Race, Soldiering, and Transnational Citizenship in Mexican American War Narratives, 1835-2005

FAIN: HR-50263-06

Ben V. Olguin
University of Texas, San Antonio (San Antonio, TX 78249-1644)

This study examines the complex negotiations of race and citizenship by Mexican American soldier authors from the early 19th century to the present through a critical survey of poems, letters, short stories, novels, memoirs, cinema, and popular song lyrics. These texts are undergirded by dramatic episodes in which Mexican American soldiers explore their roles as U.S. allies, or enemies, through identifications, and misidentifications, with other combatants and conflict participants. These recognition scenes variously involve xenophobic metaphors, subaltern multiracial alliances, problematic transnational identifications, regional identity claims, and post-racialist discourses that adumbrate new postnational Latina/o identities today.