María Amparo Ruiz de Burton: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives ed. by Amelia María de la Luz Montes, Anne Elizabeth Goldman (review)

2 2 0 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 6 protagonists in the stories of Himes and Wright find themselves the hunted; thus for them, a successful hunt is one in which they survive and “resist being objectified by the narratives and discourses ... to establish a sense of subjectiv­ ity in spite of repeated attempts to negate such self-making” (177-78). For his final two chapters, Johnson steps outside the geographic West to test the frontier myth in Mississippi, Paris, and Africa, where he sees African Americans exploring the same issues—search for racial equality, opportunity, and masculine identity— on metaphorical frontiers. While Johnson offers interesting readings of William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face (1963) and John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried 1Am (1967), these final chapters are not as convincing theoretically. Drawing out Slotkin’s assertion that a frontier is a meeting point between savagery and civilization, Johnson, for instance, asserts Europe as a kind of border between Africa and America, and thus defines it as a frontier, although he offers little evidence these texts use such definitions. The view of the frontier as the process of any place undergoing “first contacts” and thus as applicable metaphorically anywhere is one that may be, in fact, stretched too far. Like the New Western History Johnson draws on, he is unable to resolve the tension between defining the frontier as a place and defining it as an experience. Yet for both projects, exploring that tension ultimately proves productive on many counts. M aría Amparo Ruiz de Burton: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives. Edited by Amelia María de la Luz Montes and Anne Elizabeth Goldman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 303 pages, $35.00. Reviewed by María C. González University of Houston, Texas I am always asked by other scholars in American literature how I teach recently recovered texts written by US Hispanics. My response, after reviewing this book, is to mention the groundbreaking work by Amelia María de la Luz Montes and Anne Elizabeth Goldman. Their edited collection of critical and pedagogi­ cal essays provides much, if not all, the context needed to bring one recovered author, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, into our traditional American litera­ ture survey and Mexican American literature courses. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives addresses questions concerning historical context, literary analysis, cultural, gendered, and racial conceptions and provides excellent suggestions for teaching recovered texts. The diversity of perspective as demonstrated by the many scholars represented in the collection is a fundamental strength of the book. By focusing on the writings of Ruiz de Burton, Montes and Goldman cover the breadth of the field now represented by the work being done on recovered texts in US Hispanic literature. The first two-thirds of the book concentrate on the two recovered novels Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885), both B O O K R E VIEW S 221 republished by the US Hispanic Literary Recovery Project. The first section, “Locating Ruiz de Burton in the Nineteenth Century,” discusses the historical context for the novels. “Returning California to the People: Vigilantism in The Squatter and the Don" by José Aranda Jr., “Remembering the Hacienda: Land and Community in Californio Narratives” by Vincent Pérez, and “The Symptoms of Conquest: Race, Class, and the Nervous Body in The Squatter and the Don” by Jennifer S. Tuttle articulate Ruiz de Burton’s troubling nostalgia for a return to the feudalism and social caste system of the Spanish/Mexican Californio era as well as provide a historical context for the author. In section 2, “Reading Race and Nation in Who Would Have Thought It?" especially fascinating is Goldman’s complex and nuanced discussion of Ruiz de Burton’s racialized hierarchies in “Beasts in the Jungle: Foreigners and Natives in Boston.” Rich essays by Jesse Alemán (‘“ Thank God, Lolita Is Away from Those Horrid Savages’: The Politics of Whiteness in Who Would Have Thought...