Forging Arizona : : A History of the Peralta Land Grant and Racial Identity in the West / / Anita Huizar-Hernández.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2019 English
• VerfasserIn: Huizar-Hernández, Anita,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (162 p.) :; 9

In Forging Arizona Anita Huizar-Hernández looks back at a bizarre nineteenth-century land grant scheme that tests the limits of how ideas about race, citizenship, and national expansion are forged. During the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexico War and the creation of the current border, a con artist named James Addison Reavis falsified archives around the world to pass his wife off as the heiress to an enormous Spanish land grant so that they could claim ownership of a substantial portion of the newly-acquired Southwestern territories. Drawing from a wide variety of sources including court records, newspapers, fiction, and film, Huizar-Hernández argues that the creation, collapse, and eventual forgetting of Reavis's scam reveal the mechanisms by which narratives, real and imaginary, forge borders. An important addition to extant scholarship on the U.S Southwest border, Forging Arizona recovers a forgotten case that reminds readers that the borders that divide nations, identities, and even true from false are only as stable as the narratives that define them.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- PART I. Inventing the Peralta Land Grant -- 1. Counterfeit Narratives: The Peralta Land Grant Archives and the Forging of the West -- 2. Searching for Sofia: Race, Gender, and Authenticity at the 1895 Court of Private Land Claims -- 3. Southwest Speculation: Newspaper Coverage of the Peralta Land Grant -- PART II. (Re)membering the Peralta Land Grant -- 4. Counterfeit Nostalgia: William Atherton DuPuy's Baron of the Colorados (1940) -- 5. The Baron Is like a Battleground: Samuel Fuller's Baron of Arizona (1950 -- Epilogue: Forgetting the Peralta Land Grant -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author