E3W Literature | University of Texas

John-Michael Rivera
The Emergence of Mexican America: Recovering Stories of Mexican Peoplehood in US Culture
New York University Press, 2006
240 pages
$20

Reviewed by Alberto Varon

In his recent book, John-Michael Rivera attempts to recover the Mexican American cultural contribution to US history and literature. Covering a period of over a hundred years in US history, from 1821-1939, Rivera argues that the association between democracy, race, and citizen rights intrinsically depends on cultural production and representation. The Emergence of Mexican America traces the history of Mexican American peoplehood from the secession of Texas from Mexico up until World War II. Using the term “peoplehood,” Rivera analyzes the manner in which collective consciousness coalesces around cultural production that, in turn, impacts political mobilization. In this revisionist reconstruction of Western American literary history, Rivera furthers contemporary projects that identify and insert the Mexican American presence in US literary studies. By examining the intersections of cultural production and political inclusion, Rivera’s book follows the model of contemporary Latino scholarship that engages in cultural critique under the rubric of cultural citizenship, often associated with Renato Rosaldo and others.

In theoretical line with such scholars as Jürgen Habermas, Rivera further expands the prevailing understanding of the manner by which the public sphere operates as a determining factor of developing democracy. Challenging the premise that the public sphere was solely confined to eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, Rivera investigates the varying ways in which Mexican Americans maneuvered within the public sphere in efforts toward political enfranchisement. Interrogating important political figures such as Lorenzo de Zavala and Miguel Antonio Otero, Rivera convincingly demonstrates how each utilized cultural production, specifically literature, to participate in local and national debates regarding the role of Mexican Americans in the United States. Rivera contends that, though frequently overlooked, Mexican American cultural workers employed literature for specific political purposes that narrativize the Mexican American quest for political power. In doing so, Rivera delineates how collectivity was formulated and functioned through consistent and active involvement in the US public sphere and, consequently, sheds light on US expansion and race relations. Fundamental to his argument, Rivera disputes claims that Mexican American cultural representation was solely rendered by European American productions; a principal claim of Rivera’s project is the notion that Mexican Americans actively participated in their own representations.

Rivera notes how in the second half of the nineteenth century, as questions of Manifest Destiny took center stage in public discourse surrounding national progress, a second, underlying question permeated public debate. Rivera convincingly argues how the so-called “Mexican Question,” coined by John O’Sullivan in the Democratic Review—not coincidentally the same author and publication that coined the phrase Manifest Destiny—was part and parcel of how Americans viewed national expansion and thus national identity. According to Rivera, “the Mexican Question was a European American inquiry into the very constitution of Mexican peoplehood that found its rhetorical dimensions within the perimeters of democratic expansion and racialization of the Mexican peoples who lived in the ‘frontiers.’” By establishing the prevalence of the Mexican Question in US public discourse, Rivera argues that nineteenth-century print culture would play a determining role in the way that subsequent Mexican American cultural production would represent its people. Rivera first explores the Mexican Question in mid-nineteenth century non-fiction magazines, but the phrase continues as a trope throughout The Emergence of Mexican America to address the ways that Mexican Americans constructed a public and collective consciousness.

One of Rivera’s key contributions is the extended treatment of Lorenzo de Zavala’s Viaje de los Estados Unidos del Norte América (1834). Instrumental in the republication of Zavala’s text through Arte Público Press, Rivera is primarily responsible for the recovery of a valuable work of literature by a Mexican living in what is now the United States. In this fully realized critical treatment of the text (Rivera had previously written an article in American Literary History and the critical introduction to the new publication), Rivera demonstrates how Zavala offers a markedly different type of travel narrative. Read alongside Crèvecoeur and Tocqueville’s more canonical travel narratives of early America, Zavala’s Viaje provides a complex portrait of US democracy that was to serve as a model for the nascent Mexican Republic. Rivera’s reading illustrates how Zavala’s text toes the line between critical analysis and the reproduction of expansionist rhetoric. Through the lenses of political philosophy and cultural criticism, the discussion of Zavala reveals the Mexican American historical involvement in the process of US deliberative democracy, and how that involvement relied on narrative to articulate participation.

With the exception of the chapter on US print cultures, each chapter chiefly addresses a single key author to illustrate the disparate and at times conflicting ways in which Mexican Americans imagined their place in US culture and society. As part of his critique, Rivera makes evident the role of gender in positioning Mexican Americans within the US public sphere. A chapter each on Mexican womanhood and New Mexican manhood examines María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Miguel Antonio Otero, respectively, to demonstrate how gender constructions limited or enabled Mexican American social in/exclusion. Following Dana Nelson’s assertion that citizenship rights depended on an assumed fraternity of white manhood, Rivera details how Mexican Americans appealed to, were excluded from, and negotiated the intersection of racism and gender in relation to their potential political power.

For instance, Otero, territorial governor of New Mexico from 1896 to 1908, took up the now mythic figure of Billy the Kid (The Real Billy the Kid, 1936) in order to create a narrative that opposed European American assumption of political and social power. Two Anglo authors, Pat Garrett and Ash Upson, popularized a legend of Billy the Kid that associated the outlaw with Mexicans and, consequently, as a threat to US democracy. In turn, like the stereotypes propagated in popular literature, the association of Mexican American men with legal or social transgression justified the European American political land grab by rendering Mexican men as un-civilizable. Otero responds to such assertions by writing a counter-narrative that portrays Billy the Kid as a victim of circumstance, acting in self-defense only to be brutally murdered as a result of a larger territorial dispute known as the Lincoln County War. Otero’s account transforms Billy the Kid into a champion of the people, providing just one example of how literary cultural production helps fashion Mexican American collective subjectivity. Rivera cogently demonstrates how Otero utilizes literature to reshape political discourse to support Mexican Americans and New Mexican statehood.

However, as forceful and intriguing as its analysis of late nineteenth century gender constructions is, The Emergence of Mexican America perhaps places too much emphasis on specific authors as representative, particularly given the elite class status of the chosen examples. While Rivera begins to address this by selecting socialist activist Emma Tenayuca as a non-upper class representative of Mexican American challenges to democratic exclusion, the book neglects to account for the extent to which an individual can symbolize an entire people across class lines. Tracing the literary history of Mexican Americans is fraught with gaps as the material conditions of the Mexican origin population limited publication to the elite; that the majority of Mexican Americans remained outside the landed elite threatens to erode arguments about representation. Situating examples from the more common avenue of publication by Mexican Americans, periodicals, against specific, isolated texts might complicate such readings. Yet within Rivera’s critical selection, published book-length texts, his argument is quite persuasive. Of particular note, Rivera reads the development of Mexican American peoplehood as dialectically produced in the mediation of Mexican and American cultural associations. As such, Rivera’s text is an excellent study of how the inclusion of Mexican American narratives helps scholars to re-imagine US literary history.