94
edits
Changes
no edit summary
===Andres Resendez===
Like Chicano political culture, southwestern national identity is another complex subject that cannot be successfully explained through Turner’s frontier process. An understanding of Anglo-American national identity can benefit from an understanding of the place of the frontier within popular culture, and the idea that the American West signified the historic “struggle with the wilderness [that] turned Europeans into Americans.”<ref>Limerick, pg.20</ref> However, this perspective obscures the identities of nonwhite inhabitants of the West. Andres Resendez’s 2005 book, <a target="_blank" href="I>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521543193/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0521543193&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=705be5ac66302b4499e75f455efaf2fc">Changing National Identities at of the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850]</aI><img src="//ir-na, examined the identity choices of Tejanos, Nuevomexicanos, Mexicans, and Americans in the Southwest in the first half of the nineteenth century.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=dailyh0c-20&l=am2&o=1&a=0521543193" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />
Resendez used evidence of Mexican state-formation, southwestern market choices, cross-cultural marriages, ethnic literature, and violent resistance to explore the forces that influenced identity choices among Southwesterners. He integrated history of the Spanish heritage in the region, and the nation’s colonial legacy, with a rich variety of frontier inhabitant experiences to explain the construction of national identity on the Mexican-America border. He treated the Southwest as a region and an idea in order to understand the ways its inhabitants understood themselves and navigated their positions to competing national claims. Examining an era of changes and choices, Resendez also showed the continuity of the Southwest through his decision to treat the region as a discrete location, with a rich past and a dynamic cultural heritage that included the contributions of many cultures.
===Conclusion===
The historiographical scholarship on the American Southwest has progressed over the last few decades, and culminated in the kind of sophisticated analysis of heritage, culture and identity exemplified by historians such as David Weber, Matt Garcia and Andres Resendez. Yet these kinds of interpretive works would not have been possible without the contributions of Chicano and New Western historians. The “conceptual fog” that so worried Patricia Limerick was lifted from the study of the American Southwest and other western regions, and the ensuing analysis has given insight into the previously obscured lives of southwestern residents. Not only freed from the limitations set by Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, studies of the Southwest have uncovered evidence of widespread personal agency and political culture among Mexican Americans, re-examined connections between human history and ecology, and recognized the importance of identity and continuity in a contested region shaped by conquest.
{{Mediawiki:US History}}
<div class="portal" style="width:60%;">
==Related DailyHistory.org Articles==
*[[19th Century Overview of United States History Top Ten Booklist]]
*[[Civil War Battles Top Ten Booklist]]
*[[American Revolution Top Ten Booklist]]
*[[American Civil War Biographies Top Ten Booklist]]
*[[Origins of the French Revolution - Top Ten Booklist]]
</div>
===References===
<references/>
{{MediawikiContributors}}[[Category:Book Review]] [[Category:History of the American West]][[Category:19th Century History]][[Category:US 20th Century History}}]] [[Category:Historiography]]
