Before Chicano : Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 1848-1959 Paperback / softback

by Alberto Varon

Part of the America and the Long 19th Century series

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

Uncovers the long history of how Latino manhood was integral to the formation of Latino identity In the first ever book-length study of Latino manhood before the Civil Rights Movement, Before Chicano examines Mexican American print culture to explore how conceptions of citizenship and manhood developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The year 1848 saw both the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the U.S.

Mexican War and the year of the Seneca Falls Convention, the first organized conference on womenâ€™s rights in the United States.

These concurrent events signaled new ways of thinking about U.S. citizenship, and placing these historical moments into conversation with the archive of Mexican American print culture, Varon offers an expanded temporal frame for Mexican Americans as long-standing participants in U.S. national projects. Pulling from a wide-variety of familiar and lesser-known worksâ€”from fiction and newspapers to government documents, images, and traveloguesâ€”Varon illustrates how Mexican Americans during this period envisioned themselves as U.S. citizens through cultural depictions of manhood. Before Chicano reveals how manhood offered a strategy to disparate Latino communities across the nation to imagine themselves as a cohesive wholeâ€”as Mexican Americansâ€”and as political agents in the U.S.

Though the Civil Rights Movement is typically recognized as the origin point for the study of Latino culture, Varon pushes us to consider an intellectual history that far predates the late twentieth century, one that is both national and transnational.

He expands our framework for imagining Latinosâ€™ relationship to the U.S. and to a past that is often left behind.