Outlaw Citizenship

This chapter analyses perhaps the most prevalent figure associated with Mexican American manhood, the bandit. This chapter argues that, in contrast to most understandings of the bandit as an anti-U.S. criminal, Mexican American bandits developed cultural values that allowed Mexican Americans to incorporate into the U.S. nation. This chapter proposes the bandit as a figure that “cleaves” Mexican Americans to citizenship, playing on the contradictory meanings of the term cleave to both sever and adhere. Cleaving then becomes a way of conceptualizing the relationship between Mexican American manhood and citizenship throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Introduction

This introduction reframes Mexican American cultural production within the United States away from immigration and calls for a longer historical and multilingual approach to Latinos in U.S. culture. It argues for the importance of Mexican American manhood in understanding gender in the United States and describes some of the prevailing forms that Mexican American manhood took.

Queer Citizenship

This chapter sutures the pre- and post-civil rights movements—a divide that operates as a historical schism for Latino Studies. Analyzing José Antonio Villarreal’s novel Pocho (1959, which many have hailed as the first Chicano novel), this chapter argues that the novel is better understood not as an origin point but rather as a node within a longer genealogy of Latino culture. This chapter focuses on sexuality, homoeroticism, and homophobia, depictions that are at odds with some of the stated objectives of the Chicano movement’s foundational documents, but that situate the novel within earlier discussions of American democratic values. Read alongside early Chicano movement manifestos and correspondence, the chapter calls for a more historically expansive understanding of the emergence and legacy of the Chicano movement.

Economic Citizenship

Chapter four turns to two novels, now widely accepted as part of the Latino “canon” and central modernist texts, to argue for a form of Mexican Ameircan manhood that rewrites citizenship as non-migratory labor. As part of a national literature, this economic citizenship urges pragmatic integration through economic cooperation. By championing the economic capacity of Latinos not as laborers but as managers, inventors, and entrepreneurs, these texts engage with early twentieth-century ideals about productivity and the division of labor, critiquing notions of the so-called “self-made man” and refashioning Mexican American manhood as a model for the national citizen. Economic citizenship seeks a place within the structures of capitalism that dominated social life and to dissociate Mexican Americans from ideas of migration and transience that characterized discourses of labor so often associated with ethnic Mexicans. To do so, it examines the minor or marginalized characters in these novels.

Fantasy Citizenship

This chapter considers the other predominant figure of late 19th century manhood, one often directed at a middle-class readership, Spanish fantasy heritage. This chapter examines Spanish fantasy heritage as a process of racialization responding to the dual nature of U.S. citizenship that distinguished between state and federal citizenship. This chapter recovers the work of author Adolfo Carrillo whose collection of short stories, Cuentos Californianos, counters the racialization of Mexican Americans within this climate of changing legal structures through its treatment of the fantasy heritage. This chapter further asserts the need to read U.S. culture multilingually in order to understand its full complexity.

Expatriate Citizenship

This chapter demonstrates how Mexican Americans conceptualized U.S. national citizenship through a transnational lens, specifically through political developments in the Mexican Revolution. It examines México de afuera, a well known expatriate phenomenon, but by focusing on its impact on Mexican American manhood, this chapter shows how the ideology developed into “expatriate citizenship,” a way of deliberating the nation’s place as an emergent global superpower and on the contradictions posed between exported democracy and domestic citizenship. This chapter offers an extended reading of Josefina Niggli’s overlooked 1947 novel Step Down, Elder Brother as expatriate citizenship.

Epilogue

This brief epilogue connects the historical analysis of the book with the contemporary political moment. It gives a history of President Trump’s “America First” slogan within Mexican American cultural history.