In his books The Great Plains, The Great Frontier, and The Texas Rangers, historian Walter Prescott Webb created an enduring image of fearless, white, Anglo male settlers and lawmen bringing civilization to an American Southwest plagued with savage Indians and Mexicans. So popular was Webb's vision that it influenced generations of historians and artists in all media and effectively silenced the counter-narratives that Mexican American writers and historians were concurrently producing to claim their standing as gente decente, people of worth. These counter-narratives form the subject of Leticia M. Garza-Falcon's study. She explores how prominent writers of Mexican descent-such as Jovita Gonzalez, Americo Paredes, Maria Cristina Mena, Fermina Guerra, Beatriz de la Garza, and Helena Maria Viramontes -have used literature to respond to the dominative history of the United States, which offered retrospective justification for expansionist policies in the Southwest and South Texas. Garza-Falcon shows how these counter-narratives capture a body of knowledge and experience excluded from official histories, whose facts often emerged more from literary techniques than from objective analysis of historical data.
- ISBN10 0292728069
- ISBN13 9780292728066
- Publish Date 1 January 1998
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 13 July 2009
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Texas Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 325
- Language English