In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Forging Arizona: A History of the Peralta Land Grant and Racial Identity in the West by Anita Huizar-Hernández
  • Karen R. Roybal (bio)
Forging Arizona: A History of the Peralta Land Grant and Racial Identity in the West. By Anita Huizar-Hernández. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2019. Pp. vii, 165. $99.95 cloth; $27.95 paper; $27.95 ebook)

In Forging Arizona: A History of the Peralta Land Grant and Racial Identity in the West, Anita Huizar-Hernández recounts an enthralling story centered on James Addison Reavis, a nineteenth-century American con artist known as the “Baron of Arizona.” Using court records, newspaper stories, literature, and film, Huizar-Hernández provides a nuanced reading of the archives and reveals the porousness of racial identity, borders, and archival authority. Through this tale of deceit, dispossession, and invention, the author illustrates how counterfeit narratives have been used over time to amalgamate power and how power was used to fortify westward expansionist efforts. We also come to understand how racial identity was not only tied directly to westward expansion but also tied to the forging of new borders in the creation of the U.S. Southwest.

Huizar-Hernández’s examination of Reavis’s efforts to claim a substantial portion of land, via a carefully crafted Spanish identity for his wife and falsified legal property documents, points to the fluidity of identity given the instability of narratives about race, identity, and citizenship in the mid-nineteenth century. As a land-grant study scholar, I was familiar with the Peralta-Reavis case but for those who are not, Huizar-Hernández thoughtfully articulates the significance of this American tale as one that embodies the mythical underpinnings of westward [End Page 340] expansion and its attendant implications on current debates about citizenship and borders. Furthermore, this book makes a significant contribution to an understudied area, the Arizona/Mexico borderlands, by focusing on a pivotal period in the transformation of space and place through shifting borders and racialized belonging.

The book is organized into two sections: Part One, “Inventing the Peralta Land Grant,” and Part Two, “(Re)Membering the Peralta Land Grant.” The first section details the story of the fraudulent land-grant claim made by Reavis in the nineteenth century, emphasizes how trials conducted by the U.S. Court of Private Land Claims exposed his extravagant plan, and focuses on the social construction of identities. Chapter one, “Counterfeit Narratives,” one of the strongest chapters in the book, is a valuable contribution to archival studies. Through her description of the extent to which Reavis went to falsify the archival documents which were used to “prove” his land claim to the Peralta Grant, Huizar-Hernández encourages readers to consider the instability of archives and the historical evidence housed within them. The author reveals the “mediated nature of the archive and its broad power to shape historical narratives and the power dynamics they produce” (p. 25); interrogates the process through which Reavis went to refashion the “official” documents in the historical record; and describes at great length how this type of “unsettling of the archive” speaks to how westward expansion unsettled the boundaries, inhabitants, and political and social systems across the nineteenth-century West/Southwest. This multipronged reading of the archive and her use of historical, literary, and archival science scholarship provides a great model for undergraduate and graduate students to follow.

Chapter two, “Searching for Sofia,” imparts Sofia Peralta-Reavis’s (a.k.a. Sofia Treadway) backstory, which the author uses to assert that nineteenth-century racial identities (especially Mexican American identity) were already always “forged.” This reading of racial identity in the Southwest is important because it emphasizes the intersection of racial and social politics, which subsequently further expands our understandings of citizenship, belonging, and dispossession. As Huizar-Hernández argues, the questioning of Peralta-Reavis’s racial identity arises from a mid-nineteenth-century settler-colonial system that not only erases her Indigenous identity but also erases the multiple layers of colonialism underlying the complex history of land “ownership” and rights. Huizar-Hernández’s discussion of belonging emphasizes what this “in-between” status would have...

pdf

Share