In the Mean Time: Temporal Colonization and the Mexican American Literary Tradition

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred a third of Mexico's territory to the United States, but it deferred full U.S. citizenship for Mexican Americans. Erin Murrah-Mandril's book In the Mean Time argues that Mexican American authors challenged modern conceptions of empty, homogeneous, linear, and progressive time to contest U.S. colonization. It draws on literature, autobiography, political documents, and historical narratives composed between 1870 and 1940 to examine how U.S. colonization altered time in the borderlands.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 188 pages
Publication date: 01 November 2023
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded more than a third of Mexico's territory to the United States, postponed full U.S. citizenship for Mexican Americans but promised, "in the meantime," to safeguard their property and liberty. Erin Murrah-Mandril shows that the United States government colonized time in the Southwest to ensure political and economic underdevelopment and to justify excluding Mexican Americans from stories of American progress. Murrah-Mandril contends that Mexican American authors challenged modern conceptions of empty, homogeneous, linear, and progressive time to contest U.S. colonization.

Drawing on Latina/o and borderlands spatial theories, Murrah-Mandril argues that time, like space, is a socially constructed, ideologically charged medium of power in the Southwest. In the Mean Time examines how U.S. colonization altered time in the borderlands by drawing on literature, autobiography, political documents, and historical narratives written between 1870 and 1940. Instead of reinforcing the colonial time structure, early Mexican American authors exploited the internal contradictions of Manifest Destiny and U.S. progress to resist domination and position themselves within the shifting political, economic, and historical present. Read as decolonial narratives, the Mexican American cultural productions examined in this book also offer a new way of understanding Latina/o literary history.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781496237477