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

One. U.S.-Mexican War Novelettes and Dime Novels: Cousins, Seducers, Bandits

u.s.-meicanwar novelettes and dime novels o n e s e t t i n g t h e s t a g e : a P r e f a c e t o t h r e e a c t s With a shooting war flaring along the northern banks of the Rio Grande in the spring of 1846, novelette writers in the rapidly growing eastern centers of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia must have congratulated themselves on their rising fortunes. Here was an exciting national adventure providing a new rich vein from which to mine the ore of mass-market fantasy. An exotic landscape , an evil dictator as an enemy, an oppressed people ready for the liberating catharsis of benevolent invasion, golden-haired heroes, and a plain-talking general, Zachary Taylor, whose dress and manner had more than a touch of the American frontiersman, a dash of Leatherstocking himself1—what more could a writer of popular melodrama ask for? Almost immediately, the widening midcentury current of potboiler fiction began featuring adventure stories set in the time and space of the war in Mexico, but these varied in their approach to both Mexico and Mexicans, inflected as they were by intersecting currents of cultural beliefs, emerging communication technologies, and anxieties activated by a need to conduct and to justify a highly controversial military invasion. Novelette writers were not the only scribblers rushing to cash in on the war’s narratological opportunities, but their efforts—mostly short adventure tales about 100 pages long—directly incorporated the conflict as an element of imaginative fiction, and because their authors strove to cater—or pander—to an emerging U.S. American readership, they have understandably Cousins, Seducers, Bandits 1  The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War become the focus of several scholarly literary studies that examine the intersection of narrative and social context. My own approach begins by noting that the novelette form holds an interstitial place in U.S. literary history, a pulp medium that evolved from the rapid expansion of penny press newspapers and anticipated in its target markets and its fantasy adventures the western dime novel, a fictive form in the moment of breaking free from its journalistic origins but not yet the fully rendered paperback western. At the genre’s birth in the 1840s, the invasion of Mexico was only one of many historical crises to get potboiler treatment; revolutionary heroes, sea adventures, Indian wars, and more all filled the pages of the highly consumable novelette. Yet the rise of the novelette as popular and populist entertainment coincided with real and escalating tensions between the United States and Mexico at midcentury and yielded, in its U.S.-Mexican War variant , an intricate blend of romance, fantasy, history, and reportage.2 At least thirty extant titles can be defined as U.S.-Mexican War novelettes, tales set either amid the war itself or on related terrains of conflict such as the bitter dispute over Texas.3 On cursory reading, these novelettes might seem to blur into a single, incessantly repeating, focus-grouped Hollywood script: heroic Anglo-Saxon soldiers travel to Mexico to battle—successfully, of course—an oppressive regime, liberating both nations in the process. But the tales are not monolithic, and their differences are ultimately more interesting, revealing, and relevant than their similarities. This chapter attends to a particular set of novelette variations to peer into the significance of Mexico within the larger story of an expanding U.S. America. Unlike Streeby’s analysis, which frames these fictions in a more unitary field of racial and class productions, I argue for three distinct kinds of U.S.-Mexican War popular fiction, moving, more or less, from stories in which Anglo and Mexican enemies are literally part of the same family, to an intermediate moment in which Anglos and Mexicans test each other’s national loyalty, to a final and more enduring zone that fixes and fixates on the features of the iconic Mexican bandit, a familiar mode of plotting and characterization in which the Mexican enemy operates as absolutely evil and as a threat to Anglos and Mexicans alike, a characterological structure strongly aligned with images of terrorists. This is not to say that the contradictions within the imperializing dream Streeby elucidates play no role, but that I read them in different ways and organize them along a more rigidly defined architecture in an analysis aimed at showing that the U.S.-Mexican War’s...