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

Hispanics, Native Americans, and Anglo Americans made agonizing and crucial identity decisions in this southwestern region during the first half of the nineteenth century. Whereas the Mexican government sought to bring its frontier inhabitants into the national fold by relying on administrative and patronage linkages, Mexico's northern frontier gravitated toward the expanding American economy. Andrés Reséndez 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.

Andréz Reséndez is Assistant Professor at the Department of History at UC Davis. He is from Mexico City where he obtained his undergraduate degree in International Relations from El Colegio de México. He did his graduate work at the University of Chicago and later worked in Mexico to work as a professional consultant to historically-based television programs. Having obtained his Ph.D. in 1997, he returned to the US as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Yale University. He has traveled extensively throughout Mexico and the American Southwest. He has written articles about Mexico's northern frontier and the Mexican-American War for leading journals both in Mexico and in the United States. He is the editor and translator of A Texas Patriot on Trial in Mexico: José Antonio Navarro and the Texan Santa Fe Expedition, forthcoming in the Texas Library Series. He is also a member of the American Historical Association (AHA), the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).