Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts: Transnational Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century Greater Mexico by Cara Anne Kinnally (review)

In Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts: Transnational Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century Greater Mexico, Cara Anne Kinnally brings together a fascinating group of texts published between 1834 and 1892 that include genres such as travel accounts, the diary, letters, essays, novels, and novelettes. Kinnally juxtaposes the work of Yucatecan writers and politicians Lorenzo de Zavala and Justo Sierra O'Reilly with two writers from the north: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, born in Baja California and the wife of a US military commander, who immigrated to Alta California and became a US citizen in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; and Eusebio Chacón, a native of New Mexico who navigated both the separation of the region from Mexico and the struggle for statehood in the US. Together, these writers document the different manifestations of instability that emerged from foreign invasion, civil unrest, and Indigenous rebellion. Kinnally structures her study around Greater Mexico, a term which she borrows from Américo Paredes and combines with Mary Louis Pratt's "contact zone." She describes Greater Mexico as a region that is defined by the presence of people with Mexican cultural heritage. In her interpretation, it is not limited to the borderlands, the space found in immediate proximity to the recognized legal delineation we commonly call the border. Rather, it includes regions as diverse as the Yucatán, Central Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, and the Eastern United States.

Kinnally's principal claim is that these authors do not demonstrate a coherent nation-building process in their work. Instead, she argues, they document the rupture, negotiation, and contestation that were not always recorded in official accounts of Mexican and US history. The political and geographical instability that marked the nineteenth century in Mexico and the US produced what some remember as traitors to the nation. For example, Zavala campaigned for Texas's independence from Mexico while Sierra O'Reilly, in a moment of desperation during the Indigenous rebellion known as the Caste War, at least considered the possibility of offering the Yucatán to the US for annexation. Nevertheless, only official national histories speak of traitors and heroes. In contrast, Kinnally celebrates these writers precisely for the inconsistencies and anxieties that resulted from the poorly leveraged opportunities and incomplete attempts at nation building that made their texts incompatible with traditional accounts of history.

Kinnally works to undermine the notion of nationhood in these writers' work by emphasizing "transnational collaboration," "hemispheric solidarity," and "intercultural negotiation" to highlight what she considers to be collaboration between Greater Mexico and the US. The author shows that, in an era marked by the growing influence of the US in the region, not all the inhabitants of Greater Mexico resisted US cultural and economic imperialism. Instead, Zavala, Sierra O'Reilly, Ruiz de Burton, and Chacón explored pathways to potential intellectual and political alliances, which they imagined as possibilities but that were never brought to fruition. To highlight moments of collaboration, Kinnally focuses the entirety of her study on the lettered elite, a nod to Ángel Rama's lettered city. If every community is premised on exclusion, Kinnally uncovers the exclusionary gestures performed within the lettered city. She explains that, while other critics have used a transnational approach to question the power of nation states, an approach that considers the nation state as inherently oppressive, her aim is delve into "the imperialist, exclusionary, and sometimes racist imaginings of the transnational" (12).

Throughout Forgotten Futures, Kinnally invokes fundamental critical tools in the archive of nineteenth-century Latin American studies. Readers will find analysis of civilization vs. barbarism; Doris Sommer's foundational fictions; the contradictory crossroads that unite modernity, progress, and tradition; and the importance of gender and race in captivity narratives. These were the intellectual models that made it possible for letrados to imagine collaboration between diverse regions where many of the same debates raged about inclusion and exclusion. In almost every chapter, Kinnally identifies discrepancies between the discourse...