Description: In Forging Arizona Anita Huizar-Hernández looks back at a bizarre nineteenth-century land grant scheme that tests the limits of how ideas about race, citizenship, and national expansion are forged. An important addition to extant scholarship on the U.S. Southwest, this book recovers a forgotten case that reminds readers that the borders that divide are only as stable as the narratives that define them.
Review Quotes: "Forging Arizona tells a gripping story about inheriting and inventing, about fictionalizing and forgetting. Huizar-Hernández deftly mines the unsettling history of the Peralta Land Grant to make an important contribution to our understanding of the Latinx Southwest and its place in US national narratives."--Kirsten Silva Gruesz "author of Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing"