"Aranda provides an important lens through which to wrestle with the competing Spanish/Mexican and Anglo-American settler colonialist ideologies in Mexican American cultural production."—Sandra Dahlberg, Western American Literature
"This volume makes a major contribution to Chicanx studies and therefore to American studies. . . . This book will nurture further studies."—B. Almon, Choice
“José F. Aranda Jr. addresses a much-lamented gap in Chicanx literary criticism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century of American literature by Mexican Americans by providing an authoritative, compelling, and creatively challenging interpretive lens. Aranda helps us understand how these texts speak to one another (or why they don’t), how they fit in the larger scope of American literary history, and what they bring to today’s scholarly conversations about coloniality, modernity, identity, class, place, and geopolitics in Chicanx literature and theory.”—Priscilla Solis Ybarra, author of Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment
“José F. Aranda Jr. offers an intervention in the literary critical conversation in Chicanx studies that for several decades has been dismissive (or blithely ignorant) of early Mexican American literary cultures from California to Texas, typically mischaracterizing them as complicit with dominant Anglo-American settler colonial projects. This work tirelessly argues for the importance of understanding the entanglements and intersections of ethnoracial, class, and general social categories and factors.”—Stephen Tatum, coauthor of Morta Las Vegas: CSI and the Problem of the West
