Changing National Identities at the Frontier
Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850

This book explores the shaping of national identities in Texas and New Mexico in 1846–8.

Andrés Reséndez (Author)

9780521835558, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 September 2004

326 pages, 12 maps
22.9 x 16.4 x 0.1 cm, 0.55 kg

'This is an eagerly awaited update and extension of an earlier classic. … The book is written with the authority of two established authors with a combined wealth of experience in both the subject and also (importantly) in its communication to a wide audience. … The result if a book that will appeal to a wide range of readers from both undergraduate and postgraduate students, to foresters, ecologists and land managers. A colleague has 'tested' this with undergraduates and is highly pleased with the result. I'm sure this will be a classic text for a range of readers for many years to come.' Arboricultural Journal

This book explores how the diverse and fiercely independent peoples of Texas and New Mexico came to think of themselves as members of one particular national community or another in the years leading up to the Mexican-American War. Hispanics, Native Americans, and Anglo Americans made agonizing and crucial identity decisions against the backdrop of two structural transformations taking place in the region during the first half of the nineteenth century and often pulling in opposite directions. On the one hand, the Mexican government sought to bring its frontier inhabitants into the national fold by relying on administrative and patronage linkages; but on the other, Mexico's northern frontier gravitated toward the expanding American economy.

1. Carved spaces: Mexico's far north, the American southwest, or Indian domains?
2. A nation made visible: patronage, power, and ritual
3. The spirit of mercantile enterprise
4. The Benediction of the Roman ritual
5. The Texas Revolution and the not-so-secret history of shifting loyalties
6. The fate of Governor Albino Pérez
7. State, market, and literary cultures
8. New Mexico at the razor's edge.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK]