Dissertation: "Haunted Narratives: Shadows of the Southeastern Caste Wars in Mexican Literature, 1840-1958"

Certified Spring 2015

Sarah's dissertation, "Haunted Narratives: Shadows of the Southeastern Caste Wars in Mexican Literature, 1840-1958," examines how creole intellectuals struggled to represent a grouping of indigenous rebellions known as the Caste Wars and their consequences in the Mexican Southeast during the nineteenth and twentieth century. While these nineteenth-century uprisings lack the historical prominence of other Mexican rebellions and revolutions, this project demonstrates that the Caste Wars posed a very real threat to landowner power in Yucatán and Chiapas that resonated even on the national scale. While the central corpus of novels, political essays, and literary magazines often appear to have little to do with these wars, this dissertation works through their rhetorical strategies of silencing and disavowal to trace the underlying and often veiled apparitions of race wars. This project begins with examples of some of Mexico's earliest literary productions by Justo Sierra O'Reilly and Eligio Ancona, works that could not yet address the Caste War threat directly and concludes with the literature of post-revolutionary Mexico as authors such as Rosario Castellanos and Ermilo Abreu Gómez strategically reconfigure nineteenth-century creole/ladino accounts of the Caste Wars and recontextualize them within the traumas of the Mexican Revolution and newly defined discourses of nationalism and indigeneity. Because Mexico's literary criticism tends to approach literary analysis from the epistemic locus of the Mexican center, this research offers an alternative reading of canonical texts that takes into account the Southeast's peripheral and often precarious relationship to the nation's metropole. "Haunted Narratives" also offers a fresh perspective on the discourses of Indianness that takes into account the inextricable link between the aesthetics of race and the politics of space.