Abstract

Focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S. public spheres, this dissertation historically locates a discourse named the Mexican Question, which concerned the natural rights and status of Mexicans. The study divides into four long chapters and examines various narrative forms to demonstrate that the Mexican Question was a pervasive discourse that both Mexican and Anglo Americans debated in the public spheres. The first chapter establishes the historical and theoretical framework by arguing that the Mexican Question is rooted in an existing "enlightened" discourse concerning the natural rights of man that America's founders used to constitute the nation's public spheres. After the U.S.--Mexico War of 1848, however, Mexicans' "semi-civilized" status challenged this founding democratic space while simultaneously reinforcing Anglo American whiteness and masculinity. In this way, although the Mexican Question was so pervasive in the public spheres throughout the nineteenth century, it has been largely forgotten as an important inquiry precisely because it challenged American democratic identity. ;The remaining three chapters uncover the Mexican Question's significance in the U.S. literary and political spheres and the ways this inquiry affected both Anglo and Mexican American cultural production. The primary focus is elite Mexican Americans' responses to the Mexican Question and their attempts to normalize their racialized bodies in the public spheres, thereby creating a discourse of racial uplift---one that created distinctions between themselves and Native, African and working class Mexicans. Chapter two explores this process as it relates to Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's inquiry into the sexual politics of Mexican women's bodies. Chapter three examines the mass-public emergence of the Mexican Question in American magazine culture and reads the first elite Mexican Americans to write in them. Section four examines the works of Miguel Antonio Otero, the first Mexican American territorial governor of New Mexico, in order to explore how the Mexican Question affected the dynamics of the turn-of-the-century political public spheres