The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War: Narrative, Time, and Identity (review)

Jaime Javier Rodríguez’s The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War: Narrative, Time, and Identity opens with the question: “To what degree does the U.S.-Mexican War usefully illuminate the present moment of Anglo-Mexican tensions?” (3). The book explains the war as the origin of the narratives Anglo- and Mexican Americans use to explain their interrelationships, including narratives of Anglo-American exceptionalism and Mexican American border thinking. The story Rodríguez tells emphasizes trauma and uncertainty; war literature is often associated with self-assured nationalism, yet Rodríguez argues that “the literature of the U.S.-Mexican War reveals nationalist fears rather than patriotic confidence, in both Mexico and the United States” (7). Rodríguez locates these tensions in a variety of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts, reading not only familiar, canonical works but also US American popular fiction and war correspondence. Texts examined include James Russell Lowell’s The Biglow Papers (1848), Nicolás Pizarro Suárez’s El monedero (1861), and Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero (1996).

The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War contributes to the growing field of hemispheric American studies. Wrestling with the field’s historicist leanings, Rodríguez’s book uniquely emphasizes narratology and genre. For instance, it establishes a classificatory system for the popular fiction of the US-Mexican War, dividing the genre into the chivalric, the frontier, and the western. This move serves a larger claim: as the nineteenth century progressed and the war receded from memory, US American popular fiction adopted ways of representing the Southwest that evacuated the region’s history of war, thus facilitating the US American exceptionalism of Manifest Destiny. Rodríguez demonstrates this argument by analyzing the genre’s evolution. He reads the chivalric as examining the war itself and as questioning exceptionalism; the form does the latter by exploring the possibility of cross-national likenesses and recognizing the moral ambiguity of US motivations. On the other hand, he reads the western as wholly removed from the war’s realities; the form instead focuses on the historical period after the war and construes Mexicans as interlopers rather than as descendants of a people who once had a sovereign claim to the Southwest. The frontier classification intermediates between the chivalric and the western.

After its narratological orientation, the book’s two most compelling aspects are its historical perspicuity and its comparativism. Rodríguez’s success in the former may come as a surprise; as he admits, a project seeking to explain the present via the past opens itself to the charge of presentism. Moreover, while the author’s emphasis on narratology is admirable, for some, it might not forecast historical subtlety. Rodríguez navigates these challenges by imaginatively pairing literary and non-literary materials, as when he reads popular fiction against war correspondence. He also impressively resists the pull of received narratives about his topic. For instance, whereas a critical truism about US-Mexican War popular fiction is that it was a relatively simple literature that ideologically buttressed US agendas, Rodríguez delves below this paradigm. He demonstrates a greater narratological complexity in this fiction than has been previously acknowledged, and his contextualizations allow him to argue that US Americans regarded the war with anxiety. The resultant work illuminates the war’s cultural history.

The book’s comparative focus further distinguishes it. The recent emergence of hemispheric American studies has opened many US Americanists’ eyes to the interrelationships between US American literature and hemispheric contexts. One might expect that American literary scholarship would include the comparison of works from the various national and linguistic literatures of the Americas. However, this has not always been the case. Although comparativists and Latin Americanists have long done and called for such work, US Americanists have largely neglected these calls. (There are a few exceptions, such as the work of Kirsten Silva...