Enacting citizenship : a literary genealogy of Mexican American manhood, 1848-­1959

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 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.