Ramona and Postnationalist American Studies: On 'Our America' and the Mexican Borderlands

The recent rediscovery of Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) by scholars of US-Mexico border studies has provided interesting insights into intercultural relations in the late nineteenth-century U.S. Southwest. However, Jackson's idealization of race relations in mixed-race Mexico, echoed by none other than José Marti in his 1887 Spanish translation of the novel, reflects what has lately become a commonplace in contemporary border studies: a blindness to Mexico's northern borderlands. In the late nineteenth century, the northern Mexican borderlands were, in fact, the scene of racial conflicts involving local indigenous groups, which were as violent as those on the US side of the border. In the spirit of the "new American studies," this paper argues for an expansion of border studies beyond the context of the Chicano Southwest into the "other borderlands" of northern Mexico, and for a move toward truly bilingual and postnationalist American studies scholarship that positions the United States more meaningfully within the context of the Americas.