Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints: Cultural Icons of Mexico's Northwest Borderlands

by Robert McKee Irwin

Overview

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 Joaquín 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).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816648573
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	07/16/2007
Series:	Cultural Studies of the Americas , #20
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.89(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     xi
The Other Borderlands     1
The Many Heads and Tales of Joaquin Murrieta     38
Lola Casanova: Tropes of Mestizaje and Frontiers of Race     91
The Heroines of Guaymas     144
Of Sedition and Spiritism: La Santa de Cabora     195
Epilogue: Cultural Icons of the Other Borderlands     262
Notes     275
Bibliography     297
Index     321