Bandits, captives, heroines, and saints : cultural icons of Mexico's northwest borderlands

Bibliographic Information

Bandits, captives, heroines, and saints : cultural icons of Mexico's northwest borderlands

Robert McKee Irwin

(Cultural studies of the Americas, v. 20)

University of Minnesota Press, c2007

  • : pbk

Available at  / 1 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [297]-319) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints investigates cultural icons of the late nineteenth century from Mexico's largely unstudied northwest borderlands, present-day Sonora, Baja California, and western Chihuahua. Robert McKee Irwin looks at popular figures such as Joaquin Murrieta, the gold rush social bandit; Lola Casanova, the anti-Malinche, whose marriage to a Seri Indian symbolized a forbidden form of mestizaje; and la Santa de Cabora, a young faith healer who inspired armed insurgencies and was exiled to Arizona. Cultural icons such as Murrieta, Lola Casanova, and la Santa de Cabora are products of intercultural dialogue, Irwin reveals, and their characterizations are unstable. They remain relevant for generations because there is no consensus regarding their meanings, and they are weapons in struggles of representation in the borderlands. The figures studied here are especially malleable, he argues, because they are marginalized from the mainstream of historiography. A timely analysis, Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints challenges current paradigms of border studies and presents a rich understanding of the ways in which cultural icons influence people's minds and lives. Robert McKee Irwin is associate professor of Spanish at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Mexican Masculinities (Minnesota, 2003).

by "Nielsen BookData"

Related Books: 1-1 of 1

Details

Page Top