Description: 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. Andrés Reséndez 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.
Review Quotes: "Andrés Reséndez writes in truly synoptic ways about Mexico's far north becoming the American southwest in the early nineteenth century. Somehow he manages to keep in play Spain and Mexico, Mexico and the U.S., Texas and New Mexico, native-born and foreign-born, Mexican American, Anglo American, and Native American, traders and governors, men and women, and Mexican historiography and American historiography. The key to his success is a situational approach to identities-in-the-making shaped by powerful political and commercial forces that does not lose sight of particular circumstances and arresting episodes of frontier political life. This is one of those rare, well-researched books that treats national frontiers and histories from more than one side of the eventual border."
William B. Taylor, University of California, Berkeley