Richard L. Nostrand interprets the Hispanos’ experience in geographical terms. He demonstrates that their unique intermixture with Pueblo Indians, nomad Indians, Anglos, and Mexican Americans, combined with isolation in their particular natural and cultural environments, have given them a unique sense of place - a sense of homeland. Several processes shaped and reshaped the Hispano Homeland. Initial colonization left the Hispanos relatively isolated from cultural changes in the rest of New Spain, and gradual intermarriage with Pueblo and nomad Indians gave them new cultural features. As their numbers increased in the eighteenth century, they began to expand their Stronghold outward from the original colonies.

Ideas defer to no border—least of all the idea of belonging. So where does one belong, and what does belonging even mean, when a border inscribes one’s identity? This dilemma, so critical to the ethnic Mexican community, is at the heart of Homeland, an intellectual, cultural, and literary history of belonging in ethnic Mexican thought through the twentieth century. Belonging, as Aaron E. Sánchez’s sees it, is an interwoven collection of ideas that defines human connectedness and that shapes the contours of human responsibilities and our obligations to one another. In Homeland, Sánchez traces these ideas of belonging to their global, national, and local origins, and shows how they have transformed over time. For pragmatic, ideological, and political reasons, ethnic Mexicans have adapted, adopted, and abandoned ideas about belonging as shifting conceptions of citizenship disrupted old and new ways of thinking about roots and shared identity around the global. From the Mexican Revolution to the Chicano Movement, in Texas and across the nation, journalists, poets, lawyers, labor activists, and people from all walks of life have reworked or rejected citizenship as a concept that explained the responsibilities of people to the state and to one another. A wealth of sources—poems, plays, protests, editorials, and manifestos—demonstrate how ethnic Mexicans responded to changes in the legitimate means of belonging in the twentieth century. With competing ideas from both sides of the border they expressed how they viewed their position in the region, the nation, and the world—in ways that sometimes united and often divided the community. A transnational history that reveals how ideas move across borders and between communities, Homeland offers welcome insight into the defining and changing concept of belonging in relation to citizenship. In the process, the book marks another step in a promising new direction for Mexican American intellectual history.

On the plains between the San Antonio River and the Rio Grande lies the heartland of what is perhaps the largest ethnic region in the United States, Tejano South Texas. In this cultural geography, Daniel Arreola charts the many ways in which Texans of Mexican ancestry have established a cultural province in this Texas-Mexico borderland that is unlike any other Mexican American region. Arreola begins by delineating South Texas as an environmental and cultural region. He then explores who the Tejanos are, where in Mexico they originated, and how and where they settled historically in South Texas. Moving into the present, he examines many factors that make Tejano South Texas distinctive from other Mexican American regions—the physical spaces of ranchos, plazas, barrios, and colonias; the cultural life of the small towns and the cities of San Antonio and Laredo; and the foods, public celebrations, and political attitudes that characterize the region. Arreola's findings thus offer a new appreciation for the great cultural diversity that exists within the Mexican American borderlands.

Newly revised and updated, Mexicanos tells the rich and vibrant story of Mexicans in the United States. Emerging from the ruins of Aztec civilization and from centuries of Spanish contact with indigenous people, Mexican culture followed the Spanish colonial frontier northward and put its distinctive mark on what became the southwestern United States. Shaped by their Indian and Spanish ancestors, deeply influenced by Catholicism, and tempered by an often difficult existence, Mexicans continue to play an important role in U.S. society, even as the dominant Anglo culture strives to assimilate them. Thorough and balanced, Mexicanos makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of the Mexican population of the United States—a growing minority who are a vital presence in 21st-century America.

Focusing on the two major areas of the Southwest that witnessed the most intensive and sustained colonial encounters, New Mexico and the Pimería Alta compares how different forms of colonialism and indigenous political economies resulted in diverse outcomes for colonists and Native peoples. Taking a holistic approach and studying both colonist and indigenous perspectives through archaeological, ethnohistoric, historic, and landscape data, contributors examine how the processes of colonialism played out in the American Southwest. Although these broad areas—New Mexico and southern Arizona/northern Sonora—share a similar early colonial history, the particular combination of players, sociohistorical trajectories, and social relations within each area led to, and were transformed by, markedly diverse colonial encounters. Understanding these different mixes of players, history, and social relations provides the foundation for conceptualizing the enormous changes wrought by colonialism throughout the region. The presentations of different cultural trajectories also offer important avenues for future thought and discussion on the strategies for missionization and colonialism. The case studies tackle how cultures evolved in the light of radical transformations in cultural traits or traditions and how different groups reconciled to this change. A much needed up-to-date examination of the colonial era in the Southwest, New Mexico and the Pimería Alta demonstrates the intertwined relationships between cultural continuity and transformation during a time of immense change and highlights contemporary thought on the colonial experience. Contributors: Joseph Aguilar, Jimmy Arterberry, Heather Atherton, Dale Brenneman, J. Andrew Darling, John G. Douglass, B. Sunday Eiselt, Severin Fowles, William M. Graves, Lauren Jelinek, Kelly L. Jenks, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, Phillip O. Leckman, Matthew Liebmann, Kent G. Lightfoot, Lindsay Montgomery, Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman, Robert Preucel, Matthew Schmader, Thomas E. Sheridan, Colleen Strawhacker, J. Homer Thiel, David Hurst Thomas, Laurie D. Webster

Responding to shifts in the political and economic experiences of Mexicans in America, this newly revised and expanded edition of Mexicanos provides a relevant and contemporary consideration of this vibrant community. Emerging from the ruins of Aztec civilization and from centuries of Spanish contact with indigenous people, Mexican culture followed the Spanish colonial frontier northward and put its distinctive mark on what became the southwestern United States. Shaped by their Indian and Spanish ancestors, deeply influenced by Catholicism, and often struggling to respond to political and economic precarity, Mexicans play an important role in US society even as the dominant Anglo culture strives to assimilate them. With new maps, updated appendicxes, and a new chapter providing an up-to-date consideration of the immigration debate centered on Mexican communities in the US, this new edition of Mexicanos provides a thorough and balanced contribution to understanding Mexicans’ history and their vital importance to 21st-century America.