Author Archives: Kris Klein Hernandez

Rifkin, Mark. Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 290 pp. Paperback. $26.96.

Mark Rifkin’s Manifesting America is a pathbreaking and discipline-shattering examination of 1810 to 1850s imperial and subaltern rhetoric between U.S. national authorities and marginalized populations such as Amerindians, early Californios, and ethnic Mexicans. Rifkin extrapolates American legal documents such as the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo to illustrate how the imperial structure of U.S. jurisdiction over the last two centuries created a “simulation of consent” between marginalized peoples and the state (5). He argues that the ways “internalized populations” appropriated and contested North American geographies in a range of “non-fictional writings” demonstrates how U.S. imperial hegemony became embedded in the very language and society of these peoples (6–7).

Manifesting America is divided into four complementary chapters, each examining the manner in which the government articulated sovereignty and authority over contested lands. The first part deconstructs the rhetoric of the 1830 Indian Removal Act and how the U.S. framed “a certain geopolitical grammar” to justify America’s forced migration of Amerindians, especially Cherokees (49, 57). The second chapter examines the rhetoric of popular American figures like Thomas Jefferson and explains how war and expansion exacerbated the legal “inbetweeness” of Anglos and Amerindians (78). The next section investigates Texan property holdings and draws connections between the political identity and economic privilege of ethnic Mexicans, Comanches and Tejanos. The last chapter inspects Californio land claims with the “reservation-paradigm” that allowed the vehicle of violence to legally place indigenous land in the ownership of Anglos and Californios. Each segment of the book provides the reader with several examples of how American imperial rhetoric placated and abused marginalized peoples, and irrevocably appropriated land into national space. Continue reading →

When speaking about the impact of U.S. labor on early twentieth-century Latinos, one must consider how labor affected Latinos differently depending on the location, time and purpose of creating a labor capital. I would like to speak about various unique locales where U.S. labor transformed, or perhaps, imposed, notions of modernity onto Latinos – Mexicans in the Southwest and Puerto Ricans on the island. These locations are special in their proximity to  two separate countries (PR and U.S./Mexico and Arizona) as well as how U.S. imperial influence transformed the family. Continue reading →

Growing up in El Paso over the years has provided this writer the opportunity to observe the significance and impact telenovelas (Spanish-speaking soap operas) have on an audience. I remember my grandmother, glued to the TV from six to nine at night, watching her telenovelas. These soap operas played every day Monday through Friday. She became engrossed in the trivial and melodramatic storylines. When I would misbehave, she would scold me saying, “Look at this man [on the TV] – if you misbehave now, you will grow up and be like him – cheating in life.” At the time, I had no idea was she was talking about. Today, I realize that my grandmother and her friends, and their friends’ friends all based reality and attitudes of people off of the characters and situations in these soap operas. Did my grandmother actually believe that the characters in these soaps were actually real? I decided to research various soap operas/telenovelas, finding out if they had the same impact on other people like they had on my grandmother. Continue reading →