The Great Basin

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory E. Smoak
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
Great Basin ◽  
The United States ◽  
Wage Labor ◽  
Treaty Rights ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Spanish Colonization ◽  
Mormon Church

The Native peoples of the Great Basin live on some of the most arid and sparsely populated lands in the United States. The unforgiving basin environment has long influenced scholarly and popular perceptions of Great Basin Indians. This chapter is intended to historicize peoples who have too been naturalized. Spanish colonization in New Mexico transformed Native life in the Great Basin before the arrival of permanent Euro-American settlement. The subsequent conquest of the Great Basin took place largely through the actions of nonstate power interests—miners, overland emigrants, and the Mormon Church. The incorporation of wage labor was a common adaptation to conquest. Because many basin peoples lacked established treaty rights and/or reservation land bases, they struggled throughout the course of the twentieth century to reestablish sovereignty over their homelands.

"I am an American": Anglos, Mexicans, Nativos, and the National Debate over Arizona and New Mexico Statehood

2011 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda C. Noel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Descent ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Debate ◽  
Definition Of

This article focuses on how people of Mexican descent fit within the definition of "American" during the early twentieth century. It argues that during the final years of debate over Arizona and New Mexico statehood, nativos (U.S.-born people of Mexican descent), Mexicans (immigrants from Mexico), and Anglos developed and promoted strategies of pluralism and marginalization for incorporating people of Mexican descent into the nation. Pluralists worked to ensure that nativos in New Mexico would become full members of the United States as Spanish Americans, while Anglos promoting marginalization strove to limit people of Mexican descent in Arizona to second-class citizenship. Although both territories became states in 1912, the two strategies resulted in very different consequences for people of Mexican descent and provided two very different models for how they could be considered American.

La Conquistadora: A Conquering Virgin Meets Her Match

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 245-268
Author(s):  
Ann Marie Leimer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The United States ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Marian Devotion ◽  
New Mexican ◽  
Page Book

‭The Mexican Museum in San Francisco commissioned Delilah Montoya to produce a contemporary codex for the 1992 exhibition “The Chicano Codices: Encountering Art of the Americas,” which sought to critique Quincentennial observances erasing indigenous presence. The artist created a seven-page book, Codex Delilah, Six-Deer: Journey from Mexicatl to Chicana, that depicted the consequences of the initial American-European encounter, and she used the heroine Six-Deer to visually record women’s contributions to this 500-year history. In the codex’s fourth panel, Six-Deer comes across Adora-la-Conquistadora, the artist’s revisioning of the New Mexican Catholic icon of Our Lady of the Rosary, La Conquistadora, the oldest figure of Marian devotion in the United States. Six-Deer contests the designs of the Virgin, who intends to forcefully convert the native peoples of New Mexico. Rather than capitulate, Six-Deer refuses to participate in New Mexico’s Reconquista of 1692. Although Montoya appropriated La Conquistadora’s traditional sartorial splendor, she proposed an alternate reading of this Conquering Virgin. This article reads Montoya’s depiction within the dimensions of La Conquistadora’s historical, religious, cultural, and iconographic contexts.‬

The Insidious Momentum of American Mass Incarceration

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franklin E. Zimring
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Single Generation ◽  
American Life ◽  
Peak Rate ◽  
Or Practice

The phenomenal growth of penal confinement in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century is still a public policy mystery. Why did it happen when it happened? What explains the unprecedented magnitude of prison and jail expansion? Why are the current levels of penal confinement so very close to the all-time peak rate reached in 2007? What is the likely course of levels of penal confinement in the next generation of American life? Are there changes in government or policy that can avoid the prospect of mass incarceration as a chronic element of governance in the United States? This study is organized around four major concerns: What happened in the 33 years after 1973? Why did these extraordinary changes happen in that single generation? What is likely to happen to levels of penal confinement in the next three decades? What changes in law or practice might reduce this likely penal future?

Orientalized Aztecs: Observations on the Americanization of Theatrical Dance

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
K. Mitchell Snow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Policy ◽  
Ballets Russes

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw a passing fashion for “Aztec” dancing in the vaudeville theaters of the United States. Russian classical dancers Kosloff and Fokine tapped the orientalist currents of the Ballets Russes, adopting the Aztec as superficial signs of the American. Conversely, works by Shawn and film director Cecil B. DeMille, which served as points of reference for the Russians, represented a continuation of equally orientalist attitudes toward Mexico's past, forged during the realization of the United States’ policy of Manifest Destiny. The emergence of a cadre of trained dancers from Mexico, trained by students of Kosloff and Shawn, would bring a distinctively different perspective on the presentation of their heritage to the dance stage, one that was no longer based in the imagination of an expansionist America.

A Century of America on Chinese Screens

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiwei Xiao
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Print Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
American People ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chinese Films ◽  
New Millennium

AbstractNo serious study has been published on how Chinese filmmakers have portrayed the United States and the American people over the last century. The number of such films is not large. That fact stands in sharp contrast not only to the number of "China pictures" produced in the United States, which is not surprising, but also in contrast to the major role played by Chinese print media. This essay surveys the history of Chinese cinematic images of America from the early twentieth century to the new millennium and notes the shifts from mostly positive portrayal in the pre-1949 Chinese films, to universal condemnation during the Mao years and to a more nuanced, complex, and multi-colored presentation of the last few decades.

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