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

By Andrés Reséndez

Book Overview

Hispanics, Native Americans, and Anglo Americans made agonizing and crucial identity decisions in this southwestern region during the first half of the nineteenth century. Whereas the Mexican government sought to bring its frontier inhabitants into the national fold by relying on administrative and patronage linkages, Mexico's northern frontier gravitated toward the expanding American economy. Andr?s Res?ndez explores how the diverse and fiercely independent peoples of Texas and New Mexico came to think of themselves as members of one particular national community or another, in the years leading up to the Mexican-American War.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521543193
• ISBN13: 9780521543194
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 309 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

HOW THE LITTLE DOG ATE HALF OF THE BIG DOG: and egame a very big dog.

The author has an impressive academic record both before and after he earned his doctorate. He has produced a most thorough ans useful interpretation of cultural relationd on the South western frontier.* There are many more than the shown categories and subjects listed below in rhis entry yet they only refer to the United States, They could be doubled again with Mexico as the central noun. And we can add furner headings: Spanish Borderlands, Frontiers in generall. And you can probably think of several more. This omission of Mexico simply indicates ethno-centric nautr of the cataloging, ignoring the mult-national sweep of the subject and the wie-ranging rlevence to many disciplines. Berein the author starts out with the vominous works of the famous Alexander von Humboldt, who led an expediton to gather all the information and data he could on what id now known as the American Sourwesr. The only ptoject of equal scope and importance covering this area is the multivolume series sponsored by the US government in the 1850s is known to we geographer, geologists, and studints of flora and fauna known as the "Pacific Railroad Reports" and that required the efforts of several huge mult-personnel expeditions over a much longer period. The author states that he omits the lower Rio Grnde del Norte Valley and the upper Valley in the present El Paso-Juarez urnban comples. Bit puzzling to me for control of those two areas was the core of political and economic concern. El Paso controlled the major route to the vast territory of Nuevo Mexico, all of which was ceded as a result of the Mexican War. Howevwer, this book is nor a history of the borderlands, which has been asubject of scholarly concern since toe 1920s, but rather concerns the larger questions of national indentity. Two great civilizations clashed and the apparent little dog won. In 1800 the erstwhile mighty Spanish empire stretched from Calironia to Patagoina, and around the world, though less dominant than it was before the rise of the British Royal Navy and the depletion consequent to the constant wars in the Netherlans of the seventeenth century. But the Spanish Empire in the New World was about to topple due to internal political forces, and Spain would retain for almost a century control over Cuba, along the way selling Florida to the US. In economic and population terms both the US and Spain, which soon broke off to become the subsequent Mexican nation were evely matched. The Alglos appraching from the east who were familiat with living in closely wooded lands, opposed to the Mexicans, whose ancestral home was semi-ard, yet that made little difference for the Spanish had been in the borderlnads for two centuries and knew how to live in an arid climate. On the other hand, the Anglos' migration into the mid West had stalled at the prairies of Illinous, whose lack of forests indicted to them that the area was infertile The Mexican (Tejano) vwesus Anglo expansionists first met in the Arkansas,