Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest is a study of subject formation through literary production over the region's historical processes of colonization and enclosure. Focused on Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita trace the discourses of enclosure and identity formation through Native American and ethnic Mexican literature amid shifting relations of production and land tenure through Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American colonization. Over four chapters, the book explores themes of paternalism, the guardianship system, dispossession, resource extraction, invasion, and conquest in Indigenous, Tejano, and Hispano literature. The book is critical of the erasure of Native American oppression and Indigenous heritage in early Mexican American literature as landed elites sought to emphasize their Spanish heritage in the face of Anglo oppression. Centered on the premise that literature is well suited to reproduce the subjectivities of historical actors, the authors supplement their analysis with historiography, albeit largely...
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