Invocations of battle: The literary nationalisms of the war between the United States and Mexico, 1846--1848

The war between the United States and Mexico, 1846–1848, was fought at a critical moment for the development of literary nationalism in both countries and generated a wealth of cultural discourse. Yet, the war itself has been nearly erased from public memory in the United States, and it has received relatively little cultural examination in Mexico. Questions of elision as well as meaning thus shape this historical and literary study which relies mainly on contemporary theories of national identity and texts that interrogate the literary nationalisms in Mexico and in the United States.;Despite the war's optimistic expansionism, it also activated forces that threatened to alter the rhetoric of nineteenth-century American nationalism from one based on a collective exceptionalism to one that, paradoxically given the war's overt association with Manifest Destiny, would have defined the United States as a co-equivalent American nation among many. The tensions are discernible in William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), but emerge clearly in romance novelettes, such as Charles E. Averill's The Mexican Ranchero; or, The Maid of the Chapparal (1849), and in James Russell Lowell's The Biglow Papers [First Series] (1848). Despite the pressures toward relational equivalence, however, Mexico has come to stand for a basic, contrasting matrix of terms against which is visible a providential America. Mexico's real threat, in other words, inheres in its potentially co-equivalent nation-ness and not in the more stabilizing dichotomies between civilization and barbarism. For Mexico, on the other hand, the war was a catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions. Yet, the defeat activated Mexico's liberal mythology in a way that gave rise to a more coherent national self-image. Guillermo Prieto's poetry and El monedero (1861), a key novel by Nicolás Pizarro, articulate agonistic terms that later writers distilled into a national dream.;The war thus generated a double paradox. In the United States, it is both a paradigmatic example of exceptionalist fervor and a threat to American mythology. In Mexico, it is a national cataclysm and a catalyst. The war literatures reviewed here are long forgotten, yet they offer new insights into a national confrontation with continuing political, cultural, and literary reverberations.