Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948

JosÉ F. Aranda Jr. is a professor of Chicanx and American literature at Rice University. He is the author of When We Arrive: A Literary History of Mexican America.

"The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948 is an excellent example of the promising possibilities that lie between new historicist literary analysis and intellectual history. . . . It is a valuable and important contribution to literary history, intellectual history, and the interdisciplinary field of Latinx studies."-Aaron E. SÁnchez, New England Quarterly "Aranda provides an important lens through which to wrestle with the competing Spanish/Mexican and Anglo-American settler colonialist ideologies in Mexican American cultural production."-Sandra Dahlberg, Western American Literature "This volume makes a major contribution to Chicanx studies and therefore to American studies. . . . This book will nurture further studies."-B. Almon, Choice “JosÉ F. Aranda Jr. addresses a much-lamented gap in Chicanx literary criticism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century of American literature by Mexican Americans by providing an authoritative, compelling, and creatively challenging interpretive lens. Aranda helps us understand how these texts speak to one another (or why they don’t), how they fit in the larger scope of American literary history, and what they bring to today’s scholarly conversations about coloniality, modernity, identity, class, place, and geopolitics in Chicanx literature and theory.”-Priscilla Solis Ybarra, author of Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment “JosÉ F. Aranda Jr. offers an intervention in the literary critical conversation in Chicanx studies that for several decades has been dismissive (or blithely ignorant) of early Mexican American literary cultures from California to Texas, typically mischaracterizing them as complicit with dominant Anglo-American settler colonial projects. This work tirelessly argues for the importance of understanding the entanglements and intersections of ethnoracial, class, and general social categories and factors.”-Stephen Tatum, coauthor of Morta Las Vegas: CSI and the Problem of the West

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Recovering Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature1. Modernity Deferred: “There Never Was a More Peaceful or Happy People”2. Californio Settler History: Nostalgia as Patrimony3. Game of Modernities: Coloniality and Racial Loyalty in the U.S. West4. Me Llaman Mexicana: Gender and Choice under Coloniality5. Barrio Modernity: Speaking Pocho, Being Chicana/oAfterwordNotesBibliographyIndex