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Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest 2021
Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest is a 2021 book by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, both affiliated with the University of California, San Diego, released by Duke University Press. The work examines how literature portrays land theft and colonial expansion within New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. Sánchez and Pita analyze Chicano/a and Native American novels, memoirs, and cultural works spanning from the eighteenth century to today. Using Marxist ideas about enclosure—a process that separates people from resources—the authors explore how Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. authorities took Indigenous and later Mexican-owned lands through violence, laws, deceit, and policy. They show how such spatial violence was supported by discursive violence through legal systems, racial thinking, and narrative silences that justify dispossession. Literature, they argue, captures aspects of this history often missed by traditional historical accounts due to its ability to present multiple timeframes and personal experiences. A significant theme in the book is how Chicano/a writing sometimes glorifies a romanticized Spanish colonial past in order to reject claims of Mexican racial inferiority, even as it omits the role of Spanish and Mexican settlers in taking Indigenous lands.
Details
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- ISBN
- 9781478021292
- Pages
- 272
- Format
- Print, e-book
