Author Archives: Michael K. Bess

THEME: Preserving Traditions, Stories, and Customs, Values, of the Mexican and Mexican American Community

The 2016 NACCS Tejas Foco conference is an interdisciplinary conference that is calling for submissions that offer insight into traditions, oral history (leyedas), passed down by our antepasados, customs, dichos, creencias, folkore (i.e., La Llorana, El Cucuy), language (i.e., caló), food, religion (i.e.religious drama pastorela), literature, music (baladas), pastimes (i.e., game of Huachas), folk art (i.e., murals, retablos), folk medicine (sobador/a, curandero/a), education, and Latino/a history and how they affect our everyday lives and identity.

We encourage submissions that seek to address the following, but not limited to, questions:

• What external socioeconomic forces causes us to move away from these customs and traditions?
• What generational factors operate in explaining the dilemma behind our children becoming non-practitioners of nuestra cultura and especially practicing the Spanish language and recognizing the value of bilingualism as an asset?
• How does assimilation into American mainstream culture affect these customs and traditions and how has our culture changed over time?
• What can we do, if anything, to stop the disappearance of customs and traditions? Or is disappearance inevitable and/or necessary to move forward? (Are some customs better left behind?)
• How does the Mexican and Mexican American culture change American national and local cultural practices?
• What is the role that folklore and public culture play in social movements? How do social movements influence Chicano/Mexicano culture?
• How could Mexican and Mexican values serve to enrich contemporary mainstream America?
• How does gender, sexuality and LGBT analyses offer new insights to understanding customs and traditions?

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For much of its history, the United States has fostered the dream of building an empire. From visions of the Empire of Liberty to Manifest Destiny and the expansion westward, colonizing native peoples and increasing Washington’s dominion at the expense of Mexico. In 1893, as Frederick Jackson Turner’s observation that the “frontier” had closed in U.S. society, this did not mean a cessation in a desire for expansion and control of new territory. The Monroe Doctrine grouped the entire Western Hemisphere under the aegis of the United States, Americans sought to command economic and political opportunities in the region. The result of this policy had far-reaching social, political, and economic ramifications for the other countries involved.[1]

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the frontier became the border, the United States expanded its notions of what an American empire should encompass in terms of ideas and territory. This growing imperial dragnet ensnared elite Nicaraguans with modernizing dreams, a savvy island dictator who hoped to “blanche” his realm, and the Chinese diasporic community in the Republic of Panama. Studying how local elites and non-elites viewed American power, and interacted with it, reveals the dynamic movement and complexity of ideas related to empire as they were transmitted between “periphery” and “metropole.” Continue reading →

The U.S.-Mexico border is a region of overlapping contact zones, an interstitial space where economic, political, social, cultural, and individual exchanges occur across the international boundary on a daily basis. Amid this personal and communal fluidity, however, the border also exists as an entity fixed by diplomatic treaty, militarization, and police enforcement as government agencies erect physical barriers for the abstract lines drawn across this area of North America. While state surveillance and regulation seek to make the region divisible, it is a project contested by the millions of undocumented immigrants, and others, who regularly defy its reductive processes. How the border is viewed and the vantage point from which it is observed are important subjective factors in a discussion of this area. In many ways, for the people who actually live in the borderlands, the national debate emanating from Washington and Mexico City can often appear astoundingly detached from the exigencies of everyday life. Continue reading →

Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, the extractive industries carved complex social and environmental changes that deeply affected the landscape and communities of the region. Private companies and governments collaborated to build new railroads to support mining and other commercial endeavors, while new groups of people arrived in search of work. Long-standing views of proper conduct within frontier society gave way to hegemonic ideas of what it meant to be a “good citizen.” These transformations were closely linked to the deployment of new time-saving technologies that mobilized capital resources on behalf of state and corporate agents. This essay offers brief reflections on the impact of technical infrastructures and industrialization on everyday life in northern Mexico and the U.S. southwest during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Continue reading →

Cadava, Geraldo L. Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. 320 pp. Hardcover. $39.95

Geraldo L. Cadava’s Standing on Common Ground: the Making of a Sunbelt Borderland is a richly detailed investigation of postwar Tucson and its social, political, economic, and cultural significance to Arizona and Sonora. The author draws on well-crafted case studies of persons and institutions, posing them as emblematic of the region’s larger history and historical relationships. The book is strongest when describing the sociocultural landscape of its host city. Tucson comes alive on the page, and Cadava does an excellent job interweaving multiple narratives into a cohesive story that contextualizes the region’s colonial past within the construction of twentieth-century racial, political, and cultural structures.

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