Masculinity, Coloniality, and the US-Mexico Border in Literature and Political Culture

Joshua D. Martin explores how four novels set in the nineteenth-century shortly after the creation of the modern-day US-Mexico border reveal a cultural continuum of masculinized violence and cultural grievances that characterize contemporary political culture. Written by Mexican, Mexican-American, Tejana, and US writers, these novels configure Anglo male characters as builders and defenders of their communities or the republic, exploring how these roles intersect with broader imperial interests. Different iterations of violence—interpersonal, economic, and epistemic—are used to create and maintain power hierarchies against characters who stand at the periphery of this imagined community. Nevertheless, the borderlands emerge as a space for decolonial alternatives, where the power of imperial actors invites resistance and subversion, and where counterhegemonic strategies are envisioned and realized. Martin concludes by exploring the salience of this continuum in US political culture, identifying the border both as a stage for the performance of aggressive masculinity and cultural antipathies, as well as a space where American identity is contested, deconstructed, and continually reimagined.