Land of Enchantment, land of mi chante: Four arguments in New Mexican literature.

摘要

This project describes and analyzes literature written in English that concerns the development of ethnic and racial categories in twentieth century New Mexico. During the nineteenth century, New Mexicans of Mexican descent used the ethnic term "Spanish" to ensure their access to self-governance in the hostile, racist U.S. Congress. This ethnic term, however, was quickly adopted by territorial boosters to promote the region as a bastion of an authentically European culture in America, and it designated this group as culturally distinct from either the American "Anglos," or the Native American groups that also populated the Rio Grande Valley during the conquest of Mexico. After statehood in 1912, these categories were refined into what came to be known as the "Tri-Cultural Balance." The rigidity of this formulation provided both advantages and limitations in formulating new bases of political power and community formation. By pairing texts by authors who are usually read as dissimilar, I show that although the literary and cultural renaissance that accompanied the Chicano movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s left its mark on New Mexican letters, the authors who came out of this movement continue a literary discussion that began much earlier. Furthermore, although the movement did allow ethnic Mexican authors, particularly women, to speak in ways their ancestors could not, some Chicano and Chicana authors repeat the mistakes of their Anglo predecessors in surprising ways. This study presents four different rhetorical stances assumed by the authors (tourist, priest, dramatist, local) and describes how two authors within each category redefine for a reading public what it is to be a Hispano or a Hispana in New Mexico. In particular, this project examines the ways in which cultural formations allow authors to evade the consequences of possessing a racially marked body, but only at the cost of much intellectual and emotional strain. The arguments that occur across texts, between authors, reveal how New Mexicans of all ethnicities struggled, post-statehood, to describe the region's peoples in the wake of nineteenth century conquest and twentieth century attempts to contain difference with fantasy ethnography.