UC Riverside

"The Campaign for Literary Practice" provides an intervention into American literary studies by reframing Mexican-American writings from 1885 to 1940 as central to understanding the value and limits of realism and regionalism. The key intervention of this project is the concept “the campaign for literary practice” that illustrates these writers’ attempts to navigate the literary marketplace of their time and partake in professional authorship, for income as well as status. In order to encourage new readings of U.S. literary genres and history, each chapter examines an aspiring yet struggling Mexican-American writer alongside a commercially successful contemporary.

Chapter 1, “‘I’ll Publish Your Cowardice All Over California’: Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don in the Age of Howells and American Realism,” considers the first Mexican American to publish fiction in English alongside William Dean Howells, ‘the Dean’ of American letters. Using these writers’ 1885 novels, I argue for a reconfiguration of East Coast-dominated realist studies based on Ruiz de Burton’s literary production in California. Chapter 2, “Mexican Vistas in an Expansionist Literary Marketplace: Stephen Crane’s ‘Form and Color’ and María Cristina Mena’s New Regionalism,” offers a new generic framework through which to study Mena’s early twentieth-century ‘local colorist’ writings. As ‘new regionalism,’ Mena’s stories on Mexico emerge authoritatively in response to previous ruminations on the country, such as those written by the naturalist writer Crane for newspapers and magazines. Chapter 3, “‘Why Do You Hate the South?’: The Limits of Visionary Regionalism in González and Raleigh’s Caballero and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!,” reads Caballero and Absalom as failed ‘southern romances’ of the late 1930s. Together, these novels offer alternative, imaginative, and visionary ways of reading the Southwest and South during the United States’ major mid nineteenth-century wars. My final chapter, “Regionalism, Geomodernism, and the Depressions of John Steinbeck and Américo Paredes,” explores the major novels of these writers against the Great Depression and World War II. Paredes’s work, in the end, demonstrates the way global awareness emerges in the region, even if it is at odds with the nation and its rulers.