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Remapping The U.S. "Southwest": Early Mexican American Literature And The Production Of Transnational Counterspaces, 1885-1958, Diana Noreen Rivera

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation brings to light a legacy of Mexican American spatial resilience that troubles Anglo-centric constructions of the Southwest, its history, and cultural formation as a byproduct of westward expansionism. This project argues that early Mexican American writers offer an alternative paradigm of transnationalism for understanding the literature, culture, and geography of the U.S. Southwest as it has been imagined in Anglo American cultural production about the region. For early Mexican American writers, the Southwest was not a quaint literary region but a space of historic transnational zones of contact, commerce, and cultural geography where they maintained degrees of agency. …