Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest

Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest is a study of subject formation through literary production over the region's historical processes of colonization and enclosure. Focused on Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita trace the discourses of enclosure and identity formation through Native American and ethnic Mexican literature amid shifting relations of production and land tenure through Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American colonization. Over four chapters, the book explores themes of paternalism, the guardianship system, dispossession, resource extraction, invasion, and conquest in Indigenous, Tejano, and Hispano literature. The book is critical of the erasure of Native American oppression and Indigenous heritage in early Mexican American literature as landed elites sought to emphasize their Spanish heritage in the face of Anglo oppression. Centered on the premise that literature is well suited to reproduce the subjectivities of historical actors, the authors supplement their analysis with historiography, albeit largely outdated, leaving some of their critiques of the field and methodological arguments flat. Their literary analysis, however, provides for a rich account of the ways that Natives, Nuevomexicanos, and Tejanos envisioned their collective identity and recounted a shared past.The first chapter is an overview of settler-colonialism and colonization in the Southwest, with the authors focusing on enclosure as well as material and discursive dispossession of the region's successive populations. This is arguably their weakest chapter, engaging in long-settled historiographical debates over the place of Native and Mexican dispossession in US history. The following chapters prove much stronger. Chapter 2 traces a history of Native American enclosure in Oklahoma, focusing on Linda Hogan's novel Mean Spirit. Sánchez and Pita argue that the 1991 novel showcases the historical collusion between capital and the state in the dispossession of the Osages and the loss of the commons among Indigenous peoples. The authors trace the historical accounts fictionalized by the novel, such as the “Osage Reign of Terror,” where Texas cattleman William K. Hale and his nephew married and murdered a number of full-blooded and propertied Osage women to accrue their wealth and oil rights.Chapter 3 focuses on New Mexican colonization from the Spanish colonial period through Anglo invasion and then its admittance into the United States as a state. Here, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s poetry gives an account of the 1599 Acoma Massacre, WPA narratives alongside Dora Ortiz Vásquez's 1975 Enchanted Temple of Taos cover the state's history of debt peonage and Indian slavery, and Cleofas Jaramillo's 1955 Romance of a Little Village Girl and Nash Candelaria's 1982 Not by the Sword account for landed Nuevomexicanas/os’ perspectives on Anglo invasion. Sánchez and Pita give a rich history of the ways that Hispanos recounted and constructed their shared history and identity and countered discursive, legal, material, and physical violence by Anglo invaders and a Congress that had little interest in incorporating a state full of “mongrels.” Similarly, the final chapter covers the colonization of what is now the Texas Rio Grande Valley amid Spanish and then Anglo-American colonization. The authors show how Jovita González and Americo Paredes's works chronicle Mexican American dispossession after 1848 and the accompanying shifts in personal, familial, and collective identity against a backdrop of shifting modes of production and social relations.Despite their well-founded critique of culturalist approaches to decolonization prevalent in Latino/a/x studies, Sánchez and Pita rely on literature and cultural production, rather than current historiography, to build a material history of dispossession and conquest in the borderlands. While the authors emphasize the heterogeneity of settler-colonialism and colonization across the Southwest by European Americans and mestizos through the Spanish, Mexican, and American periods, they present a declensionist portrait of colonization where, except in Oklahoma, Natives disappear or fall into the background after the arrival of the Spanish. This leaves the authors falling into their own (outdated) critique of a historiography that neglects Natives and Chicanas/os as Sánchez and Pita disregard more recent critical contributions from borderlands historians who prioritize Native American agency and even regional hegemony against outsiders and newcomers. The result is a strong analysis of shifting cultural identities at the expense of Indian agency and historiographical rigor. I would recommend this for upper division and graduate Chicana/o studies or literature students to be read alongside recent works in Chicana/o and/or Native American history

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