The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War: Narrative, Time, and Identity

Notes

n o t e s i n t r o d u c t i o n 1. The U.S.-Mexican War draws interest from some historians, but when compared to the regular dramatizations of the revolution against England, the Civil War, or the Second World War, the U.S.-Mexican War remains collectively elided. 2. “Presentism” in the sense I am using it here refers to a mode of historical analysis that suppresses knowledge about a particular historical context in order to make past events comprehensible primarily in terms of contemporary, or present, conditions. 3. Garber, “Historical Correctness: The Use and Abuse of History for Literature ,” 65 and 49, respectively. The Walter Benjamin quotation is from “Literary History and the Study of Literature,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2 (1927–1934) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 464. 4. The war has been a continuing subject of documentary investigation from 1848 forward, largely through efforts to romanticize and justify a controversial invasion . A more critical, twentieth-century examination of the U.S.-Mexican War can be said to have begun with John Douglas Pitts Fuller’s The Movement for All Mexico, 1846–1848 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936), and then gained new relevance with John H. Schroeder’s Vietnam-era study, Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973). More recent histories include John S. D. Eisenhower’s So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848 (New York: Random House, 1989) and Richard B. Winders’ Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997). Also crucial to U.S.-Mexican War studies is Eyewitness to War: Prints and Daguerreotypes of the Mexican War, 1846–1848, compiled and introduced by Martha A. Sandweiss, Rick Stewart, and Ben W. Huseman. Recently, Mexican and Latina and Latino scholars have produced new historical studies; among these are the works collected in Myths, Misdeeds, and Misunderstandings: The Roots of Conflict in U.S.-Mexican Relations (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1997), edited by Jaime E. Rodríguez O. and Kathryn Vincent. Mexican historiography has been highlighted by the work of Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, including Mexicanos y norteamericanos ante la guerra del 47 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1972) and La intervenci ón norteamericana, 1846–1848 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 1997). Cecil Robinson’s translations of Mexican writings in The View from Chapultepec: Mexican Writers on the Mexican-American War are an important resource. 5. “I am saying that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding ; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War” (Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory, 35). c h a P t e r o n e 1. General Zachary Taylor, “Ol’ Rough and Ready,” in command of the first U.S. troops to engage the Mexicans, near present-day Brownsville, Texas, was known to dress rustically, at times wearing a plain brown overcoat and a straw hat (Johanssen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 115–116). 2. The Associated Press news service got its start during the U.S.-Mexican War, and recent documentary findings indicate that, instead of the AP forming relatively late in the war in 1848, correspondents began organizing a collective news-gathering operation, which led to the AP, as early as May 1846, during the first weeks of the war (San Antonio Express-News, Feb. 1, 2006). 3. A more precise estimate is difficult to calculate, but the figure of thirty titles represents a minimum, based on a review of the holdings at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at Arlington, and Harvard University. For the University of Texas at Arlington’s holdings, a useful guide is Jenkins Garrett’s The MexicanAmerican War of 1846–1848: A Bibliography of the Holdings of the Libraries: The University of Texas at Arlington (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995). 4. “Story-paper fiction, while no doubt overlapping with domestic fiction’s readership in part, is known to have incorporated many groups situated outside such feminized ease: farmboys, soldiers, German and Irish immigrants, and men and women of a newly solidifying working class” (Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 79). Even if this early form of “low-brow” fiction was not read by all groups, its designs and...