In Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita examine literary representations of settler colonial land enclosure and dispossession in the history of New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. Sánchez and Pita analyze a range of Chicano/a and Native American novels, films, short stories, and other cultural artifacts from the eighteenth century to the present, showing how Chicano/a works often celebrate an idealized colonial Spanish past as a way to counter stereotypes of Mexican and Indigenous racial and ethnic inferiority. As they demonstrate, these texts often erase the participation of Spanish and Mexican settlers in the dispossession of Indigenous lands. Foregrounding the relationship between literature and settler colonialism, they consider how literary representations of land are manipulated and redefined in ways that point to the changing practices of dispossession. In so doing, Sánchez and Pita prompt critics to reconsider the role of settler colonialism in the deep history of the United States and how spatial and discursive violence are always correlated.

Rosaura Sánchez is Professor Emeritus of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios.
Beatrice Pita is Retired Lecturer of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Together they have written Conflicts of Interest: The Letters of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest  1
1. Spatial Violence and Modalities of Colonialism: Enclosure  26
2. Indigenous Spatial Sovereignty and Governmentality: Rights and Wrongs in Oklahoma  43
3. Enclosures in New Mexico: Land of Disenchantment  92
4. Texas Narratives of Dispossession: When the Land Became Real Estate  148
Conclusion. Spatial Moorings and Dislocation  202
Notes  213
Bibliography  241
Index  253