 42 emphasis added). Mr. Hale appeals to his reader’s sense of “national character,” the perception of integrity, pride, and of manhood which Cortina’s raids “exposed at every moment [and] in which their lives, fortunes, and honor are to be risked.” In defining the Mexican American “race,” Cortina uses the vocabulary of manhood that would have been immediately recognizable to his Southern and

Northern contemporaries as manly.23 Explaining Texas Mexicans to his readers, Cortina describes them as possessing “genial affability,” “humility, simplicity, and docility, directed with dignity,” an “irresistible inclination towards ideas of equality,” and “adorned with the most lovely disposition towards all that is good and useful in the line of progress,” qualities that would ring as manly virtues. At the same time, he demands justice for those that wronged him or “leave them to become subject to the consequences of our immutable resolve;” in short, challenging them to a duel. Cortina industriously dedicates himself to “constant labor” and paints himself as hard working, unwavering, and invested above all in the prosperity of his fellow man who are also “honorably and exclusively dedicated to the exercise of

23 For a discussion of southern manhood, see Craig Thompson Friend and Lori Glover, Southern Manhood (2004), Friend, Southern Masculinity (2009) and to some degree, Nina Silber, Romance of Reunion (1993). 42 industry.” His bandit manhood is then confident and courageous, not the rigid machismo often associated with banditry, but rather in deliberate concert with a feminized sense of mutual freedom, in “sisterhood of liberty.” Cortina readily accepts the label of bandit, stating “If, my dear compatriots, I am honored with the name, I am ready for the combat,” but only if offered with an explanation of its qualities (24). Both Cortina and the nation tried to understand his exploits in terms of national manhood, but antebellum notions of manhood were intimately connected to citizenship. In his first proclamation, Cortina claims he aims only “to chastise the villainy of our enemies” who “form, so to speak, a perfidious inquisitorial lodge to persecute and rob us, without any cause, and for no other crime on our part than that of being of Mexican origin.”24 Cortina makes abundantly clear the racial prejudice that dominates the Texas social structure, but excuses his use of violence as the state’s inability to meet its obligations to its own citizens, stating bluntly, “inasmuch as justice, being administered by their own hands, the supremacy of the law has failed to accomplish its object.” The failure of the nation-state animates his position as a U.S. citizen, and Cortina’s proclamation is as much a declaration of U.S. citizenship as it is a declamation of racial injustice. Cortina imagines himself within the ideals of emancipatory citizenship, as “a part of the confederacy” that champions the rights of its citizens, calling on the government, “for the sake of its own dignity, and in

24 Elsewhere he talks of “secret conclaves” and “shadowy councils,” both of which would resonate with male homosocial secret societies then prevalent. See Mark Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America. 43 obsequiousness to justice,” to come to the aid of Texas Mexicans. His statements bear quoting at length as it sets the terms for a vexed nationalism and obligation: And how can it be otherwise, when the ills that weigh upon the unfortunate republic of Mexico have obliged us for many heart-touching causes to abandon it and our possessions in it, or else become the victims of our principles or of the indigence to which its intestine disturbances had reduced us since the treaty of Guadalupe? When, ever diligent and industrious, and desirous of enjoying the longed-for boon of liberty within the classic country of its origin, we were induced to naturalize ourselves in it and form a part of the confederacy, flattered by the bright and peaceful prospect of living therein and inculcating in the bosoms of our children a feeling of gratitude towards a country beneath whose aegis we would have wrought their felicity and contributed with our conduct to give evidence to the whole world that all the aspirations of the Mexicans are confined to one only, that of being freemen; and that having secured this ourselves, those of the old country, notwithstanding their misfortunes, might have nothing to regret save the loss of a section of territory, but with the sweet satisfaction that their old fellow citizens lived therein, enjoying tranquility, as if Providence had so ordained to set them an example of the advantages to be derived from public peace and quietude.” ("Pronunciamiento" 17) For “diligent and industrious” Cortina, it is the failure of the Mexican nation-state that has led Texas Mexicans, with regret, to become U.S. citizens. The shift in national affiliation was not taken lightly, but a calculated risk lest Texas Mexicans “become the victims our principals,” the victims of national loyalty over self- preservation. In Cortina’s words, Texas Mexicans worked diligently to prosper and 44 uphold order, but when circumstances of fate required them to switch national allegiance, they did so willingly because “desirous of enjoying the longed-for boon of liberty within the classic country of its origin,” they value democratic ideals over any single nation-state, crediting the U.S. with the creation of republican ideals. Cortina’s sense of citizenship moves fluidly between nations, perhaps a consequence of the war, but Cortina was willing to leave behind ties to Mexico (the “old country”) and to “their old fellow citizens” in exchange for the “advantages derived from public peace,” of “liberty” and being “freemen.” His commitment to the U.S. nation-state would have been complete had Texas Mexicans not been “defrauded in the most cruel manner” and left with not option than to retaliate and “destroy the obstacles to our prosperity.” This excerpt, like much of the Pronunciamientos, is written in long, sprawling sentences, with numerous appositional phrases interrupting the flow of his assertions. The appositions provide useful description and much needed contextualization of the events Cortina narrates, but the syntactic breakup of the narrative imparts a sense of dislocation in the reader, one which linguistically reflects Cortina’s own condition of provisional control and disrupting the reader’s confidence in the accepted sources of textual authority. Moreover, by intervening in the structure of his own narrative, Cortina asserts his ability to interject on behalf of the Texas Mexican community, jumping in to remind the reader of the failures of the nation-state and the need for new interpretations. Casting himself as a champion of justice, Cortina seeks to rewrite the bandit figure as a defender of the rights putatively guaranteed by the state. This literary performance charges banditry with both moral and revolutionary purpose, and transforms banditry into patriotism by revealing a language of rebellion familiar to 45 U.S. audiences as Cortina self-consciously sought to envelop his raids within a rhetoric of revolutionary right that framed his activities within nationalist movements, both U.S. and Mexican. Cortina’s proclamations fit squarely within Mexican nationalist movements of the 1850s, including the Plan de Ayutla (1854) that called for the overthrow of Santa Anna and that sets the stage for Benito Juarez’s liberal government and Constitution of 1857. The Plan de Ayutla sought to establish a democratic republic “sin otra restricción que la de respetar inviolablemente las garantías individuales” [without other restriction except the inviolable respect for individual rights], but uses masculinist tropes in defining national belonging, grounding its claims by “usando de los mismos derechos de que usaron nuestros padres en 1821” [using the same rights that our forefathers used in

1821], the year the Spanish recognized Mexican independence. 25 Where Cortina staunchly defends the “sacred right of self-preservation,” he uses the word inviolable three times in just these two proclamations: discussing the “inviolable laws;” how “Hospitality and other noble sentiments […] are inviolable to us;” and “orderly people and honest citizens are inviolable to us in their persons and interests;” foregrounding ideological commitment over personal retribution. At the same time, Cortina’s banditry attempts to locate Mexican American manhood within a tradition of patriotic resistance and national defense resounding of the founding fathers and the United States’ national origin story. Cortina’s proclamation recalls Thomas Paine, who in Thoughts on Defensive War, praises “a point to view this matter in of superior consequence to the defence of property; and that point is Liberty in all its meanings” (56). Historians have shown that for Paine,

25 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Spanish are my own. 46 “creating a viable national identity for Americans other than through their customary association with Britain [a competing national presence] was a crucial part of the revolutionary process,” in the bandit narratives the revolutionary process itself becomes a crucial part of the creation of a viable national identity (Larkin 270). Eric Foner states that among Paine’s contributions to revolutionary America, “the politicization of the mass of Philadelphians– from the master craftsmen to a significant segment of the laborers and poor– was the most important development in Philadelphia’s political life in the decade before independence” (56). Foner holds that this politicization helped mobilize a nascent nation otherwise culturally indistinct from England; that process was made possible through literature and through the inception of an imagined reading public. Cortina’s proclamation makes an analogous statement that attempts to mobilize the local populace, composed mostly of Texas Mexicans with a minority Anglo U.S. population, in support of his ideals and in opposition to an absent national government unable to provide for the defense of its borders. In Cortina’s narratives, the revolutionary process itself becomes a crucial part of the creation of a viable Mexican American identity, one that elevates democratic ideals above national boundaries. The proclamation makes clear that Texas Mexicans are separated by “accident alone, from the other citizens of the city,” and that they act explicitly “not having renounced our rights as North American citizens.” Cortina and his followers “disapprove, and energetically protest, against the act of having caused a force of the National Guards from Mexico to cross unto this side to ingraft themselves in questions so foreign to their country that there is no excusing such weakness on the part of those who implored their aid” (Cortina "Pronunciamiento, September 30, 47 1859"). Cortina’s U.S. citizenship is juxtaposed with Anglo Texans who looked to Mexican enforcement, whose proximity provided a more rapid response to the area disagreements. As Cortina would tell it, his choice for self-defense is a more American action than those who sought the aid of a foreign government, and reframes the threat to U.S. sovereignty not in his assault on Brownsville, but on the Anglo Texans call to the Mexican National Guard, inviting a foreign army into the country. While in some aspects, Cortina’s literary banditry functions within transnational revolutionary movements, his literary performance of that rebellion reinforces U.S. authority in the region. By reigniting revolutionary discourses, Cortina suggests a U.S. national project still in the making and locates the U.S. within ongoing hemispheric revolutions. Though Cortina may not have explicitly modeled his proclamations on the founding documents of the United States, the proclamations resound with the rhetoric of republican revolution that situates banditry not apart from, but within democratic national projects. Cortina was heavily invested in hemispheric revolutionary movements and was committed to the liberal reforms. Throughout the 1860s, he fought alongside Juarez and against the French intervention, until Porfirio Diaz imprisoned him in 1876. His proclamations need be understood within transnational movements for democracy, one pursued both in the U.S. and in Mexico, both against the nation-state but also in cooperation with it. Transforming banditry into an act citizenship, Cortina was able to textualize his actions to resonate with public understandings of national obligation, manhood, and the duties of citizenship. As the Brownsville committee of safety put it, many could now “believe him to be the man he represents himself in his proclamations” (DSF 75).

48 As a literary performance, his proclamations transform banditry into claims for citizenship. Cortina textualized his actions to make them familiar, to resonate with public understandings of national obligation and with the duties of citizenship. Cortina bases his claims to citizenship on “the sacred right of self-preservation,” the natural rights that both precede and derive from national law. Cortina goes to great lengths to downplay the violence in his actions. He is “horrified at the thought of having to shed innocent blood,” and reports to be “loth to attack,” odd words for a career soldier (16). He laments the way the events were portrayed, stating “it behooves us to maintain that it was unjust to give the affair such a terrible aspect, and to represent it as of a character foreboding evil” (15). Rather than think of the bandit as a figure who operates outside of accepted social order, as an entity who uses violence out of a disregard for society and its institutions, Cortina emphasizes shared democratic ideals that cross race and nation. As banditry moves from armed resistance to literary representation, it presents the possibility for Mexican American manhood to move from regional conflict to national manhood by imagining Mexican Americans within the American body politic. In his writings, Cortina is made the champion of American democracy and republican virtue rather than a figure of resistance to the nation-state. Elsewhere, Mexican Americans would use banditry as narrative strategy to make a case for national inclusion.

BANDIT SOCIETIES: MANUEL CABEZA DE BACA AND VICENTE SILVA

In 1959, José Timoteo López, Edgardo Nuñez, and Roberto Lara Vialapando compiled Una Breve Reseña de la literatura hispana de Nuevo mexico y Colorado,

49 what amounts to the first endeavor toward a Chicano literary history.26 This early study calls Manuel Cabeza de Baca’s novel La Historia de Vicente Silva y sus cuarenta bandidos, sus crimines y sus retribuciones (1896) “el más representativo de los escritores hispanos de Nuevo Mexico, tanto por el estilo como el argumento” [the most representative of the New Mexican Hispanic writers as much for its style as for its argument] (18). Cabeza de Baca’s story achieved immense regional popularity but never garnered the national recognition, most likely because one, the novel is clearly rooted in a specific regional political history not familiar to national audiences and two, Silva was a living historical figure difficult to make legend and not easily absorbed by the “social outlaw” model outlined by Eric Hobsbawm, Robert J. Rosenbaum, and others, to which characters like Joaquin Murieta are often ascribed. Nonetheless, including Cabeza de Baca’s Historia within multilingual American literature as an important and “representative” example of Mexican American literary history highlights the ways in which literary banditry presented complex claims to citizenship. Roughly thirty years after the Cortina Wars, in the 1880s and early 90s, Vicente Silva, a saloon owner, embarked on a crime spree that involved robbery and murder, and that terrorized the population of north central New Mexico, Anglo and Hispano alike. Like Murieta and Cortina before him, Silva was able to organize the area’s residents and outlaws into a criminal network known as the Sociedad de

26 Based upon a reading of this work, literary scholar Manuel Martín-Rodriguez made the observation that the recovery of a “plethora” of a Latina/o “narratives, memoirs, personal letters, testimonials, journalistic pieces, and poems […] while enriching our knowledge of the Chicana/o literary past, further complicate the task of reconstructing its history” (797). In his efforts to “help Chicano/a literature critics reconstruct a historiography beyond borders that would maintain a balance between our present critical moment and past horizons of expectations,” Martin-Rodriguez points to how “the diverse and contradictory tensions that have shaped” Chicana/o literatures are often omitted from Chicana/o literary histories that critically organize them (803-4). 50 Bandidos, with Silva at its head. But unlike Cortina, Silva’s actions were not guided by any clear moral or ideological agenda; his crimes were largely committed for personal gain. Late in his life, Silva ordered his brother-in-law, whom he suspected of informing the authorities about the gangs activities, killed and the body disappeared. When his wife began inquiring about her brother’s death, Silva plotted her death as well, but was betrayed and murdered by his henchmen. Throughout his crime spree, New Mexican Hispano attorney Manuel Cabeza de Baca prosecuted several of Silva’s bandits. Much of what is known about Manuel Cabeza de Baca comes from critic A. Gabriel Melendez and from Manuel’s niece Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, whose novel We Fed Them Cactus has enjoyed some recent critical attention. Born in 1853, Manuel Cabeza de Baca was educated in the Catholic school systems around Las Vegas, New Mexico (the public school system did not exist until 1891). A descendent of land grant family in the region, by 1890 Cabeza de Baca worked as an attorney and as a prosecutor for San Miguel County, even prosecuting members of Vicente Silva’s crime syndicate. In 1886, he served as a member of the House in the territorial legislature from San Miguel County and was voted Speaker of the House for that term (F. Cabeza de Baca 95-6). Manuel held numerous other government posts, but was always a “stanch Republican” who supported New Mexico’s admission into the United States (F. Cabeza de Baca 96). As implied by his career choice, Cabeza de Baca was also a committed advocate of legal and “moral” order, highly influenced by Christian values, and his politics and sense of communal obligation were driven by a desire to work within the American legal and juridical system. Erlinda Gonzales- Berry notes that he advocated for the admission of Spanish speakers to national citizenship (171). Although Manuel was a member of the nuevomexicano elite, 51 Fabiola states that he was “quite a humanitarian” who often “cancelled debts of poor people who were unable to pay him for his services as a lawyer” (96). As a lawyer with first-hand access to the Silva case, Cabeza de Baca was deeply invested in enforcing the law and preventing further crime sprees. Like much of the U.S. southwest, New Mexico experienced massive population growth in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Anglo settlers came in droves, and traditional industries like sheepherding collided with the growing cattle, mining, and railroad interests. By the time the railroad reached the town of Las Vegas, then the largest town in New Mexico, in 1879, newspapers and political organizations formed to coordinate efforts against social changes. By the 1890s, the Spanish print culture in New Mexico was flourishing, a development in which Cabeza de Baca was fully embroiled. Cabeza de Baca was well aware of the power of the press and its potential to sway public opinion, perhaps contributing to his later decision to publish the Silva novel. As a voice against political corruption by Anglos and nuevomexicanos, Cabeza de Baca founded his own newspaper, El Sol de Mayo, which began publication on May 1, 1891, and used the newspaper as a mouthpiece for his political and cultural views. Specifically, he saw El Sol as a necessary counterpoint to the ideological dissemination and illicit activities of more radical groups, especially those of Las Gorras Blancas (the White Caps), known for their distinctive white head coverings, which in turn formed as an “activist” counterpart to the Partido del Pueblo Unido (the United People’s Party), whose action threatened social disorder similar to what he had seen with Silva. According to Gabriel Melendez, “Las Gorras Blancas were for the most part land grant heirs who were being dispossessed by Anglo-American land companies and speculators who consorted with political rings to wrench control of Mexican and Spanish land grants” and used illegal methods to 52 challenge their disenfranchisement (79). Sympathetic to the efforts of both the el Partido del Pueblo Unido and Las Gorras Blancas, Felix Martinez’s long-running La Voz del Pubelo provided a literary and journalistic outlet for the expression of communal issues and interests. But not all residents of northern New Mexico agreed with either the politics or the tactics espoused by these groups, and Cabeza de Baca explicitly viewed his literary endeavors as a moral response. In counterpoint to La Voz del Pubelo (which, as testament to mutual cooperation despite disagreement, published Historia de Vicente Silva), El Sol de Mayo led each issue with the statement, “La virtud debe amarse, no solo porque es virtud, sino por que como el sol con su ejemplo ilumina las conciencias, con su calor vivifica los corazones, el ser virtuoso consigue elevar a la virtud a los seres que le rodean aunque hayan caido en lo mas profundo del vicio” [Virtue should love itself, not only because it is virtue, but also like the sun with its example illuminates the conscience, with its heat revitalizes hearts, the virtuous elevate those around him to virtue, even though they may have fallen to the depths of vice] (M. Cabeza de Baca). Cabeza de Baca openly espoused a moral rectitude that eschewed violence and hoped the newspaper would help sway others to his more pacifist approach. Moreover, Cabeza de Baca billed the newspaper as a “periódico consagrado a los intereses del pueblo de Nuevo Mexico– y organo de la Orden de Caballeros de Proteccion Mutua de Ley y Orden del Territorio” [newspaper devoted to the interests of the New Mexican people– and organ of the Order of knights for Mutual Aid of Law and Order of the Territory]. The Orden de Caballeros was an organization formed by Cabeza de Baca candidly opposed to the illicit tactics of Las Gorras Blancas and similar groups.

53 Despite political or ideological disagreements, the Spanish language press in New Mexico viewed the press as an essential element in advocating for the rights of the Mexican origin population. In order to reach as wide an audience as possible, a group of journalists formed La Prensa Asociada, a collaborative effort by journalists and publishers to share information. La Prensa Asociada “assumed the role of guarantor of the community it served” and “had the immediate effect of enhancing the exchange of information among its membership. A network of canjes created by the association improved exchange among member editors and provided nuevomexicano editors with a steady and inexhaustible source of texts from member newspapers in northern Mexico, who in turn reprinted items from other Latin American sources” (66). Melendez notes how Manuel Cabeza de Baca conceived of La Prensa Asociada as “an antidote to the threat of social and cultural erasure” (66). The Prensa Asociada strengthened the newspapers reach and scope, and enabled journalists to mediate between the class and social differences by organizing the public in support of shared communal goals. This unified response was especially important given the hotly contested debate around New Mexican statehood. Though New Mexico became a territory in 1850, it would not enter statehood until 1912. Historically elite nuevomexicanos had controlled the political sphere and in the long transition to statehood they struggled to maintain their grasp on power. Many Anglos capitalized on the class discrepancy between elite nueovmexicanos and the working class to argue against statehood on the grounds that New Mexico’s working class Mexicans and Native

54 Americans were racially unfit for citizenship.27 On all facets of his professional and public life, Cabeza de Baca advocated statehood as a means to social equality but for Cabeza de Baca, violent protest was contrary to full inclusion within a national body politic. In his history of Vicente Silva, Cabeza de Baca used an account of extralegal violence to critique illegal behavior within the nuevomexicano community and to challenge the banditry of Las Gorras Blancas and other criminal groups in the area. La Historia sheds light on the intra-cultural class-based infighting among the nuevomexicanos, but when read within a transnational literary tradition of banditry, it also communicates a complicated relationship between Mexican Americans and the U.S. nation from a region seeking national recognition. Much of Cabeza de Baca’s narrative of Silva was based on the confession and testimony that he heard as state prosecutor from the bandit El Mellado, but the novel is a fictionalized account of Vicente Silva’s crime syndicate. The narrative is told achronologically, skipping across a bloody timeline that is interspersed with accounts of the deaths, deeds, and capture of Silva, his bandits, and their victims. Cabeza de Baca adds descriptive details to enhance readerly interest, inserts dialogue in dramatic moments, and offers authorial commentary on the heinousness of the crimes. In other words, Cabeza de Baca narrativizes the events not as journalistic account, but within a genre of sensational literature and Mexican American banditry. In Cabeza de Baca’s novel, Mexican Americans play all the roles; they are villains, victims, and heroes, bandits and lawmen.

27 For a discussion of race and New Mexican statehood, especially its relation to manhood, see John- Michael Rivera, Emergence of Mexican America (2006). See also Linda C Noel, "I Am an American" (2011) and Anthony Mora, Border Dilemmas (2011). 55 In the narrative world Cabeza de Baca creates, he shows a broad spectrum of Mexican American society in New Mexico. As such, Cabeza de Baca’s novel seems written to distance the majority of the Mexican American population from the criminal acts of Silva’s Syndicate; by distinguishing criminal from lawman, the novel absolves the community of any potential, collective labeling as criminal. Furthermore, Cabeza de Baca’s account of Silva also seeks to prevent the possibility that others writers may turn Vicente Silva into a Murieta-like popular hero, which as a symbol of anti-national violence would detract from his goals of statehood. By emphasizing Silva’s horrific and bloody crimes, Cabeza de Baca paints a clear picture of Silva as both abhorrent and aberration, an outlier to the shared values of most law-abiding nuevomexicanos. Silva’s violence knows no limits and his self-interest trumps all other social alliances, be it familial or communal. This narrative purpose is made apparent when read through a transnational literary tradition. The bandit is a widely-used and well-recognized narrative trope of nation formation in the Mexican and broader Latin American tradition. During the late nineteenth century, Mexican literature sought to forge a national culture through literary representations of the national landscape, particularly after several failed attempts at national consolidation (such as la guerra de 1847 with the U.S., the Constitution of 1857, and the French Intervention of the 1860s). This era has been categorized as both romantic and realist, but according to Margarita Vargas, “in Mexico, romanticism is primarily a response to the country’s particular political situation rather than an aesthetic rebuttal” (83). Banditry in Mexico during the period of civil war that marked much of the mid-nineteenth century had run rampant and “endemic banditry disrupted the economy” at large (Wasserman 69). An industry onto itself, banditry threatened the stability of the central state and 56 signified a failure in the government’s contract with its citizens. Attempting to make sense of that rupture, Latin American authors used literary banditry to attempt to suture divisions among the citizenry. In this category famously stands Manuel Payno’s Los Bandidos del Rio Frio, what Mexican literature scholar Margo Glantz has called no less than “una épica nacional” (Glantz 6). Published serially in both Spanish and Mexican newspaper between 1889-1891, Payno’s novel garnered immediate success. It has been continuously in print over the last century has been hailed as a prime example of costumbrismo, the novel of everyday life and manners. Los Bandidos is a vast, sweeping novel that links together a disparate and wide-ranging cast of characters around the construction of the railroad between Veracruz and Mexico City, the ultimate technological statement of liberal political ideologies. The sprawling novel centers around three bandits– Juan Robreño, Evaristo Lecuona, and Relumbrón– who turn to banditry for disparate reasons, though each ultimately confronts the Mexican nation-state to be absorbed, condemned, or punished. Cabeza de Baca’s novel fits within a larger transnational tradition that includes Mexican texts such as Los Bandidos del Rio Frio and Cabeza de Baca’s Mexican American novel works in the tradition of the Mexican literary bandit, which was widely seen as, in the words of Chris Frazer, “a narrative of national redemption” that issued “normative claims about what it meant to be Mexican” (12- 13) and “used the figure of the bandit to argue out the rights and duties of citizenship” (60). In short, Mexican “narratives about banditry, were part of a larger effort to grasp, interpret, give meaning to, and shape the reality of postcolonial Mexico” (Frazer 7). Such a reading has implications for the national narrativization of Mexican American manhood, and Cabeza de Baca used a bandit narrative to 57 challenge both the immediate intracultural tensions among nuevomexicanos and the national narrativization of Mexican Americans as bandits or outlaws. Chris Frazer sees Los Bandidos as part of a “propaganda campaign to dispel foreign notions that Mexico was a ‘violent, uncivilized, insecure, and wild country” that “mobilizes the literary bandit to confirm the ‘progressive’ nature of the Porfiriato” (60, 123). My own reading lies closer to that of Latin American literature scholar Juan Pablo Dabove, who reads Los Bandidos not just as a novel of costumbrismo or an apologetic for Anglo travel writers, but as a “critique of both porfirian modernity as well as the presuppositions that ideologically consolidated the porfirian nation-state in the making;” thus the novel offers “a genealogy of Mexican modernity” (200). Dabove argues that the Latin America literary bandit took several forms, but one of the primary forms situated the bandit against the urban (i.e. government) center. In Latin American literature, the bandit often “marks what escapes the material and symbolic control of the elite […] both the product of and the arena for the struggles between the lettered city and the various social sectors that challenged is dominance” (Dabove 6). In other words, through the bandit, the letrado “carries out a mapping of the social terrain in which the opposition between lawful and outlaw violence is the defining feature” (Dabove 7). Payno’s bandits tell “precisely the story of the collapse of the distinction between state and criminal organization” through the legitimized use of violence that we find in Cabeza de Baca’s Historia de Vicente Silva (200). While the bandit serves as a figure of opposition to state violence and authority, at the same time it functions to fashion a national identity through the absorption of the bandit. While I hesitate to state that Los Bandidos directly influenced him, Cabeza de Baca uses the bandit in the tradition of the Latin American letrado, demonstrating the 58 nuevomexicano population’s position as citizens of the United States against other outlaws. Through la Prensa Asociada, Cabeza de Baca had access to the popular serialized novel, as well as other bandit narratives of the Latin American tradition (like El Periquillo Sarniento, or Martín Fierro), and the Historia de Vicente Silva shares a similar nationalizing purpose. As a journalist and politician, Cabeza de Baca turned to the bandit narrative because of its history in Latin American nation formation and its uses in narrativizing a particular relationship between mexicanos and the state. Cabeza de Baca’s bandits help position Mexican Americans as citizens of the nation state. In Cabeza de Baca’s novel of Vicente Silva, there is no conciliatory romance between Anglos and Mexicans, nor any marriage resolution to heal a wounded (national) family structure. Instead, greed and corruption lead Silva to murder his own wife, an act that ultimately causes his bandits to turn against him. Central to Cabeza de Baca’s Historia de Vicente Silva is the conspiracy and murder of Gabriel Sandoval, brother-in-law to Silva. According to the novel, Silva, eager to leave his wife Telesfora Sandoval and paranoid about the possibility of her betrayal, plotted to dispose of Gabriel Sandoval and eventually Telesfora in order to clear obstructions between himself and his lover. One of Silva’s accomplices sends Silva a letter accusing Telesfora of betraying the group to the author, of having “declarado públicamente todos los secretos que guarda de las picardías que hemos cometido” [publically declared all the secrets she knows about the foul deeds we have committed]. In response, Silva, with characteristic gruesomeness, stabs his wife and “le hundió el puñal en mitad del jadeante pecho, un mar de sangre hirviente brotó de la herida, Doña Telesfora se agitó violentamente y su cuerpo se desplomó sobre el duro pavimento [he sank the dagger between her heaving breasts. A sea of boiling 59 blood burst from the wound, she fell to the ground writhing with the last agonies of death” (46). Silva’s violence against his kin is also directed at his brother-in-law, Gabriel Sandoval. Angry with Sandoval, Silva orders his men to lure him to a secluded area and then attack him. The bandits follow his orders, and Cabeza de Baca notes how under Silva’s leadership: “Aquellos á quienes se les habia confiado la seguridad de las vidas y propiedades del pueblo del condado de San Miguel; los guardianes de la tranquilidad publica; los que habian jurado soportar la ley obligándose á vigilar por lós intereses de la comunidad, tratando con el más vil bandido, con el mayor enemigo de la sociedad; no para cumplir con sus sagrados deberes, no para enforzar la ley, sino tratando de dar muerte á un jóven que ningun daño les habia hecho […] á un jóven incauto que los consideraba como amigos, que no imaginaba que los protectores asalariados del gobierno del condado fueran capaces de dar cabida en su corazon á pensamientos malévolos, mucho menos que tratasen de exterminarlo. [Those to whom the security of the lives and property of the people of San Miguel County had been entrusted; the guardians of public tranquility; those that had sworn to uphold the law and obligating themselves to guard the interests of the community, dealing with the most vile outlaw, with the greatest enemy of society; [worked] not to comply with their sacred duties, not to enforce the law, but to murder an innocent man, […] an unsuspecting man who considered them friends, who could not imagine the paid protectors of the county government would be capable of evil thoughts, let alone would try to kill him.] (39) 60 The author juxtaposes Gabriel Sandoval’s truthfulness and honesty with the corruption and greed of the bandits, made worse by the betrayal of their duties. Cabeza de Baca takes care to distinguish between the character of Silva’s bandits and the victims and law-abiding citizens who fought Silva’s power. The distinction between these two types sharply divides the characters along a moral binary. For Cabeza de Baca, manhood is a moral obligation and a commitment to justice and community, anathema to banditry. In these scenes, the violence is directed not against an oppressive regime, but turned domestically as an affront to the family. Silva’s heinous crime shows his willingness to betray those closest to him and his disregard for any individual or ideal outside his immediate desire. Here, banditry is self-serving and undermining the stability of the community, and Cabeza de Baca appears determined to separate Silva from literary reinterpretation as a revolutionary figure of communal importance. Silva uses a letter ostensibly sent from Telesfora to the authorities to condemn her to death. Facing death at the hands of her husband, Telesfora pleads “que crédito merece esta carta” [what credence does this letter merit], yet the letter remains the evidence with which Silva condemns his wife (83). Both the written word and the act of reading bind Telesfora to her fate, and Silva orders her to “lee las palabras de esa carta fatal para tí, leelas y averguenzate de ti misma” [read the words of the letter. Read them and be ashamed of yourself] (84). Calling attention to the literary reason for her death, Silva uses the letter as justification for the crimes he commits but when read within the genre of popular bandit literature, the novel belies a fear the written word can be used for immoral purpose. As a prosecutor, Cabeza de Baca promoted strict adherence to law, and as editor and newspaperman he also cautions against the power of the written word in shaping public opinion. 61 Although the characters are equally motivated by greed, a corrupted sense of chivalry ultimately seals Silva’s fate. The bandit Piernas de Rana (Frog Legs) promises “si Silva mata á su esposa, por vida del hijo de mi madre que yo le despacho en el momento que él menos lo espere” [If Silva kills his wife, I swear on the life of the son of my mother that I will dispatch him the moment he least expects it] (63). When Silva stabs his wife, he is immediately repaid with a bullet to the temple. For Cabeza de Baca, manhood entails an obligation to one’s community and upstanding citizenship is connected to a code of honor. Banditry occludes these qualities and needs to be replaced with a strong and centralized government organization. Cabeza de Baca uses Silva’s banditry to show how a national presence is needed to prevent the abuses and corruptions of unethical leadership. Where in popular genres banditry may exist in opposition or resistance to the nation-state, here Cabeza de Baca implies that it is the absence of the state which allows banditry to emerge, censuring the state for its absence and calling for national inclusion. When describing Silva’s modus operandi, Cabeza de Baca states how Silva, “como era el Rey de los malhechores, habia dividido el Territorio en distritos vandálicos,” and to some, “les habian designado los precintos que componen los condados de Mora, Taos y Colfax con permiso especial para traspasar los límites del Estado de Colorado” [“since he was King of the lawbreakers, had divided the Territory in vandalic districts,” and he designated to some “a jurisdiction including the counties of Mora, Taos, and Colfax with special permission to cross the border into the neighboring state of Colorado”] (93). In the absence of a strong state power, Silva structures his organization as an administrative hierarchy with groups of bandits given specific geographic areas to pillage.

62 Silva’s leadership transformed the common robber into a murderer in order to prove to him their bravery and skill. To some members of his gang, “el robo era su política, su religion, su creencia, su ambicion” [robbery was their politics, their religion, their belief, their ambition]. Cabeza de Baca’s narrative cautions against this and urges a national project can help provide the order and ideology to govern actions. Without such, banditry would continue unhindered. Earlier in the novel, by way of introduction of the titular character, Cabeza de Baca depicts Silva organizing his syndicate of bandits in a tribunal for a member accused of betraying the group. Each member of the group is given a role in the trial, “al Mellado [gap-tooth] como presidente, al Moro [the Moor], secretario, al Romo [the boor] y al Gavilan, mariscales [the Hawk, as bailiff], á Silva, fiscal [prosecutor], y á Polanco, defensor” (15-6). As prosecutor, Silva accuses gang member Patricio Maes of the crime of treason and produces a note purportedly sent from Maes to the editor of El Sol de Mayo, the newspaper Cabeza de Baca began. In the letter, Maes resigns from the United Peoples Party (the political organization often associated with Las Gorras Blancas) and joins the Order of Knights for Mutual Aid, the counter organization founded again by Cabeza de Baca. Found guilty by a jury of his peers, the gang debated over Maes’s punishment. Fearful of his role as a potential informant, the Syndicate of Bandits eventually sentence Maes to death by hanging. While Silva uses the mock-trial to justify the use of violence, Cabeza de Baca condemns the actions of the tribunal, using language such as “sed de sangre humana” [bloodthirsty], “despiadado” [merciless], bárabaros verdugos [barbarous executioners] to describe the participants (18). By depicting the bandits as performing the institutional practices of “legal” society (not mocking the judicial system, but representing an analogous version of it, albeit with Silva the criminal as 63 their authority figure), Cabeza de Baca’s purpose is two-fold. He at once demonstrates the Mexican American community’s ability to participate in the practices of democracy, a willingness to enter into American civil and political society by showing initiative and developing their own organizations. Additionally, reproducing a tribunal organized by Silva illustrates the risks posed to the U.S. nation by not including Mexican Americans in the national narrative (as a danger both to society and to the legitimacy of existing legal institutions). In the novel, Silva’s legal authority is idiosyncratic and justified only by his willingness to use violence for personal gain; when he is ultimately captured, Cabeza de Baca restores authority to nationally-sanctioned institutions. The restoration of just society hinges on the bandit figure as the representative of Mexican American manhood. The bulk of the second half of the narrative is a case-by-case account of the numerous murders for which Vicente Silva and his bandits were blamed. The events provide the reader with closure, but reinforce the inevitability of the triumph of law and legal system, through the help of the New Mexican communities, even against the violence perpetrated by Silva and his gang. One bandit, Feliciano Chavez, goes to the gallows described as having “habia sido buen ciudadano, buen hijo, buen esposo y buen padre, pero que las malas compañias le habian causado tan temprana muerte. Aconsejó á los padres y madres de familia de apartar á sus hijos de las malas companies” [been a good citizen, a good son, a good husband and a good father, but that bad company had caused such an early death. He advised the fathers and mothers of families to keep their children from bad company], reiterating the theme of corruption in the absence of the state (113). Chavez reportedly stated “May God grant that my blood spilled on this gallows will serve as an example to society, and

64 that with me, the last of the murderers are gone” (114).28 Following his execution, the narrator interjects that “the law was vindicated.” No crime is more reprehensible to Cabeza de Baca than those that betray those institutions: “Mas se hace el deber de la corte pintar la enormidad de vuestra ofensa para que el pueblo pueda realizarla y ver el peligro que puede amenazarle de aquellos que debieran ser sus protectores. Vos y algunos de vuestros complices érais los escogidos guardianes de vuestra comunidad, encargados de protejerla encontra del peligro; los representantes de la ley y del órden, encargados de enforzar la una y preservar el otro, para la seguridad y bienestar de vuestros constituyentes; portabais la insignia del cargo oficial, la cual constituia vuestra autoridad para restringuir las violencias é impedir el crímen; vuestro era el deber de velar al pueblo mientras dormia, protejerlo contra los malhechores y preservar sus hogares. Pero descuidando esta sagrada obligacion, os tornasteis en sus enemigos, malhechores contra ellos, conspiradores contra la vida de uno que jamas os hizo daño, y á quien debierais haber salvado.” [Moreso it is the duty of the court to illustrate the enormity of your [Eugenio Alarid’s] crimes so that the people may realize and see the danger that may arise from those that should be their protectors. You and your accomplices were the chosen guardians of your community, charged to protect it against danger; the representatives of law and order, charged to enforce the one and

28 Chavez’s dying statement, as reported by Cabeza de Baca, recalls Tiburcio Vasquez’s published deathbed piece (1875) cautioning the Mexican American population of California to adhere to the law and civility. 65 preserve the other; for the safety and security of your constituents; bearing the official seal that vested authority to restrict violence and prevent crime; yours was the responsibility to watch over the people as they slept, protect them against evildoers and preserve their homes. But disregarding this sacred obligation, you became their enemy, criminal against them, conspirator against the life of one who never did you harm, and to whom you should have saved.] (78-9) In the portrayal of Alarid, a member of both Silva’s gang and a police officer, Cabeza de Baca offers a bitter indictment of Alarid’s perversion of duty. Cabeza de Baca criticizes the failure of those who were “the chosen guardians of your community,” the “representatives of law and order” who fail to uphold it. Cabeza de Baca chronicles the attempt to root out corruption and at the same time is able to critique both the crime syndicate and the U.S. nation’s failure to include New Mexico into the national body. His critique of the government and the relative strength of its governing agencies is tempered by a deep faith in its institutions. Cabeza de Baca, in writing this as novel, is concerned with how the narrative is told, how Silva is remembered, the communal purpose to which his memory is put. By writing the narrative of Silva, Cabeza de Baca precludes the chance for the bandit to be inscribed as either social outlaw or archetype of Mexican American manhood. Rather, Cabeza de Baca uses Silva to advocate for the region’s place in the nation and to critique the violent tactics of some regional actors. Cabeza de Baca implicitly associates the murders and crimes of the varied bandits with the extralegal activities of las Gorras Blancas, using banditry to critique violence in absence of a just state.

66 CONCLUSION

While banditry is often regarded as an exclusion to national unity or a deficiency in the normalization enacted by national narratives, I suggest that literary banditry can serve a contrary if counterintuitive purpose. The bandit holds an undeniable place as a stereotype of Mexican American manhood that threatened to write Mexican Americans out of the national narrative. But the literary bandit also provides what elsewhere David Kazanjian calls a “flashpoint” in U.S. history. When placed within transnational literary and national projects, literary banditry as a form of manhood cleaves Mexican Americans into and out of citizenship. Literary banditry helps demonstrate how citizenship was enacted at a textual or affective level rather than as statutory right. Banditry is not only a tool to racialize and disenfranchise, but a means for Mexican American authors to assert inclusion. Whereby Mexican American authors used bandit manhood to challenge Anglo American narratives of colonialism, that is, the writing of Mexican American subjects out of national history (either through legal exclusion such as by treaties and land grants or through textual conquest (dime novels, sensational literature, etc.)), these authors were staking ground for themselves as citizen-subjects and for alternative cultural traditions at work within, against, and apart from colonial U.S. narratives. The bandit narratives admit Mexican Americans into the US nation and into norms of citizenship by making legible Mexican Americans as a recognizable manhood.

67 Adolfo Carrillo, Mexican American Masculinity, and Competing California Literary Histories

“What refuge did you find here, ancient Californios? Now at this restaurant nothing remains But this old oak and an ill-placed plaque. Is it true that you still live here In the shadows of these white, high-class houses? Soy la hija pobrecita Pero puedo maldecir estas fantasmas blancas. Las fantasmas tuyas deben aqui quedarse, Solas las tuyas.” (Lorna De Cervantes, “Poema para los Californios Muertos”)

In one iteration of the popular Joaquin Murieta legend, Murieta and his band of brigands avenge his sister's rape and murder by marauding the California country, showing the gringos no mercy, but leaving the women and children alone. Murieta hunts down the villain who violated his sister, eventually capturing him and "cortándole por donde más había pecado" [lopping off the place where the villain most had sinned] (Carrillo 38). In this particular version, however, Joaquin is not captured by Captain Love, nor is he wounded by the lawmen. In this version, Joaquin and his loyal sidekick Three-Fingered Jack choose death over capitulation and, arm in arm, shoot the other in the head with the cry, "los mexicanos no se rinden: mueren!" [Mexicans don’t surrender: they die!] (42). This version of the Murrieta story was written nearly seventy years after John Rollin Ridge’s original tale The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854) and nearly as long before Corky Gonzalez famously re-envisioned the legend in the Chicano poem “I Am Joaquin” (1967). Although the tale has been revised countless times in the one hundred and fifty years since the publication of Ridge’s novel, the

68 particular version summarized above is part of a collection of short stories written by expatriate Mexican and California immigrant Adolfo Carrillo (1855-1924). Throughout his lifetime, Carrillo was variously a politically active author, journalist, translator, editor, law student, and government consul. Exiled from Mexico for his opposition of el porfiriato, the dictatorial regime of Mexican president Porfirio Diaz (1830-1915), Carrillo would eventually take up permanent residence in California. Carrillo’s California fiction fits within a broader cultural movement that characterized both the state’s history and its entry into the national literary marketplace. This chapter traces the rise of the Spanish Fantasy heritage as part of multilingual literary efforts that address the longstanding Mexican American presence in the state.29 This chapter argues that the fantasy heritage excluded Mexican Americans from state citizenship by linking Mexican American manhood to the fantasy past, and examines how one author sought to counter that exclusion by engaging with and revising the fantasy heritage.

THE MAKING OF THE FANTASY HERITAGE

While the exact date of his entry into California is uncertain, by 1891 Carrillo had established himself in San Francisco after several years perambulating the globe. Carrillo’s arrival in California coincided with an eruption of interest in California’s Spanish colonial past. On the heels of the gold rush, the expansion of the railroad, including the completion of transcontinental routes, ushered in a demographic and real estate boom, with huge numbers of Anglo Americans moving

29 Throughout the essay, I use Carey McWilliams’s term “fantasy heritage” in reference to the legends and cultural practices surrounding Old Spanish Californios, the mission past, and boosterism (locations and events such as parades and “fiesta days” festivals) that emerged as a result of the imaginative recreation of historical California. See McWilliams, North From Mexico (1949). 69 and visiting from the East Coast and the Midwest.30 Hubert Bancroft’s massive history project institutionalized the Spanish origins of California, romanticizing the role of the Spanish or Californio ranchero within American literature,31 and statewide, California residents turned to the Spanish mission and hacienda past as both tourist attraction and a recruitment tool for Anglo immigration. This renewed interest in the California past developed from a widespread and wide-ranging effort to imaginatively reconstruct the history of the American southwest and proved a pervasive and prominent mythos in the American public imaginary, one with material consequences in the lives of Mexican Americans. While the Spanish fantasy heritage had numerous regional incarnations, its California variant can largely be traced through a constellation of three figures: Helen Hunt Jackson, Charles Fletcher Lummis, and Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton. Many historians, notably Cary McWilliams, attribute the inception of the Spanish past to the success of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Native American reform novel Ramona (1884). In the novel, the titular character of mixed Anglo and Native heritage falls in love with a Native American shepherd, Alessandro, and flees from the hacienda where she was raised by her adopted aunt. Together, Alessandro and Ramona begin a life together among the Native Californio tribes, but eventually Anglo settlers force the couple and the tribe from their lands, leading to Alessandro’s death at the hands of a white settler. Ramona reunites with her adopted brother Felipe, who confesses his love for her, and Felipe and Ramona marry and move to Mexico to begin life anew.

30 See: Kevin Starr, California: A History (2005), especially chapter five, and Richard J Orsi, Sunset Limited (2007). 31 See Cecil Robinson, Mexico and the Hispanic Southwest in American Literature (1977). 70 The novel spurred interest in both the Spanish missions and in the pastoral California society that inhabited the region from Spanish colonization through Mexican rule until the U.S. Mexican War. Using the mission past to disguise a sentimental appeal advocating for better treatment of Native Americans– along the lines of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)– Ramona’s ultimate success lay more in the reclamation of an imagined past than in evoking real change for the Native and mestizo population of California.32 Jackson’s “tremendously popular novel became for many a boosterist device, rather than a battle cry” and wily entrepreneurs quickly created products and attractions to capitalize on the novel’s popularity.33 For example, in May 1886, less than two years after the novel’s publication and one year after Jackson’s death, the Rancho Comulos was positively “identified” as Ramona’s birthplace (DeLyser "Ramona Memories: Fiction, Tourist Practices, and Placing the Past in Southern California" 894). Stimulating both tourism and real-estate speculation on a massive scale, the narrative events would be mapped onto the actual landscape; several geographic locales “became the premier sites identified with the novel, places fictional associations where [what] would become for most, more important than factual ones” (DeLyser "Ramona Memories: Fiction, Tourist Practices, and Placing the Past in Southern California" 893). The romantic invention of California’s physical and imaginative landscape as a

32 See: Susan Gillman, "Otra Vez Caliba/Encore Caliban" (2008).; for a discussion of the novel in the context of Latin America and the Mexican borderlands, see Robert McKee Irwin, "Ramona and Postnationalist American Studies" (2003); and in relation to novels of domesticity, see John M. González, "Warp of Whiteness" (2004). 33 The novel was published in multiple editions well into the twentieth century and still remains in print. Along with tourist site claiming to be the real-life location of fictional events, Ramona also spawned numerous consumer products such as perfume and beer, and businesses renamed themselves in reference to the novel. Since 1923, the novel has been converted into annual play staged at the Ramona Bowl in Hemet, California, known as the Ramona pageant and has been made into at least four films, including a 1910 version by D.W. Griffith and a 1928 version starring Mexican superstar Dolores del Rio. See Dydia DeLyser, Ramona Memories (2005). 71 result of the Ramona “boom” extended far beyond the novel’s immediate fame, lasting decades and generations. Inspired by the newly created public memory, the Spanish fantasy heritage manifested across the social and cultural landscape in demonstrations of public holidays (“Spanish Days”), in the education system (curricular changes to include the Spanish pioneers), and on the physical topography (in a “mission revival” architecture style). This imaginative recreation reaches its full cultural realization through the statewide celebrations established by Charles Lummis (1859-1928), founding member of the Association for the Preservation of the Missions (later the

Landmarks Club).34 One of the chief proponents of the Spanish fantasy heritage, Lummis worked as a writer and editor for the Los Angeles Times, famously beginning his tenure there in 1884 by walking from Ohio to his new position 3,500 miles away. Lummis published prolifically, moving between adventure stories and histories of the American southwest, such as The Land of Poco Tiempo (1893), The Man Who Married the Moon (1892), and Some Strange Corners of Our Country (1892). As the titles suggest, Lummis sought to introduce national readers to the cultures and geographies of the Southwest, though often through an orientalizing lens. As a young man, Lummis suffered from neurasthenia, that ill-defined ailment connected to emotional or psychological unrest that troubled so many (primarily middle-class white men) in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.35

34 See Turbesé Lummis Fiske, Charles F. Lummis: The Man and His West (1975) and Mark Thompson, American Character (2001). 35 Neurasthenia was thought to be the symptomatic results of excessive mental activity, the outcome of innate “powerful” manhood suppressed by excessive civilization, but was a widespread and influential cultural phenomenon during this period. See Tom Lutz, American Nervousness (1993). 72 Lummis, like his childhood friend Teddy Roosevelt, turned to the outdoors, the so- called “strenuous life,” to remedy the physical manifestations of the “neurasthenic paradox” (Bederman 91). In California, Lummis found in the Spanish fantasy heritage a means to conjoin two distinct social needs– how to address the continuing “Mexican Question,” and the need to refashion American manhood following, as Frederick Jackson Turner put it, “the closing of the American frontier.” In the preface to his book The Spanish Pioneers (1893), Charles Lummis confesses, “it is because I believe every other young Saxon-American loves fair-play and admires heroism as much as I do, that this book has been written.”36 He suggests that “race-prejudice, the most ignorant of all human ignorances, must die out,” but more tellingly, “we must respect manhood more than nationality, and admire it for its own sake wherever found,– and it is found everywhere” (11). Lummis continues: “We love manhood; and the Spanish pioneering of the Americas was the largest and longest and most marvelous feat of manhood in all history” (12). In the hierarchy of ideology that Lummis outlines, racial identity dissolves before other categories of identity, where even national allegiance gives way to a shared performative gender identity. And while his display of male homosocial equality purports to supersede national designation, in reality the fantasy heritage facilitated the racialization of Mexicans by using “Spanish” to designate certain classes as distinct from a racialized or indigenous Mexican identity. Overtly aligning the Spanish fantasy heritage with national manhood becomes a way of simultaneously

36 In curious parallel, Lummis dedicates The Spanish Pioneers to Elizabeth Bacon Custer, wife of General George Custer, who was largely responsible for disseminating the propagandistic legend of Custer’s Last Stand as heroic during the Battle of Little Big Horn during the Sioux War of 1876-77. The dedication reads, “to one of such women as make heroes and keep chivalry alive in our less single-hearted days;” the seeming paradoxical domestic imperative of praising a woman for the maintenance of male chivalry and creating heroes bears noting. 73 obfuscating the racial character of California’s Mexican origin population and of adopting a triumphant history of conquest in the service of national identity. But Lummis also demonstrates how American manhood was actively being rewritten during this period. For Lummis, manhood supplants race and nationality as the final determining attribute of character. In Lummis’s account, there is no primitive manhood to be adopted from a racial other (as we will see in the subsequent chapter of this study). Manhood’s prowess is not energized by racial superiority, but by acts of conquest and nation building; as such, it must be admired above and beyond national belonging. “Admir[ing] it for its own sake,” he invests in the Californio past a historical importance attributable to a triumph of gender that does not divide Anglo California from the region’s past, but uses manhood as a way to absorb the Spanish heritage into American Californian history. In other words, Anglo Americans can claim the Spanish conquest of California as part of their own national history because of shared qualities about manhood. Lummis decouples nation and race in favor of an outwardly more inclusive notion of gender, but Leonard Pitt has argued that during this period, “the ‘Spaniards’ went into apotheosis; ‘Spanish California’ became a cult” which produced a “patina of romantic mis-information” resulting in the “Schizoid Heritage” that separated mythic Californians from living Mexicans (Pitt 284, 94). The alteration of public memory effectively replaced complex Mexican racial history with a fictional, idealized Spanish pastoralism. The Spanish fantasy heritage further aimed to “drive a wedge between the native-born and the foreign born,” creating a schism between established residents and newly-arrived Mexican immigrants (McWilliams 53). Of its many cultural uses, the fantasy heritage’s distinction 74 between historical Californians and contemporary Mexicans hastened the implementation of racist ideologies into California society. As early as 1946, historian Ruth Tuck notes, “the ranchero period was to spawn a romantic tradition of considerable vitality” that, as “a dressed up version of the Spanish and Mexican occupation” perpetuates a fiction useful in maintaining segregationist policies in

California (15).37 Most studies of the “fantasy heritage” attribute its rise to the convergence of economic and demographic factors at the regional level; yet attending to the myth’s impact on Mexican American manhood also places the fantasy heritage in reference to national citizenship. It is a well-known and often cited truism that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo officially transformed the previously Mexican population into Mexican Americans. The 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted Mexican Americans federal citizenship, and the “enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States, according to the principles of the Constitution” (Chavez 122). The protection under the Treaty ostensibly assured the freedoms of the Mexican origin population that the territorial cession following the U.S. Mexican War re-nationalized in the U.S. Their status “according to the principles of the Constitution” only guaranteed protection under the constitution, and thus, as national citizens. However, the treaty ignored the question of state citizenship. With the omission of the Article IX of the Treaty, it remained to the individual states to designate state citizenship and according to the dualistic character of American

37 Tuck sees this social phenomenon taking place among both Anglo and Mexican communities and critiques the myth’s validity by analyzing mestizaje in the population around Descanso, California. Regrettably, she ultimately concludes that the colonization of the Mexican was a product of his “passive and apathetic” nature (100). 75 citizenship in the latter half of the nineteenth century, only the states had the authority to bestow political rights. One of the crucial consequences in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s vesting of citizenship was the intermediary status of Mexican Americans. Laura Gomez points out how “federal citizenship was inferior to state citizenship […] Federal citizenship extended the protections of the Constitution and provided ‘a shield of nationality’ abroad, but it did not convey political rights. Instead, political rights stemmed only from being a citizen of a state” (Gomez 43-4). Legal scholar James H. Kettner anticipates and elaborates on Gomez’s point, stating how the courts defined citizenship according to “the relevance of intent, residence, and so forth aimed at providing a working definition of state citizenship for the purpose of establishing diversity jurisdiction; they did not purport to create general criteria that states were obliged to use in identifying their own members” and “considerable ambiguity thus remained at the heart of this notion of dual citizenship” (Kettner 264). Consequently, the division between federal and state citizenship enabled the states to bestow and withdraw political rights according to the political exigencies of respective regions. Irrespective of guarantees made by the Civil Rights Act of 1866, 1870 (Enforcement Act), and 1875, the division between state and federal rights was affirmed in a 1973 Supreme Court ruling known as the Slaughter House Cases.38 As a result of the ruling, “while the federal government could and did protect a more

38 Where the Civil Rights Act of 1866, 1870 (Enforcement Act), and 1875 “recognize the equality of all men before the law, and hold that it is the duty of government in its dealings with the people to mete out equal and exact justice to all, of whatever nativity, race, color, or persuasion, religious or political” (echoing the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth amendments), the Supreme Court’s Slaughter-house decision (1873) made the individual states the guarantors of civil rights. Justice Marshall, who authored the majority opinion, stated “there is a citizenship of the United States and a citizenship of a State, which are distinct from each other, and which depend upon different characteristics or circumstances in the individual” (Labbé and Lurie 215). 76 narrow list of rights– those traditionally associated with national citizenship, such as habeas corpus or the right to assemble peaceably to petition for redress of grievances–, citizens still had to seek protection for most of their civil rights from state government and state courts” (Ross 200). Thus state recognition of citizenship was the cornerstone of social inclusion. Just five years before the publication of Ramona, on May 7, 1879, California revised their state Constitution that had been in effect since October 13, 1849. Of the numerous changes, Section One, Article II defining the rights of suffrage (i.e. the recognition of state citizenship) was revised in revealing ways. The language of “white male citizen” was removed and replaced with “every native male citizen.” Furthermore, for the Mexican Californian, the burden of citizenship is moved from “election” to “acquisition,” from choosing to exercise one’s rights to previous recognition of those rights. The strict legal distinction between state and federal rights, argued either regarding the application of due process or the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth amendment, gave heightened significance to extralegal forms of social control, shifting the ground of social inclusion from institutional mandate to civil society. While the federal constitution no longer allowed for de jure political exclusion on the basis of race, the demographic shift due to immigration exacerbated existing racial tensions. This concurrence seems more than coincidental, and I argue that the Spanish fantasy heritage emerged in response to these legal developments as a way to manage incompatibilities between racial ideologies and legal status. Recognition at the state level was crucial for the attainment of civil, political, and social rights and as a result, California cultural history became a prime, extralegal site for the racialization of Mexican Americans 77 that circumvented legal frameworks for citizenship. Conversely, cultural history could also provide an avenue toward social and political recognition by imagining forms of social inclusion, as in the case of Atherton discussed below.

GERTRUDE ATHERTON’S CALIFORNIA

Beginning in the 1880s, the increasing numbers of Anglos immigrated from northern California to the south, displacing the Mexican origin population that resided there. While “at the turn of the century it appeared– in fact it was generally assumed– that the Mexican influence had been thoroughly exorcized” from southern California, “in the period from 1900 to 1920, these surviving elements of the old [Spanish-] life were renewed and revived by a great influx of Mexican immigrants and the long-dormant conflict of cultures entered upon a new phase” (McWilliams 92). One of the central figures in this imaginative reconstruction of history and successor to Jackson was the author Gertrude Atherton. Atherton was perhaps the best-known fiction writer on California’s mission past, at least during her lifetime. She was “described as a ‘story-chronicler’ of California” (Forrey) and one reviewer described her as “gifted with an historical sense” (Forman). Her biographer Emily Leider informs us that by the turn of the century her career was established “on both sides of the Atlantic, and in Europe in the 1920s Atherton’s books […] were the most popular of all American novels,” while “to many, she seemed the embodiment of California” (4, 6). Much of Atherton’s fiction draws upon California history for its source material and she adopts the Spanish mission mythos to idealize California culture in the national imaginary. According to California historian Kevin Starr, her fiction was “concerned with the coming of the Americans and their assumption of

78 power after conquest. By the late 1890s Atherton’s sympathies lay with the Old Californians, tragically doomed aristocrats who represented the poetry and romance of California giving way to gringo efficiency” (Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 352). Starr further posits, “behind nostalgia for a lost utopia bristled the belief that something better had taken its place. In that sense, the myth of Arcadia’s passing served the imperialist fantasies of the California elite” that propelled Atherton and the fantasy heritage to national and international fame (353). Atherton and her stories achieved national recognition as examples of "local color," what one editor of Philadelphia based Lippincott's magazine praised the "actual vivid reality" of her California romances and the North American Review applauded as the "paradoxical union of romance with realism" (McClure 131, 34). Atherton, with entrepreneurial acumen, seized upon national appetite for regional fiction that had dominated the literary marketplace since Reconstruction. Leider suggests Atherton’s turn to California local color emerged out of “a new perspective on the way the rest of the world viewed California and a new respect for the commercial potential of regional fiction,” hoping “to turn her study of pre-American California to profit” (Leider 108). Atherton self-consciously imagined herself a purveyor of the state’s past. Beginning with Los Cerritos (1890), developing in the short story collection Before the Gringo Came (1894), expanded and republished as Splendid, Idle Forties (1902), and most fully in The Californian (1898), Atherton created an interconnected, imaginative narrative community, what Starr calls “one ongoing saga” (Starr Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 347). Characters appear in multiple texts, as the central focus in one and reappearing elsewhere in brief post-scripts to the characters’ stories, producing a triumphalist 79 state history that diffuses the violence of imperial conquest and simultaneously rewrites regional history with an eye to national appeal. While Atherton popularized a version of California for the nation in her novels and short fiction, she erases Mexican American males from the California landscape through a nostalgic appeal to a largely fabricated history. Atherton’s short fiction dislocates Mexican American manhood either by substituting “Spanish” racial-national characteristics or by killing off Mexican men. In the short story “La Perdida,” the old Californio society marry a young girl to an old man, preventing the attainment of her true love, but “such were the law and justice in California before the Americans came” (319). In “The Bells of San Gabriel,” the protagonist, Don Luis de la Torre, is a soldier in the Mexican army, but nonetheless described as a “very good-looking, this tall young Spaniard” (371). The narrative shifts between Spanish and Mexican to discriminate between the Spanish inhabitants of California and the physical nation of Mexico, located somewhere to the South. The American Sturges in “Head of a Priest” rescues and elopes with a young California woman alienated by her mother and the church. “The Ears of Twenty Americans” begins on the eve of the American occupation of California in 1846, with the hawkish Californio Doña Eustaquia berating the Californios; she decries “the men of California are cowards” and wishes “the women of California were men” (50-1). Soon thereafter, when the American invasion turns to inevitable conquest, Doña Eustaquia concedes, “all is over and cannot be changed. So, it is better we [Anglos and Californios] are good friends than poor ones” (64). Learning that the Californio men are defeated, she belabors the point, stating bluntly “I like better the Americans than the men of my own race… I shall hate [the American] flag so long as life is in me; but I cannot hate the brave men who fight for it” (69). Doña 80 Eustaquia never relinquishes her dislike for the United States, but when the American captain Russell and the Californio Fernando Altimira compete for the hand of Doña Eustaquia’s daughter Benicia (on the battlefield no less) and Russell emerges triumphant, Eustaquia “forgive[s] him for being an American” and “love[s] him like my own son” (126). The story ends tragically, with Benicia dying from a curse placed by her mother, but the Anglo male overcomes the Californio. Atherton’s short stories focus on female protagonists living under the yoke of patriarchy, and her treatment of Mexican American manhood in her short fiction seems limited by triumphalist narratives of American conquest. But it is in her longer fiction that Atherton really engages with questions of assimilation and of potentially including “Spanish” Americans in the U.S. nation. The Californians, set primarily in Menlo Park, a late nineteenth-century retreat for the affluent just outside San Francisco in the decades after the American conquest of California, follows the young protagonist Magdaléna. The Californians differs from Atherton’s short stories in assuming a much more realist tone and style. Magdaléna “dreamed of caballeros serenading beneath her casement” but the dreams “had curled up and fallen to dust” as she witnesses the decline of Californio society against Anglo cultural and social pressures (Atherton 88). Magdaléna, “an unhappy and incongruous mixture of Spanish and New England traits” (17), invoking what Yolanda Venegas has called the “erotics of racialization” at play in fin- de-siècle California that operated within the “emergent rhetoric of romance and nostalgia” (69), finds herself a reluctant participant in the idyllic indolence of the Californio lifestyle, uncomfortable and unable to find satisfaction in the sociality expected of a young woman of her class. Living alone with her father, the oppressively restrictive Don Roberto Yorba, and unimpressed by Californio suitors, 81 Magdaléna eventually falls for an older Anglo male, Mr. John Trennahan of New York, and the two begin a tangled romance. Trennahan and Magdaléna plan to marry, but before they do Trennahan falls for Magdaléna’s beautiful and capricious friend Helena, abandoning a distraught Magdaléna and promising himself to Helena. After learning of Trennahan’s lurid past, Helena dissolves the engagement and by novel’s end, Magdaléna and Trennahan reconcile, but only after Don Roberto goes mad lamenting the failed marriage. Unlike most Californio land owners, Don Roberto “was a man of wealth and consequence to-day” who preserved his fortune through careful investment in gold mines, real estate in San Francisco, and various other ventures, most importantly a bank. Yet his pecuniary success was not entirely self-made. Don Roberto struck a partnership with the “shrewd Yankee,” Mr. Polk, who came to California in July1846 as a midshipmen in Commodore Sloat’s navy and was complicit in the taking of land from native Californios through usurious lending practices (Atherton 12).39 While his “gratitude and friendship for Don Roberto never flickered,” Polk nonetheless sees Don Roberto’s “boots are a comfortable fit, and I propose to wear them,” openly announcing his desire to appropriate Californio manhood (13). As representative of the Spanish conquest of California, Polk’s move is akin to Lummis’s own valorization of the Spanish conquest. The friendship is cemented when Don Roberto marries Polk’s thirty-two year old sister “some eleven years after the Occupation of California by the United States” (15). Polk reciprocates, marrying Don Roberto’s younger sister (also named Magdaléna Yorba) and the two men establish the new

39 It seems reasonable to surmise that the character Polk is perhaps named after President Polk, who held office during the U.S. Mexican War. Polk’s arrival and rise to power in California becomes a thinly veiled metaphor for the nation’s aspirations in and conquest of the state. 82 Californio aristocracy, legally merging the military conquest of California and civil society. Atherton’s novel inverts the marriage resolution common to fiction of interracial or national romance, beginning her novel with a Californio-Anglo marriage. The unions make possible the conquest of California, yet the transcultural marriage does not resolve the cultural tension in the region nor does it make national subjects. Rather, the marriage sets the stage for the subsequent containment of Mexican American manhood.40 Through Don Roberto and Polk’s marriages, California presents the possibility for an inherited European aristocracy and its attendant cultural capital. Atherton turns to the Californio past to preserve a European cultural legacy, embodied in Mexican American manhood and represented by Don Roberto: “Fifty years ago, when the United States was still so old-fashioned as to be hardly ‘American,’ it was more or less bound together by the conventions it had inherited from the great civilisations that begat it. These conventions exist to-day only in men of the highest breeding” (242). When his daughter’s marriage to an east coast aristocrat is called off, Don Roberto worries that he “no go to have the son” even after all the years he “make myself over, and now the screws go to drop out of my character, and I am like before” (257-8). Don Roberto worries about perpetuating his family, but his desire to see his daughter married is inseparable from his desire to Anglicize his lineage. His fears are imbedded within an apprehension over losing his “Americanness,” that he should return to the prelapsarian days of pastoral idleness. Even as Atherton valorizes the Californio culture, Don Roberto is plagued

40 Various scholars have discussed at length the trope of marriage resolution in nation formation and imperial conquest. For a discussion of the family in early American fiction, see Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic; for marriage resolution in Latin American novels, see Sommer; and for post- Civil War national reunification through marriage, see Silber. 83 by the inevitability and the desirability of Anglo assimilation. Without the security of Anglo posterity to complete the “structure of his Americanism,” Don Roberto is unable to navigate within California society (101). Compounded by the death of Mr. Polk, Don Roberto is incapacitated, “afraid to trust himself in the world for fear he would relapse into his natural instincts” (348). Within the racial logic of the novel, class status alone protects Don Roberto from his “natural instincts,” wealth withstanding the threats of racialization. Without the guidance of either Mr. Polk’s business acumen or Trennahan as future heir, Don Roberto becomes incapable of managing his family and his position in California society. Atherton is sympathetic to the difficulties facing a conquered culture, but she advocates assimilation to combat the threat of racial reversion and the novel suggests that through assimilation Mexican Americans can be absorbed into the U.S. nation. In the final scene, Don Roberto “hanged himself with the American flag” which “had floated above the house of Don Roberto Yorba for thirty years” (351, 339). Where through his friendships and professional life, Don Roberto identified with Anglo America and sought to become a recognized, assimilated American, the novel denies him the possibility of national inclusion (though leaves the possibility of assimilation to his daughter). Roberto dies thinking his daughter a spinster and is overwrought by the lack of a male heir to manage his estate, shattering his dreams of social incorporation. In a desperate act of physical and symbolic integration, Roberto wraps himself in the emblem of national unity before removing himself from the California landscape. With Roberto now dead, Trennahan inherits his father-in-law’s estate and with it the legacy of Californio aristocracy, but Californio manhood moves from Mexican American history into Anglo cultural memory.

84 In the novel, assimilation is a double-edged sword in which Californio manhood becomes ”no longer so much a man as an ideal” (337). It is only with Don Roberto’s death that Magdaléna can proceed along the path toward assimilation. Though previously she was a “wonderful example of misdirected energies,” marrying Trennahan enables her to continue her life as an American (350). While Don Roberto was unable to assimilate fully, in his death Magdaléna is freed from the burden of patriarchal Californio culture and left to begin life anew with her east coast husband. At the same time, Don Roberto never lives to see his dreams of social incorporation achieved. The novel’s final image is Don Roberto suspended in death by the American flag, suggesting perhaps of the way the American dream betrayed him, but symbolizing how his legacy can be absorbed into American culture. But by writing the story of Mexican American men who possess traits of cultural value but are denied the opportunity to assimilate, Atherton chastises both American society and Mexican American men for their failure to assimilate. That Don Roberto hangs himself with the American flag serves less as a gesture of colonization than as an acknowledgment of the tension between Anglo and Mexican American manhoods. His action recalls a pervasive story from the U.S. Mexican War, familiar in Mexican but not U.S. history: that of the “niños héroes,” the boy soldiers who resisted the U.S. invasion of Mexico City. Mexican cultural memory memorialized six teenage soldiers who defied orders and held their hilltop post at Chapultepec Castle against the American army. Overwhelmed, they each were killed, but the last wrapped himself in the Mexican flag and leapt to his death rather than surrender. Of course, Don Roberto’s act is not of defiance, like that of the niños héroes, but of failure and surrender. Through the metaphor of the American flag, with time Don Roberto “might have been wrought into the tissue of that beautiful 85 delicate web,” but instead perishes a “grotesque intruder” in his very home (351). In death, Don Roberto fulfills Atherton’s purpose, allowing Spanish history to be co- opted for nationalist ends. If in the national imaginary, “the West is imagined as (masculine) epic [and] is as often dismissed as cultureless,” for Atherton, Californio manhood provides the cultural capital necessary to dispel East Coast and European claims of western crudity, but subsumed within Anglo American manhood (Goldman 48). Reminiscent of Loomis who desired to acquire the Californio heritage as American cultural capital, Atherton’s depiction of Don Roberto decouples that notion as an explicitly male inheritance. Don Roberto, whose attempts at assimilation are incomplete, must fade away so that his successors, notably his daughter Magdaléna, and the Anglo male Trennahan can carry forward the Californio legacy. The land itself, California, is both redeemed and redemptive, but only when under control of an Americanized manhood. In other words, to perform Don Roberto’s Mexican American manhood is suicide. Atherton dedicated The Splendid, Idle Forties to the Bohemian Club, a “moral, beneficial and literary association,” a private men’s club in San Francisco and devoted to the preservation of and providing fraternal alliance for men in journalism and the literary arts (Bohemian Club: Certificate of Incorporation, Constitution, by-Laws and Rules, Officers, Committees, and Members). Dedicating her collection to an all-male organization itself dedicated to the preservation of California and regional literature suggests Atherton’s collaboration in the literary construction of American manhood. Atherton drew heavily on the local legends from her home state, further fictionalizing an already fictional history, providing a localized, state-based “exoticist aesthetics” (Greeson).

86 Attending to Mexican American manhood also helps explicate how Atherton translates Old California into a consumable, nationalized product. The Californians domesticates racial and class problems by rupturing the California landscape of Mexican American males, consequently separating “Spanish as a legal category linked to autonomous identity and individual rights, and ‘Mexican’ as a racial category linked to insurgent social problems and secret, hereditary alliances with racial otherness” (Foote 97). Mexican Americans become available as landless, history-less labor force allowing for, in Mary Romero’s words, “occupational stratification” (D. J. Gonzalez). Atherton relocates Mexican American manhood into a fictionalized past, and the subsequent absence of Mexican American manhood transforms California into historical relics, a marketable, consumable product of cultural memory suitable for regionalist fiction. As The Californian protagonist remarks, “it is only the living enemies we fear; the dead and their past are beautiful unrealities to the smarting ego” (323). Atherton’s portrayal of Mexican American manhood in The Californians offers assimilation as the best possible means toward social inclusion, and the Spanish fantasy heritage enables her vision of a single national culture by absorbing the Mexican American inhabitants of the state into a national body. Her self-conscious use of local color and desire to pen a novel worthy of Henry James (with realist prose and psychological interiority) suggest a desire to find a solution to the Mexican American presence in California, but her vision trades national unity for Mexican American cultural integrity. In a different context, Marita Sturken defines cultural memory as “a field of contested meanings in which Americans interact with cultural elements to produce concepts of the nation, particularly in events of trauma, where both the structures and the fractures of a culture are exposed. Examining cultural memory thus 87 provides insight into how American culture functions, how oppositional politics engages with nationalism, and how cultural arenas such as art, popular culture, activism, and consumer culture intersect” (2-3). Crucial to the concept of cultural memory is how it “is shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning (3). Under Sturken’s definition, cultural memory works conjointly with formal venues to forge the relationship between individuals (citizens or otherwise) and official institutions. In Atherton’s narratives, state history can function to assimilate Mexican American men, represented as inheritors of the Spanish legacy since they possess cultural characteristics desirable for national incorporation, but those attributes must be subsumed to a national culture. This was the cultural environment of California during the first decades of the twentieth century. When Adolfo Carrillo arrived in San Francisco in the 1890s, he witnessed firsthand the ascendancy of this myth, and later reworked the California mission tales to organize the Mexican origin population of California toward political enfranchisement.

A BIOGRAPHY OF EXILE

Though Adolfo R. Carrillo spent over half his life in California, his formative childhood was spent within the Porfirio Diaz’s dictatorship in Mexico. Forced into exile, it was this engagement with an autocratic government that would shape his political and literary views. Born in the town of Sayula, in Jalisco, Mexico, in July of 1855, Carrillo moved to Guadalajara, the state capital, to be educated in a Catholic seminary. He entered public letters at a young age, publishing La Picota in 1877 and shortly thereafter, La Unión Mercantil in 1878, both in Guadalajara. Fluent in

88 Spanish, English, and French, he often translated sources between languages for his newspapers. As a writer for La Unión Mercantil, Carrillo's attacks on the Guadalajara government quickly drew attention, and he was forced to leave Guadalajara for Mexico City. Carrillo arrived in Mexico City less than two years after Porfirio Diaz assumed the presidency. Carrillo supported Benito’s Juarez’s Liberal government legacy, and once in Mexico City, he used the newspaper as an outlet to mount a critique of Diaz’s newly assumed dictatorship. He continued his assault on the local and national government as editor of Mexico City’s El correo del lunes, “de los que mayor circulacion alcanzan el el país” [a newspaper with one of the largest circulations in the country] (Elices Montes 233). In July, 1885, Carrillo and several other newspaper men were imprisoned for criticizing Diaz, and later that month Carrillo and fellow editor Enrique Chavarri were found guilty of “sedicion, insidia, calumnia y faltas a las autoridades” [sedition, deceit, slander, crimes against the state] (Agüeros). Sentenced to seven and a half months in prison and a fine, Carrillo’s case was upheld by the Supreme Court, which “de una vez concluye con la libertad de imprenta, fijando una jurisprudencia enteramente contraria a la libertad del pensamiento” [definitively [did] away with the right to free speech, affirming legal precedent contrary to popular beliefs] (Agüeros). Carrillo’s sentencing and its subsequent impact on Mexican journalism and freedom of speech became a central and recurring theme in his writing. Frustrated by his inability to practice his profession, in the winter of 1886,

Carrillo travelled to the United States.41 In New York City, Carrillo was a regular

41 It remains unclear whether Carrillo’s exile was government coerced or self-imposed. His movements and ability to work were certainly severely limited by the porfiriato, though immediately following his 89 acquaintance of deposed Mexican president Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, who served as his benefactor for a short time, and claimed to have befriended José Martí (Cue). Drawing on his intimate knowledge of Lerdo, Carrillo wrote a biography of the ex- president entitled Memorias inéditas del Lic. Don Sebastían Lerdo de Tejada (1889), which for many years was thought to be autobiographical. Published in Brownsville, Texas (the future site of much revolutionary activity), the apocryphal biography and purported autobiography was a potent tool to protest the Diaz government and served as an instrument of organization for revolutionary forces for years to come, republished numerous times on both sides of the border as recently as 1978. The biography represented Carrillo’s first U.S.-published text that uses literature to critique government policy. Carrillo traveled to Cuba and Europe, as a reporter for Madrid’s El Dia and for Paris’s L’Intransigeant and a law student at the Sorbonne, before settling permanently in San Francisco where he established a printing shop (Voz de Mexico). In 1897, Carrillo published a picaresque novel entitled Memorias del Marqués de San Basilisco (1897), which chronicles the adventures of the titular marquis, Jorge Carmona, during the French intervention to advocate for Mexican cultural integrity.42 In 1914, Mexican President Venustiano Carranza appointed Carrillo

arrest Carrillo publicly asserted that his departure from his home country was voluntary. See Agüeros, El Tiempo, Diario Catolico February 28,1886. However, Carrillo left Mexico City promptly upon his release from prison, suggesting that his “voluntary” departure was either a gesture of defiance or a forced statement. Furthermore, in an interview shortly before his death, Carrillo discusses his expulsion, and claims to have been forced aboard the steamship, penniless and distraught Cue, "El Autor De Las Memorias De Lerdo," Excelsior March 11, 1926: 5. At minimum, the inconsistent accounts suggest the troubled relationship Carrillo had with Mexico’s national government, and his conflicted attitude toward his home and source of cultural affiliation. 42 When originally published, the cover mistakenly read Memorias de San Basilio, perhaps intended to create the impression that the text was a biography of a saint. Curiously, Hector R. Olea published a purported biography of Jorge Carmona in 1951, titled Andanzas del marquees de San Basilio. Oleas mentions Carrillo as the original source for Carmona’s biography, but it is unclear whether Olea was 90 consul of Los Angeles, where Carrillo provided information to Carranza’s Constitutionalist government on the movements of los cientificos (former supporters of Diaz), Pancho Villa, and other rebels, as well as reported on U.S. public sentiment for Carranza. As a result of charges that Carrillo “no ha posesionado del deber que tiene de ayudar y proteger a los mexicanos” [does not use his power to aid and protect Mexicans], he was forced out of office (Gomez-Quiñones 521), Carranza removed Carrillo from office, for what George Sanchez states were “numerous complaints about his scandalous behavior and lack of interest in protecting Mexican workers” (111). His forced resignation as consul was the final straw in a lifelong struggle against state sanctioned violence. He felt betrayed by his country and the revolution to which he had devoted thirty plus years of his life. After decades of support for the betterment of his country, Carrillo found himself aged, beleaguered, insolvent. Like in his youth, Carrillo again found himself embroiled in national politics, but this time “the partisan divisions in Mexican politics were duplicated in Chicano communities” (Gómez-Quiñones 517). Caught between multiple national loyalties, he became the subject, if not the victim, of the very processes of pochismo (Americanization) he had previously combated. Carrillo often blurred the distinction between journalism and fiction and his prose is heavily laden with allegory, allusion and irony, which his readers frequently misread. His style led to numerous public disagreements and statements asking Carrillo to clarify his outspoken criticism of violence, whether state sanctioned or against the state, a position that made him unpopular with anarchists and revolutionaries. His

misguided as to the historicity of Carrillo’s novel or if he intended the novel as a strange retelling of Carrillo’s original tale. 91 termination from office, however, would again force Carrillo to reevaluate his relationship with both his home and adopted country. Carrillo would spend the years following his dismissal traveling through California, collecting material for his next literary project, Cuentos Californianos, before his death on August 24, 1926, in Los Angeles.

CULTURAL HAUNTING AND HISTORICAL REVISION: CARRILLO, THE SPANISH MISSION TRADITION, AND THE LIMITS OF MEXICO DE AFUERA

Though among the most successful, Atherton was not alone in aggrandizing California’s Spanish heritage, nor was its deployment confined to Anglo Californian writers. Many, like Ruiz de Burton’s romantic and romanticized The Squatter and the Don, put forth a “political future where the civic ethos of an evolving, educated California citizenry takes as its founding mythos a nostalgic embrace of Californio ranch culture” (Aranda "Returning California to the People" 15). Adolfo Carrillo arrived in California shortly after the publication of Ruiz de Burton’s novels, and during Atherton’s most prolific period of California fiction. In 1922, after residing for more than thirty years in California, Carrillo turned to the Spanish fantasy heritage and published Cuentos Californianos, a collection of stories set in and drawing on the state’s history. By engaging with this well-worn genre, these tales attempted to translate the state’s cultural narrative for Mexican Americans and to rewrite Mexican Americans within it. If “historical narratives are central to the formation of racial and ethnic communities and […] national ideologies are imbricated in modes of historical discourse,” reading the stories of old California multilingually enables a more complete version of how state history was the site of racial and ethnic competition (Lopez "Political Economy" 876). Carrillo’s use of the 92 Spanish past as literary subject reveals a desire to engage with state history, both for and on behalf of the state’s Mexican origin population. Where Loomis and Atherton saw Mexican American manhood as a boon to U.S. cultural capital and assimilation as the best strategy for social inclusion, Carrillo’s stories work transnationally and multilingually for social inclusion that preserves Mexican American cultural integrity. Carrillo tries to de-romanticize the mission past and inserts Mexican Americans as central actors in an ongoing state drama, paradoxically linking Mexican American manhood and citizenship through the fantasy heritage. Virtually the only existing contemporary scholarship on the Cuentos Californianos is by Francisco Lomelí. Lomelí reads Cuentos Californianos in the context of the Mexican short story, locating Carrillo’s fiction in the tradition of “la leyenda novelesca, tan popular en México durante el romanticismo y costumbrismo” [fictionalized legends, so popular in Mexico during the romantic and costumbrismo periods] (212). Lomelí astutely identifies how Carrillo is able to “rescatar en los cuentos una cultura que… estaba experimentando el opacamiento por parte de la cultura anglo-americana” [rescue through the stories a culture that was experiencing suppression by anglo-american culture] (214). While Lomelí praises the collection as “un esfuerzo literario por documentar los procesos internos sufridos por una cultura… [que] consigue darle al mexicano un lugar central en los mitos y leyendas de California, haciendo hincapié en la permanente presencia mexicana” [a literary effort to document the internal changes suffered by a culture [that] emphasizes the enduring Mexican presence], his focus on Mexican literary traditions stops short of noting the ways Carrillo intervenes in both the fantasy heritage and the cultural myth’s connection to citizenship. Carrillo publishes his 93 collection just two years before the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which caused a surge in Mexican immigration even as it limited immigration from other national and ethnic groups.43 But those immigrants were overwhelmingly admitted as migrant laborers and not seen as contributing citizens of a state or national society. Manhood was at the center of fantasy heritage as Loomis and Atherton imagine it, and I suggest that Carrillo reworked the fantasy heritage to combat social exclusion and through its revision is able to approach the cultural history essential to recognizing the continued and “permanente presencia mexicana.” Carrillo’s revisions to the Murieta legend summarized at beginning of the chapter start are particularly instructive as the performance of manhood functions as “linguistic, legal, cultural, and political repetitions-in-transformation, invocations that are also revocations” (Benhabib 48). In addition to having Murieta and Three- finger Jack commit mutual suicide, Carrillo adds numerous biographical details not found elsewhere, including the location of Murieta’s home, that he lived with his mother and sister, and the monetary value attached to his capture. Leal suggests that, “no other novelist has exceeded Walter Noble Burns [author of The Robin Hood of El Dorado (1932)] in the re-creation of Joaquin’s life,” but credits Carrillo for predating Burns in amending Joaquin’s story. In contrast to John Rollin Ridge’s original tale and most subsequent versions, the rape of Dorotea, Joaquin’s sister and not his wife, catalyzes Joaquin’s move into crime, shifting the narrative away from marital obligation and dispelling notions of sentimental politics dependent on romantic union. Murieta pillages California carefully, “robando y asesinando a los hombres y dejando en libertad a las mujeres y los niños” [robbing and murdering

43 For a discussion of the Immigration Act of 1924 and its relation to Mexico, see Clare Sheridan, "Contested Citizenship" (2002). 94 the men but leaving free the women and children] (38). Noting his differential treatment of the sexes grants Murieta a chivalric sense of compassion, but it also de- masculinizes the Anglo population in a retaliatory move against imperial conquest. Carrillo's Murieta effectively castrates the Anglo assailant that violated his sister, and he subsequently attempts to depopulate the landscape of Anglo men. Removing Anglo men from the narrative enables the tale to establish heteronormative relations between Mexican American males exclusive of extra- cultural involvement. In the fourth part of the story, Murieta attends a dance in honor of the niece of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the factual Californian whose story was famously captured in Bancroft’s histories. At the dance, Joaquin meets and falls in love with Lina Solano, “[quien] pertenece a una familia de renegados” y “su tio el señor Vallejo, fue uno de los que entregaron California a los gringos”[who belongs to a family of renegades [and whose] uncle was one of those who delivered California to the foreigners] (41). By introducing Vallejo, perhaps the most famous Californio thanks to a lengthy memoir included in Hubert H. Bancroft’s multi-volume history of California, Carrillo connects the literary banditry discussed in the previous chapter to the fantasy heritage. Juxtaposing Murieta and Vallejo, Carrillo combines the two dominant narratives of Mexican Americans in California state history, merging ideas of national resistance that Joaquin symbolized with the fantasy heritage that held the potential for social inclusion. Joaquin, the hero of Mexican American lore, loves Lina blindly but that love is misguided. Rather than write Murieta as a symbol of resistance against the U.S. state, Carrillo depicts him as a tragic (and romantic) consequence of national rivalry. At the same time, he emphasizes the importance of cultural integrity, here taking the form of homosocial loyalty, in asserting one’s place as citizens of the United States. 95 Joaquin’s judgment was clouded by his love for Lina, and he chooses to stay in California despite Jack’s warnings of imminent danger. The romance endangers the life of Joaquin and his comrades, but the love-struck Joaquin disregards the warnings of Three-Fingered Jack, who “estimaba a su Jefe con el cariño de hermano” [respected his leader with the love of a brother] (41). Joaquin discloses his plans to Lina, who betrays him to the state governor and leads to the dramatic joint suicide. Lina’s surrounds herself with Vallejo and the social environment he represents, and she is unable to distance herself from that space. Her ultimate attachment to that ideal, and her only partial commitment to Joaquin, serves as a warning to Mexican origin people not to subscribe to the fantasy heritage. Carrillo makes legible that critique through the popular bandit figure and adjusting the terms through which Joaquin enters the lore. In place of the romance of the fantasy heritage, Carrillo invokes homosocial obligation to enable a national brotherhood demarcated by shared masculine ideals. The story disavows the romance and marriage resolution as viable options for the reconciliation of masculine authority or as means toward social improvement. The dramatic climax and self-imposed death emphasizes the importance of homosocial cooperation in the face of Anglo racism as the story unequivocally states that Joaquin was persecuted “por el solo hecho de ser mexicano” [for the sole reason of being Mexican] (36). Yet, the story’s emphasis on homosocial relations also invokes a diasporic ideology of return, the desire to, as Three-Fingered Jack urges, “olivdala y regresemos a Mexico” [forget her and let us return to Mexico] (41). The hero Joaquin, born in Sonora but a resident of California, claims both Mexican and American cultural heritage but stands in contradistinction to the class of Californios here responsible for surrendering the state to Anglo America. Three-Fingered Jack 96 goes so far as to say he prefers “un gringo hecho y derecho, que una de esas viborillas de charco” [an honest and upright American to one of those snakes] that would betray his nation. Three-Fingered beseeches Joaquin to return to Mexico, but Joaquin chooses to remain loyal to his adopted state. Joaquin, a figure of transcultural power, is martyred on behalf of the Mexican population of California. By choosing death over repatriation in Mexico, Carrillo ties Mexican American males to the land, both in the diegetic present and the historical past, and places the burden of social change within the Mexican American community itself. Carrillo’s Joaquin defies the threat of cultural dissolution within the Mexican origin community of California at the hands of Anglo society by instilling a sense of collective residence among the Mexican American readership through attachment to geographic space, mediated by a model of manhood that emphasizes tight homosocial bonds. In choosing death at the hands of a fellow Mexican instead of capitulation or death by the American authority, Joaquin stays loyal to the ideals of resistance with which he was associated and serves as a proponent of fraternal allegiance. This sense of national brotherhood is typical of the narratives of Mexican writers residing in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, in which Luis Leal identifies Carrillo's fiction (Leal X). Among the Mexican exile population living in the U.S. emerged an ideology of cultural nationalism known as “mexico de afuera” in which “it was the duty of the individual to maintain the Spanish language, keep the Catholic faith, and insulate the children from what community leaders perceived as the low moral standards practiced by Anglo- Americans. Basic to this belief system was the imminent return to Mexico, when the hostilities of the Revolution were over” (Kanellos "Recovering and Re-Constructing 97 Early Twentieth-Century Hispanic Immigrant Print Culture in the Us" 441). Mexico de afuera has a long history, characterized by the main objective "to extend official Mexican domestic policy into the emigrant community" (G. G. Gonzalez 1). The ideology of Mexico de afuera enabled through print culture what Juan Bruce-Novoa has called "vicarious participation in a Mexican national project, even when that project was no longer the official one of a country going through rapid change" (151). Historian Gilbert Gonzalez finds that in the 1920s and 30s, "the Mexican government endeavored to […] incorporate México de afuera into a political ideology and social relations consonant with the interests of the ruling upper classes in Mexico," but the “Mexican state, especially in its policies toward the expatriate community, [also] operated within the parameters of an empire administered by its northern neighbor" (9-10). Under the ideology of Mexico de afuera, social improvement would always be subject to binational politicking that held national imperatives above local or regional conditions and presented countless difficulties in negotiating the conflicting national interpellation of U.S. and Mexican citizenships. Like Mexican novelists Jorge Ulica and Daniel Venegas, Carrillo utilized popular fiction to communicate with the Spanish-speaking, Mexican origin communities living in the United States. Like Daniel Venegas’ The Adventures of Don Chipote, Carrillo's earlier novel Memorias del Marques de San Basilisco uses the picaresque form to engage the Mexican origin population and advocate for “mexico de afuera” cultural perpetuation. However, Carrillo’s short fiction balances between expressing a desire to preserve cultural integrity and the need to integrate into California and U.S. society. Las Memorias del Marques de San Basilisco demonstrates the dangers of foreign influence for the Mexican expatriate and immigrant community and "how those attitudes applied pressure on families to conform to old 98 gender roles and resist the social change that the new American host culture was making imminent." But Cuentos Californianos modifies the staunch mexico de afuera ideology away from the presumption of eventual return in favor of a more permanent Mexican American presence in California (Kanellos "Cronistas and Satire in Early Twentieth Century Hispanic Newspapers" 20). Through his experience in the consul, Carrillo was well acquainted with the policies of the Mexican government in the United States. But over the course of his lifetime, Carrillo lived among the Mexican middle-class intelligentsia on both sides of the border and while only partially effective in defense of worker’s rights as consul, the stories seemed poised to make a middle-class cultural argument for the inclusion of Mexican Americans through the California fantasy heritage. After thirty plus years in the United States, the rigidity of Mexico de afuera gives way to a more immediately local concern for social inclusion. As Juan Bruce-Novoa notes regarding the exilic press, cultural objects mediate between nationalist sentiment and lived extraterritoriality; through the act of reading, national participation is indirectly but nonetheless intimately experienced. Carrillo's decision to write Spanish fantasy heritage myths for a Spanish-speaking audience offered the appeal of national participation but for a Mexican American reading public more heavily invested in life in the United States. The collection’s prologue begins with a reference to the “cuento californiano” column in La Prensa del sábado, a newspaper to which Carrillo contributed several articles and editorials. The stories were eventually collected, but given Carrillo’s longstanding work in journalism it seems very likely that at least some were published in one of the many daily or weekly Spanish language newspapers then in

99 print in California.44 The Spanish language press thrived during this period, had significant readership. Publication in these newspapers had the potential to reach a large audience on both sides of the border. Readers in the Mexican American communities of California would have been surrounded by the Spanish fantasy mythos, its developing history and consequences, and Carrillo’s stories of old California would both translate that history for their consumption and constitute their participation in it, against the frequent tendency of the fantasy heritage to erase the Mexican population. Carrillo’s choice to enter the genre signals a move toward the establishment of a distinctly U.S.-oriented Mexican American culture in the height of a period still known for its mexico de afuera ideology. The Cuentos Californianos could mediate transnational obligations linguistically, as its Spanish-language readers were still engaged with the literature of Mexico, but the content and context of the stories’ consumption located Mexicans within the territorial, historical, and cultural United States. The Cuentos Californianos produce a Mexican American reading public engaged with the rights of citizenship in Mexico and the U.S. cultural milieu, at once demonstrating the limits of Mexico de Afuera but without denying its power or relevance to the emigrant community. In many ways Carrillo's use of the fantasy myth prefigures Aztlán (the Chicano movement ideal of a transnational homeland) as a "mythological symbol of this rhetorical manipulation of the exile experience into one of homeward pilgrimage" (Bruce-Novoa 154). Somewhat akin to cosmopolitan ideals that Seyla Benhabib identifies as “a normative philosophy for carrying the universalistic norms of discourse ethics beyond the confines of the

44 To date, I have been unable to locate any of the stories in Los Angeles’s La Prensa, though the search is ongoing. 100 nation-state,” allowing the state subject to invoke universal values without the restrictions of federal or state legal institutions, Carrillo’s Mexico de afuera transnational ideology enables and informs his cultural appropriation of the Spanish fantasy heritage (Benhabib 18). Carrillo rewrites popular fiction to potentially include Mexican Americans within California’s literary economy against the ambiguity of legal discourse that enables the state to exclude racialized subjects. Carrillo relies on the imaginative construction of the citizen subject in order to remap those boundaries of civic participation. Of the nineteen tales contained in the collection, eleven are set in the mission past, seven are ghost stories or contain gothic elements, and all are located in precise geographic locations. Unlike in Atherton’s tales, women, Anglos, or priests commit nearly all of the violence in the Cuentos and several of the tales describe priests who break their vows by falling in love with women or driven by greed, de- romanticizing the mission past. The decision to engage with this genre of regional literature suggests Carrillo’s awareness of the fantasy heritage in defining state identity and his desire to critique its exclusion of Mexican Americans. The fantasy heritage sought to separate living Mexican Americans from or relegate them to the past and Carrillo’s de-romanticized mission past seeks to expose that false separation. The departure from the otherwise traditional valorization of the mission past culminates in a disavowal of mission system as corrupted. Additionally, the Cuentos Californianos assert the Mexican origin population as descendants of the mission past, largely through the narrative use of ghosts. Carrillo’s characters are, know of, or encounter spectral presences in many of the stories. The sixteenth story of the collection, "Los Espectros [or Ghosts] de San Luis Rey," demonstrates how the mission past haunts the California landscape and how 101 the past affects the Mexican American population. The tale is set at two of California's missions, San Luis Rey and San Juan Capistrano, roughly 30 miles apart in the area now between Los Angeles and San Diego. In her last confession to Friar Pedro Somera, Doña Claudina confesses of an illicit, premarital affair with Juan José de La Serna, former prior of the San Luis Rey mission who “escandalizando la comarca con sus francachelas y estruendosas orgías” [scandaliz[ed] the region with his binges and rowdy orgies] (79). The youthful and sacrilegious romance resulted in Doña Claudina giving birth to two children, who were buried alive by Fray Serna in order to conceal the secret of their affair. Doña Claudina dies, and a few years later Fray Serna is hung from a tree by the pirate Rene Bouchard, a French corsair equipped by an unnamed Latin American country to combat Spanish rule. These events fill the first three parts of the story, but in the final part, the narrative jumps forward one hundred years, to the lobby of a small hotel where several "huéspedes norte-americanos" are staying. Over dinner, conversation turns to local folklore; one of the guests, a Hollywood photographer, is determined to find "aparecidos y apariciones" [visions and ghosts], armed with “unos lentes [a que] nada escapa, ni aun los objectos intangibles e invisibles” [with photographic equipment from which nothing escapes, not even the intangible or invisible] (81). An elderly man, the only character in the section identified as a native Californian, confirms the presence of ghosts at the mission and recounts the nightly visits of two young children dressed in white and of a young woman, followed by a terrifying silhouette swinging from an old tree. The party ventures out and by sunrise, the Hollywood photographer successfully captures the ghosts on film. As the guests depart, the photographer triumphantly declaims that "muy pronto aplaudirán en la plantalla la tragedia sin

102 música que acaban de presenciar" [very soon you will applaud on the screen the tragedy without music that you have all just witnessed"] (83). This story about the ghosts of California history haunting the then-present takes as its subject the same mythic California past, but then radically reshifts the framework for its interpretation. By rupturing the narrative diegesis and compressing story time, Carrillo forces readers to confront their relationship with the cultural transmission of California's literary history. California's missions are alive in the present, though their spectral presence suggests ephemerality and illusoriness rather than historical reality. The photographer brings in the camera a symbol of progress, but a paradoxical one, as the ghosts "que fueron realidades y no fantasias" [that were reality and not fantasy] would seemingly contradict the scientific knowledge the camera represents (83). Successfully capturing the images of the ghosts, the camera at once affirms and denies the California mission lore; by converting myth into scientific evidence or marketable culture, the camera effectively commodifies the legends. In this tale, "la fantasmagoría [es] transformada en símbolos positivos" ["the fantastic [is] transformed into absolute symbols"], in parallel to the way the mythos of Old California is rendered historical fact through the fantasy heritage. In almost the same breath, however, Carrillo infuses the myth with a new legend, as the image of a ghostly woman in white and her two children are eerily reminiscent of La Llorona, a mythic figure widely familiar to a Mexican cultural readership. Though the North-American guests are primarily interested in the ghosts’ value as cultural objects, the elderly Californian is a living reminder of the people the fantasy heritage obscures. Consequently, “el efecto ilusionista habia desaparecido” [the magical effect had disappeared] and the myth is exposed as a cultural construction (83). 103 Carrillo repeats this strategy of linking Mexican American men to both past and present through ghosts in several stories. While the ghost of “Los Espectros” connects history to the present, the story “El Resucitado” recasts a Mexican American male as the ghost himself. “El Resucitado” is told through a first person narrator whose story is relayed as a found object, the purported memoirs of a Californian named José Palau who experienced the American occupation of California. Born in Los Angeles, in 1835 Palau became a priest at the San Gabriel mission, but soon relinquishes his priestly garb in the face of the American annexation. Palau explains his departure from the mission as a response to the “hombres de otras razas, de luengas barbas y formidable aspecto,” who offer him “el oro y el moro si yo, José Palau, predicaba haciendo propoganda anexionista” [men of other races, speaking barbarous languages and of formidable appearance, [who] offer gold and riches if I, José Palau, preached separatist propaganda] (51). José Palau is thus rendered the “true,” patriotic Californio, placing loyalty to place above all else. The loyalty to California is further emphasized by the romance around which the plot turns. Palau further justifies his decision to leave the priesthood by asserting that “en mi cutis había algo del celibata y mucho del sátiro en mi talante habia mas de soldado que de monje” [in my skin there was some of the celibate and much of the satyr. And in my character more soldier than monk] (51).45 Carrillo charges Palau’s self-identity with the sexuality of satyr and the martial prowess of a soldier, characteristics incommensurate with priesthood, but appropriate to the

45 In the story, “El Sacrilegio,” which is also framed as a found object, the dying priest regrets his vows and casts doubt on the value of the Spanish mission past and its ability to generate a productive future, inquiring “para que sirve un monje? Pues ni para hacer un monje” [what purpose does a priest serve? Alas, not even to create another monk] (18). When viewed through the narrative layering of ghosts, history, and survivors, the rhetorical question superimposes historical legacy on reproduction and sexuality. 104 “feats of manhood” the state requires. His realization of his true character is made clear when he meets Elena Castro, daughter of General José Castro (General of the Mexican army during the U.S. Mexican War), in the confession booth. Elena “revelomé entonces las intrigas que se movían entre sus hermanos de California para independer la Provincia, or entregarla a manos de un poder extranjero” [revealed to me the intrigues that moved among her Californian brother to free the province or turn it over to the hands of a foreign power] and after Palau absolves Elena of her sins, he then joins her cause (51). As a Californio first and foremost, Palau’s national loyalties are dependent on what he deems the best interests of the Californio people. Set during a tumultuous period of California history when government changed hand numerous times, the story is thus of shifting and emerging national affiliations, as Californian, as Mexican, and as American. Palau witnesses Governor Micheltorena’s entrance into Los Angeles at the head of an army of cholos– the mercenaries and criminals who made up the Mexican-appointed governor’s army. Observing the way that Micheltorena’s army pillages the town, the next day Palau “colgue los habitos, y ciñendo las espada, fuíme con Elena a refugiarme en la casa de Pio Pico” [hung up my monk’s habit and grasping the spear, Elena and I took refuge in the home of Pio Pico], a third- generation Californian and future governor (52). Renouncing his vows and rebelling against the Mexican government, Palau declaims both the church and the Mexican authority, choosing instead a native Californio poltical position. Palau joins an army of horsemen who, as native Californians, are “dispuestos a rechazar a laos audaces invasores” [ready to repel the audacious invaders] (52). August 18, 1847, a gruesome battle ensues, during which an explosion traps him under his dead horse and he is consequently buried alive. Emerging from the grave 105 three days later, perhaps alluding to Christ’s resurrection, the reborn Californio searches for his beloved, only to find her bedded with the American Captain Gillepsi. Palau feels betrayed by both his beloved and the lost cause, having died in the defense of California only to be quickly forgotten. Returning from the dead, furious for having lost his land and his woman, Palau plots his revenge. Donning his priestly garb once again, this time as disguise, Palau sneaks into Gillepsi’s home to murder Elena. Assuming that Gillepsi would sacrifice his life to defend Elena, Palau, “sentíame capaz de embestir contra todo un batallón” [feeling capable of attacking an entire batallion,” nevertheless proceeds with an inflated sense of masculine power (55). Palau takes on Gillepsi, fighting “cuerpo a cuerpo de salvaje contra salvaje” [hand to hand savage against savage] (55). In the ensuing battle, Elena is murdered and Gillepsi badly wounded, and Palau becomes an outcast and a wanted man. Energized by a speech “exitándolos a que fueran hombres” [rallying them to act like men], Palau equates martial achievement and manhood with success, but his blind rage only results in the death of his beloved (55). Elena, daughter of a Californio and lover of an American, trading her affection between the two, is at least partially symbolic of the state, a construction perhaps familiar to allegories of national conquest. While Elena is able to shift her national loyalties, assuming that her former lover has fallen victim to the American occupation, Palau is unable to make the transition. From Palau’s perspective, the story takes a decidedly less sympathetic stance toward Americans, but the mere act of writing in this genre suggests Carrillo’s engagement with American cultural practices. Palau, both ghost and man, priest and Californian, also represents the conflated and conflicted loyalties that Mexican American Californians faced.

106 Palau attends Elena’s funeral, where in remorseful passion he pleads to the heavens, “Perdonala, Dios, misericordioso, como yo la he perdonado!” [Forgive her, merciful god, like I have forgiven her!] (56). Whether Palau makes this plea as laymen or as clergy is unclear, but in either case Palau does not excuse his murderous behavior, but rather beseeches the heavens to forgive Elena for choosing the American captain. This somewhat perplexing request speaks to the quandary in which Mexican American national status and cultural affiliation was placed. In the story, the attachment to land and place supplants personal and national loyalties, but that attachment was grounded in a fantasy heritage of the mission past. The fantasy heritage made the performance of manhood difficult if not impossible for Mexican Americans, and at one point in the story, Carrillo openly critiques the Spanish heritage myth, stating “Mas bajo la superficie de ese idilio patriarchal, bullian infernales ambiciones” [beneath the surface of the patriarchal romance were teeming diabolical ambitions] (51). Unable to cope with the contradictions in which he is left, and left with the broken dreams of state inclusion, Palau seeks “expiación de mi crímen” [expiation from my crime] and like Joaquin and Don Roberto, commits suicide (56). Carrillo portrays Mexican American males as agentive, as agents both of historical change and of their own destruction. The ghosts of Carrillo’s fiction function much like what Kathleen Brogan identifies in contemporary ethnic literature, where ghosts “attempt to recover and make social use of a poorly documented, partially erased cultural history” and point to “the degree to which any such historical reconstruction is essentially an imaginative act” (2, 6). In California, the cultural history and its reconstruction are already imaginary; since the social marginalization of California’s Mexican residents took place in part through the 107 creative rewriting of state history, Carrillo turns to the cultural arena to advocate for social inclusion. His task is to reaffirm the group identity behind the erasure. In many ways, Carrillo’s ghosts are less about the spectral than about the continuing historical presence of Mexican American manhood. The repeated inclusion of the native narrator as or alongside the ghosts of the mission past emphasizes the presence of Mexican Americans in both historical and contemporary California. The tale, “El Hombre Invisible,” illustrates the spectral presence of Mexican American men. The story takes place on San Francisco’s Kearney Street in 1902, the same year Atherton published Splendid, Idle Forties. The protagonist is a Mexican tailor named Pepe Pérez de Perezcano, “tan trigueño, que al verle uno no sabia si era de dia o de noche” [so dark-skinned that upon seeing him one could not tell if it was day or night] (84). Engaged to a German woman named Celendina Ham, Pepe was very jealous and suspected her infidelity. One day a sorcerer from South Asia visits his shop, promising a potion that would make him invisible. Upon taking the potion before bed, “nadie la verá aunque se halle usted presente” [no one would see you until you make your presence known]. The sorcerer touts the advantages of being invisible, suggesting to Pepe he could rob a bank unnoticed. Pepe immediately and fiercely protests; “yo no soy ladrón” [I am not a thief]. Changing his pitch before one of “los hombres honrados,” the witch doctor instead promises that the potion would allow Pepe to test Celendina’s fidelity and the tailor immediately concedes. The next morning, having drunk the potion the previous eve, Pepe returns to his store as usual. The first customers come in, and although Pepe offers clothes in many styles, “tengo de todos: franceses, ingleses, y…,” the customers leave angrily, appalled by el “sastre tan flojo” [the very lazy tailor] (85). Eventually, Pepe realizes the potion functioned as promised, rendering him invisible. He quickly departs to the home of 108 his “Dulcinea,” where his suspicions are confirmed; Celendina and “un hombre peludo” were locked arm in arm. Lamenting “los malditos polvos,” Pepe throws himself into the sea, where, “como nadie le veía, le dejaron ahogarse” [since no one could see him, they let him drown]. This is one of few stories that distinguish between Californios and Mexicans. Pepe is explicitly racialized here, and his skin color acts as his sole defining physical characteristic. In contradistinction, Celendina’s “cabellera color de panocha y ojos de azul celeste” [caramel colored hair and sky-blue eyes] indicate whiteness.46 In racial terms, the two characters function as referents for Anglo Mexican relations, portrayed here as romantic betrayal. The dark-skinned Pepe tries to foster a relationship with his white girlfriend, who has “dado su palabra de casamiento” [given her word in marriage]. Celendina has promised Pepe to marry him, to convey upon him the legal and institutional recognition of their relationship. Pepe himself fully commits to their relationship, more interested in his love for Celendina than his desire for “el banco,” the promises of wealth insinuated by the witch doctor. Pepe’s romantic attraction suggests the primacy of social relations over pecuniary gain, yet he remains highly suspicious of the promises previously extended. Pepe’s suspicions are ultimately well founded. He catches his sweetheart in the act of betrayal. Curiously, Celendina’s hairy “amante” more resembled “un oso escapado del Golden Gate” [a bear escaped from Golden Gate park] than a lover. While the peculiar description of the lover as hairy carries less overt racial overtones, the comparison to a bear makes a historical analogy. The bear holds a

46 “Panocha” also functions as a double entendre here. In Spanish, panocha translates as an ear of corn or a candy made from flour and piloncillo. However, the word is also slang for female genitalia, the latter connotation perhaps suggesting how the story may operate differently for different classes of readership. 109 celebrated place in California history, immortalized on the state flag and, as part of the Bear Flag Revolt referenced in “El Resucitado,” a lasting symbol of the U.S.

Mexican War.47 The nameless man, a symbol of California’s “independence,” intentionally or unknowingly wrests Pepe’s lover away, and both Celendina and the man are oblivious to Pepe’s protests. His efforts futile, left isolated and unheard, Pepe is left with few options. His death does not go unmarked, and Pepe’s story is still remembered by “sus deudores, colmando su memoria de bendiciones” [his debtors, who fill his memory with blessings]. The survivors of California understandably bless Pepe’s memory, whose absence allows them to profit from his efforts. It is not his friends or family who note his disappearance, but those that carry debts unpaid. In the context of the story, this concluding remark implicates California for bearing the fruit of Mexicans efforts without recognition, remuneration or recompense for their labor, politically economic, socially or otherwise. The “polvo” that transforms Pedro implies more than the literal potion of the story. In Spanish, polvo carries several meanings. Though it literally translates as powder, the phrase “hecho polvo” is idiomatic for “to be ruined;” similarly, “morder polvo” is to be overcome. In “El Hombre Invisible,” the Mexican male protagonist is rendered powerless by the powder, divested of his connection to state and society. Carrillo recognizes Mexican American manhood’s invisibility as social syndrome, the result of cultural displacement. If Atherton conveniently dispenses with Mexican American men by consigning them to history as cultural artifact, Carrillo critiques the cultural relegation and attempts to remedy the displacement. His Mexican male is reminded, “nadie la verá aunque se halle

47 Around the turn of the century, Golden Gate Park housed a menagerie, including a bear named Monarch, which specificity further contributes to Carrillo’s geographic embedment. 110 usted presente” [no one would see you until you make your presence known]. The story makes available the possibility of social enunciation, the affirmation of Mexican American manhood in California culture. “El Hombre Invisible” works within models of civic participation that would only emerge in the later half of the twentieth century. Carrillo’s Cuentos Californianos appeal to the Mexican origin community to reevaluate its relationship to the state and to cooperate as a permanent ethnic presence. Carrillo’s stories present an early effort at organizing cultural belonging by creating an inclusive shared mythos for Mexican Americans against the prevailing exclusionary histories, claiming the Spanish fantasy heritage on behalf of the Mexican origin community. He uses Mexican American manhood to create an alternative mode of civic participation, citizenship through cultural inclusion. Cuentos Californianos attempts to galvanize the Mexican origin population of Mexico by asserting their historic connections to the geographic space and to cross, in Laura Lomas’s words, “the gap between the existent and the possible to stress the role of the imagination as a force for creative political change” (85). While other authors reached beyond national boundaries in crafting modes of citizenship, Carrillo retreats to the region to reconfigure citizen affiliation. Like Ruiz de Burton, Carrillo “works within existing frameworks of U.S. citizenship (and its accompanying racial hierarchies) rather than challenging such frameworks with a discourse of hemispheric citizenship” (Luis- Brown 55). The Spanish fantasy heritage as a cultural form operates as a particular practice of citizenship, outside of legal and juridical frameworks. At the same time, in the context of American literature more broadly, Carrillo’s fiction reveals his attempt to inscribe the Mexican origin community into state history in ways that do not require assimilation. Reading the stories of old 111 California multilingually enables a more complete version of how state cultural history was the site of racial and ethnic competition. Carrillo’s stories openly contest the disavowal of Mexican heritage that the California fantasy heritage attempted, with considerable success, to enact. Cuentos Californianos lays claim to cultural inclusion as a necessary prerequisite for obtaining state’s rights and a first step toward the state’s eventual granting of political citizenship. The contest over Mexican American manhood in California puts into conversation multiple locations and discursive arenas (national, regional, local) that are collectively formative in the making of Mexican American citizenship. In a different context, Rosa Linda Fregoso has stated the “ways in which fantasy heritage represented the phatasmagoric convergence of racial, economic, and cultural domination in the region” (104-5). Fregoso examines early Mexican and Chicana/o film history to make a case for the contradictions inherent in cultural genealogies that rely exclusively on Chicano movement models of interpretation that often neglect conflicting representational politics of early Mexican American culture. For Fregoso, the fantasy heritage functions conceptually “as the process of historical recovery that glosses over contradictions, struggles, and conflicts” (455). What is so fascinating about Carrillo’s works is how he uses the fantasy heritage itself as the very site to make visible the contradictions of civic participation. Carrillo, who had a vexed relationship to his home and adoptive countries, is both a participant in and demonstrates the limits of transnational cultural belonging. Is it possible that cultural products, though informed by Mexican, U.S., and Mexican American culture, may only be made legible within a particular nationally-based and regionally specific literary economy? At the very least, including Carrillo in critical genealogies highlights the need for new interpretive models for early Chicana/o 112 literary history that account for multiple linguistic and national affiliations obtaining across historical moments.

113 National Borders and Bodily Boundaries: Stephen Crane and Jack London’s Mexican American Manhood

Naturalist, adventurer, writer, and vocal promoter of Mexico, Frederick Albion Ober declared in 1884, “there no longer being any ‘Great West’ to which trade and travel may flow, it is believed that our country of the future lies in the South,– that Greater South,– in Mexico, Central and South America” (6). Ober’s statement, published in his guide to the natural and man-made resources of Mexico roughly a decade before Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the West “closed,” is indicative of a developing national concern that the mythic West, which at the end of nineteenth century still very much under construction in the cultural imaginary, could no longer supply the United States a geographic and cultural outlet for the growing nation and national attention gradually shifted toward other avenues for national expansion. For Ober, the continental and conquered West no longer provided the unexplored terrain necessary for growth and he proposes that USAmericans visit and invest in Mexico, stating boldly that it is in southern hemispheric expansion that the U.S.’s future lies. Ober’s recognition of a “Greater South” looks to hemisphere as the future and necessary site for U.S. expansion. At the close of the nineteenth century, the method and means by which the United States would expand remained largely undefined. From the 1850s through the 1870s, several filibustering expeditions attempted to establish in northern Mexico a new republic, often led by U.S. born men or by residents of the border

114 region, but none were able to seize control of the Mexico’s northern states.48 These expeditions into Mexico revealed the instability with which the border region was held by both the United States and Mexico. Frequent raids and skirmishes between Anglo and Mexicans and Native Americans helped create a sense of lawlessness and violence in the border region49 and after an 1877 U.S. War Department order allowed U.S. forces to cross into Mexican territory in pursuit of lawbreakers, “disagreements over border problems reached such a pitch that in the American press and some official circles… there was talk of a new military confrontation between the two countries that would take care of the problem by moving the border south” (Ceballos-Ramírez and Martínez 154).50 “By the early 1870s the situation in the border area had become the primary issue in Mexico-U.S. relations,” and by the time Porifirio Diaz came to power in 1876, border security was a pressing national security concern for both nations with the U.S. threatening to annex more territory (Nevins 28). According to Elliott Young, revolutionary activity along the border, the “literal and metaphorical crisscrossing of the boundary line, exposed the limits of a border that was supposed to divide Mexico from the United States and Mexicans from “Americans” was all part of a growing apprehension over the nation’s borders” (Young 21). Mexico as a potential territory for expansion was

48 Among these were filibustering expeditions by José Maria Carvajal (the Republic of Sierra Madre), Charles de Pindray, Gaston Raouset de Boulbon, William Walker, and Henry A. Crabb. See Ceballos- Ramírez and Martínez. 49 Incursions by U.S. forces into Mexico (such as those be J.H. Callahan, Col. R. S. Mackenzie, and Texas Ranger Leander H. McNelly, for example), often on the grounds that Mexico failed to defend against Native American raiding provided for in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, blurred national boundaries. Again, see Ceballos-Ramírez and Martínez, 143-45. 50 During this same period, Mexico enabled a “zona libre,” a free trade zone along its northern border to facilitate the flow of goods from the U.S., much to the ire of the U.S. border residents. Whereas prior to the U.S. Mexican War goods freely crossed the Rio Grande, beginning in 1858 in Tamaulipas, zona libres were established to counteract the steep tariffs charged by the national government on imports. For a discussion of zonas libres, see Bell and Smallwood, "Zona Libre” (1982). 115 not so distant (like impending forays into the Phillipines) as to make its population remote and, as the daily crossings of border residents demonstrated, its proximity to the U.S. made it an easy candidate for the experimentation of national policy. John Mason Hart has argued that “Americans entered Mexico well before they developed the capacity to exercise a powerful influence in the farther reaches of the world” and “the evolving patterns of American behavior in Mexico have reflected and usually anticipated the interactions of U.S. citizens in other Latin American and Third World societies” (Hart 2). Mexico, geographically proximate but culturally straddling the national border, presented the possibility for territorial conquest, an expansion of manifest destiny’s continental expansion, but also the nearest location of global and imperial domination.51 Though independent, Mexico loomed under the shadow of burgeoning U.S. imperialism and between 1895 and

1915 invading Mexico was a heated, very real possibility.52 As part of the debate governing those endeavors, the nation contemplated how to deal not only with the economic utility of imperial growth, but with the inhabitants of the respective regions, impacting debates about national manhood and creating “a deep uncertainty over whether the United States would ever be able to assimilate a Spanish-speaking population to itself under the same terms by which it assimilated others” (Gruesz Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing 211).

51 The U.S. expanded its physical presence in the hemisphere during the first decades of the twentieth century and Latin American saw repeated interventions by the U.S. into their countries, for example: the Spanish American War of 1898 in Cuba; U.S. intervention in Haiti in 1905, later occupied from 1915 to 1934; administration of the Dominican Republic’s customs house in 1905 and subsequent occupation; and the U.S. support of Panamanian independence in 1903. These interventions were colored by U.S. experience in Mexico. 52 For instance, before Panama was selected as the location of a transcontinental canal, several influential businessmen and politicians pushed for the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico; in 1914 a minor incident known as the Tampico affair escalated into a six-month U.S. occupation of the Mexican port of Veracruz. 116 Often denying outright imperial aims, the U.S. eventually opted for a policy of dollar diplomacy, the joint effort of government, private banks, and financial experts in the first half of the twentieth century to trade monetary loans in exchange for increased external supervision in the interest of U.S. international goals (both economic and political). Particularly during the 35-year dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, which nationalized industry and natural resources and opened the country to foreign investment, a steady stream of transnational traffic in people, commercial goods and materials, and capital investment flowed between the two countries, setting the stage for other forms of dollar diplomacy in Latin America.53 While for some dollar diplomacy presented the opportunity to expand democracy and economic stability and the U.S. civilizing mission, for others it was a euphemism for U.S. imperial control that placed other countries under economic dependency to the

U.S.54 Dollar diplomacy enabled the United States to enter into the sovereign territory of other nations, at times with military escort, under the auspices of economic investment instead of colonial conquest. Maintaining a firm national boundary was essential to that process and to the illusion of separation, but as the case with the U.S-Mexico border shows, the boundary between nations was never clear. Elsewhere, Amy Kaplan has shown how

53 Porfirio Diaz ruled Mexico, directly and through puppet figures, from 1876-1911. During his reign, Diaz consolidated power in a centralized government, often by suppressing regions. Diaz promoted foreign investment in Mexico and sought to modernize the country. While his policies provided for a more stable nation-state, they also caused large class differences in the population and distributed wealth among a relatively small number of people, setting the stage for the Mexican Revolution. 54 In her history of dollar diplomacy, Emily Rosenberg shows the development of a financial foreign policy as a key component of U.S. imperial growth. Rosenberg state how dollar diplomacy “intertwined with cultural contexts that fostered the growth of professionalism, of scientific theories that accentuated racial and gender differences, and of the mass media’s emphasis on the attractions and repulsions of primitivism. It was related to discourses of money, expertise, masculinity, and whiteness” (3). Bringing together American foreign policy, international economics, and domestic cultural ideals to achieve international objectives, dollar diplomacy as “a transnational mode of economic colonialism” presented a challenge to national character (Gonzalez and Fernandez 35). 117 “the confounding of the borders between the foreign and the domestic lies at the heart” of the “anarchy of empire” (12). For Kaplan, the “paradox” of American exceptionalism “is in part an argument for boundless expansion [that] aspires to a borderless world where it finds is own reflection everywhere, then the fruition of this dream shatters the coherence of national identity, as the boundaries that distinguish it from the outside world promise to collapse” (16). In Kaplan’s readings, the ideals underpinning the exceptionalist ideology collapses under its own weight; the nation’s policy of expansion and the administration of spaces not incorporated into the nation endangers the very notion of American-ness that the nation sough to export. In this context, cultural narratives, capable of and often used to sustain this contradiction, employed discourses of manhood that cast Anglo American manhood in a “millennial drama of manly racial advancement, in which [white] American men enacted their superior manhood by asserting imperialistic control over races of inferior manhood.” (Bederman 171). Yet, discourses of manhood, often discussed in relation to ideas about the west or the frontier, can also be productively understood in terms of borders and national policy. When national boundaries blurred, discourses of manhood helped demarcate the lines between Anglo American men and racial and national others. Establishing clear boundaries between Anglo American men and such “foreign” groups helped buttress claims to American exceptionalism integral to ideas of dollar diplomacy, and cast Anglo American men as distinct from those they encountered abroad. Furthermore, borders provided both a literal and metaphoric system for managing national integrity, for controlling the flow of people and goods in and out of the national body. Managing who could enter the nation, and consequently who counted as part of the national body, was 118 crucial to maintaining the hierarchies of white male privilege characteristic of the period. Political or social power is premised on physical access to the national space, and the national borders could determine who constituted and who controlled that access. Mexico, which shared a continent-wide and often disputed physical border with the U.S., held a unique position in the American imaginary. Border security, a constant and visible focus in the contemporary national spotlight, was already at the turn of the nineteenth century a point of concern. Mexicans and Mexican Americans were frequently associated with the dangerous permeability of the border where migrations and border pressures potentially ruptured the integrity of the nation state. In this light, Mexico and Mexican Americans (U.S. citizens living within the territorial boundaries of the nation but in the popular imaginary inseparable from a separate sovereign nation) were crucial for conceptualizing American manhood. Even before the massive political changes in Mexico ushered in by the Mexican Revolution caused waves of immigration that radically changed demographics in the U.S. southwest, “most Americans failed to recognize the significance of large-scale Mexican immigration for the simple reason that they recognized no distinctions between Americans of Mexican descent and more recent immigrants from Mexico” (Gutierrez Walls and Mirrors 40). Failing to distinguish between Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, most Americans viewed both Mexican origin groups as foreign, irrespective of longstanding and often generational roots and legal citizenship in the territorial United States. Consequently, the conflation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in cultural production blurred the line between the national and the international.

119 Cultural depictions, whether in imaginary literature or in journalistic accounts, regularly treated the Mexican origin population as exotic interlopers, as domestic foreigners or orientalized residents. The general inability of the Anglo American population to discern between migrants, immigrants, and U.S. nationals further contributed to the sense that Mexican Americans existed both within and without U.S. national and cultural jurisdiction. Because of this conflation and the USAmerican desire to “define and protect the lines that separated the middle classes from frightening social groups literally adjacent to them,” Mexicans and Mexican Americans were particularly suitable subjects against which American manhood was contested (Barrish 19, 18). Waging imaginative battle against a sovereign nation state, testing American masculinity against Mexican men helped some American men imagine themselves as players in a global imperial game. This tendency is explicit in the writings of two of the most successful authors of this period– Stephen Crane and Jack London– who looked to Mexico and Mexican American manhood to build a cultural narrative about U.S. foreign policy. Unlike the romances discussed in the previous chapter, Crane and London’s writings are exemplary of Realism or Naturalism, genres with what Denise Cruz has noted

“characteristically hyperbolic masculinity” (488).55 Crane and London’s short stories can be understood in the context of emerging dollar diplomacy as antecedent cultural narratives or responses to the nation’s burgeoning international aims. These authors’ Mexican stories are typically understood within the context of domestic racial tropes, but they also reveal an anxiety about nationhood and of the

55 Though the genres of realism and naturalism are often associated with men, recent critics have shown how women figure centrally to the genres and how feminist claims were instrumental in shaping them. See, for example, Jennifer Fleissner, "The Biological Clock" (2006). 120 boundaries necessary for national manhood on a global stage. Mexico and Mexican American manhood provided a formative space in preparing U.S. manhood for global imperialism because of its focus on defined borders and boundaries between individuals. In both writers fiction about Mexico, the male protagonists map out anxieties over national boundaries onto the physical body, and in doing so, Anglo manhood maintains strict boundaries between itself and the foreign other that allows the freedom to move about in international spaces without danger to national male identity. In Crane’s “One Dash–Horses,” the protagonist preoccupies himself with the need to establish boundaries between himself and his Mexican antagonist, a concern that ultimately determines his survival; in London’s “The Mexican,” the protagonist learns to circumvent the boundaries between bodies, relaying an apprehension over migration and the movement of bodies into and out of the United States, one that helps explain London’s departure from socialist politics. The fixation on borders reveals a cognizance of the dangers that colonialism could have to American character. Both stories examine the risks of a nation that no longer has secure, definite boundaries to demarcate both citizenship and manhood. Mexican American manhood could provide a cultural space through which to regulate the influx of foreign bodies and offer strategies for U.S. expansion across the hemisphere and beyond.

STEPHEN CRANE’S SHORT FICTION AND SOUTH/WESTERN FRONTIER

Writing from Galveston, Texas, at the United States’ southern edge, Stephen Crane states that those “travelers tumbling over each other in their haste to trumpet the radical differences between Eastern and Western life have created a generally

121 wrong opinion” and that “it is this fact which makes men sometimes grab tradition in wonder… this fact which has kept the weeping march of the West from being chronicled in any particular true manner” (31). Ever the ironist, Crane deflates the Western myth even as he sets off on his own excursion out west. The American West was an integral part of the national imaginary, and some of Crane’s best known and highest regarded fiction depended on popular conceptions of the west. In stories like “Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “Blue Hotel,” Crane’s use of the tropes of the Western enabled him “to manipulate his audience’s preconceptions concerning basic Western materials, [which] leads to the undermining of conventional forms rather than their fulfillment” (Monteiro 158). Crane’s tales of adventure confronted the West as both imaginative construct and necessary delusion so that, in Frank Bergon’s words, “the mythic showdown of the Wild West provided Crane with the intense moments that were his favorite subject, and the circumstances of their occurrence released the basic primitive emotions and archetypal realizations that social conventions kept in the closet” (Bergon 111). The American West, so closely associated with the frontier, was to provide the space for an overly civilized male culture to connect with some latent or primitive manhood. For instance, “The Blue Hotel’s” Swede, full of bravado, heads West to fulfill a fantasy of conflict and manly confrontation and in “Bride,” Sheriff Potter and Scratchy Wilson’s expected encounter should result in a manly contest of violence; yet, in both cases, Crane undermines the reader’s expectations. The Swede dies unexpectedly and without chance for manly battle and Potter’s standoff ends peacefully. In contrast, Gail Bederman’s discussion of Teddy Roosevelt and his historical multivolume study The Winning of the West, shows how to some “the American West [was] a crucible in which the white American race was forged 122 through masculine racial conflict” (178). Painting himself the “Manly frontiersman,” Roosevelt “tell[s] a story of racial origins in which the hero, the manly white American race, proves its manhood by winning a series of violent battles with inferior, savage Indians… Only virile, masculine combat could establish whose men were superior and deserved to control the land and its resources” (180). Roosevelt’s West was a space for racial triumph and manly prowess, but Crane dismantles such notions through irony and plot inversion, revealing the mythic West as a literary construct. Mexico itself was inseparable from American notions of the frontier. After all, the majority of the territory considered the “frontier” was previously part of the

Mexican state, and the Mexican question was inseparable from Manifest Destiny.56 By the 1890s, “‘Frontier’ became primarily a term of ideological rather than geographical reference” and after the “closing” of the American frontier, Mexico provided an accessible frontier space, geographically proximate, culturally present, yet already bound by geopolitical boundaries that rendered it separate from the U.S. nation (Slotkin 4). In another essay from his Western adventure, Crane, heading southbound by train from Texas toward Mexico City and accompanied by an “archaeologist” and a “capitalist,” writes of their “invasion, in which they were both facing the unknown,” (43). Though shrewdly omitting himself as participant in the “invasion,” Crane goes uninformed and ill-equipped to the Mexican capital, and acknowledges that his “train again invaded a wilderness of mesquite. The travelers had somehow expected a radical change the moment they were well across the Rio Grande. On the contrary, southern Texas was being repeated” (45). Though not a

56 John O’Sullivan coined both terms in the 1840s when considering the United States’ expanding and imperial role on the continent. 123 conspicuous advocate of southern “invasion,” Crane’s observation at minimum reveals a complicity in U.S. involvement in Mexico. Though the terms of that involvement are yet to be determined, Crane’s comments acknowledge the arbitrariness of borders between the two countries (a lack of “radical change”) but also the possibility that the history of southern Texas was and could be “repeated.” To research these themes, Crane traveled to places of cultural, class, and imperial conflict outside his native East Coast– out West to Texas and Kansas, and to Mexico, Greece, and Cuba– fictionalizing theses experiences and reporting on his travels for several newspapers of the period, including the New York Tribune, William

Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, and Scribner’s.57 In January 1895, Crane headed out West on assignment from the Irving Bacheller Syndicate to Nebraska, Arkansas, New Orleans, Texas, and then overland to Mexico City on which he wrote the essays discussed above. 58 Some of Crane’s most enduring short fiction was drawn from the experiences during this trip and four short stories explicitly draw on his time in Mexico: “One Dash-Horses” (1896), “A Man and Some Others” (1897), “The Wise Men: A Detail of American Life in Mexico” (1898), and “Five White Mice” (1898), all of which were reprinted in the collection The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure, published by Doubleday & McClure in April 1898. The stories were published during the height of el porfiriato,

57 Mexican Americans appeared in newspaper accounts side by side creative fiction, either in short stories or serialized writing, an exemplary instance of what David Spurr, in a different context, has called “literary journalism ... the complex layering of figurative language that conventionally belongs to imaginative literature” for nonfiction, the adoption of narrative techniques from one literary form for the other (9, 3). Spurr argues that many authors during this period blurred the boundaries between journalistic reporting and literary fiction in ways that contributed to a “rhetoric of empire” complicit in the exercise of colonial power. See also: Michael Robertson, Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature (1997). 58 For a thorough biography of Crane, see Wertheim and Sorrentino, Crane Log (1994). 124 a period of intense American investment in the nationalized Mexican economy and the sale of mineral and natural resources to foreign development. In particular, U.S. interests invested in the Mexican railroad industry as a means of connecting Mexican natural resources to U.S. centers of commerce, in some way making Mexico an extension of Crane’s engagement with the Western genre.59 Crane’s travels through the American West and through Mexico were crucial for his understanding of confrontation in frontier fiction, as well as his critiques of the genre. “One Dash– Horses,” whose title alludes to a throw of the dice, follows the adventure of an American, Richardson, who finds himself somewhere in the (presumably) northern Mexican frontier. The story is divided in two parts: the first recounts Richardson’s night in a small rural tavern and the second is a harried flight from a group of bandits that pursue him. Each part centers on Richardson’s dread of being attacked or overtaken by his Mexican rivals. As night falls, Richardson and his guide José happen upon a small village where he hopes to lodge for the night. José arranges their board, and the American and his servant settle in. As Richardson drifts off to sleep, his rest is disturbed by a raucous group of men carousing in the adjoining room. Richardson, fixating on a blanket hanging flat on a concealed door between the rooms, readies himself for trouble. Overhearing the drunken men plot his robbery and possible murder, Richardson spends a sleepless and terrifying night preparing for the impending confrontation with the bandits. The violence is delayed and Richardson and José stealthily depart just before dawn, fleeing eastward on their horses. The highwaymen mount a chase, and the protagonists, teetering on the

59 In 1884, just eleven years before Crane’s Western trip, the railroad connecting Mexico City was complete, enabling a steady movement of people and resources between the two countries, but introducing problems of “modernity” like those illustrated in Frank Norris’s The Octopus or Ruiz de Burton’s Squatter and the Don. 125 edge of fear-induced paralysis, ride wildly in search of safety. This story offers many of the narrative features common to Western fiction: a man roaming the frontier, the confrontation with outlaws, a horse chase, and the eventual rescue by lawmen. This story also offers many thematic similarities to Crane’s other short fiction– man’s realization of a world outside of his control and his inability to act in the face of danger. Like in much of Crane’s fiction, “conflict is a condition” that drives the narrative and here, “the significance in Crane of the outsider” trying to overcome his ignorance is a central feature of the plot (Halliburton 38). However, here the conflict is deferred, and much of the story instead contemplates the boundaries erected and eroded between the characters. The crisis begins when Richardson is startled from his sleep by a “badly- played” guitar,” where “in this land of Mexico… the romance of the instrument ascends to us like a perfume” (112). Mixing the music and titillating perfume of the foreign, Crane tempts the reader by gesturing to generic conventions of the romance, suggesting the allure of an exotic Mexico. Richardson’s purpose in Mexico is unstated, although José at one point describes him as “an American señor of vast wealth, who was the friend of almost every governmental potentate within two hundred miles,” the hyperbolic characterization might be mere exaggeration (135). But for the realist Crane, the romantic Mexico “was groaning and whining like a badgered soul,” unable to sustain such fantasies of powerful alliances, and the subsequent narrative insists upon communicating the hazards of international intervention (112). Richardson grows increasingly nervous as the noise from the adjacent room escalates, and in his fear that the drunken men will attack, he “prepared for sudden disaster,” waiting, longingly “dreaming for his far and beloved North” (113). Richardson’s fear builds, squeezing out the “slow and careful process 126 of thought” and replacing reason with an “instinctive comprehension” (113). Preparing himself to face his mortality, Richardson willingly or not must rely upon his more animal instincts to survive the impending conflict. In fact, the story seems to suggest that the titular horses, particularly Jose’s black horse, called upon to make their “life’s sacrifice” by “these two men who cried to him in the universal tongue,” better understand the consequences of such rivalries (133).60 Richardson’s progression from contemplative reason to primitive reaction evokes themes familiar to U.S. readers about the sources of and validation of manhood, common to the genres of naturalism. But here, the frontier is not the American West, but sovereign international territory, shifting the framework for the interpretation. Richardson’s purpose for travelling through the Mexican interior is never made apparent, but his journey, made for leisure or with the intent of investing in Mexican resources, leads him deep into “the wilderness,” linguistically isolated, and removed from the scope of his knowledge (108). Throughout the story, Richardson’s ability to survive depends on his rigorous defense of the space between his physical body and that of the attacking Mexicans, of controlling the distance between himself and the looming threat. The story is about maintaining boundaries, the spaces between Anglo and racialized men, and the threat that imperial expansion presents to national manhood. “One Dash–Horses” critiques the romanticization of violence that accompanies Western genre fiction and ideas of “rugged individualism” that predominated U.S. notions of

60 In his journalistic reports, Crane states how “the countenance of a donkey expresses all manly virtues even as the sunlight expresses all colors” because he, “born in slavery” to labor, “reasons not at all,” relying solely on his physical and instinctual capabilities (Stephen Crane in the West and Mexico 53). In many ways, this statement speaks to Crane’s treatment of Richardson’s horse later in the story which somehow embody more “manly virtues” than men themselves.

127 national manhood, but Crane offers a vision of national protectionism to buttress American character abroad. Over the course of the evening, a "fat, round-faced Mexican, whose little snake-like mustache was as black as his eyes, and whose eyes were black as jet," flings the dividing blanket aside and bursts suddenly and drunkenly into Richardson’s room (115). Richardson and the Mexican “contemplated each other,” affixed in their position, the American crouched with his finger on the trigger and the Mexican “posed in the manner of a grandee” (115). The standoff comes to a standstill (Crane would later recycle this image in “Five White Mice”) and the story focuses on the characters’ physical and mental responses to the circumstances. Richardson, reduced to his “animal” instincts, tries desperately to control the situation while grappling with a near-debilitating fear (116). The “long horror” slowly converts his fear into “a fierce hatred– a hatred that made him long to be capable of fighting all of them, a hatred that made him capable of fighting all of them” (117). Toeing the line between savage aggression and realist incapacitation, the narrative suggests how the primitive impulse to fight distorts the perception of his abilities. There is no savage power to be found here, only the very real possibility of anonymous death in a land far removed from the urbanity of his “beloved North.” Outnumbered and alone, with limited understanding of the language, Richardson struggles to suppress his panic, to separate the anxiety of his mind with his outward appearance; his fear, rather than trigger a primitive impulse capable of action, debilitates him. The bandits turn their hostility to José to elicit a response, but Richardson just “looked on impassively. Under the blanket, however, his fingers were clinched as rigidly as iron upon the handle of his revolver” (118).

128 It is precisely the failure to act– the paralysis accompanying his lack of supposed masculine instinct– that saves him. While he struggles internally, outwardly he appears calm. Richardson remains frozen, transfixed and immobile, letting the Mexican posse wonder whether “he was a great fighter; or perhaps he was an idiot” (116). Richardson’s affected manhood is effective and none of the Mexicans dares challenge him since they cannot judge whether Richardson was a fighter or a coward, but the reader is made privy to Richardson’s paralyzing fear. Richardson’s struggle between fight and flight, between reason and instinct, debunks any notions of courage as the saving characteristic of American manhood. Crane’s story, published in 1896, sits on the hinge of a shift in U.S. notions of manhood and the story marks the transition from manliness to rugged individualism as the defining characteristics of U.S. manhood. In the 1890s authors deployed discourses of civilization to represent the superiority of white, Anglo manliness, those discourses increasingly shifted to draw upon the so-called primitive as the source for “true” manhood. Aggressive, sexualized masculinity was supposed to fuel white dominance over racial groups, but that virility needed to be checked by some means lest the primitive overtake the civilized. The conflict between civilization and savagery, here rendered between Richardson and the Mexican, is resolved when the Mexican retreats behind the blanket dividing the two rooms, reinstating the boundaries between them. Richardson affixes his dread to a blanket that hangs between the two rooms. “Being of the opinion that it concealed a door,” Richardson looks to the blanket as a representation of the boundary between himself and danger (113). Rendered a concealed door, the blanket is a porous border that mediates his relationship to the drunken crowd in the next room by demarcating the zones of comfort and power, of 129 ownership, both physically and symbolically. Throughout, Richardson gazes at the blanket as both physical and symbolic divider between himself and the mustachioed Mexican that threatens him. By veiling the threat that lies beyond, the blanket also poses a real risk to his security, as he meditates at length: "The blanket over the door fascinated him. It was a vague form, black and unmoving. Through the opening it shielded was to come, probably, menace, death. Sometimes he thought he saw it move. As grim white sheets, the black and silver of coffins, all the panoply of death, affect us because of that which they hide, so this blanket, dangling before a hole in an adobe wall, was to Richardson a horrible emblem, and a horrible thing in itself" (121). The blanket becomes larger than life, portends death and decay, but integral to its ontological weight the blanket controls the movement of bodies between the rooms; it mediates the influence that one side will have on the other. Crane breaks the narrative frame to address directly the American reader as to the dangers of what “affect[s] us because of that which they hide,” intimating a shared national concern for firmly establishing perimeters between the “us” and others. Richardson fears the blanket not because of what it is, but because of what lies behind it, of the secrets it keeps, the unknown surge that lingers, threatening to make its presence known. Discerning the blanket as provisional barrier, it becomes a “horrible thing in itself” and the New-Yorker Richardson, speaking only “lame Mexican” (108) and unable to separate himself from his native “North,” maintains a constant vigil to subdues the potential menace. The importance of the blanket in maintaining Richardson’s bodily integrity is further emphasized by Crane’s emphasis on another covering, the serape that Richardson wears. Attempting to fit in, Richardson assumes the dress and habit of 130 the local population by wearing a serape “hung over his left shoulder, furled into a long pipe of cloth, according to a Mexican fashion” (110). Crane explains the utility of such garb, with the “blanket about him-first across his chest under his arms, and then around his neck and across his chest again, this time over his arms, with the end tossed on his right shoulder. A Mexican thus snugly enveloped can nevertheless free his fighting arm in a beautifully brisk way, merely shrugging his shoulder as he grabs for the weapon at his belt. They always wear their serapes in this manner” (110-11). Worn in this manner, the serape allows for the complete protection of the body while still allowing for movement beneath and beyond the enclosure. Enveloped within the blanket, the body is contained, separated from the outside world and the potential threats the outside poses, yet remains poised to respond to those challenges in a “beautifully brisk way.” Like the blanket over the door, the serape separates the body from the exterior, but it also allows the body to be simultaneously contained and responsive (that is, open and permeable) to the challenges of an external world. The blanket is an essential component in Richardson’s ordering of the external world and the attention to this particular form of dress parallels the consideration Crane gives to the blanket dividing the two rooms. The serape bestows on Richardson a sense of control, of immanent jurisdiction of self when confronted by external others. While on the surface Richardson “looked on impassively,” “under the blanket, however, his fingers were clinched as rigidly as iron upon the handle of his revolver” (118). Like a second skin, the blanket staves off the violence lurking beneath, and it partitions outward appearance from psychological interiority. The blanket conceals the internal struggle Richardson faces, suppressing panic, and when Richardson confronts the belligerent Mexican, 131 the blanket allows his interior fear to become “lost in the folds of his blanket” (115). Concealing the nervousness that such excursions into the frontier ostensibly remedied, the blanket enables a façade of self-control, courage, and strength that the adventurer represented.61 Richardson’s fixation on and need to control the “blankets” between himself and his rival is thus rendered as a question of manhood. As a source of authentic, primitive manhood, Mexican masculinity could guide and supply Anglo American men. By comparison, on Crane’s train to Mexico City a man “folded in his serape… justified to them all their preconceptions. He was more than a painting. He was the proving ground of certain romances, songs, narrative. He renewed their faith” (“Stephen Crane in Mexico: I,” 45-6). More than a static painting, this living serape-covered figure promised to satiate the American’s need for a “proving ground” on which to test its narrative constructions, or at least represented the country’s potential to do so. Yet in “One Dash– Horses,” previous events and education no longer function as structuring factors for Richardson’s experience. Aside from the escapist characterization of Mexico as a place free from “civilized” rules of social engagement, the encounter fundamentally challenges

Richardson’s survival and subjectivity.62 While the cloak of American nationality no longer shields him from impending mortality, Richardson’s physical covering helps define himself against encroaching threats.63 Through the serape, he attempts to mimic not just the fashion of the local Mexican inhabitants, but to adopt the

61 Expeditions out west were often prescribed as cures for male neurasthenia. See Lutz. 62 Crane’s reports from Mexico are travel narratives bordering on guides and tout Mexico City as a “place of joy,” if one comes prepared having given “a proper number of hours each day to the study of guide books” (Stephen Crane in the West and Mexico 57), a preview to such works as Charles Macomb Flandrau’s Viva Mexico! (1912) published just after the turn of the century. 63 Richardson’s use of the blanket recalls Frederick Jackson Turner’s “garments of civilization” that the American had to shed in order to adapt to life of the frontier. Here, in lieu of the “hunting shirt and moccasin,” Richardson relies on the serape (Significance of the Frontier in American History). 132 necessary habits of survival in the frontier. The adaptation is difficult, and as night creeps on and though the “dread blanket did not move,” Richardson “felt in his blood the effect of this cold dawn” (122). The promise of savage, innate manhood as saving grace for American manhood remains unsatisfactory and potentially deadly, leaving him both vulnerable and disconnected. The narrative use of the blanket, and the narrator’s preoccupation with it, reflects an anxiety over Anglo American male self- integrity. The foreign or international is not only a spectacle of manhood rehearsed for a domestic U.S. audience, but also a warning against the potential effect of relying on the international to determine national manhood. Questions of national sovereignty and foreign policy are reflected in the blankets used to manage the sovereignty of Richardson’s body. Just as the blanket is essential for Richardson to maintain his self-sovereignty, it is at the same time a practice borrowed from the local inhabitants. Richardson must adopt the blanket in order to survive, but the blanket then becomes the very thing that separates him from the Mexicans, suggesting that strict regulation of borders is equally crucial to maintaining national sovereignty. The blanket is all that lies between Richardson and the threatening Mexican bandit, and he carefully maintains his focus on and distance from it, careful not even “to touch it with his finger” (121). At the same time, the blanket is his point of escape and must remain permeable since borders are not “meant to completely block passage but rather to regulate and manage the flows of people, capital, and ideas” (Young 6). The story thus urges the importance of maintaining and managing the boundaries between Anglo American manhood and racial or national others to preserve national character. Published on the eve of the Spanish American War, and anticipating the national debate over the U.S. presence in Mexico, Mexican manhood 133 reflects Anglo American manhood’s need to preserve the boundaries between itself and racial or national others as the U.S. becomes a world power. Richardson leaves his homeland and comes very near losing his life and self-possession; in Crane’s critique of the Western, rugged individualism cannot help him in a global world outside the U.S. boundaries. While the blanket designates the boundaries between Richardson and approaching Mexican American manhood, delimiting the boundaries of self- sovereignty also suggests the ways that permeable borders caused an anxiety of normative Anglo manhood. The border requires strategy, skillful negotiation and management to contain and utilize that which lies on the other side. The tavern, like the frontier, provides a space absent of any institutional authority, and for Crane, Anglo American manhood fixates on “the blanket which hid the strategic door” to revitalized manhood (120). As the story moves from the interiority of the tavern to the open landscape, there is no heroic against-the-odds shootout, but rather a calculated and panicked retreat. Richardson and José take to their horses at first light, fleeing quietly lest they disturb their sleeping attackers. Knowing that “his friends the enemy had not attacked him when he had sat still and with apparent calmness confronted them, they would certainly take furiously after him now that he had run from them-now that he had confessed to them that he was the weaker” and had dislodged his blanket, Richardson must redouble his efforts to assert his integrity and his survival (128). Desperately fleeing, Richardson sees the advancing mob as “crimson serapes in the distance [that] resembled drops of blood,” reminding himself of the blankets and the threat they conceal (132). On horseback, Richardson acts upon the instinctual need to guard the spaces between him and the other men. Richardson, “too frightened himself to do anything 134 but hate,” demands that José ride fifty-paces behind him, essentially creating a buffer zone between himself and the pursuing Mexican posse (129). Richardson, fresh from his lessons indoors with the blankets, senses the need to establish a boundary, uses José to inhibit the approaching threat. Richardson surveys the land, and consequently “resolve[s] in his rage that at any rate he was going to use the eyes and ears of extreme fear to detect the approach of danger; and so he established his servant as a sort of an outpost” (130). José has played the buffer before, having undergone a thrashing at the hands of the Mexicans wanting to solicit a response from Richardson. José "had been educated in the Rio Grande country," a reference to the events surrounding the U.S. Mexican War and presumably the harsh policing of the border by agents such as the Texas Rangers, and by implication had learned of U.S. colonial desires and the consequences on the individual for noncompliance (130). Despite a feeble protest, José accedes to Richardson’s demand. Richardson’s attempt to create borders in this foreign land is ultimately resolved by the arrival of a stronger state presence. Like in “Five White Mice,” Richardson imagines the moment of his capture, but as he does so José discovers a means to safety. In the near distance, a “detachment of rurales,” the federally authorized country police force, approaches (134). The rurales function as both “the law and the arm of it-a fierce and swift-moving body that knows little of prevention, but much of vengeance,” and Richardson quickly realizes his deliverance in their arrival (135). The rurales disperse the approaching mob and Richardson and José are saved. The rurales that Richardson and José encounter would later symbolize the Diaz’s regimes authoritarian and often violent practices, though in the early 1890s, to an American unfamiliar with Mexican culture or politics, the possibility of revolution was remote and Diaz’s policies favored U.S. investment and intervention 135 in Mexico. Crane’s writing, however, forebodes of potential pitfalls in U.S. involvement in Mexico. As David Halliburton keenly observes in his study of aestheticism in Crane’s fiction, “in the West, Crane could see movement in all its aspects against an immediate physical horizon and against a more remote but recognizable national horizon as well” (223). For Halliburton, the West provided Crane the backdrop to write stories of movement– people moving, meeting, fighting, and of the social interactions that result from movements– and it is the movement in Crane’s that story would have signaled to his readers the need to find alternative strategies for entering into economic and foreign policy across the hemisphere and globally. Richardson’s excursion in Mexico may have recalled to Crane’s contemporary readers the filibuster attempts into Latin American in the second half of the 19th century, but his story reminds them of the other side to that equation. Whether Richardson intends to invest, to foment revolution, or to travel leisurely, the cultural ramifications of entering a foreign country have repercussions on national manhood that the story tries to manage through the use of metaphoric borders. “One Dash–Horses” illustrates the troubling source of manhood that Mexico, as the new frontier of a nation on the verge of global expansion, was to provide. Richardson’s efforts to buoy his manhood depend on the clear delineation of space and on the boundaries between nations. For dominant national manhood refashioning itself from refined manliness to virile masculinity, Crane’s story provides a window into the contradictions those discourses faced when contending with international expansion. Whereas Crane’s story uses Mexican manhood to warn of the dangers imperial expansion poses to U.S. national character as Anglo

136 American men move abroad, London’s short story “The Mexican” examines the impact that foreign manhood has upon entering the U.S.

JACK LONDON’S “THE MEXICAN”

Some fifteen years after the publication of “One Dash–Horses,” tensions in Mexico and along the border, many the result of the Mexican Revolution, had hawks in the United States threatening the use of state sanctioned violence against Mexico. Early in the Revolution, popular author Jack London traveled to Mexico to cover the developing events. His essays about Mexico in Collier’s Magazine exhibit the complicated position the United States held in its involvement in the Revolution and the public debate underway. Between 1911 and 1914, when London wrote the short story “The Mexican” and functioned as foreign correspondent, the U.S. debated the feasibility of invading and reconquering Mexican territory. London’s fiction demonstrates a conflicted racial logic that positioned Mexican Americans as possessors of original manhood and as a racial other that would prove difficult to assimilate into U.S. racial logic. Mexican Americans, although legally classified as white, could undermine U.S. racial paradigms because of conflated notions between racial and national identity. Like Stephen Crane, London established himself as a writer through his journalistic fiction, publishing stories in McClure’s, Century, and Cosmopolitan magazines. A prolific writer, publishing some 197 short stories over his lifetime, London also wrote hundreds of nonfiction essays for a large number of magazines. Jack London, remains most famous for his stories of individualism and adventure, and he spent much of his professional life traveling the globe writing and

137 chronicling his travel. Best known for his stories of Alaska and the South Seas, London’s Call of the Wild (1903, serialized in the Saturday Evening Post before being published as a novella by McMillan), for example, with its canine protagonist, captures American sentiment surrounding the effects of urbanization on the American male. The short novel resonated with readers in part because it portrayed a crisis in American culture. The novella is now synonymous with the cultural inscription of “primitive masculinity,” a belief that “beneath the veneer of all human training lurks a wild animal,” that men were instinctual animals driven by an irrepressible biological passions (Rotundo 229). Similarly, his fiction concerning the South Seas often expressed concerns regarding the effects of racial contact between a “developed” American and racial others, but London’s views on white manhood were severely challenged by the Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries boxing match of 1910, for which London spent ten days in Reno as a reporter for the New York Herald. In his accounts of the bout and the mass anticipation that preceded it, London wrote a series of articles describing the collective anxiety surrounding the much-hyped physical and racial battle. For days before the match, London championed the white, retired boxer Jim Jeffries who was recalled from retirement by popular opinion to challenge the reigning heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, an African American from Galveston, Texas. London articulates his understanding of: “this contest of men with padded gloves on their hands [as] a sport that belongs unequivocally to the English-speaking race, and that has taken centuries for the race to develop… It is as deep as our consciousness, and is woven into the fibers of our being. It grew as our very language grew. It is an instructive passion of race. And as men to-day thrill to short Saxon words, 138 just so do they thrill to the thud of blows of a prize fight, to the onslaught and the repulse and to the exhibition of gamesness and courage.” (278) In prize fighting, London merges his views on race, recreation, and language. He attributes the sports origin to the “English-speaking race” and as an essential component of white, masculine identity. Aligning the sound of fist fighting with the sound of language, London assures his readers that both the contest itself and vicarious participation in it through writing are unique qualities to be enjoyed and claimed by white men. Many across the nation shared London’s views of the upcoming match, and of the certainty that white male would triumph over his black counterpart. London elevated the boxing story as a reputable topic for fiction, but boxing as a form of entertainment expressed serious anxiety among American men (see Lundquist, 178). As daily life and work became increasingly regulated by the demands of expanding capitalism, boxing, or prize fighting, provided a venue for an increasingly urbanized working-class to foster the more primitive, aggressive impulses suppressed by civilized life. Boxing provided a leisure activity that could promote a gender ideology that valorizes primitive masculinity as a mechanism for the white middle-class to claim power against external social and economic challenges, yet this recreation was in peril. With such weight placed on the match, it is little wonder then that the results would trouble London’s ideas of race and gender. Following the Johnson-Jeffries fight, in which the “amazing negro from Texas, this black man with the unfailing smile, this king of fighters and monologists” roundly defeated his white opponent, London faced a growing anxiety about Anglo manhood, one complicated by his political ideals (Jack London Reports 301). Again conflating boxing with language (penning Johnson as monologist as well as the better fighter), London laments that 139 “the greatest battle of the century was a monologue delivered to twenty thousand spectators by a smiling negro who was never in doubt and who was never serious fro more than a moment at a time” (294). If black manhood could so readily defeat the best fighter the white race had to offer, what did that mean for the prevailing ideologies of racial supremacy? Translating this dilemma from journalism to fiction, London authored the short story “The Mexican,” published in the Saturday Evening Post on August 19, 1911, and later collected in the short-story compilation The Night-Born, published in February of 1913 by the Century Company. The story tells of a young Mexican boy named Felipe Rivera, who appears mysteriously at the offices of a group of expatriate Mexican revolutionaries, collectively referred to as the Junta.64 The story takes place in the last years of the porfiriato, Porfirio Diaz’s dictatorship from 1876- 1911, and somewhere north of the U.S.-Mexican border, likely in southern California though the exact location is unspecified. Little is known of Rivera’s past, and the revolutionaries skeptically accept his menial services at their headquarters. Some time later, when the revolutionaries require money to support their propaganda activities in attempts to overthrow Diaz’s regime, Rivera silently leaves only to return with the requisite funds. He provides no explanation, returning to his custodial tasks. At last a crisis confronts the revolutionaries: on the brink of revolution, all that remains between the Junta and victory is to equip the revolutionary troops that they have been recruiting in the US and “fling this heterogeneous, bankrupt, vindictive mass across the border, and the Revolution was

64 The Junta represents one of a growing number of anti-Diaz organizations in the first decade of the twentieth century. Many of these groups were associated with socialism or anarchism as an alternative to Diaz’s “progressive” policies. For an intriguing discussion of the transnational connections between Mexican revolutionaries and anarchists, such as the Magon brothers, and their American counterparts, see Shelley Streeby, "Labor, Memory, and the Boundaries of Print Culture" (2007). 140 on” (5). Rivera, against his comrades’ disbelief, assures them that he will secure the necessary funds. This episode divides the narrative, and the second half of the story details the method through which Rivera earns the funds to support the revolution, namely through the revenues generated in successful boxing bouts. Rivera offers himself in a boxing match against American champion Danny Ward. Against all odds, undernourished and untrained, and in front of an audience completely stacked against him, Rivera holds on through a grueling seventeen rounds to win the “grudge fight “ (10). Notably, London writes his protagonist as neither black nor white, but a Mexican who moves across the U.S. Mexico border, shifting the sphere of contention from the nation to the international. Following the uproar caused by the Johnson- Jeffries fight, London capitalizes on boxing as a space for man-making but, by shifting the setting and protagonist to a Mexican, communicates an understanding that to maintain the fictions of Anglo American manhood’s superiority he must reassess his relationship in a global world. London turns to Mexico to politicize the boxing ring because, where African American manhood (epitomized by Johnson) posed a domestic threat for U.S. Anglo manhood, Mexican American manhood was poised as both domestic national other and an international peer that allowed for debate over borders, boundaries, sovereignty, and models of colonial expansion. Among the questions posed, what were the implications on national manhood if the U.S expanded its borders, enlarging the nation, or would the nation be better of instituting relations of dependency and economic “cooperation” among its hemispheric neighbors? To engage with these debates, London drew on the U.S. Mexico border as source material for his short story “The Mexican,” Two years later, in 1914, Collier’s 141 Magazine hired London as a war correspondent during the U.S. occupation of Veracruz, which took place from April 21 until November 23 of 1914. The turbulent and uncertain years of the Mexican Revolution saw violence and revolutionary activity frequently occur from and on both sides of the border. The United States’ official policy carefully balanced a strategy between military intervention and seclusion, strictly policing the border. The occupation of the port of Veracruz escalated from a minor diplomatic incident known as the Tampico Affair, and enabled President Woodrow Wilson to utilize American military force to depose, albeit indirectly, Victoriano Huerta from power. Before he became a war correspondent in Mexico, London’s “The Mexican” depicted Mexico’s civil war to a U.S. audience. Comparatively few London scholars devote any attention to this story. Those few that do restrict their discussion to the story’s formal elements, or locate the story within a larger critical area of London’s fiction, such as its relation to ideas of individualism. In his thorough account of socialism in Jack London's writing, Philip S. Foner situates the story within London’s socialist fiction, alongside other writings such as the novel The Iron Heel and the collected short stories in The Strength of the Strong. Critics generally regard the period from about 1906-1911 as London’s socialist period, and, according to James McClintock, “by 1910, with the exception of “The Mexican” written in 1911, [London] had exhausted his interest in socialism as a thematic basis for the short story and discontinued writing such stories” (132). Another well-known London scholar, Jeanne Campbell Reesman discusses "The Mexican" as an example of London's "experimental point of view," but also as an example of his "social realism." Reesman applauds the story for its depiction of "cultural relativism" and for "oppos[ing] Latinos to Anglos" (111). For Reesman, the portrayal of Rivera 142 exhibits London’s progressive racial politics in favor of a universal proletarian revolution by "oppos[ing] young male heroes of diverse ethnicities to powerful whites who display shocking lapses of ethical and moral behavior" (113). During this period, London invested himself in the possibility of widespread proletarian rebellion, as demonstrated by his 1905 national tour promoting the socialist movement, and more to our purpose here, in London’s optimism regarding the impending revolution symbolized by Felipe Rivera’s victory in the ring. London was not unusual in looking to Mexico for the beginning of a future class war. In response to a lack of widespread class-consciousness in the U.S., many socialist activists turned to Mexico and its promise of proletarian revolution as a cynosure, at least rhetorically, for their organizational activities. As Shelley Streeby points out, many socialist looked “forward to the revolutionary break with the present that some hoped the Mexican revolt might inaugurate” ("Labor, Memory, and the Boundaries of Print Culture: From Haymarket to the Mexican Revolution" 407). Though sympathetic to the socialist cause, London’s treatment of Mexico departs from the mainstream socialist view in that the U.S.'s immediate southern neighbor becomes a site and placeholder for the immanency of working class revolt in the U.S., rather than a threshold potentiality for social change. London’s enthusiasm for socialist change was rapidly undercut by a growing anxiety over the diminishing perceived racial superiority to white men. Understanding London’s view of Mexican revolutionary masculinity in “The Mexican” helps illuminate the seeming reversal that he makes three years alter, when he reports on the U.S. occupation of Veracruz; where once he was sympathetic and hopeful, London advances more hegemonic U.S. depictions of Mexico as backward, primitive, and in need of imperial guidance. In this seeming 143 contradiction, London presents a vision of borders as at once open for cultural exchange and controlled by imperial designs. For London (like Crane before him), Mexico functions as a literary topos onto which to map out his own fantasies of masculinity and narratives of civilization as well as national experiments of imperial expansion. London appropriates Rivera's masculinity as a model for American men, which the story’s racial and spatial dynamics reinforce in terms of racial characterization and permeable borders. Danny Ward, the white American boxer, like the fans and promoters, is convinced of his own victory. He is appalled at Rivera's presumption of victory and Rivera's demand for a winner-take-all stakes. In his indignation, Danny refers to Rivera as a "dirty little greaser" (9), "a little Mexican rat," and threatens to "fetch the yellow outa you" (13). Rivera remains quiet, but the narrator informs the reader "this Gringo he hated with an immediacy that was unusual even in him" (8). As the bout begins, Rivera notes that Danny's "skin was white as a woman's, and as smooth" though "his body was a man's body" (13). Danny's paleness stands in opposition to "the brown-skinned boy of eighteen with what seemed the body of a boy" (13). The physical descriptions correlate skin color with manhood; Rivera's boyish body presumably cannot withstand Danny's manly onslaught. The story, however, reverses the reader’s expectations. London associates Danny’s white skin with womanhood, and gender convictions overwrite racial stereotypes. Though Danny’s white skin (like Jeffries in his fight with Johnson) would presumably guarantee his triumph, the feminine qualities of his otherwise robust body reveal latent remnants of a deficient manliness. Danny loses the match and Rivera remains the paragon of manly determination and on the surface, London seemingly directs American manhood to adopt some masculine traits still available to "less civilized" Mexico. 144 Danny, like all Americans, should take heed of Rivera's savagery and augment his masculinity by "fetching" some of Mexico's "yellow." Rivera, in turn, promises to infuse American men with his primitive masculinity by serving as a silent model. Although Danny tries to dismiss him as a “little Mexican rat” London unabashedly imbues Rivera with a primitive animalist power (13). Rivera’s eyes were “savage as a wild tiger’s,” and he is “implacable,” able to kill “monsters,” no less than “the hand of God” (3). London explicitly states that “he is power– he is the primitive, the wild wolf, the striking rattlesnake, the stinging centipede,” leaving the reader in no doubt of the animalistic drive which powers him (4). Like an animal after a hunt, Rivera would return to the Junta, bruised, exhausted, but victorious, “a born fighter, and tough beyond belief” (7). Rivera’s victory comes about because of his ability to control the spaces between himself and his Anglo foil. To envision Mexico as a space for man-making requires that the space be containable, transportable, paradoxically fluid and static. The space between the two fighters fluctuates just as the apparatuses of state power and individual migration patterns continually renegotiate borders. As Danny falters after his first knock down by Rivera, "he now devoted himself to infighting" (15). Danny "was particularly wicked" at this type of close combat, which collapses the liminal space between the fighters. Danny, exemplary American male, skillfully manipulates the manner in which boundaries are maintained. When his expertise in the ring faces pressure, Danny deconstructs the space between himself and his opponent in order to cope with that challenge. Danny's strategy succeeds and he keeps Rivera at bay, asserting his position as dominant male. Yet his success is temporary and Rivera retaliates quickly, knowing “if he was to win at all it was with the outfighting that remained to him" 145 (18). Victory for Rivera depends on maintaining strict boundaries between the two sides. Danny's overly intellectualized masculinity suffers in comparison to Rivera's raw fury and "in the narrow space between their bodies [Rivera's] right lifted from the waist. Danny went to the floor and took the safety of the count. The crowd was appalled. He was being bested at his own game" (16). Rivera triumphs because he effectively preserves the border between the two fighters. In a parallel gesture, London invites his American reader to appropriate Rivera's primitive masculinity even as he critiques American masculinity through Danny's defeat. For London’s gesture to succeed, the reader must sympathize with Rivera to the extent that Rivera’s masculinity appears desirable. At the same time, the reader must disregard the incontrovertibility of national borders in order to accept the Mexican male as object of imaginative or imperial conquest. London idealizes Mexican masculinity for the purposes of revolution, but manages the racial difference by containing it within the boxing ring, a space bound by capitalism and spectacle in which the space of empire, as Amy Kaplan has argued, “is represented as the setting where the primal man is staged as a highly theatrical spectacle by deploying the technologies of mass destruction and mass media he fled from at home” (99). The boxing ring promises all of the violence associated with distant imperial theaters but within a codified platform directly accessible to those at home. Those within the nation home can experience the emotive force of combat with less, or for the spectator, no imminent danger to the participant. For men within the continental United States, the theaters of global empire can only be represented through mediated forms of communication. Mexico, however, brings the empire into the national domestic space, by locating American manhood along a porous border that fluctuates according to national needs. Like Jack Johnson who 146 “had shown no yellow” and “put it all over him in the mouth fighting, and all over Jeff in the outfighting and infighting,” Rivera is able to adapt his techniques according to the space between the two fighters (299). Even though Johnson “had not the best of the infighting and the outfighting,” his ability to draw Jeffries outside his comfort zone enabled victory (299). As Douglas Monroy has described in his history of Los Angeles, in the three decades beginning with London’s revolutionary boxer, “boxing gave youths a particular and Mexican notion of manhood to think about, or, more likely, a demeanor to imitate” (Monroy 59). Boxing increasingly provided “a central means by which [Mexican] men’s ethnic consciousness was formed,” and as early as 1910, London must concede that Anglo-Saxon men do not hold jurisdiction over the sport and its manly implications (57). Danny was lauded as “protean. That was why he was the coming champion” and his ability to adapt to the situation, to shift the rules of engagement, had previously led to his success, but Rivera could more readily adapt and did so more skillfully and more quickly. Rivera realizes the spectacle was “trying to job him,” that “some trick was about to be worked;” the rules would change against his favor (17). The referee desperately looks for an excuse to disqualify him, so Rivera chooses to outfight, to move away from Danny and to maintain the distance that separates them. Doing so, Rivera catches Danny off guard, knocking him to the ground with a series of powerful blows. If Anglo American manhood was to be defined by primitive savagery, the primitive savage was always going to win. Rather than a story championing rugged manhood, “The Mexican” instead reveals a growing uncertainty that U.S. manhood can withstand the hazards of empire. Instead, London realizes the need to devise a system to contain the primitive, to regulate through borders the savage influence on Anglo American men. 147 Pummeled time again, Rivera stays on his feet, withstanding the onslaught, and in Danny’s furious demonstration of prowess early on, the audience “forgot Rivera… it rarely saw him, so closely was he enveloped in Danny’s man-eating attack” (14). Danny’s assault tries both to overpower and to absorb Rivera’s primitive strength, and the offensive shields the audience from his presence. But Rivera was “schooled hard” and, as “too many aspiring champions… had practiced this man-eating attack on him,” he knew how to endure (14). He has learned how to withstand those attacks and refuses to be subsumed by Danny’s flurry. As the momentum changes, and Danny tries to maintain control and worried about his survival in the ring, he “tried mo man-eating tactics” (15). Toward the end of the bout, as Danny “grew desperate,” he tries to mimic Rivera’s savagery and again “went back to his man-eating rushes,” but to no avail; he cannot best Rivera at his own game (16). In his earlier reports, London concedes that Jeffries was “heroically carrying out the policy that was bringing his principle to destruction,” referring to his closing the space between himself and Johnson, but suggesting that pursuing this contest with racialized manhood would inevitably bring about defeat (299). London’s statement is equally suggestive of the dangers that colonial expansion brought to national manhood. In stark contrast to descriptions of American men in "The Mexican," London's articles in Collier's Magazine praise American servicemen and mock the Mexicans soldiers, indicating a complete reversal of London's political sympathies. London, like many others, numbered among those who regarded the Mexican Revolution in its early stages as a site of potential revolutionary change, but by the time of Victoriano Huerta's ascension to power in 1913, many were disillusioned by the resulting chaos and lack of political coherence. London 148 relinquishes his socialism in favor of "a wider social vision [that] is growing in the foremost nations that property rights are a social responsibility, and that society can and must interfere between the owner and his mismanaged property" (Colliers, May 30, 1914, p 7). The socialist impulse behind London's support of revolution in "The Mexican" transforms into an elitist protectionism where more "developed" civilizations must impose order on those struggling with Modernity. Advocating "interference [as] logically the duty of the United States" merely restates the "barbarous Mexico" rationale that London had previously ostensibly written against. London takes up Mexican masculinity in a paradoxical tethering that both serves as a source of true masculinity and as the uncivilizable barbarian. The American public demonstrated widespread support of the U.S. occupation, and the public debate echoed some of the political divisions from the Spanish American War. After the capture of Veracruz, many foresaw a reenactment of the march from the U.S. Mexican War of 1846-48, following a similar path from

Veracruz to Mexico City.65 Many Americans desired a theater on which American manhood could prove its worthiness, if not its superiority, to the men of other nations, a militant manhood.66 But by 1914, when the violence in Mexico could no longer be regulated and contained within spectacle, Mexico failed to provide a viable venue for and model of the performance of American masculinity. Rivera, who

65 When in Houston on his journey to Veracruz, London writes in “The Red Game of War” how, “we set aside holidays of the celebration of old wars and ancient battles” (2). He arrives in time for San Jacinto Day, which commemorates the Texan victory over and secession from Mexico. While his statement makes plain the persistence of soldier-hero as the model male in the public imagination, the particular event has clear associations with the United States previous incursion into Mexico. Curiously, the celebration never takes place as all the soldiers are sent to Mexico for duty. See John S. D. Eisenhower, Intervention! (1993). 66 One American man interviewed by London claims “only our army and our navy can put us Amricavns back again and insure us a fair deal. And when I speak of ourselves I mean the people who have made Mexico what it is to-day… By virtue of what we have done in Mexico we have a right here, and we should be protected in that right” (Jack London Reports 148). 149 “fought for all Mexico,” was not the reliable, easily contained source of the primitive masculine that London sought (16). (At one point, a group of Americans accuses Rivera that “nobody ever heard of you,” to which Rivera responds that “they will… after this fight” (10).) By the time London reports from Veracruz, he no longer sees in Mexico a desirable source for American manhood. The disjuncture between "The Mexican" and London's Collier articles may indicate the author's departure away from socialism, but the reporting also reveal a apprehensiveness about border-crossing manhoods. London states that, like the ”hunting animal” and the “savage” before, war is part of the human condition, “dreadfully human” and an innate part of human society that has developed according to the “refining influence of civilization” (Jack London Reports 129). If war is but a game, then the rewards of the game, like prizefighting, should benefit both spectator and participant and be socially advantageous.67 London warns “one could not help being sorry for these sorry soldier Indians” (145) and notes how any comparison between American and Mexican soldiers was “in vain” since “the American was– well, American” (144). He wonders “what is the rational man to do when those about him persist in settling matters at issue by violent means?,” further stating “as it is with rational men to-day, so it is with nations,” and ultimately reporting on Mexico moved London away from socialism in large part because of his need to police American manhood from the dangers of primitive or racialized manhood (145). London worries about the “very simple and very clever technique of waging war on civilians of the United States” (147), conceding that, though he is “a rational man” (145), “each peon was equipped with sufficient cartridges to

67 At one moment, two soldiers vying for duty and eager to prove their “claims of health, strength, and record… put on boxing gloves and fought for it” (Jack London Reports 142). 150 destroy the rationality of a hundred men like me,” thereby justifying the need to separate national manhoods (146). The primitive savagery that had seemed so promising to American manhood now seems only the threat of violence. Furthermore, the ferocity attributable to primitive manhood is no longer necessary as London makes clear that American men, “are what we are, and it is most evident that we are still warriors” (London "Red Game of War" 5). The threat of transnational social movements, while perhaps previously in line with his political views, threatened his ideals of masculinity that he had rigorously promulgated. In order to mitigate the challenges to Anglo American masculinity, both Crane and London advocated a strict regulation of the U.S. borders, at once maintaining rigid boundaries between racial bodies. The establishment of firm borders between nations and between bodies may suggest an implicit endorsement of economic dependency models of global power. Between U.S. nation and dependent Latin American nations, the dependency model (which involved economic control and protectorate status of dependent states) sought to promote U.S. interests without directly imposing state agencies or military conquest (using only a relatively small number of administrators), offering control without annexation. In dependency colonialism, the “dependent” nations were managed in such a way as to exploit resources for the dominant power, directing raw materials, natural resources, and goods into the U.S. economy and power. In parallel, in an age where Victorian sensibility was giving way to primitivism, racialized manhood needed to be controlled and directed in the service of U.S. national manhood, a project troubled by Mexican Americans and the seeming connection to two national projects. Some years before the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924, London and Crane’s Mexican fiction foretell of a continuing national concern with 151 immigration and the need to police and impose controls over both bodies and borders.

152 Mediating from the Margins: Alternative Manhoods in Jovita González and Raleigh’s Caballero and Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gomez

Until relatively recently, little was known of Mexican American literary production in the early twentieth century. As part of a nationwide effort to recover the cultural production of Latina/os in the United States, the publication of Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez (1990, hereafter GWG) and Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s collaborative Caballero (1996) expanded Chicana/o literary history into the early part of the twentieth century. Paredes and González wrote their novels within a coincidently brief span of years in the late 1930s and are among the few extant fictional accounts written by Mexican Americans during the interwar period, a time of significant social change in Mexican American communities. When read as part of a continuing trajectory of Mexican American manhood reaching back into the mid-nineteenth century, these texts, rooted very closely in local events, also participated in national literary trends, though their circulation as national texts was precluded by an exclusive if not racist literary marketplace. While most critical treatments of these texts critique the novels as regional or even Texas fiction, this chapter interrogates these very local texts as national literature to flesh out the multidirectional role of Mexican American manhood in shaping national identity. In the novels, representations of manhood influenced and were influenced by both local events and national citizenship; attending to the impact of local history on manhood reveals a national identity embroiled with regional imperatives. The connection between local and national can be seen through a variety of lenses, but here I focus on Paredes and González’s use of genre as a means of 153 bridging the divide. Generic convention makes local events legible to the nation by locating them within a familiar cultural product for a specific audience. While the specific value of a genre label as interpretive category is debatable,68 critics like Shelley Streeby, Amy Kaplan, June Howard, Nina Baym and Doris Sommer, for example, have shown that genre (sensational, realist, naturalist, sentimental, and romantic literature, respectively) plays an important role in the narrative of nation building by disseminating, rehashing, and reinventing narratives of national culture. This holds true for Paredes and González, who operate within generic convention to transform manhood in the service of the Mexican American national inclusion, implicating manhood as a contested site in scripting belonging in the nation. Both authors write within established generic lines; González self-consciously authors a romance and Paredes a bildungsroman.69 The romance frequently functions as an institutional reconciliation between ethnic or racial groups under the banner of a new nation.70 Similarly, the bildungsroman attempts to reconcile the contradictory nature of the individual as a subject within the nation and in the face of modernity.71 Genre is thus implicated in the project of constructing a stable, if inherently contradictory, national order. Yet genres, by definition, are constantly subject to revision. Within the generic constraints of romance, Anglo American authors regularly portrayed racial

68 Literary scholars critique genre’s usefulness because of its impurity or “contamination” by other genres, but still rely on generic labels to classify texts. See Jacques Derrida, "Law of Genre" (1980). 69 For discussions of the novels as examples of these genres, see, respectively: Limon, "Mexicans, Foundational Fictions, and the United States" (1996) and Saldívar. 70 See: Streeby, American Sensations; for romance in domestic or sentimental fiction, see Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction (1993).; for a discussion of the family and national politics in romances, see Samuels; for national consolidation and romance novels in Latin America, see Sommer. 71 See: Mikhail Bakhtin, "Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)" (1986); Franco Moretti, Way of the World (2000); and Yolanda A Doub, Journeys of Formation (2010). 154 or ethnic minorities as unfit for acceptance in the nation. In their novel, González and Eimer, and to a lesser degree Paredes, operate within generic confines in order to intercede in the project of national inclusion; both novels similarly use what I term a textual strategy of marginalization to alter genre and to imagine alternative Mexican American manhood. The textual strategy of marginalization is the use of minor or marginal male characters to inform or critique the types of manhood performed by central characters; it makes possible both alternative representation and a critique of longstanding heteronormativity within both the Mexican origin community and Anglo society. Textual marginalization provides a literary strategy through which authors can imagine and begin to articulate alternative possibilities for national and cultural belonging to those offered by hegemonic narratives. Though the marginalized characters are often overlooked, the strategy of marginalization allows the representation of non-authoritarian masculinity and an associated critique of patriarchy. Marginalization as a textual strategy also enables authors to envision social possibilities that exceed the constraints and limitations of genre, while still adhering to formal devices and generic convention. Attending to the marginal demonstrates the conflicted and often contradictory nature of Mexican American manhood before the late twentieth century, and the ways in which manhood served as a contentious representation of social belonging. Through this technique, Paredes and González and Eimer assert Mexican American social inclusion by imagining a productive Mexican American participatory manhood, within the nation and within norms of citizenship. The novels suggest that national citizenship is predicated on the need for local organization and political cooperation, with underlying economic security. Their texts demonstrate how predetermined perceptions of subjectivity, like the oft- 155 constructed association of Mexican Americans as violent bandits, do not constitute the premise for citizenship; rather, the novels “make participation the path to capacity rather than the reverse… The engine of this ethical reversal, which puts primary normative value on mass participation, is the idea that economic [and social] equality cannot be achieved without mass politics” (Appadurai 32-3). Rather than depend on the state to bestow citizenship (which requires legal declaration of competence defined by intellect, race, gender, or otherwise), by portraying Mexican American manhood as always already operating within U.S. society these authors make civic participation itself the precondition for citizenship. While critic Arjun Appadurai finds this phenomenon a product of the twentieth century that fully emerges following World War II, Paredes and González deploy Mexican American manhood to conjecture how communal collaboration and economic activity can underwrite local and national development. Downplaying “the heroic mode of cultural resistance” (Schmidt Camacho 96) or the “mythic hero of the corrido tradition” (Schedler 115), GWG and Caballero replace the near century long association between Mexican American manhood and extralegal violence with community-wide economic participation.72 In this chapter, I examine the marginal characters of each text in their capacity to authorize alternative social relations as the condition of literary manhood that complicate dominant narratives of the nation during the interwar period. González and Paredes held disparate views about the political climate in which they wrote and the direction Texas Mexican culture was heading; nevertheless their novels reveal a similar position for Mexican American manhood– that of economic citizenship made

72 In this sense, social collaboration as the hallmark of Mexican American manhood marks the connection to the late 20th century movimiento by emphasizing social organization under a shared cultural vision. 156 visible through the textual strategy of marginalization. Either in the call for gendered equality (as in Caballero) or the undeniable lament for the passing of patriarchal authority and the influx of national U.S. culture on Mexican American culture and society (as in GWG), both texts present Mexican American manhood as making claims to national citizenship through participation in the marketplace. Attending to the alternative manhoods often neglected or forgotten reveals where Mexican American manhood might have gone and challenges contemporary Chicana/o literary histories.

JOVITA GONZÁLEZ AND EVE RALEIGH’S CABALLERO

Incorporating elements of the sensational and the sentimental in a historical romance, Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s historical romance Caballero, written during the 1930s but set during the American invasion of Texas in1846, chronicles the life of Don Santiago de Mendoza y Soría and his ranchero family as they struggle to cope with the widespread social and political changes following the Anglo occupation of Texas. In the aftermath of the U.S. Mexican War, Don Santiago sees his family and influence disintegrate under cultural pressure from the Americanos. Each of his children confronts the cultural and imperialist pressures of the American arrival, breaking with tradition and departing from the patriarchal family unit. Santiago’s relentless adherence to patriarchal authority undermines the very material realities of his power by alienating him from his family. His eldest son Alvaro is shot by the invading army after several failed attempts at armed resistance, his second son Luis Gonzaga leaves the state with an American army Captain to pursue painting, and his two daughters Susanita and Angela marry

157 Americans as Santiago stubbornly struggles to maintain tradition. As a result, Don Santiago offers a rigid portrayal of the hidalgo patriarch, eventually dying alone, estranged from his family, a fistful of earth fruitlessly clenched in his palm. Critics have cogently argued for how the novel voices a critique of American colonization in South Texas and how the resulting social order left Texas Mexicans living as a colonized population. Born on January 18, 1904, in the small border town of Roma, Texas, González experienced the racist society firsthand. Although a member of the emerging Mexican American middle class with long-standing ties to the region, she nevertheless had first-hand knowledge of the persistent inequities of

South Texas life, a social structure largely akin to the Jim Crow south.73 In 1910, her family relocated to San Antonio so that the González children could attain better educational opportunities, including instruction in English. In 1918, González earned her teaching certificate and began teaching while she further pursued her education, completing a Bachelors degree in Spanish from Our Lady of the Lake College in San Antonio in 1927. Teaching full-time at Saint Mary’s Hall, González continued her education at the University of Texas at Austin, culminating in a master’s degree in history from that university in 1930, a monumental achievement for a woman of color in the racist and sexist academic climate of the 1930s. Through friendships with renown folklorist J. Frank Dobie (architect of some of the most famous legends in Texas history, like the those surrounding the Texas Rangers) and Carlos E. Castañeda (pioneering historian and librarian at UT-Austin), González eventually rose to the presidency of the Texas Folklore Society for two terms from 1930-32, the first woman to achieve the position. She married Edmundo

73 González wrote a brief, unpublished autobiography collected in Dew on the Thorn, published by the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. 158 E. Mireles in 1935, and a few years later in 1939, moved with her husband to Corpus Christi, where she taught high school and lived until her death in 1983. González’s professional career included numerous publications, including several Spanish language textbooks. As an academic, she conducted fieldwork in South Texas on which she based her master’s thesis and later published the folk stories of South Texas Mexicans, such as "Folklore of the Texas-Mexican Vaquero" and "America Invades the Border Towns." Her research on folklore would be collected in Dew on the Thorn, though its publication would have to wait some fifty years. Her folklore, teaching, and historical work were the central focus of González’s career, and her research on South Texas undoubtedly influenced her narrative fiction. In the late 1930s, González began work on a novel that as “the only book of its kind, [offered] the Mexican side of the war of 1848 [that] has never been given” (González xix).74 In its production, González collaborated with Margret Eimer (under the pseudonym Eve Raleigh) to write the historical romance. The novel, Caballero: A Historical Novel, despite the authors’ concerted efforts to find a publisher, remained in manuscript form until the 1990s, when scholars José Limon and Maria Cotera discovered the manuscript in the archives at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. González and Eimer’s decision to write a historical romance, a genre popular in and with ties to both US American and Latin American literary history, implies an intention to participate in national culture, which required the use of familiar literary conventions to reach a mass audience. During the nineteenth century, the romance was immensely popular in both the United States and in Latin America. As

74 This quote is from personal correspondence to John Joseph Gorrell, quoted in the introduction to the 1996 publication of Caballero. 159 Doris Sommer and Nina Silber have shown, romance novels frequently use transracial, transcultural, or transnational unions to consolidate regional or racial divisions in the service of national unity.75 Popular fiction that depicted Mexicans– romantic, sentimental or sensational–relied on rigid Mexican patriarchs that oppressed his family and whose unjust reign could only be undone by an Anglo suitor. This prevalent image of Mexican American manhood in the popular imaginary became a stock plot and the dominant narrative of national contact with Mexico. González’s Caballero utilizes the genre and these same plot devices, but in ways that enables possibilities for Mexican American society. Though co-authored, González, bilingual in Spanish and English, chose to author the text in English. Her decision imparts a desire to reach an English- speaking audience; in her historical moment, a literate English-speaking audience extends beyond a limited middle-class Mexican Americans stratum and into Anglo society. The linguistic choice belies readings of the novel as solely local and underscores my assertion that the novel be read in the national context. Furthermore, González and Eimer sent the novel to “three major publishers, Macmillan, Houghton-Mifflin and Bobbs-Merrill, only to have it rejected” (J. Limon

"Introduction" xix).76 Their solicitation (albeit unsuccessful) of a major publisher, one with access to national literary markets, further suggests the authors desire to participate in national culture and a national dialogue about Mexican American civic participation.

75 See: Sommer and Silber. 76 The Macmillan and Houghton-Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) publishing houses remain two of the largest book publishers in the United States, and each operates several distinct press and distributors. Bobbs-Merrill, based in Indiana, was a leading “trade and specialties publishing house of national stature” from 1838-1959, when it was purchased by the Howard Sams Company. See: Jack O'Bar, Origin and History of the Bobbs-Merrill Company (1985). 160 The extent of González and Eimer’s collaboration is uncertain, though according to José Limon, González, already at work on the novel, invited Eimer to join her in 1937, perhaps to alleviate publisher’s racist prejudices. Based on archival evidence, Limon speculates that González and Eimer participated equally on the project, though González was largely responsible for the historical content (based on her academic work) and Eimer “had a strong authorial hand in shaping the romantic plot development of Caballero but always with active participation of González in the crafting process… the development of the novel’s characters were largely González’s contribution to the project” ("Introduction" xxi).77 González’s fears about the racist climate of the 1930s and early 40s were well founded and their collaboration, like the novel’s content, certainly speaks of a desire to bridge racial and cultural divides. But their collaboration also attests to González’s desires to reach a broad audience beyond the local Mexican origin community. The presence of an Anglo co-author, irrespective of but enforced by the novel’s Anglo-Mexican political content, speaks to the possibility for cross-cultural social alliance and non- violent cooperation between the two groups. Maria Cotera suggests that the novel is "a collaborative text about collaboration, a text that self-consciously enacts the politics of its production within its pages" (224). Cotera sees in the novel, both in the text’s joint authorship and in the cross-racial romances, a critique of Mexican patriarchal authority and of the mythos of Texas history emerging contemporaneously with the novel’s writing.78 For Cotera, the collaboration between González and Eimer “works to undo this

77 Based on correspondence between González and Eimer, Maria Cotera places the novel’s origin between 1936-38, formalized in 1939 with a profit-sharing contract. See Native Speakers, 255n1. 78 For an illuminating discussion of the Caballero in the context of Texas history, see: John Moran Gonzalez, Border Renaissance (2009). 161 fiction [of the singular authorial subject] in favor of a plural one and thereby suggesting... that 'the author' is always a 'composite figure' and that his/her 'singularity is always a fiction,’” thereby destabiliz[ing] the dominant logic of historical mythmaking in Texas by offering a multi-perspectival vision of history, one that literally multiplies the authority upon which historical claims can be made” (214-5). Cotera’s analysis is compelling both in its reading of the novel’s couplings and in the politics of collaboration as a tactic. Although Cotera limits her historical reading of the novel primarily to Texas, the novel’s multi-perspectival vision of history, reified by collaboration, alludes to the importance of including multiple subject positions and to locating the novel in a broader cultural milieu. Cotera turns not to literary genre but to a romantic relation, focusing on the “socio-erotic” relationship between Luis Gonzaga and the American Captain Devlin to flesh out the politics of collaboration. To read the text multi-perspectivally, I would add, involves attending to the text engagement with multiple genres and to González and Eimer’s strategy of marginalization.

GENERIC MEXICAN AMERICAN MANHOOD

González’s depiction of the oppressive patriarch Santiago was hardly unfamiliar. Much of the popular fiction that drew upon the U.S. Mexican War for its content depicted the Mexican patriarch as dictatorial, uncaring, impotent, or even draconian. In fact, the tyrannical Mexican male became an almost necessary convention in order to justify U.S. imperial aims through romantic union. In her masterful account of nineteenth-century sensational literature, Shelley Streeby identifies a recurrent theme in the sensational literature of the nineteenth century

162 that associates “Mexico and Spain with patriarchy and coercive force, [consequently] these narratives represent the United States, by contrast, as the land of modernity and relative freedom for women” (American Sensations 130). In novels such as Ned Buntline’s Magdaléna, Joseph Holt Ingraham’s The Texan Ranger, or

Augusta Evans’s Inez,79 or Harry Halyard’s Chieftain of Churubusco, the American invasion of Mexico presents an opportunity for the Mexican female to free herself from the yoke of patriarchy, usually through romantic union with an Anglo invader, in which Streeby finds “the ideal of white ‘native’ military manliness tested and displayed through violent encounters with foreigners and nonwhites. This is true of all of the story-paper novels that obscure or negate the hero’s class origins in favor of an overarching model of imperial manhood and international romance” (American Sensations 129). In this way, the violence of territorial conquest is displaced through the international romantic attachment between Anglo men and Mexican women and the unions are depicted as emancipatory or consensual for the conquered female at the expense of Mexican manhood. The international romance nearly uniformly weds a conquering male to a conquered female, displacing the conquered males, a trope that González herself recycles. González and Eimer’s use of elements from these genres suggests they intended to reach a national audience who would be familiar with and were the primary consumers of the genre. Yet Caballero imagines alternative manhoods within the very genres that circumscribed Mexican American manhood within particular racial roles; through marginalized manhood, Caballero conceives of ways for a national readership to imagine a productive Mexican American male

79 Perhaps coincidentally, one of Susanita’s friends is also named Inez and is disowned by the community for marrying an Anglo soldier. 163 citizenship. The novel’s patriarch and the presumed titular “caballero,” Don Santiago de Mendoza y Soría is the third generation hidalgo to preside over the Rancho la Palma de Cristo, established in 1748 under a land grant from the Spanish colonial government. While Santiago as patriarch would be immediately recognizable, González complicates his character with an interiority that exceeds stock plots and by imagining other sympathetic Mexican American men.80 The novel begins on the eve of the American occupation of Texas in 1846 and introduces Santiago as “a bas- relief of power and strength” whose defined features “could only be chiseled by generations of noble forbears” (3). Filled with “arrogance,” Don Santiago was “lord of land miles beyond what his eye could encompass, master of this hacienda and all those that would soon gather before him.” From the onset, Santiago’s authority is unquestioned, and his national allegiance to Mexico is steadfast, if nostalgically granted. Encouraged by his father, Alvaro’s pompous and pugnacious comportment, whose “lustful, possessive eyes” lay claim to both the property and women of the Rancho, is brazen and impetuous, and mimics his father’s contempt of the American invaders. He befriends the rebellious Juan Cortina (a real-life bandit and revolutionary) who together pledge to oppose the Anglos at all costs. The father and son share a conviction in possessiveness and unbridled authority as the defining features of manhood. For Santiago and his son Alvaro, manhood is determined through one’s ability to command and by one’s sexual prowess. Alvaro, “sullen and arrogant, beyond endurance,” (29), “indulged and unrestrained” (59), of “uncurbed

80 Mary Chapman and Glen Hendler argue that, in the mid-nineteenth century on forward, emotion was predominantly reserved for women, inscribed within a domestic ideology, and American men were expected to control and subvert their emotions. See: Chapman and Hendler, Sentimental Men (1999). 164 passions” and ”supercilious conceits” (60), engages in sexual liaisons with the peons, to which Santiago silently approves. Alvaro’s sense of masculine authority, as an upper-class hidalgo and descendent of the prestigious Mendoza y Soría line, is intimately associated with his ability to acquire his desires, including sexual desires. His emotions, however, are subject to a “bruised vanity,” further ally his masculine performance with the conquest of femininity. Alvaro repeatedly seeks revenge for injuries real and perceived and Santiago, with “the high-minded pride willed him buy two aristocratic families and come to fullest bloom in him, all the vanity of a dictator,” concurs, claiming their reputations demand further violence as a matter of respect, “for your honor and mine. Now indeed it is a duty” (140). In Santiago and Alvaro, González reproduces the tyrannical and pugnacious Mexican American manhood prevalent in the sensational literature of U.S. Mexican War. As such, Santiago’s demise at novel’s end would hardly have been surprising to a reader familiar with the historical romance genre or with the sensational literature of the U.S. Mexican war. The tyrannical patriarch frequently gave way to Anglo romantic hero and Caballero’s plot is no exception. Much like in Atherton’s The Californian, the Anglo male announces the patriarch’s death in symbolic conquest of Mexican women and culture.81 When Santiago’s daughter Susanita returns to the Rancho La Palma de Cristo with her American husband Robert Warrener and their newborn daughter, “anticipation kept faces bright” as the family expect, reservedly, a reconciliatory homecoming (335). The family cannot locate Santiago, after which Warrener and a vaquero named Simón decide to ride out to “the place we called papá’s altar,” a clearing on a bluff overlooking the ranch where

81 In chapter two, I explore how Atherton’s California fiction both draws on and codifies convention of Anglo suitor supplanting Mexican American manhood. 165 “Don Santiago’s father’s father saw Rancho La Palma de Cristo in a dream from there” (335, 336). Santiago’s “altar” is intimately connected to Santiago’s own vision of himself and his role as guardian of traditional manhood, the site for the intersection of land, history, and representative manhood. For Santiago, the altar signifies a place where “pride could have a man’s stature,” where he can observe “all this that I can see, and far beyond, is mine and only mine” (32-3). From this vantage point, Santiago reflects upon the “power [that] was wine in his veins. Power was a figure that toughed him, and pointed, and whispered,” and Santiago returns to this spot to die (33). The altar functions as a point from which to survey his domain, but connects Santiago to the ancestral lineage from which his power derives. Like his “father’s father” before him, Santiago holds fast to the illusion of uninterrupted perpetual masculine authority, impervious to national conflict, vested in a solitary individual, and patrilineally inherited: the rancho would persist “after him by Alvaro, and his sons, and their sons. Let the world whirl in madness. Rancho La Palma would never change. The Mendoza line would never die” (33). With Alvaro’s death, Luis Gonzaga’s departure, and the marriage of both his daughters to Anglo males, Santiago can no longer deny the massive social changes that took place in South Texas. He dies at his altar, resolutely clinging to “a scoop of earth, brown and dry” (337). The novel notes “it was a last irony that an American [Warrener], and the man who took his most beloved child, should be the one to close the lids over the eyes of Don Santiago de Mendoza y Soría,” yet this inclusion further situates the novel within the generic conventions of mid-nineteenth-century popular literature (336). By discovering Santiago’s death, Warrener assumes, at least spatially, the role of male patriarch, a move that resonates with popular fiction that seeks to assuage 166 the violence of imperial conquest by replacing conflict with consensual romantic relations. In this instance, however, the demise of the patriarch is not equivalent to the assumption of national authority by the Anglo male. The novel’s conclusion is hesitantly hopeful; in the same scene, the novel’s last, Warrener reflects upon the political climate which caused Santiago’s death and “the men piling into the new state [who] were asserting their rights as ‘Americans,’ wearing the rainbow of the pioneer as if it we new and theirs alone. Already talking loudly about running all Mexicans across the Río Grande from this ‘our’ land” (336). Warrener’s reflection, made on the same location on which began the initial colonization of the territory in 1748, casts doubt upon the legality of the American conquest of Texas. Warrener acknowledges previous claims to land rights by undermining Anglo settler claims “as if it were new and theirs alone” and placing them in a longer historical framework. González deviates from generic convention that heralds American imperial destiny by questioning the notion of national citizenship, one’s “rights as ‘Americans.’” Given the segregation prevalent in 1930s, institutional and de facto, the novel cleverly voices a critique through the American invader, separating Mexican American manhood from subversive, anti-national behavior. The “men piling into the new state” had spurious claims to territorial ownership themselves, even as those claims would be used historically to displace the Texas Mexican population. The possessive statement, “from this ‘our’ land,” remains ambiguous and it is unclear to whom “our” refers. The text focalizes the previous two sentences through Warrener, who “knew” the facts and “thought” about the settlers, but this final sentence is unmarked. As such, “our land” could refer ironically to the settlers’ assertions, to Warrener’s marital association with the Mendozas, or facetiously to the author’s own generational but contested affiliation to Texas. The ambiguity 167 enables Caballero to alter generic expectations by critiquing manhood and to unsettle Anglo and Mexican claims to authority and possession. Santiago’s dying grasp of the earth takes on heightened significance, becoming an assertion of the Texas Mexicans longstanding presence in the area. Within the generic constraints of sensational fiction, Santiago must perish, “dying in the aloneness he had made” (336). But Santiago cannot be read alone as the steward of Mexican American manhood. Throughout, the novel dissolves existing familial obligations in favor of other forms of association which further emphasize the Texas Mexicans’ associations to the land. Whereas, in reference to “our ancestors,” Santiago reminds the reader that the land “was theirs by right of royal grants, ours by right of inheritance,” by 1848, inheritance was not longer a viable or visible (documentable) claim to authority or ownership (50). For a broad Anglo audience, Santiago’s death is recognizable but troubles assumptions of the inherent right of American colonization. For a Mexican American audience, the patriarch’s death reverberates differently. Santiago cannot alone represent Mexican American manhood. His performance of manhood does not align with the practices of productive citizenship because it relies on a system of production (the debt peonage of the hacienda) rendered obsolete by national conflict. Santiago cannot adapt in the face of modernity, in its agricultural (economic) as well as political aspects. As a figure of Mexican American manhood (but more closely associated with Mexicanness), Santiago is unwilling and unable to translate masculine performance into the American nation. His refusal to assimilate, reminiscent of the violent opposition seen in bandit narratives, is devastating to himself, his family, and his community

168 (those who work on the hacienda or depend on the hacienda structure for survival) and precludes the possibility of social incorporation. On the other hand, Santiago’s patriarchal manhood imagines Mexican Americans within the nation through textual representation of atavistic, mediated masculinity. Santiago’s performance of manhood, though antiquated and obsolete, shows the historical presence of Mexican Americans that predates national U.S. history. The novel uses generic conventions of sensational literature to enact Mexican Americans participation in a shared literary marketplace or print culture, but revises the generic Mexican American patriarch as both sympathetic and anachronistic. Santiago cannot represent a Mexican American citizen because he is an artifact from a time before the nation, or from before Mexican American became a category of citizenship. His performance of manhood is incongruent with national belonging and, alone, insufficient to represent Mexican American manhood, but his death paves the way for alternative masculinities. The novel includes other, regularly overlooked, Mexican American masculinities that provide models for and appeals to national inclusion. Imagining social belonging along affiliation rather than inheritance (as shown below) introduces a new idiom of collective belonging through which to conceive of self as citizen. The text emphasizes Mexican American manhood’s movement from the patriarch to the communal network of homo- and heterosocial alliance through economic participation, underscoring the attempt to inscribe Mexican American society within and operating as a democratic republic.

169 CABALLERO’S ALTERNATIVE MANHOODS

Santiago is far less accepting of his second son, Luis Gonzaga, condemning what he perceives as unmanly, yet Luis Gonzaga presents an important alternative manhood. Luis Gonzaga aspires to become an artist, though in Santiago’s eyes, his behavior is more “like a woman... An artist– insult to a father’s manhood! A milksop, and his son!” (6). Santiago associates artistry with effeminacy, and the novel implies a homoerotic if not queer relationship between Luis Gonzaga and Devlin.82 Luis Gonzaga challenges Santiago’s strict harsh imperiousness and provides a potential outlet for alternate modes of cultural cooperation. His decision to leave the ancestral home at Rancho la Palma de Cristo instigates a crisis in patriarchal authority, despite which Luis chooses, with regret, to abandon. Cotera asserts that Luis’s departure “is not a retreat to individualism or an escape from the bounds of community, but a gesture toward collaboration with a different kind of community” that defies Santiago’s insistence on retaining masculine dominance in Texas Mexican society (223). Cotera sees in Luis's relationship with Devlin an instance of productive collaboration, mimicking González and Eimer's, that finds alliance neither through nation or race, but as artists, “a conceptual move that deconstructs geopolitical boundaries and generates a creative third terms from the clash” (223). Luis departs with Devlin to Baltimore, New York, and ultimately Spain, maintaining only epistolary connection to his home and family. While Luis and Devlin’s friendship, erotic or otherwise, indicates the possibility of a transcultural partnership, I would add that as artists, a classification both professional and cultural, underscores the economic basis of Luis and Devlin’s alliance, but his

82 Jackie Cuevas has recently offered a provocative and persuasive queer reading of Luis Gonzaga as a precursor to Chicana feminism. See Cuevas, To(o) Queer the Chican@s (2010). 170 relation to his South Texas home is non-participatory, mediated, strained if not estranged. Unlike the Mexican patriarch, Luis would be less familiar to national readers and the character’s inclusion seems more directed at the local Mexican American population and the possibility of non-familial affiliations. Patriarchal society, like that associated with the hidalgo mode of social organization that Santiago represented, depended on common ancestry and blood ties in determining social relations. In lieu of kinship, the novels utilize Mexican American manhood as the medium for establishing new social relations among Mexican Americans that depend on other forms of social belonging. The novels rehearse this process through the difference between "filiation," "the natural continuity between one generation and the next" (16), and "affiliation," alternatives to human relations "provided by institutions, associations, and communities whose social existence was not in fact guaranteed by biology" (Said 17). Edward Said traces the move from filiation to affiliation as a specific characteristic, if not problem, of modernity that leads to the establishment of cultural systems that rely on "transpersonal forms" of obligation as opposed to natural (blood) ties (19-20). Luis’s commitment to affiliation over filiation, a useful counterpoint to and critique of Mexican patriarchy, uncovers how Mexican American manhood functions as the instrument for the articulation of social change and as an alternative to generic circumscription. The novel justifies Luis departure in his need for personal freedom and possibly safety, but issues a perplexing statement, “Luis Gonzaga had willfully turned his back on his people to take up life with the Americanos” (219). In choosing to leave South Texas to seek personal and professional development, Luis Gonzaga chooses individual fulfillment over collective participation, a politics of collaboration obtained at the cost of one’s community that cannot be ignored. How 171 does one attain individual security without and harming communal interest? Seeking a more egalitarian and inclusive society, Caballero turns elsewhere for manhood that is non-patriarchal and nonsexual, focused more on civic participation than on dominance. In counterpoint to the stock oppressive Mexican patriarch, Santiago’s neighbor and fellow caballero Don Gabriel del Lago is the only male figure to attain a place within both Anglo society and Mexican culture. Gabriel offers the figure of Mexican American manhood best suited for social improvement, but only allied with and supportive of female agency. Throughout the novel, Gabriel serves as a transcultural mediator for the community. He is the Mendoza y Soría’s most frequent visitor and the bearer of political and social news, including the original warning of the American invasion. Ever resourceful, Gabriel recognizes the long-term repercussions that will follow the American incursion and identifies the possibilities for social inclusion: relocate within the new geopolitical boundaries of Mexico, assimilate into Anglo American society, or mount an armed yet ill-fated resistance (14-15). Gabriel rejects Santiago and Alvaro’s impassioned calls to violent resistance, and instead yields to Santiago’s widowed sister Doña Dolores’s more reasoned patience. About midway through the narrative, friends, family, and neighbors converge on the Rancho La Palma in celebration of Santiago’s saint’s day. As the festivities wear on, the older men gather together to debate current events. From among the men: Gabriel del Lago quickly took the lead by saying, “Even though my host [Santiago] does not agree with me, I feel I must speak what is on my mind, for it may be a long time until we again get together. We are a beaten, a conquered people, and we rancheros are a group apart and but a handful. It is all very high-sounding, this

172 dying for a cause, but death is death, our families are left without protection when we are gone, or land will be for anyone to take.” (217) Against the prevailing current of thought among his peers, Gabriel bravely ventures forth a dissenting opinion. Even though his opinion is unpopular, he acknowledges the American conquest of Texas (and all northern Mexico). Gabriel concedes that they are a “conquered people,” and distinguishes between the “rancheros” and other occupants of South Texas. He asserts that they retain a cohesive sense of communal identity, “a group apart and but a handful” even against political conquest. The rancheros tightly knit community limits the options for social enunciation. While the men speak of and rally for armed revolt, Gabriel tempers their bellicosity with pragmatism. While dying for the Mexican state may be “high-sounding,” a glorious death leaves their families “without protection,” open to the intrigues of the American occupiers. The family, both literally and as a metaphor for community, ultimately pays the price and death leaves the community open for exploitation. Gabriel’s voice of reason and coalition ventures some prefigurative components of social accord. Less an appeal to assimilation than to preservation, Gabriel tries to organize the community to combat the Anglo occupation through nonviolence: We have titles, and I am told they are recognized but must be recorded with the new government, which seems sensible to me and should seem to you. The war has not touched us here, and there is no blood on our hands. There are many who bear us no ill will, and if we go with courtesy and dignity, it is my belief that we will be treated so in return. (217)

173 Calling for the group to act “sensible,” Gabriel distinguishes between active combatants and the unfortunate civil victims of military might. Unlike soldiers of the Mexican army (or by extension the revolutionaries of the Borderland Wars), those at the gathering remain without “blood on our hands,” which allows for the possibility of civil exchange. Gabriel invokes categories of universal citizenship, “courtesy and dignity,” of mutual respect and civility, as both prerequisites for social inclusion and as presenting the highest probability for community conservation. Gabriel’s proposition remains optimistic and perhaps places undue faith in legal institutions of justice, but he is the only man to accept the historical inevitability of the U.S. occupation and seeks to ameliorate the Mexican American social and economic opportunity despite national or racial inequity. Although Gabriel refers to the Mexican American War, Gabriel’s comments allude to the Borderlands War of 1915. Through Gabriel, González and Eimer discourage violence as a means toward social progress. The novel points to non-combatants as the recipients of state- sanctioned retaliation since death leaves families without protection and only with “no blood on our hands” can Mexican Americans earn the rights of citizenship. Gabriel opposes national preconceptions of Mexican American men as violent that preclude national incorporation. As such, manhood is rewritten in the service of national citizenship through potential intra-communal alliances. Gabriel’s appeals to nonviolent inclusion culminate with an “astonishing proposal” to marry Santiago’s eldest daughter Susanita (247). At first reluctant, Santiago eventually consents to the proposal in hopes of extinguishing Susanita’s love for the American Captain Warrener and hoping to preserve filial and genealogical succession. Notwithstanding his initial revulsion, Santiago affirms their relationship, “aren’t you our friend? What more fitting than closer ties binding 174 us? You have always been like one of the family, Gabriel” (248). Santiago assuages his momentary guilt for imposing unhappiness on his daughter by stating, “the children would bind the marriage. His grandchildren, without alien blood” would formalize the union through kinship (250). Susanita, later accused of disgracing her family for travelling unchaperoned to save Alvaro from Anglos captors, eventually nullifies the betrothal and marries Warrener. During Gabriel and Susanita’s short-lived courtship and engagement Gabriel’s alternative masculinity is rendered puerile. “Cavorting with Susanita … [has Gabriel] looking like a boy in his father’s best suit. Acting like a boy,” Gabriel deviates from the assertive, leadership role he held among the ranchero men. His unexpected decision to marry Susanita, explained as “lovesickness,” seems less about romantic union than it does about garnering Santiago’s support for his conciliatory ideals. During the family discussion over Susanita’s future, González repeats the phrase “they would follow him” [Santiago] three times (281-2). Unable to convince Santiago of his political and social strategy, Gabriel relies on filial ties. Yet the process transforms him from nonconforming mediator and leader into an inchoate man, a boy parading in men’s clothing (221). Gabriel’s reparative venture aimed at affirming social order through marriage between pedigreed families, rather than cement his position as leader of the group, converts him into an object of ridicule and ostracizes him from the others. The union hardly reconciles the novel’s cross-cultural tensions and is doomed from the outset. However, Gabriel demonstrates his willingness to forge affiliative bonds across culture. He places his trust in the American system through Red McLane, an Anglo newcomer and political opportunist who seizes the American occupation as an opportunity for personal gain through alliance with the Mexican population. 175 Gabriel solicits McLane to survey and secure his land rights concluding, “that unless we go to Mexico and stay completely Mexican we must conform in part” (327). More than a declaration of an intention to assimilate, Don Gabriel is complicit in a troubled protectionism that seeks to safeguard a measure of his economic and political security, acceding to the Anglo need for “straight lines, definite lines” while he “admired the efficiency” of American capitalism (324, 5). Gabriel’s willingness to cooperate with McLane by asserting his land rights invokes the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s guarantee of Mexican property, but his cooperation also reveals “how rights in property are contingent on, intertwined with, and conflated with race”

(Harris 1714).83 The constitutionally defended right to “life, liberty, and property” was systematically and legally divested from Mexican Americans following the U.S. Mexican War. Gabriel recalls the national promise and asserts his status as property-owning citizen as the basis for economic independence and as a path toward national inclusion. Rather than dismiss his decision to engage with the American legal system as merely assimilationist or as attempt “to justify for the reader the role that some of the Mexican elite would eventually play in the future oppression of the Mexican working class,” Gabriel lays claims to Mexican American manhood as participants in a national economy (Garza-Falcon 121). Through Gabriel, the novel ruminates what might be possible if Santiago “were not the true caballero” and representative and Mexican American male (325). In Gabriel, Mexican American manhood is neither violent revolutionary nor assimilationist or accomodationist; rather, Gabriel demonstrates a form of public

83 For a discussion of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s relationship to citizenship, see Kazanjian and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, "Wavering on the Horizon of Social Being” (2004). In a California context, see Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita's Introduction to The Squatter and the Don (1997). 176 manhood that is pragmatic and internalized within the framework of a U.S. nation state, faithful in the possibility for social inclusion but on the basis of economic participation. In González and Eimer’s novel, economic citizenship is only possible when supported by cross-gender collaboration. Caballero’s deployment of Mexican American manhood does not communicate dependence on masculine authority, but rather demonstrates the ways in which Mexican American women participated in the creation of Mexican American manhood.

DOMESTIC ECONOMIES: CROSS GENDER COLLABORATIVE MANHOOD

Gabriel’s assertion of economic citizenship is reinforced by his marriage to Dolores. Gabriel models a pragmatic, integrationist position, but his role cannot be fully understood without equal attention to his wife, Santiago’s sister, Dolores. The marriage between Gabriel and Dolores happens quickly in the penultimate chapter, but ties up the loose plot lines, reconciling rancho life with the increasing migration of Mexican Americans to urban spaces. When Gabriel travels to San Antonio to register his property, he reunites with Dolores only to realize “they had always loved each other and were discovering it only now” (323). Independent, impertinent, and unabashedly antagonistic to Santiago’s authority, Dolores is contradictorily progressive and the guardian of social decorum, yet valuing individual happiness over custom.84 “Like a spoon that keeps the broth stirred so the grease cannot rise to the top” Dolores moves freely among the rancheros, and the narrator informs of her role, like Gabriel, in tempering the men’s volatility.

84 Dolores herself performs an anti-authoritarian manhood, but one that must be mediated through Gabriel to be socially viable. It seems that González seeks to create Mexican American masculinity influenced by both men and women. Still working on what do with Dolores. 177 Dolores throughout the novel challenges her brother’s authority. On the one hand, Dolores serves as the custodian of social decorum. In public, she frequently acts “the proper gentlewoman, taking the parting bows and murmuring compliments of the men with an exact measure of dignity, putting her charge before her” (243). As the novel progresses, Dolores remains steadfast in this role and “her code of self-possession and assurance were the fixed attributes of the true lady, which no disaster either real or rumored could change… She was completely mistress of herself” (14). Her sense of decorum extends even to patriarchal manhood. When Santiago’s emotions overrun his restraint, Dolores ran and closed the door of her brother’s room, against the agonized sound of his weeping” (234). Dolores tactfully screens his emotional display from the family and servants. Dolores protects her brother’s standing by closing the door, serving as guardian not only of domestic tradition, but of Mexican American manhood. These moments are never offered at the expense of her own independence, as Dolores finds space within social decorum to assert her agency. Fully cognizant of social norms, she nonetheless modifies tradition to suit the situation. She is the proxy of cross-cultural contact, subtly arranging meetings between Susanita and Angela and their suitors. Her refusal to accede to Santiago’s authoritarianism indirectly inspires Gabriel to action. One may “wonder if Don Gabriel would have dared to propose as he had if the old ways were still with them– would have done so now, had not Dolores lifted a barrier,” but yet, “it did seem right for Dolores and Gabriel to marry, so very right” (329). Dolores explicitly states she has “always resented, Petronilla, a man ruling me as if I were a bought slave, but here in this [Santiago’s] house there is nothing that can be done about it” (238). Dolores’s bold statement chides Maria Petronilla for her submissiveness to her husband, but 178 invoking the analogy to a “bought slave” alludes to a long history of gender inequality in the home and workplace. While historically women were granted and expected to hold authority in domestic matters, as a widow living in her brother’s home, Dolores depends on the family for her subsistence; according to custom, she should defer to her sister-in-law’s authority as mistress of the Rancho la Palma but does so reluctantly, proudly stating that in her own home, “the orders would not come from only one pair of lips, I can tell you that!” (25). Despite familial tradition, Dolores is in charge of the domestic economy, even in the presence of her sister-in-law Maria Petronilla as woman of the house. Even though “Doña Maria Petronilla was everywhere, supervising the work, Doña Dolores, like a general, gave orders and commands” (30). Throughout, Dolores’s concern with the material goods demonstrates a mastery over the domestic economy: She weaves the sash and blanket for Susanita’s nullified engagement to Gabriel (256), owns an emerald necklace “purportedly a gift from Moctezuma” (88), and measures the costs of supplies to be collected on the yearly trip to Matamoros, “twenty pesos for wax, twenty for a new dress, coins for mass and the responses… needles, a mantilla” (24). Uncomfortable with her restricted position in the household, Dolores seeks ways to ameliorate her situation. In the emotional aftermath of the children’s climactic departure from the hacienda, Dolores reproaches Santiago, stating “As for your house, it was our father’s and therefore mine also, and I refuse to be driven from it. If I go at any time, I shall return whenever it pleases me” (314). Dolores claims paternal inheritance as equally her own and contends a woman’s entitlement to property rights against the (Spanish and Mexican) custom of primogeniture, which are traditionally vested through male succession. Like Gabriel, Dolores sees economic citizenship as 179 essential to independence and equality. The marriage with Gabriel enables Dolores “to at last have a place where she would not be secondary” and offers an avenue to realize her desires (326). Gabriel’s spontaneous but sincere “proposal by proxy touched the individualism in her and exhilarated her” (324). Curiously, the marriage proposal, an alliance that until the late twentieth century legally designate women as dependents of their husband, sparks Dolores’s independent spirit, her “individualism.” As a widow, a feme sole (unmarried woman), living under Mexican and then Texas law, Dolores depends on Santiago as arbiter of the family estate. With her husband Anselmo’s land presumably still in the possession of his respective family, Dolores lives without any separate property or means for sustaining herself. She acknowledges a desire “have a place where she would not be secondary,” to not belong as a “bought slave.” Despite technically having access to legal rights as a feme sole, she could not conduct herself as a free woman due to her financial dependence and the social limitations on a woman’s access to employment. Of “the two great emblems of public standing, the vote and the opportunity to earn,” the right to work functions as an important assertion and symbol of personal freedom with implications on social standing and similarly on questions of citizenship (Shklar 3). At the same time that caused “many men to abandon their faith in the marketplace as certain to confirm their manhood,” the first three decades of the twentieth century saw a flurry of labor legislation emerge that on the surface, protected the labor conditions of women (Kimmel 136). In Texas, the same period

180 also saw several legal changes to married women’s property rights.85 However, beneath those laws, “protecting women in the workforce become[s] the major means of protecting the public interest in motherhood and family life” and concomitantly with Anglo American manhood’s move toward masculine individualism, the nation sought to institutionalize separate spheres for men and women, largely by regulating the workplace (Kessler-Harris 33). The early twentieth century saw a national investment in motherhood that strictly divided the workplace along gendered lines, seeking to constrain women’s work to the home. In her excellent analysis of how the gendered imagination influenced social policies, historian Alice Kessler-Harris demonstrates that "achieving the formal political equality guaranteed by suffrage did not pave the way to economic equality" (63). The exercise of voting rights notwithstanding, the policies which governed the marketplace, suffused ideologically with concerns over a woman’s status as national citizen, legislated ways to keep women, particularly married women, confined to the domestic space. Kessler-Harris uses the term “economic citizenship:” “To suggest the achievement of an independent and relatively autonomous status that marks self-respect and provides access to the full play of power and influence that defines participation in a democratic society. The concept of economic citizenship demarcates women's efforts to participate in public life and to achieve respect as women (sometimes as mothers and family members) from the efforts of men and women to occupy equitable relationships to corporate and government services.” (12)

85 In 1911, married women in Texas were granted rights equal to unwed women, including the right to enter into contracts irrespective of their husbands. Legislation in 1913 and later 1921 modified laws regarding separate property, including granting women control of their separate income. It was only following the 1967 Civil Rights Act that women were granted equal rights as men. See Kathleen Elizabeth Lazarou, Concealed Under Petticoats (1986). 181 In both the diegetic world of the novel and in González and Eimer’s historical moment, avenues through which to participate as equal members of civil and political society were strictly controlled. Dolores’s mediates her assertion of economic and political independence through Gabriel. Dolores’s allies herself with Gabriel in order to access economic rights. Marrying Gabriel grants her authority, albeit limited, as spouse; collaborating with Gabriel allows her to exercise economic independence. Through marriage, and subsequent influence on Mexican American manhood, Dolores was able to acquire partial control over her economic and civil status. Gabriel places his financial resources at her disposal: “I have money, we could live wherever you wished” (324, emphasis added). Her marriage grants a degree of wealth and, in San Antonio’s emerging Mexican American society, potentially enhances her social standing. Although the marriage contract subsumes personal freedom under coverture, Dolores exchanges legal independence for cultural and economic power. Furthermore, her status as married woman is perhaps more palatable for a national Anglo audience invested in familial roles and who seek a marriage resolution to the romance genre. In addition to its generic utility in the resolution of a romance, what appears to be an abnegation of women’s rights is actually an attempt to perpetuate cultural integrity through claims to social norms and a strategy to achieve communal cooperation between Mexican American men and women. Dolores and Gabriel’s marriage is romantically motivated, but their relatively advanced age prevents the likelihood of the marriage producing offspring. The non-productive union relies on affiliative networks for the reproduction of social order and the sustainment of communal identity, and creates space for mutual development. Dolores prides herself on being “a woman a man could talk to,” and conversely, she 182 talks to and through men to achieve her goals (240). The representation of Mexican American manhood becomes a crucial tool in the cultural reworking of women’s rights. González and Eimer use Mexican American manhood as a tool to imagine a cooperative Mexican American society modeled on economic citizenship, textualized through the strategy of marginalization within genres of romance. The detour into Dolores’s womanhood elucidates how women helped shape Mexican American manhood. Gender performance is not only determinative of economic rights, but becomes and instrument through which to appeal for “economic independence as the foundation of political voice and ultimately of political equality for women” (Kessler-Harris 8). González and Eimer’s vision of Mexican American manhood, while sharing the importance of economic citizenship, differs from their contemporary Américo Paredes.

AMÉRICO PAREDES’S GEORGE WASHINGTON GOMEZ

Like Caballero, Américo Paredes’s novel GWG was written in the late 1930s but remained unpublished for over fifty years. In recent years, GWG has assumed near canonical status in the Chicana/o literary history. Variously praised for its depiction of the process of Mexican American subject formation, albeit a fractured and incomplete subject, or as an artifact of Texas Mexican society amidst chaotic social changes in the wake of multiple transnational conflicts, the novel is a moving and unsettling account of a young boy’s struggle to become a “great man who will help his people” in the face of institutionalized racism (16). While the novel differs widely in content and genre from Caballero, I want to suggest that GWG shares a

183 vision of Mexican American manhood behind its protagonist’s troubling narrative of assimilation. GWG describes the life of eponymous character, nicknamed Guálinto, raised by his mother and Uncle Feliciano in the early 20th century South Texas town of Jonesville-on-the-Grande, a fictionalized version of Brownsville. When Texas Rangers murder Guálinto’s father Gumersindo, the family moves to Jonesville to escape the violence of the Borderlands War. The aspiration to lead his people, although it weighs heavy on him, would largely determine Guálinto’s fate as he moves through the various institutional and cultural apparatuses that shape his future. At novel’s end, Guálinto ultimately chooses to abandon his South Texas community, renouncing his name in favor of George G. Gomez and spying on his childhood friends as an Army agent assigned to border security. Son to a Mexican father and Texas Mexican mother, Guálinto straddled the border both biologically and culturally, producing what Ramon Saldívar has famously called a “checkerboard of consciousness.” Explicating the process by which a subject is interpellated within a culture or nation, Saldívar argues that since he is “formed ideationally as a mirror image of the Anglo-American subject and against the traditional Mexican subject, Guálinto becomes the precursor of a new middle class, partially assimilated and wholly alone, the quintessential buffer between Anglo-American and Mexican American modernity” (166). Saldívar’s reading attempts to make sense of the novel’s despondent ending by attending to the effects of a racialized society on subjectivity, locating Guálinto “at the margins of history, fluctuating between his uncle Feliciano’s values and the temptations of a homogenizing American melting-pot identity, [where] Guálinto opts for the non- heroic path of Americanization and assimilation” (Saldivar 186). Saldívar positions 184 GWG in the tradition of the bildungsroman, a genre concerned with a youthful protagonist’s quest for maturity that symbolizes the forward-looking qualities of modernity, what Bakhtin has characterized as “a novel of emergence… [that] achieve[s] a significant assimilation of real historical time” (Speech Genres and Other Late Essays 24). For Bakhtin, the bildungsroman coincided with and was dependent on modernity because the bildungsroman depicts “man growing in national- historical time” and demonstrates an internal, psychological growth inseparable from specific geographical and historical location in which the story takes place (Speech Genres and Other Late Essays 25). While the bildungsroman has a less firm literary history in the United States than its European counterpart, the narrative structure involving a protagonist coming to maturity as citizen-subject is nonetheless familiar to an early twentieth century Anglo American reader, although with telling variations. Imbricated with racial overtones and popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what can loosely be called novels of assimilation detail the path of an ethnic protagonist finding her place within the U.S. racial hierarchy. For example, novels such as James Wheldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, D’Arcy McKnickle’s The Surrounded, the autobiographical Jacob Riis’s Making of an American and to a lesser degree The Education of Henry Adams and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn all chronicle their respective protagonists search for a position as a racial subject or seeking to understand U.S. social order, though each takes radically disparate approaches and meets with divergent ends. As narratives about the psychological development of an individual’s progress in the nation, these novels of assimilation offer a hermeneutic through which to locate Paredes’s “bildungsroman.” 185

GENRE BATTLES: BILDUNGSROMAN V CORRIDO

While the bildungsroman emerged in Anglo American literature, among the Mexican American population of South Texas other forms of cultural expression dominated. Until roughly the period when Paredes composed his novel, the corrido was the predominant cultural expression for Texas Mexicans. As narrative ballad, the corrido is a verse form intended for performance or vocal recital. In its content, the border corrido (specific to the region in which Paredes lived) focuses on “the concept of the local hero fighting for his right, his honor, and status against external foes, usually Anglo authorities, [which] became the central theme of this balladry” (J. E. Limon Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: Hisotry and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry 24). Steeped in the folkloric tradition of South Texas, Paredes established his professional life (and to a large extent the academic study of minority folklore more broadly) with a masterful account of the corrido as the primary vehicle of cultural expression for Greater Mexico in the authoritative With His Pistol in His Hand (1958). According to Paredes, “the ideal type of hero of the Rio Grande people [was] the man who defends his rights with his pistol in his hand” (A. Paredes 124). Yet following the Mexican Revolution and the Borderlands War, armed violence proved increasingly detrimental to the Texas Mexican community, as state-sanctioned retribution exacted a murderous toll on the Mexican American population. Consequently, the corrido’s social force waned as the Mexican origin community diversified and became more internally stratified between class and national (U.S, vs. Mexican born fuereño) origins. Paredes’s novel grapples with both the social changes facing the community and their related impact on cultural

186 expression. Together, the corrido and the bildungsroman provide the two genres that structure Paredes’s novel. Though saturated in the corrido tradition, Paredes turned to the novel to communicate the conflicts affecting the Mexican American community. Like González, Paredes chose to write a novel in English, addressing a double audience that reaches beyond his immediate locale. The conflict between an insulated Mexican American culture and national participation in Anglo society is captured through the fusion of the two genres. Leif Sorensen offers a reading of the novel that “illustrates the failures of the totalizing models of subject formation encoded in both the corrido and the bildungsroman” to posit that "the narrative neither mimics the bildungsroman … nor decries this departure from the code of the corrido hero;” rather, the result is a “hybrid poetics,” a “combination of the subject matter, themes, and styles of the corrido and the bildungsroman [which] have the effect of superimposing one perspective on events over the other, with neither achieving ultimate explanatory power" but coexisting in a "mutually reinforcing relationship" (112, 24, 33). Sorensen concludes that the fusion of genres act as “a signpost to a path that Chicana/o literary history did not take” but “by the end of the novel, Chicano/a literary emergence seems impossible” (113, 35). Sorensen’s analysis is excellent in its attention to generic forms and in his suggestion that the novel charts (potential) alternative literary histories. Sorensen’s call for a hybrid poetics treats each genre as acting independently, competing for supremacy of form and ideology of subject formation. This conflict, like Saldívar’s “checkerboard of consciousness,” leaves the novel at an impasse that “repeatedly reject[s] the agency of the heroic figure within the historical present, but it also offers no alternative future plot to replace heroic action either” (Saldivar 180). I suggest Paredes uses a textual 187 strategy of marginalization precisely to work around this conflict. In order to consider an alternative Mexican American subject position not bound exclusively by historically rooted identity, marginalization enables textual space in which to formulate adaptive manhood.

GWG AS NOVEL OF ASSIMILATION

Imagining the text found publication shortly after it was written, one may speculate a contemporary Anglo reader of the novel to have found the narrative a successful bildungsroman of U.S. assimilation. Against other novels of assimilation, Guálinto/George’s narrative education is complete; he journeys from ethnic individual to assimilated national subject, although at the cost of his original communal affiliation. George succeeds in Anglo society and suppresses any underlying revolutionary fervor, downplaying (by internalizing) U.S. racialization in favor of national citizenship, “doing what I do in the service of my country” (302). While his actions in the fifth and final part of the text are portrayed as traitorous and inimical to south Texas Mexicans, George’s actions are predicated on an understanding of economic citizenship. Upon hearing of George’s return to Jonesville, old friends and acquaintances– Antonio, Elodia, El Colorado, Arty Cord, La Gata– organize a gathering at La Casita Mexicana, a restaurant owned by Antonio and Elodia. The meeting reveals itself to be a meeting of “the executive committee of Latins for Osuna” supporting Mexican candidates for the city government (292). When the group asks George, “a good speaker,” to “get the people really fired up” in support of their cause, George refuses because he is “down here on assignment for the company I work for. They won’t like it if I engage in local politics” (293). When

188 repeatedly pressed to reveal the name of his company (the reader later learns he is an first-lieutenant in counter-intelligence for Army border security), George evades the questions before claiming he is a lawyer for a real estate company based in Washington. The friends press him further, accusing him of being in the FBI. George demurs and maintains secrecy, dismissing the cross-examination in one word: “business” (293). While George admits, “getting the Mexican out of himself was not an easy job,” it is through economic gain that he achieved “success” (283, emphasis added). He disregards his former friends as “clowns playing at politics,” suggesting that their interests would be better served if they “get rid of their Mexican Greaser attitudes” (300). Implicit in his comments, while derogatory and self-deprecating, is a belief that national channels of economic improvement (at all costs) hold the most promise for improving Mexican American social standing. As an agent of the nation- state, George references the inevitability of national integration for the local population. While George’s adoption of economic citizenship is detrimental to his community, other characters use a similar strategy while adhering to different beliefs. Like in Caballero, GWG proposes several models of Mexican American manhood– in Guálinto, Feliciano, El Colorado, and Juan Rubio– that compete for representation or that seek inclusion within the various levels of social inclusion, either communally or nationally. What these characters’ representative manhood shares is an appeal to economic citizenship, made visible through marginalization.

189 GWG’S MULTIPLE MANHOODS: ECONOMIC AND GEOGRAPHIC CITIZENSHIP

Focusing on George alone renders a novel of assimilation through economic citizenship. Where González and Eimer use Mexican American manhood as a vehicle for women’s rights through an appeal to economic inclusion, Paredes offers several versions of economic manhood. While critics read Guálinto as assimilationist because he uses institutions for personal economic gain, without regard for the network that enabled his success, the novel’s use of multiple genres destabilizes the assimilation narrative. Here I want to suggest a related but distinct form of economic citizenship. More than just “modifying the corrido to encode and express a program of class rather than border struggle,” the novel draws on the performative nature of the corrido as a way of redistributing social power among the community (Libretti 120). Most scholars of the corrido agree that “any personal point of view manifested in the [corrido] ballad seems to represent a shared perspective;” that “capture and articulate this community’s values and orientations” (J. E. Limon Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: Hisotry and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry 15, 16). Textual marginalization accounts for how the “shared perspective” may be internally inconsistent, even as it presents a similar strategy of national inclusion. The characters in the text rely on economic citizenship in representing the Mexican American male, but the multiple manhoods represent those claims in distinct ways, offering a resistance that is not violent, but intimately familiar to a national Anglo readership. Sorensen’s “hybrid poetics” might better be called a “communal bildungsroman,” where multiple protagonists rather than a single hero develop under a shared ideology of manhood and undergo the process of developing subject interiority, “men growing in national-historical time.”

190 The historical context illuminates the divergent visions of civic participation. After the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 (roughly the time in which the novel is set), Anglo Americans protected citizenship and “claimed that “Mexicans” [Mexican Americans] as a whole did not have the education or cultural understanding to meaningfully participate in a democracy” (Sheridan 7). One argument for limiting the rights of citizenship relied on economic citizenship, what historian Clare Sheridan explains as “the idea that citizens are owed an opportunity to make a living wage by virtue of their citizenship” (19). In the first third of the twentieth century, Mexican origin peoples were racialized to provide cheap labor and subsequently suffered widespread poverty, contributing to a protectionist argument that, as a group, Mexican Americans were unfit for civil participation because “the practice of citizenship required autonomy and independence of mind, and thus, economic independence” (13). Similar to Kessler-Harris study of economic citizenship as a strategy of gender equality, Sheridan shows how economic citizenship could combat the exclusionary practices based on claims to

“whiteness.”86 More poignantly, however, Sheridan discuses how “economic arguments posed by pro- and anti-immigration forces were underpinned by very similar assumptions about the racial characteristics of Mexicans” both in favor and against Mexican American rights in the 1920s and 30s, demonstrating how economic citizenship suited multiple agendas (8). Guálinto serves less as an isolated hero of the national bildungsroman than as the fulcrum that tethers association around which new social relations are

86 For a discussion of the relationship between whiteness and labor, see: David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness (1999); Neil Foley, White Sourge (1997); and Emilio Zamora, World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (1993). 191 produced. Focusing on homosocial relations instead of “a modernist desire for a singular, unified subject who functions as the single representative of his group,” Paredes’s corrido-influenced strategy circumvents Anglo stereotypes that threaten to relegate Mexican Americans as non-participatory citizens (Mendoza 155). Guálinto’s closest male relative, Feliciano, presents the possibility “for Mexicans in Texas to steer a course between consuming resentment of Anglos and abject identification with them” (203-4). José Limon suggests that Feliciano may offer a “radical hope” against his nephew betrayal and finds in Feliciano a “repository… narratively living, breathing, well-developed, yet flexible repository– of a different set of values” that either Guálinto or the educational institutions embody ("Radical Hope: Americo Paredes's George Washington Gomez and The "Mexican Question" In the United States" 25). Feliciano chooses to broker a livelihood in an Anglo- dominated South Texas, a decision that Limon sees as more practically accommodationist than assimilationist. Limon’s reading of Feliciano as a radical hope represents the potential for upward mobility without abandoning cultural ideals, “an alternative to the other paradigmatic ways of responding to the Mexican question… [and] as an exemplary figure for on-going social life for Mexican- Americans” (34). Feliciano is never quite able to leave history in the past, and never fully embraces his decision to leave his pistol behind him, always lamenting the passing age of armed resistance, “a revolver and a bottle” always longingly beside him. 87 Feliciano faced hard decision in order to care for his family, but ultimately

87 Critical treatments of Feliciano are polarized between Limon’s “radical hope” and Sorensen’s view of Feliciano as assimilated, enforcing the “neo-imperial order” he once resisted (123-4). The tension could perhaps be resolved along what Scott Lyons has elsewhere called the modernizing impulse of nationalism, the assent to social reality even as it signals a break from the traditional ways of life. Feliciano does perhaps hold potential as a queer figure and, as adopted father, initiator of non-normative family, but that discussion must be deferred to another place. 192 chooses to work within the colonial Anglo order to secure his family’s safety. His success in Jonesville models manhood around teaches his nephew the importance of economic citizenship. Feliciano’s first confronts the decision to depart from revolutionary manhood through his encounter with Juan Rubio, a marginal character but present throughout the narrative. In the opening pages, when he is a young revolutionary traveling with a band of sediciosos (seditionist Mexican and Mexican Americans), Feliciano witnesses how the borderlands violence impacts Mexican American solidarity. Feliciano’s group of rebels captures a travelling Anglo peddler and his Mexican peasant assistant, later revealed as Juan Rubio. This scene, part of the novel’s opening sequence, sets the tone for the text’s dissociation of violence from masculine potential. During and in the wake of the Borderlands war, violence leads only to further social disintegration. The novel recounts in vivid detail the violence out of which Feliciano and Juan Rubio’s friendship begins; in doing so, it privileges violence’s impact on the Mexican community, intra- over inter-racial conflict. While “a Border Mexican knew there was no brotherhood of men” among Gringos and Mexicans, the novel implicitly acknowledges the importance of social cooperation among Texas Mexicans (19). Lupe, Feliciano’s brother and leader of the rebel faction, orders Feliciano to kill Juan, but Feliciano opts to stage Juan Rubio’s death, deceiving his brother in order to save Juan Rubio. This decision marks Feliciano’s first rupture with patriarchal authority, defying his brother and superior officer in a gesture against traditional familial and military forms of authority. Feliciano’s ruse replaces the family bonds of Border Mexican custom with social collaboration and affiliative belonging, catalyzing Feliciano’s movement into Anglo society. Juan Rubio, unnamed yet “one of ours,” permits the possibility for the development (27). 193 Feliciano and Juan Rubio part ways only to reconvene serendipitously in Jonesville-on-the-Grande. Once Feliciano brings his family into town and establishes himself within Judge Roberts’s political machine, he works hand to hand with Juan Rubio in executing the Blues political strategy and managing El Danubio Azul saloon. Together, they learn to work within what David Montejano has termed the peace structure in South Texas, however unstable or dissolving that structure might be in the late 1910s. Feliciano succeeds at his job, partly out of determination to survive, partly out of his own ingenuity (he invents the political party’s slogan, “arriba los azules”), and partly because "he had what some people called a manly presence" (47). Juan Rubio, who “doesn’t say much,” undergirds Feliciano’s prosperity and Feliciano “depend[s] a lot on him, though” (39). Juan Rubio and Feliciano’s relationship enacts a homosocial partnership aimed toward mutual advancement. Relegated to the narrative margins, Juan Rubio’s presence recurs throughout the novel, emerging at key moments in both Guálinto’s and Feliciano’s development. The story is rarely focalized through Juan Rubio, but his opportune involvement in the text facilitates the others’ progression, even as he labors silently in the background. Juan Rubio, steadfast, loyal, and hard working, enables the novel to inscribe Mexican American manhood around a discrete work ethic, but a work ethic that is both communally derived and oriented. Juan Rubio patiently achieves economic independence through farm labor and the gradual acquisition of land. The importance of property rights marks the mixing economic and gendered citizenship and is a foundational principle of American citizenship. Like Gabriel, procurement of land establishes Juan Rubio as a productive member of both Mexican American community and Anglo society. While toiling the land, Juan informs Guálinto of his uncle’s complete past and restores 194 Guálinto’s confidence in his uncle and in his Mexican heritage, prompting Guálinto to pursue his college education and providing the cornerstone for the novel’s perplexing narrative rupture between parts four and five. Paired with Juan Rubio to mend a fence, Guálinto recognizes Juan’s ingenuity and ability, commenting, “he’s more intelligent than I imagined” (276). Acknowledging Juan’s competence at labor that leaves Guálinto having “never felt so tiered and sore in all his life” underscores a burgeoning respect for the farmhand (277). The normally trenchant Juan confesses to Guálinto that his own family was murdered by Rangers, and that he himself was nearly the victim of sedicioso violence had Feliciano not interceded, corresponding directly to Guálinto’s own trauma. Juan functions as an informant, though an informant not between cultures but between history and the narrative present. The novel does not reveal the details of Juan’s confession, but “Juan talked for a long time, longer than he had talked to anyone in years” (278). The narrator’s statement enables cross-class and transhistorical communication through homosocial alliance and the novel poses listening as a transformative act that generates communal cohesion from otherwise marginal members of the community.88 One can only speculate as to the exact content of his monologue, Juan’s declamation of historical and familial events singlehandedly enables Guálinto to pursue his education. Juan lives on to establish a stable and productive life for himself within the Mexican community, steeped in the knowledge of but not subservient to historical violence. Juan, who for Feliciano “has been like a son to me these past few years …

88 Guálinto’s "listening to” Juan exemplifies the type of communal responsibility that produces positive, productive, and potentially transformative action in the participants. This kind of listening stands in contradistinction to that which returns George G. Gomez to the valley. When Guálinto/George returns as an agent of the U.S. army, he is “listening for” the nation, undermining the community’s efforts at social organization (my thanks to Lydia French for bringing this to my attention). 195 [and] will continue to work both parts of the farm,” replaces Guálinto as surrogate child and inherits the farm (301). Juan Rubio values Feliciano’s bravery not as “a being of heroic proportions,” but in his dedication to everyday life and the sustenance of his family despite the omnipresent threat of death should his former involvement in revolutionary activities be discovered (265). Here, Paredes inscribes a different form of heroism, one that imagines manhood free from “the restrictions of patriarchal social forms [that] accentuates the crucial centrality of the nonheroic (not to be confused with the unheroic) agents of history for subsequent political courses of action” (Saldivar 177). Neither kinship nor genealogy dominate masculine performance, but his economic and social success remains firmly rooted in the geography of his people, literally as farmer and metaphorically. Guálinto’s failure is that he forgets Juan Rubio’s example of how to negotiate personal history with communal needs. In these terms, the novel seems to call for a local, grassroots coalition of middle- and working class workers. In emphasizing Juan’s attachment to the land, I draw on the way in which scholars of Native American cultures have theorized community, particularly in its relation to geography. According to Jace Weaver, the “linkage of land and people within the concept of community, reflecting the spatial orientation of Native peoples, is crucial” (38). Defined in this way as the spatial connection to land, history, and people, community “is not simply a place or a group of people, rather it is, as novelist Louise Erdrich [Anishinaabe] describes it, a place that has been ‘inhabited for generations,' where 'the landscape becomes enlivened by a sense of group and family history’” (42). The land becomes productive as a symbol of history, but also as an economic resource that instills Mexican American manhood within

196 the growing national commercial agriculture.89 Extrapolating from Weaver, topographic manhood with specific claims to long-standing territorial attachment and active defense of communal rights turns to regional economies in formulating a cultural response to national alienation. Juan and Feliciano’s activities are never autonomous from other economic activity. In parallel to Juan Rubio, Juan José Alvarado, better known as El Colorado, models a different mode of economic participation. El Colorado serves as surrogate paternal influence on Guálinto and assumes the role of protector, mediating between Guálinto, “the friend and protégé of El Colorado,” and any potential conflict. El Colorado supports himself through work and supplements Guálinto’s leisure activities, providing him with spending money for recreation and entertainment, generously offering “any time I got money we both got money” (215). Confident in the “future ahead of you,” the redheaded Colorado (like Gumersindo) encourages the predictive burden that is Guálinto’s fate to be “leader of his people.” El Colorado explains “we will need you here in Jonesville. Men like you and Orestes and me and Antonio Prieto. Our people will need us here. It’s time we quit being driven like sheep by the Gringos” (250). El Colorado’s diatribe against Anglo racism very clearly delineates social belonging along racial lines, between “our people” and “Gringos,” but it also reinforces El Colorado’s vision of a future Jonesville-on-the-Grande populated by a male homosocial community, the collective efforts of an alliance of educated, working class Mexican Americans.

89 As agricultural technologies increased the productivity and value of land in South Texas, the increasing number of new Anglo settlers displaced the Mexican American ranching industry and disrupted the previously existing racial order. One outcome of these social changes was that ethnic Mexicans were forced to become laborers on lands they had previously owned. See David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (1987), particularly chapter 9. 197 El Colorado praises Guálinto's ability to debate, to articulate the conflicts that plague their lives, an attribute that Guálinto peremptorily dismisses as "just getting rid of some of the anger inside me" (250). Rather than minimize the lingering racial violence, El Colorado affirms Guálinto’s feeling, claiming that all Mexican Americans in South Texas are "full of anger inside. All of us are, but you can speak out about it. You have that gift. You can get people to listen" (250). By El Colorado’s analysis, what distinguishes Guálinto from his companions is his unique ability to make others listen, to promote dialogue in defense and not at the cost of the Mexican community. El Colorado compliments Guálinto’s ability to articulate the frustration and resentment that all Texas Mexicans experience in postcolonial conditions. Guálinto’s “gift” is not only the ability to speak, but in getting others to heed his pronouncements. “Listening,” as opposed to merely “hearing” (the perception of sound), requires not only the lending of one’s attention, but implies some degree of participation on behalf of the listener. El Colorado endeavors to channel Guálinto’s talent into a sense of communal progress through economic achievement. El Colorado attempts to demonstrate the shared trauma of poverty by recounting the personal events from his own abusive childhood and his determination to enact a Horatio Alger type rags-to-riches story. In his defense of economic citizenship, El Colorado gives “longest speech he had ever made to anyone in his life,” and perhaps this is Guálinto’s true talent, his real success– not to get others to listen as their leader but to get others to talk, to forge alliances and imagine a future, an act of transformative listening (253). Rather than be constricted by the poverty in which he was born, El Colorado: “learned to wash and delouse myself. I sewed the seat of my own pants and I went to school without breakfast if I had to. But I stuck to it. I failed again 198 and again till I almost grew up to be a man and I still was in school… What do you think all that makes me feel like? Laughing? Oh, I’m always joking and acting dumber than I really am, but I’m not laughing inside… Sometimes I get to thinking and I say to myself, ‘Who the hell am I? Just a poor damn Mexican that’s worth less than a dog in this cursed country. I wont ever get nowhere, I don’t have a change, I was born behind the eight-ball, that’s all there is to it.’ And it makes me feel very sad. But by God, it isn’t very many times I feel that way… I’m going to be one [a successful accountant], whatever it costs me. I’ll show these bastards” (252) Discipline and ambition drive El Colorado, and he refuses to capitulate to the racism and inequities in which he lives. In the face of institutional and societal racism, he eventually succeeds in the modern economy as an accountant. The self-reliance Colorado demonstrates would seem a familiar form of manhood in fin-de-siècle

United States.90 Both financially and emotionally independent, the reliant self that Colorado enacts is never fully separate from the community in which he is engaged and is offered in the service of “our people [who] will need us here.” El Colorado repeatedly emphasizes the collective emphasis of individual achievement; individual success, while important, is only one step toward communal representation. His achievements come at great personal cost, but induce in him an appreciation for social integration of the individual and community within Anglo society. Able to advance despite monumental structural obstacles, Colorado enters

90 Self-Reliance was a common masculine trait associated with American manhood. But as Kimmel has argued, by the early twentieth century would have been seen nostalgically and obsolete, leaving American manhood in crisis. 199 the arena of citizenship through capitalism. As a “bookkeeper for Acme Produce, Inc. and… a public accountant on the side,” he regulates the exchange of capital across cultural lines (289). When George returns to Jonesville, he learns it was Colorado who financed (two of Guálinto’s childhood friends) Antonio and Elodia’s restaurant that houses a community meeting, a new Casita Mexicana that is “ a much better place, and it’s the real thing too” (287). El Colorado’s success improves his community’s, and although less is known about George’s other friends, the novel states that Orestes was “now a registered pharmacist working for the Jonesville Drug Store,” “Francisco López-Lebré had got a degree in dentistry… [and] had finally made it,” and that another of Feliciano’s farm hands “had a job in town with the City” (289). While El Colorado enters into market capitalism through the service industry and Juan Rubio through agriculture and property rights, both model the potential of Mexican American national inclusion through economic independence, made legible through viable alternative manhood. Mexican American manhood functions as a practice of citizenship that exhibits civil participation.

TEXTUAL MARGINALIZATION AS GENRE CRITIQUE

In both GWG and Caballero, the authors use the textual strategy of marginalization to show Mexican American manhood as a site for the aggregation of national ethnic identity through multiple claims to economic citizenship.91 Registered in the texts’ political unconscious, economic citizenship underwrites the political organization that the novels seek to achieve. Revising genre means revising

91 I use the term economic citizenship and not Self-Reliance to differentiate between the earlier Anglo American view of manhood as self-made prosperity and the Mexican American view that economic rights can be used as a means to oppose racialization and seek political rights. 200 possibilities for Mexican Americans, and that revision entails economic freedom by positioning Mexican Americans as citizen earners. Locating manhood in the margins provides choices, a space of options for author and narrative world. Marginalization most commonly refers to peoples left out of discourses of power; thus as a textual strategy locates spaces within but not constrained by hegemonic discourse. The textual strategy of marginalization enables critics to identify alternative subject positions that are repeatedly overlooked by critics of both American and Chicana/o literature. Marginalization does not occur exclusively between colonizer and subalterns, but within each community, or within the mythos of that community, hierarchical distinctions exist. When texts emerge as part of minority canons (an inevitable result of recovery work), marginalization can also refer to people or characters within minority counter-narratives that are left out of the prevailing new discourse. Reading the peripheral spaces enables marginalization to become not only a textual strategy, but also a reading strategy that reveals how even minority discourses gain hegemonic strength. Gendered marginalization reveals the presence of alternative histories that challenge dominative discourses, such as the resistant corrido hero as foundational of the Mexican male experience. In other words, literary marginalization makes visible the types of manhood erased by hegemonic cultural narratives that emerge from within and without a community. By the mid-century, other forms of public identity and political collaboration superscribe claims to economic citizenship.

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