The Mexican War, 1846-1848 by K. Jack Bauer

Bauer’s work is an important break in this pattern, for it is based upon extensive research among both primary and secondary sources, and while its weight of scholarship does not rival that of Smith’s history it is easily the most serious study of the Mexican War we have had in recent times. It is now fifty-six years since Justin Smith’s War with Mexico appeared, and although several histories of the war have been published since none has done much more than synthesize previously published works-including Smith’s-with little to offer of their own except a point of view. The publishers of this book state that it is “the first large-scale study in fifty years” of the Mexican War, and in one sense their claim is too modest. Berge, Professor of History, San Diego State University, author of “A Mexican Dilemma: The Mexico City Ayuntamiento and the Question of Loyalty, 1846-1848,” Hispanic American Historical Review (May, 1970), and editor-translator of Considerations on the Political and Social Situation of The Mexican Republic, 1847 (1975) New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., lnc., 1974. In Mexico, the agonized response to the nation’s failure to stop the “Yankee” invader led instead to a confrontation with its own lack of a unifying national identity and forced writers and political intellectuals to ask hard questions about Mexico’s destiny.The Mexican War: 1846-1848 By K.

For Mexican American writers, the war, although a major feature of Mexican American literature, nonetheless became an environment in which to explore conditions of non-national, liminal border identities, which became strikingly relevant as the 20th century turned into the 21st. The eventual projection of the bandit figure as the prototypical Mexican villain reinforced Anglo-American national self-definitions of moral, cultural, and racial superiority as a response to the destabilizing energies resulting from the invasion of a neighboring American republic. This instability in how writers saw Mexico and Mexicans suggests that the war could paradoxically generate critical self-reflections that countered essentialist notions of manifest destiny. Much of the popular literature produced in mass-market novelette form, for example, deployed a range of Mexican enemies that ran through a sequence from noble, chivalrous opponents, to fiendish enemies and terrorist bandits. The US–Mexico War produced a wide range of literature in the United States that exposed the provisional and contingent qualities of US nationalism, even while it also asserted the anti-Mexican racism and xenophobia that continues to shape cultural and political discourse in the early 21st century.

The Mexican War, 1846-1848 by K. Jack Bauer