Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 (review)

This book pushes forward the study of the early U.S.-Mexico borderlands by showing us the degree to which national identities in the early- to mid-nineteenth century were fragmented and flexible. The author criticizes the tendency to tell the story of the borderlands as a teleology that ends in nation-state formation, and instead paints a portrait that allows us to see the contingencies and alternative paths as they unfolded. Rejecting a reliance on the notion of Manifest Destiny to explain U.S. expansion to the West and annexation of Mexico's Far North, Reséndez tells a "subtler tale in which all frontier inhabitants participated actively and in deeply human ways that did not necessarily conform to implacable national or ethnic lines" (p. 6). Although the book covers a series of complex events, including Mexican and Texan independence, the Texan Santa Fe Expedition, the U.S.-Mexican war, and a whole host of rebellions, the author eloquently balances descriptive narrative and theoretical arguments.

By situating the borderlands in the context of late Spanish colonial and early Mexican republic political and economic reforms, Reséndez demonstrates the weaknesses of the "prevailing narrative of early Mexico as declension from Spanish monarchical institutions, loss of control and chaos" (p. 91). Whereas federalist-centralist tensions and desire for regional autonomy were resolved within the national framework elsewhere in Mexico, on Mexico's northern frontier they resulted in loss of territory because of the powerful economic forces linking this region to the United States. The pace and degree of economic integration of Texas and New Mexico with the United States determined their different political trajectories, Texas declaring independence from Mexico in 1836 while New Mexico remained loyal to the Mexican state until Kearny's Army of the West took it by force in 1846.

Reséndez carries his state and market argument through the book in a non-deterministic and culturally sensitive manner. For example, in response to Benedict Anderson's oft-cited contention that print-capitalism led to national "imagined communities," Reséndez shows that "journalistic domains and national boundaries were not coterminus" (p. 205). In one of the most innovative chapters, the author examines competing interpretations of the 1841 Texan Santa Fe Expedition to show the importance of narratives in shaping a sense of belonging to a national community and the limits on the homogenizing influence of print-capitalism. The military foray into New Mexican territory sponsored by the Texas government and merchants attempted to gain access to the lucrative Santa Fe Trail and claim more territory for the burgeoning Texas Republic. English language newspaper accounts of the expedition that were oriented toward the tastes of their readers barely reached South Texas, where the inhabitants relied on rumors for news about the expedition. The Mexican government published their own interpretation of the expedition, employing public readings of bandos (official communiqués) to disseminate their message. At the same time, the Kiowa recorded their version of the expedition in pictorial Winter Calendars, revealing the "limits of market and state" and the possibility for a "literary culture to flourish independently" (p. 216). These various and oftentimes competing narratives, Reséndez argues, prove that "printing presses did not generate standard print cultures. . . . And these very diverse cultural milieus both predated the onset of print capitalism and survived long afterward" (p. 236). While multiple literary cultures certainly continued (and continue) to exist in the borderlands, Reséndez's own evidence suggests that Anderson may have been correct about the homogenization of national identity as a product of print-capitalism. The fact that the Kiowa Set-Tan gave his Winter Calendar to a white anthropologist in 1892 because "the young men were already forgetting their own history" (p. 226), and that the Mexican state no longer had the authority to have its bandos read aloud in New Mexico after the...