Guerra Mexico-Americana

First edition. Frontispiece portrait and 12 plates. 8vo. Inner joint split at head but sound. A near fine copy in the original blue cloth. Ink ownership inscription to front pastedown "L. M. Salazar", also initialed to ffep. 259, [1]pp. New Mexico, Compañia Impresora del Nuevo Mexicano,

 

A lovely copy of this important work on the Mexican-American war (1846-48). The distinguishing feature here is that the author, Benjamin Maurice Read (1852-1927), was a Mexican American. With the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, Mexican citizens in the newly acquired territories became American citizens. Here he represents the little-reported views of those annexed.

 

Along with Aurelio M. Espinosa, Nina Otero-Warren, and Francisco de Thoma, Read was one of several academics who emphasized New Mexico's ties with Spain over those with Mexico. Naturally, Read chose to write in Spanish and, in the introduction, calls it "the first history book written by a son of New Mexico descended from both races, the Anglo Saxon and the Latino."

 

Published two years before New Mexico became a state, Read's work can be seen as part of the ongoing culture war over who had claim to the intellectual territory of the frontier, specifically in opposition to some of the biased English-language histories. "Read declares his goal is to bring into discussion the work of Mexican historians that had not figured in Anglo-American accounts of the origins and causes of the US invasion of the Mexican republic" (Gabriel Meléndez). Erlinda Gonzales Barry adds, that while the arguments were "ostensibly over the veracity of the facts, they really were about a broader issue; namely, who had the authority to write that history." Alas, Read's valuable efforts came to little.  Once "Anglo-American hegemony laid exclusionary claim to the frontier, the question Read raises was rendered moot, his contestory treatises buried in the archival dustbin, virtually erased from the nuevomexicano collective memory."

 

Read's father, Benjamin Franklin Read, had fought in the war, and at its conclusion settled in New Mexico where he met and married the Nuevomexicana, Maria Inacia Cano. One of four brothers, Benjamin was born in Las Cruces (NM). He trained as a lawyer and served in the territorial legislature before becoming the pre-eminent Latinx historian in New Mexico. Read followed this work with a general history of New Mexico Historia Illustrada de Nuevo Mexico (1911) and Popular Elementary History of New Mexico (1912) both of which provided further testaments of a Spanish point of view.

 

The plates are facsimile documents by Charles Bent, Donanciano Vigil and Manuel Armijo.

 

Gabriel Meléndez, Anthony, Spanish-language Newspapers in New Mexico, 1834-1958 (University of Arizona Press, 2005), p.127; Gonzales-Barry, Erlinda, "Benjamin Read: New Mexico's Bernal Di´as de Castillo" in Recovering The US Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. VI (Houston, 2007) p.25.

 

Stock Code: 235259