Forging Arizona: A History of the Peralta Land Grant and Racial Identity in the West (Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States) - Softcover

Huizar-Hernández, Anita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813598818 ISBN 13: 9780813598819

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2019

Synopsis

In Forging Arizona Anita Huizar-Hernández looks back at a bizarre nineteenth-century land grant scheme that tests the limits of how ideas about race, citizenship, and national expansion are forged. During the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexico War and the creation of the current border, a con artist named James Addison Reavis falsified archives around the world to pass his wife off as the heiress to an enormous Spanish land grant so that they could claim ownership of a substantial portion of the newly-acquired Southwestern territories. Drawing from a wide variety of sources including court records, newspapers, fiction, and film, Huizar-Hernández argues that the creation, collapse, and eventual forgetting of Reavis’s scam reveal the mechanisms by which narratives, real and imaginary, forge borders. An important addition to extant scholarship on the U.S Southwest border, Forging Arizona recovers a forgotten case that reminds readers that the borders that divide nations, identities, and even true from false are only as stable as the narratives that define them. 

About this title

About the Author

ANITA HUIZAR-HERNÁNDEZ is an assistant professor of border studies in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Review

“Forging Arizona tells a gripping story about inheriting and inventing, about fictionalizing and forgetting. Huizar-Hernández deftly mines the unsettling history of the Peralta Land Grant to make an important contribution to our understanding of the Latinx Southwest and its place in US national narratives." (Kirsten Silva Gruesz author of Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing)

"In this highly original study, Anita Huizar-Hernández combines the history of western expansion with the concerns of Latino/a/x studies to show how ideologies that forged the US border in the nineteenth century were intertwined with facile notions of ethnic identity. With insightful analysis of fabricated historical documents, Huizar-Hernández questions the uses of archival authority to support logics of inclusion and exclusion." (Rodrigo Lazo coeditor of The Latino Nineteenth Century)

"Recommended." (Choice)

"Arguably one of the most important books on Arizona history written in the last decade."  (Tombstone Epitaph)

"Borderlands Professor Brings Fresh Light to an Arizona Land Fraud," interview with Anita Huizar-Hernandez (Tombstone Epitaph)

Edition details

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0813598818
• ISBN 13: 9780813598819
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 180