The Lost Land: The Chicano Image Of The Southwest.

Abstract

Before the war between the United States and Mexico, which ended in 1848, present-day California, Texas, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, more than half of Colorado in the southern and western portions of the state, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and the southwestern corners of Wyoming and Kansas were all parts of Mexico's national territory. What effect did the loss of this immense territory have on the psychology of the region's Mexicans, especially on the interrelationships they saw between the land, themselves, and the Anglo-Americans? And what effect, in turn, has this image of the Southwest had on Chicano history from 1848 to the present? Borrowing from the imagist tradition of intellectual history--the tradition of Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and Roderick Nash--this dissertation follows the changes in the Chicano perception of the Southwest from earliest times to the present, but especially after 1848. From the chronicles of the Aztecs, through the Spanish-language press of the nineteenth century, to the literature and social thought of the 1970s, a specifically Chicano image can be traced, one focussed on the aspect of the Southwest as home. During the sixteenth century the region was pictured as an Edenic land to the distant north of Mexico City: for the Spaniards a land of riches to be conquered, but for the Indians an ancient homeland. Later the picture became mundane: a series of defensive outposts to the Spanish in Mexico City, but a simple homeland to the mestizo settlers on the frontier. After Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821, the far northwest was perceived as an integral part of the whole Mexican homeland that would help the new republic prosper in the future, but this image was soon shattered by the Anglo-American invasion of the 1840s. The present Chicano image of the Southwest had its beginning in 1848; from that year on, the Mexicans of the region have seen the land as lost and themselves as a conquered people. Since, then, the belief that the Southwest (especially the areas long settled by Mexicans) is the Chicano homeland and the belief that Mexicans are indigenous to and dispossessed of the region are beliefs that have had a formative and continuing influence on the collective Chicano mind. Over the last 130 years the image of the lost land has served as a focus for Mexican nationalism in the Southwest. The image has reminded Chicanos of their long history in and prior rights to the region, and these rights have formed the foundation for claims of many kinds against U.S. society. Over the decades Mexicans in the Southwest have defended their language, customs, property, freedom of movement, and their very dignity on the basis of their rights as a native people. Yet the greatest significance of the image of the lost land has been the recurring hope for the recovery of that territory in one form or another. The desire of Southwest Mexicans for recovery of the region has always been tied to their desire for cultural, political, and economic self-determination, a self-determination they belief can only be achieved through control of the space they occupy. The story of the struggle for that environment, the subject of this dissertation, is central to Chicano history.