A little over one year ago, I began reading for my PhD comprehensive exams – a process that involved reading nearly 200 texts over the course of several months for four different fields of study, writing several syllabi and an historiographical paper, and being orally examined by four professors on what I had read. It was, as almost any PhD student will tell you, an incredibly stressful, tiring, and at-times dispiriting part of the PhD process. The last months of the entire ordeal were perhaps some of the most difficult – mentally and emotionally – of my many years in school due to the way that the comprehensive exam process is structured in the North American academy. But once I felt I had recovered from that time, I wanted to take what I had done and turn it into something (hopefully) useful to others. The syllabus found below is in part built out of and serves as a response to the comprehensive exam process (which I successfully completed in November 2018!), in hopes that I can share the knowledge and intellectual resources that I have acquired throughout my PhD program so far. Where possible, I have linked to the source directly.
One of my minor comprehensive exam fields was “History of Modern México,” which I designed in collaboration with my examiner for the field, Professor Gilbert M. Joseph. The syllabus that you will find below is an edited and adapted version of what I handed in as my written component for the field, and I hope that it may serve as an introductory English-language guide for those who are new to thinking about the history of modern México or who are simply looking for some reading recommendations. Although I am not an historian of modern México in any strict sense, as someone who studies the transnational migration and community formations of Mexicans in the U.S. I feel that it is necessary to understand the history of México in order to do this work rigorously and ethically. For me, Mexican history does not stop at the borders (whether its northern border shared with the U.S. or southern border shared with Guatemala and Belize), just as Mexican migrant history does not start at the U.S.-México border either. I hope that this syllabus can serve some use to those who are curious about Mexican history. Beyond that initial curiosity, though, I hope that this syllabus can help us begin to make sense of the long histories of colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and violence that continue to haunt this continent. From the Mexican state continuing to work in concert with the violence of U.S. immigration policies; to the targeted murders of Indigenous land protectors and environmental activists; to the ongoing femicide crisis that has left thousands upon thousands of Mexican women dead over the last several decades, all of these horrors have their roots in modern Mexican history. Consider this syllabus a starting place and an offering. ~ M Reading List Themes:
COLONIAL PERIOD AND INDEPENDENCE: FOUNDATIONS OF THE MEXICAN NATION
MEXICAN INDEPENDENCE AND ITS AFTERMATHS
FORGING THE NATION IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, LAND, LABOUR, AND THE STATE
BLACKNESS, INDIGENEITY, AND THE U.S.-MÉXICO BORDERLANDS IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY
CULTURAL AND GENDERED DYNAMICS OF MEXICAN MODERNITY UNDER EL PORFIRIATO
THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION PT. I: UNDERSTANDING ORIGINS IN EL PORFIRIATO
THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION PT. II: ENTANGLEMENTS AND CLASHES BETWEEN THE MEXICAN STATE AND THE MEXICAN NATION
THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION PT. III: CULTURAL NATIONALISM
(RE)FORGING A MESTIZO NATION IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY MÉXICO
GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND CITIZENSHIP IN REVOLUTIONARY AND POST-REVOLUTIONARY MÉXICO
MESTIZAJE AND CHINESE MEXICANS: FROM CHINESE EXCLUSION TO THE COLD WAR
FROM COLD WAR TO DIRTY WAR: THE LONG ARC OF THE COLD WAR IN MÉXICO/THE MEXICAN COLD WAR
YOUTH MOVEMENTS IN COLD WAR MÉXICO: STUDENT CULTURES, THE MEXICAN MIDDLE CLASS, AND 1968
THE RISE OF NEOLIBERALISM: MEXICAN MODERNITY AND THE EZLN
TRANSNATIONAL WAR ON DRUGS IN THE TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURIES
TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY FEMINICIDIOS AT THE U.S.-MÉXICO BORDER/FRONTERA
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As someone who is a cultural historian of twentieth century Mexicans, Mexican-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the U.S. West, U.S.-México border/lands, and México - and who broadly works on issues surrounding migration, racial formations, and U.S. Empire - the political weight of my work always sits at its very foundations. These are interlocking fields of study that I am immersed in as a PhD student in history; I therefore feel that it is not only important but politically and ethically imperative for me to share the knowledge and resources that I have access to as a doctoral student at an Ivy League institution.
For many people in the U.S., everything that has been happening in 2018 and more broadly since the inauguration of Donald J. Trump feels like it is "new," like it is part of only this presidential administration. For many who have been shielded from (and have actually benefitted from) the ongoing foundational violences of the United States, so much of this presidency feels unprecedented. However, like so many people have been saying, in actuality, it is much more complicated and the violence of the Trump Administration is just one in a long line of many violent, imperialist presidencies in the United States. The Trump Administration is simultaneously both rupture and continuation; how we try to make sense of this simultaneous rupture and continuity is profoundly difficult. How do we at once make clear the absolute atrocities being committed by the Trump Administration and by this government's supporters while also paying close attention to the histories that have led the U.S. to this point, all without inscribing a teleological narrative? How do we balance the fact that much of this is not new (ICE was not created under Trump, as just one example) with the important fact that the violences of the Trump Administration are most certainly being heightened, electrified even into fascist proportions (while ICE was not created under Trump, it is certainly being used in its fullest, most horrific capacities which is in many ways novel)? If we take the time to learn about the intertwined histories that this administration is a part of and born of, we can begin to understand, contextualize, and highlight the ways in which none of this is necessarily new, but that it not being new doesn't lessen the speed at which these horrors are accelerating. To say that a lot of this is not new (and of course, it would be ahistorical of me to not point out that much of it is new) is not to lessen or erase the absolute horrors of this fascist presidential administration. It is to help contextualize, to help in understanding how it is that this fascist presidency has come to exist. If we do not have a critically engaged understanding of the entangled histories that the Trump Administration comes out of, how can we expect to dream up better, more just, liberatory futures? It is painful work, but it is necessary. This is where those of us who study history or consider ourselves to be historians absolutely need to understand the political and ethical imperatives of our work and the power we can exert through our scholarship both inside and beyond the classroom. While oftentimes we can easily feel overwhelmed by the absolute horrors of the world and feel like "I can't do anything, I'm just one person" (which is in part a result of the purposefully isolating neoliberal world we inhabit, a politically driven project of making us feel that we all act alone and that collective solidarities and actions are impossible) we all have so much to offer one another. We cannot all be lawyers, front-line community organizers, etc., but we can use what is at our disposal. And frankly, we need people to be fighting for liberation and justice in every corner of society, not just the lawyers or community organizers but the teachers, artists, stay-at-home parents, carpenters, everyone in any way we can while acknowledging that socially constructed power dynamics will mean that how each of us does this work will look profoundly different. In light of all of this, I feel it is important for me to share a reading list on something I know relatively well (but am always learning more about), the interdisciplinary study of the U.S.-México border/lands, in order to help those who may feel lost as to how we have gotten to the nightmarish 45th presidency of the U.S. This is just one component of the history of the U.S. that is important for us to be familiar with if we want to understand what is happening in 2018. This reading list is my no means comprehensive, and is meant to be a starting point targeted specifically at non-specialists, at people who may not know a lot about the U.S.-México border/lands but who desperately want to learn more but don't know where to start. We can't build networks of solidarity and care with one another if we don't engage with each other, if we refuse to share what we know and how we've come to know it and where we want to keep on learning and unlearning. Feel free to pick and choose what you want from the list, and if there is a book or an article that you think should be here, leave a comment with the name of the author and title. At the moment, this list will remain organized by family name of scholar with Chicago Style citations. However, I will eventually make sure to organize the list into separate themes to make it easier to navigate. And remember: care, justice, liberation, and radical love should be our ongoing praxis, not just our endpoint. ~ M Edit: Thank you to Twitter users @Laura_R_Prieto, @FrazierAsh, and @WilliamCossen for recommending several additional sources that have now been included (Gómez [2018], Greenberg, Martínez, Menchaca, Molina [2014], St. John [2012, 2016], and Streeby). An Introduction to the Study of the U.S.-México Border/lands Aldama, Arturo J., Chela Sandoval, and Peter J. García, eds. Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Adelman, Jeremy and Stephen Aron. “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples In Between in North American History.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 104, No. 3 (June 1999): 814-841. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Second Edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. Blackhawk, Ned. Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Blackhawk, Ned. “The Displacement of Violence: Ute Diplomacy and the Making of New Mexico’s Eighteenth-Century Northern Borderlands.” Ethnohistory, Vol. 54, No. 4 (2007): 723-755. DeLay, Brian. War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Deutsch, Sarah. No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Folsom, Raphael Brewster. The Yaquis and the Empire: Violence, Spanish Imperial Power, and Native Resilience in Colonial Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Fregoso, Rosa-Linda. “‘We Want Them Alive!’: The Politics and Culture of Human Rights.” Social Identities Vol. 12 no. 2 (March 2006): 109-138. Gómez, Alan Eladio. The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico: Chicana/o Radicalism, Solidarity Politics, & Latin American Social Movements. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Gómez, Laura E. Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race, Second Edition. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Hämäläinen, Pekka. “The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 2 (April 2010): 173-208. Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Hernández, Kelly Lytle. Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Hernández, Kelly Lytle. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Jacoby, Karl. Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Jacoby, Karl. The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. Kun, Josh. “Playing the Fence, Listening to the Line: Sound, Sound Art, and Acoustic Politics at the US-Mexico Border.” In Performance in the Borderlands, edited by R. Rivera-Servera and H. Young, 17-36. Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Loza, Mireya. Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Martínez, Anne M. Catholic Borderlands: Mapping Catholicism onto American Empire, 1905-1935. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. McKiernan-González, John. Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848-1942. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Meeks, Eric V. Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Menchaca, Martha. Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants: A Texas History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Minian, Ana Raquel. Undocumented Lives: Mexican Migration to the United States 1965-1986. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018 Molina, Natalia. Fit To Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Needham, Andrew. Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Why the Virgin of Zapopan Went to Los Angeles: Reflections on Mobility and Globality.” In Images of Power: Iconography, Culture and the State in Latin America, eds. Jens Andermann and William Rowe, 271-290. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. Radding, Cynthia. Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700-1850. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Saldívar, Ramón. The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Schmidt Camacho, Alicia. Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. New York: NYU Press, 2008. St. John, Rachel. Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. St. John, Rachel. "The Unpredictable America of William Gwin: Expansion, Secession, and the Unstable Borders of Nineteenth-Century North America." The Journal of the Civil War Era Vol. 6 no. 1 (March 2016): 56-84. Streeby, Shelley. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Truett, Samuel. “Neighbors By Nature: Rethinking Region, Nation, and Environmental History in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.” Environmental History 2 (1997): 160-178. |
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