Review by New York Times Review
IN "OUR AMERICA," Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a British historian of Spanish heritage at the University of Notre Dame, recasts the pilgrimage of Hispanics in the United States as a rich and moving chronicle for our very present. His book navigates five centuries of painful documents, atrocious statements and dubious literature to argue that the United States was, from its beginning, as much a Spanish colonial southern enterprise as an unending march westward. After long periods of migration, deportation and accommodation, the next United States could well be a pluricultural bilingual power, updating the American dream. "Our America" is perhaps the first history to make the case for this nation's becoming a bright Latin American country. From the brave conquistadors who dreamed of the legendary North American city of Cibola, the Fountain of Youth and the mythical kingdom of Queen Calafia, to the Texas secessionists who revolted against Mexico's emancipation of its slaves ("the protection of slavery was among the most urgent economic reasons for rebellion," Fernández-Armesto writes), to the Native Americans who saw the bison disappear from their prairies before being almost eliminated themselves, this story is one of random violence, intentionally inflicted pain and wanton killing (not to mention smallpox). The narrative moves easily from panoramic views and exemplary cases to interpretation and reflection. Fernández-Armesto's first conclusion advances his main claim: "The U.S. empire, in short, was like the Spanish empire and the Mexican empire and Mexican imperial republic that succeeded Spain in North America, mixing mercies and malignity." Spain, Mexico and the United States all turned to "subjugating, exploiting, victimizing and sometimes massacring." Borges took the United States side in calling the Alamo "that other Thermopylae." Octavio Paz protested. But the earliest representations of Nova Britannia were not too different from those of Nueva España: "most excellent fruits ... much warmer than England, and very agreeable to our natures." José Marti, the spokesman for the Cuban independence movement, advanced the notion of "Our America" in 1891 to distinguish it from Anglo-America, afraid of the idea of a Pan-America, a United States without borders. The 19th-century California novelist and playwright Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, the first Mexican-American female author to be published in English, rewrote "Don Quixote" and denounced "how we would be despoiled, we, the conquered people." From a different perspective, a woman interviewed by The New York Times in 1856 spoke for many when she declared that "white folks and Mexicans were never meant to live together anyhow and the Mexicans had no business here." This book is especially adept at following the construction of the United States territory as it defined its borders beginning in the early 1800s. Time and again, those borders were traced through rebellion, looting and murder. Spanish forces, Mexican armies and United States troops competed ferociously, with opportunists and landowners ready to join the shooting. In 1819, Spain renounced claims to Florida while the United States renounced Texas. But Mexico's independence from Spain resulted in its losing Texas to immigrants from the United States, the "illegal aliens" of their day. John Quincy Adams said, "In this war, the flag of liberty will be that of Mexico, and ours, I blush to say, the flag of slavery." Stephen Austin, on the other hand, saw the war between the Texans and Mexicans as one "of barbarism and of despotic principles, waged by the mongrel Spanish-Indian and Negro race against civilization and the Anglo-American race." The frontiers multiplied along with the cast of characters. The United States Land Commission of 1852-56 remade the map of California, redistributing estates at will. In Texas one wealthy Hispanic family defended its property in the courts for 50 years and lost. Other Hispanic landowners were shot or lynched. Things worsened with the California gold rush as nationality became an issue. Recent American citizens were excluded from the gold fields after California joined the Union, and they often turned to social banditry as a means of resistance. Probably the first Hispanic hero working as a bandit showed up in the 1890s in "El Hijo de la Tempestad," by Eusebio Chacón, which may have been the blueprint for Zorro. Joaquín Murrieta is another popular hero of these early cultural wars. People doubted his existence but not his death at the hands of the Rangers. (Let's hope Quentin Tarantino isn't paying attention.) Though not cited by Fernández-Armesto, Carlos Fuentes is the Latin American author whose engagement with the many MexicanUnited States borders became a poetic exploration. The frontier, he wrote, is a scar because the Rio Grande border is a historical body still alive. Its melancholic genealogy is a matrix of human sacrifice, recycling racism, marginalization and subjection. It is a brutal irony that President Obama, elected in Spanish (¡Sí, se puede!) and with a majority of Hispanic votes, has a record of more than 1.4 million deportations, many of which have expelled students and separated families. Fernández-Armesto dutifully deals with this changing landscape, writing with detail and gusto. He accounts for the incorporation of territories (in 1853, Tucson and nearly 30,000 square miles were transferred from Mexico to the United States); takes care of the adventurers (William Walker failed to incite rebellion in Baja California and Sonora, then invaded Nicaragua in 1856 only to be ousted); and pays attention even to "socialists" like the ones who rode into Mexico to exploit the Mexican Revolution. Puerto Rico was frozen in a zombie citizenship as a "free associated state," a colonial euphemism. Cuba, of course, was a colonial dream. After American troops left the country in 1902, the United States maintained a puppet government for over 50 years. And there remains the hell of Guantánamo, designed by lawyers as an extralegal military base for prisoners of undeclared wars. One of the darkest hours registered in this book is the abduction of orphans by an Anglo mob in 1904, after the Sisters of Charity, in New York, sent abandoned children to Arizona for adoption by Mexican families. In a climax of racism and anti-Catholicism, the white locals seized the children. The district court ruled against "half-breed Mexican Indians," who were "impecunious, illiterate," saying that some good "Americans ... assisted in the rescue of these little children from the evil into which they had fallen." "Fraternization was unthinkable," Fernández-Armesto says. In his 1925 book of essays "In the American Grain," William Carlos Williams, born of a Puerto Rican mother and a British father, advanced the extraordinary notion that the United States' Spanish beginnings were mythical, poetic, heroic but, first, modern - that is, made up by mixture. "Our America" documents Williams's statement and opens space to follow new developments and drives. After all, America's cultural history includes more than chewing gum (from Mexico) and Coca-Cola (from Peru). Latin American history has been not only a memory of things past but also a series of brave new projects of the future. The United States, for good and ill, has always made up an intrinsic part of its horizon. Because of the presence of Hispanics and the imperative of the Spanish language, Latin America is an inextricable part of the United States' future. This book is also the history of that better mañana. From its beginning, the United States was as much a Spanish colonial southern enterprise as an unending march westward. JULIO ORTEGA, a professor of Hispanic studies at Brown University, is the author of "Transatlantic Translations."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 26, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Most high-school and college survey texts for U.S. history continue an Anglocentric approach, although recent efforts have been made to acknowledge the contribution of non-English and non-European groups to our cultural heritage. A giant swath of current U.S. territory, from California to Florida, was once part of the Spanish Empire, and subsequently much of it was part of the Mexican Republic. Fernandez-Armesto, a professor of history at Notre Dame, provides a useful and absorbing counterperspective. He utilizes a chronological approach beginning with the first Spanish explorers and conquistadors in the sixteenth century and finally analyzes the effects of the current second Hispanic colonization as our Latino population surges. He touches on various aspects of Latin American achievements and contributions to our country. His assertions that the U.S. should be and soon will be viewed as part of the broader Spanish-speaking American continents is unlikely to win broad acceptance but will certainly provoke interesting debate.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Taking on the conventional Anglo-centrism of American history, this superb survey offers a different way of looking at the nation's past. A leading scholar of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame, Fernandez-Armesto (Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration) brilliantly reveals the U.S.'s deep roots in Spanish and Hispanic culture and aspirations. With convincing arguments and deftly told stories, he shows how Spain and Hispanics have influenced American history from well before the British arrived. Likely to be controversial, Fernandez-Armesto's study makes a strong case for the 20th-century being America's " second Hispanic colonization" and argues that "the United States is-and has to be-a Latin American country." Along the way, readers will learn who the real Zorro may have been and how literary magical realism may have originated in the U.S. While not an entirely new way to look at the American past, no one has presented it better or with more zest. A first-person, opinionated, learned, wide-ranging, and delightfully written book, this is responsible revisionist history at its very best and deserves the widest possible attention. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A welcome corrective to Anglocentric versions of American history, which continue to dominate the textbook market--thanks, at least in some measure, to diversity-doubting Texas. Texas, of course, is a key place in a historical geography that predates Jamestown and Plymouth Rock by a century. Spanish missionaries and conquistadors were busily colonizing what are now California and Florida well before the arrival of other European powers, and as historian Herbert Eugene Bolton noted a century ago, their presence left a deep imprint on the places they settled: "[T]he Southwest," he wrote, "is as Spanish in color and historical background as New England is Puritan, as New York is Dutch, or as New Orleans is French." In a sense, Fernndez-Armesto's (History/Univ. of Notre Dame; Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration, 2006, etc.) argument is an extension of Bolton's, though with more political fire behind it and a keen sense of the injustices perpetrated when Hispanic America came under Anglo sway. For that reason, he offers "a history of the United Statesslanted toward a Hispanic perspective," one that extends across the southern tier of the United States--embracing in particular Florida, which, the author is quick to remind us, is fast tracking to a minority-majority population in which 85 percent of people under the age of 5 speak some language other than English at home. Fernndez-Armesto makes numerous important observations, noting that Spain's New World empire grew so large in part due to competition with those other European powers, and he takes in episodes of history that are largely overlooked--e.g., the El Paso "salt war," in which Anglos and Hispanics fought for control of that critically important resource. The correctives are useful and necessary, and it is easy to imagine that this book will become required reading in ethnic-studies courses--and, with luck, in American history survey courses as well.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
