« Speculative settler colonialism: Michael A. Blaakman, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023
A specter is haunting settler colonialism (its South): Anna C. Bills, ‘”The Ghosts of Predators Past”: Nonhuman Specters and Extinction in Henry Clay Lewis’s “Valerian and the Panther”‘, Mississippi Quarterly, 76, 3, 2024, pp. 327-345 »

Identifying settler colonialism (in Mexico): Dominique Salas, Identifying a Traditionalism of the Past: Settler Colonialism and the Rhetoric of Mexicanness, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin – Madison, 2024

10Sep24

Abstract: This dissertation arose from discussions around privilege and the settler-slave-exogenous triad popularized in settler colonial studies, specifically regarding this project’s object of study: Mexicanness or Mexican cultural identity. The triad maps out uneven relationships created through the structure of settler colonialism but can unproductively flatten political dynamics of communities and their relationships to settler states. To pivot from discussions of privilege, this project instead considers complicity with the settler colonial states by examining how practices of identification with or of Mexicanness are informed by their (settler) colonial contexts. Chapter 1 surveys ways in which settler states have structured ways of identifying Mexicanness from the inception of New Spain, the rise of Mexico as a settler state, and the effects of incorporating Mexican citizens into the U.S. after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This pan-historiography provides a “palimpsest” of history that serves as a reference for the second and third chapters of this project. Chapter 2 examines over 50 genetic ancestry videos and their comments published on YouTube from 2014 to 2023 by self-described “Mexicans.”. Chapter 3 examines practices of identification in promotional material surrounding Mexico’s recently operational railway development project, Tren Maya, from its announcement in 2018 to its operation in 2023. While the latter two chapters differ in the structural view they provide on practices of identification, the first through the affective reactions from communities themselves and the second through the contextualized actions of the Mexican settler state, the case studies trace when the histories of the settler states are not confronted or averted. In sum, this project aims to highlight the importance of considering historical and transnational structures with practices of identification and Mexicanness, especially in response to colonial experiences.


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