The literary archive of the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848) opens to view the conflicts and relationships across one of the most contested borders in the Americas. Most studies of this literature focus on the war's nineteenth-century moment of national expansion. In The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War, Jaime Javier Rodríguez brings the discussion forward to our own moment by charting a new path into the legacies of a military conflict embedded in the cultural cores of both nations. Rodríguez's groundbreaking study moves beyond the terms of Manifest Destiny to ask a fundamental question: How do the war's literary expressions shape contemporary tensions and exchanges among Anglo Americans, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans. By probing the war's traumas, anxieties, and consequences with a fresh attention to narrative, Rodríguez shows us the relevance of the U.S.-Mexican War to our own era of demographic and cultural change. Reading across dime novels, frontline battle accounts, Mexican American writings and a wide range of other popular discourse about the war, Rodríguez reveals how historical awareness itself lies at the center of contemporary cultural fears of a Mexican "invasion," and how the displacements caused by the war set key terms for the ways Mexican Americans in subsequent generations would come to understand their own identities. Further, this is also the first major comparative study that analyzes key Mexican war texts and their impact on Mexico's national identity.

Arguing for a new and sober look at the nature of U.S.-Latin American relations, Dr. Hayes addresses the question: Does the United States have compelling national interests in maintaining close relations with Latin American countries? Her conclusion is yes, but for reasons different from those offered in the traditional literature or espoused by many policy analysts. She maintains that U.S. interests in relations with Latin America are primarily political, secondarily economic--though economic ties are the basis of the relationship--and only marginally military. Proper emphasis on these long-term interests may be critical to U.S. national security in a global, as well as regional, context. Dr. Hayes points out that the Latin American countries--occupying a unique position among developing nations today because of their comparatively successful experiences in achieving economic growth and development--represent an increasingly important political influence in both the developed and developing worlds. Moreover, she argues, it is in the U.S. interest to give economic aid to the less-developed countries in the hemisphere, particularly in the Caribbean Basin: U.S. security is better preserved and enhanced by encouraging political and economic stability in the region than by promoting military alliances that Latin Americans may not really want. Supporting the need for a revised rationale for U.S.-Latin American relations, Dr. Hayes focuses in detail on the regions and nations of special interest to the United States today: the Caribbean Basin, Mexico (in a chapter by Professor Bruce M. Bagley), Brazil, and the Southern Cone.

In the American imagination “the West” denotes a border—between civilization and wilderness, past and future, native and newcomer—and its lawlessness is legendary. In fact, there was an abundance of law in the West, as in all borderland regions of vying and overlapping claims, jurisdictions, and domains. It is this legal borderland that Beyond the Borders of the Law explores. Combining the concepts and insights of critical legal studies and western/borderlands history, this book demonstrates how profoundly the North American West has been, and continues to be, a site of contradictory, overlapping, and overreaching legal structures and practices steeped in articulations of race, gender, and power. The authors in this volume take up topics and time periods that include Native history, the US-Canada and US-Mexico borders, regions from Texas to Alaska and Montana to California, and a chronology that stretches from the mid-nineteenth century to the near-present. From water rights to women’s rights, from immigrant to indigenous histories, from disputes over coal deposits to child custody, their essays chronicle the ways in which marginalized westerners have leveraged and resisted the law to define their own rights and legacies. For the authors, legal borderlands might be the legal texts that define and regulate geopolitical borders, or they might be the ambiguities or contradictions creating liminal zones within the law. In their essays, and in the volume as a whole, the concept of legal borderlands proves a remarkably useful framework for finally bringing a measure of clarity to a region characterized by lawful disorder and contradiction.