“We Are Considered Undesirable Foreigners” in “This Our Texas”: Mexican American Settler Nativism in Caballero

Narratives of settler belonging rely, in part, on the appropriation of indigeneity. Today in the United States, non-Natives regularly coopt perceived markers of Indianness, such as dream catchers or a mystical connection to nature. Some claim distant indigenous ancestry, most often through the mythic Cherokee-princess-grandmother trope.¹ They also supplant indigenous identity through place-making: destroying or taking over significant indigenous sites and conflating a sense of “belonging to the land” with property ownership.² As a result, settlement frames land as a site of contest, and the many groups entangled in a given settler project produce claims to the land and justifications for their right to belong. Indigenous communities rightfully cite their having dwelt in North America since time immemorial (Pierotti and Wildcat 4–5), and many migrant and immigrant groups point to long histories of overcoming discrimination to live the American Dream.³ Settler populations imagine themselves somewhere in the middle ground, between having always belonged to the land and having made their place on it. Often, this liminality is expressed through resistance or opposition toward both indigenous and (im)migrant peoples.

As James Belich demonstrates, settler-colonial studies largely reflects the processes by which Anglo settlement in North America and Australasia eventually bore the nation-states of Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita argue, however, that the US Southwest is a palimpsest of settler-colonial projects reaching back over half a millennium, including Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American settlement. As such, the logics that produce and are produced by specific settler projects—race, nationalism, and gender hierarchy—are not necessarily identical from project to project.

While settler-colonial theory is not widely used as a framework for critical Chicana/o studies, several scholars in the field have, since the 1990s, explored problematic ways in which Chicana/o nationalists associated with the 1960s Chicano Civil Rights Movement (el movimiento) and its legacies use Indianness as a means of political redress against US imperialism (Chabram-Dernersesian 268; Guidotti-Hernández 14).⁴ In his 1971 essay “Toward the Study of Chicano Colonialism,” Tomás Almaguer argued that “Chicanos were the indigenous people of what is today the Southwestern states” (11). However, Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, and B.V. Olguín have since demonstrated that such a claim to belonging is enabled by a romanticized notion of racial and cultural hybridity known as mestizaje that, when expressed through utopian narratives such as Aztlán, often obscures the violent dispossession that Spanish and Mexican colonialism inflicted on indigenous peoples. As Sanchez and Pita point out, people of Mexican origin in the United States today are oppressed in ways specifically linked to race, culture, and ethnicity, yet they do not experience colonial oppression as an indigenous population (1039–40).

Literatures of the US Southwest, including Chicana/o literature, reveal complex and often conflicting narratives of belonging to shared geographic landscapes. Written during the 1930s but not published until 1996, Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero represents a milestone in Mexican American literature prior to el movimiento and the Chicana/o Renaissance of the 1960s (López 120–21). María Eugenia Cotera, who played a pivotal role in the novel’s publication, argues that the politics of collaboration that went into authoring Caballero—González was Mexican American, Raleigh was Anglo-American, and both experienced gender discrimination as women writers—“[destabilize] the dominant logic of historical mythmaking in Texas by offering a multi-perspectival vision of history, one that literally multiplies the authority upon which historical claims can be made” (215). Set in Texas during the US-Mexican War (1846–48), the novel revolves primarily around Don Santiago Mendoza y Soría, an elite ranchero desperately trying to preserve his cultural legacy and family dynasty. Throughout the novel, his stronghold over the rancho and his patriarchal status in his family are challenged by invading Anglo-Americans: men of high social standing who woo away his children, competing landowners who entice his peons with wage...