Mexicans, foundational fictions, and the united States: Caballero, a late border romance

Modern Language Quarterly

Volumn 57, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 341-353

  Limón, José E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79958494002     PISSN: 00267929     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00267929-57-2-341     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991 ).
2. Gonzalez and Raleigh, cabdmo: A Historical Novel, ed. José. Limón and Maria E. Cotera (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996).
3. Altamirano, El Zarco: Episodios de la vida mexicana en 1861-63 (Mexico City: Ediciones Ockana, 1986).
4. See David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987).
5. See Arnoldo De León Thed, TM Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).
6. Dobie, Some Part of Myself; ed. Bertha McKee Dobie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980 [1964]), 89.
7. See Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler, "The Plan of San Diego and the Mexican-United States War Crisis of 1916
8. A Reexamination," Hispanic Am'can Histm'cal Revim 58 (1978): 381-408. This biographical section is based on research of the E. E. Mireles and Jovita Gonzalez de Mireles Papers, Special Collections and Archives, Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi Library.
9. See Richard A. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican Am'can Middb Class: Sun Antonio, 1929-1941 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991).
10. See my analysis of Gonzalez's work and her relationship to Dobie in Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 60-75.
11. This hypothesis is based on archival research in the J. Frank Dobie Collection, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. A beleaguered minority in Texas politics and culture, the Anglo liberal community symbolically coalesced around Dobie and vied for power with the conservative and racist Texas establishment during these years and later. See George Norris Green, The Establishment in Texas Politics: The Primitive Years, 1938-1957 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979).
12. Cotera, "Epilogue: Hombres necios," in Gonzalez and Raleigh. Cotera reads Caballero as a text that, in its complicated representation of women, fully anticipates much contemporary Chicana writing. See also AmCrico Paredes, "With His Pistol in His Hand ": A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958).
13. Sommer, "Textual Conquests: On Readerly Competence and 'Minority' Literature," Modern Language Quarter4 54 ( 1993) : 151
14. rpt. in The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 265.
15. Caballero itself was anticipated by a romance novel from and about California, The Squatter and the Don, also by a Mexican American woman. It offers a far more generalized, ambiguous, and ambivalent resolution of Anglo-Mexican relations, leaving the Mexican elites and working classes alike undelineated and marginalized. If Caballero speaks to Texas, The Squatter and the Don is the perfect symbolic projection of Pete Wilson's California. See Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don, ed. Rosaura Sdnchez and Beatrice Pita (Houston: Arte Ptiblico, 1992).
16. Yet another novel is deeply implicated in the debate on national consolidation: América Paredes, George Wmhington Gómez (Houston: Arte Público, 1990)