Thread by @jessnevins

Good morning! As a diversion from this dreadful year and the cartoonishly evil president, let’s jump back 170+ years, to the mid/late 1840s, and take a look at a time when American popular culture offered a more positive view of US-Mexico relations than we currently get. 1/

The popular culture I’m talking about was neither newspapers nor popular magazines, but rather “novelettes,” the 1840s precursor to the dime novels of the 1860s. Novelettes, like the British penny dreadfuls, evolved out of the penny press newspapers. 2/

Novelettes had pulp content & anticipated the markets of pulps & adventures of dime novel Westerns. Frontier novelettes (the novelettes featured other genres, of course) were a part of the evolution of the Western genre and its move away from straight journalism. 3/

Novelettes weren’t series, like dime novels and pulps—they were one-and-dones. There were hundreds of them—the taste for disposable genre fiction on cheap paper was as keen in the US as in the UK—and were often more topical than the dime novels or pulps. 4/

The novelette’s rise coincided with the escalating tensions between the US & Mexico in the 1840s, which culminated in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). (“Escalating tensions” = US colonialism, racism, & pro-slavery politics: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E… ) 5/

During and in the first years after the war numerous publishers produced novelettes (at least thirty) specifically about the war. These contained a combination of romance, fantasy, history, and pure reportage. These “war novelettes” generally sold pretty well. 6/

(Interestingly, US novel writers didn’t address the war for almost a generation, but novelette writers went there immediately, much as their British counterparts, the penny dreadful writers, would during the Crimean & Afghan wars.) 7/

One such “war novelette” was Charles Averill’s THE MEXICAN RANCHERO; OR, THE MAID OF THE CHAPPARAL (1847). Published in the immediate wake of the US occupation of Mexico City in September 1847, RANCHERO is both typical and not at all what might be expected. 8/

RANCHERO is set in Mexico after occupation of Mexico City. Its protagonist is Raphael (alternatively Rafael) Rejon, the “Lion of Mexico” and “mortal foe” of Americans. (The US troops burned his home, killed his parents, and left Raphael and his sister orphaned and homeless). 9/

Note: Raphael is *not the villain* of RANCHERO. He is sympathetically drawn, the motivation for his anti-US attitude and actions is presented as not merely reasonable but just, and he’s positioned so that the US reader roots for him. 10/

Modern readers aren't going to expect this. But Raphael’s status, and the subversion of expectations in RANCHERO more generally, are actually representative of the somewhat sizable and very outspoken US anti-war sentiment. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E… 11/

Raphael has a sister, Buena Rejon, the “Maid of the Chaparral.” Together they wage a guerrilla war against the US occupiers. “Hundreds of Americans…have become the victim of [Buena’s] unerring lasso.” Raphael, Buena, and their troops are ruthless toward the US soldiers. 12/

At one point Raphael, Buena, and their troops slaughter a company of American soldiers and scrawl “Vengeance on the Invader” in blood on the American flag. (War novelettes were intended for adult readers, emphatically not for kids). 13/

Again: *not the villains of the story*. An apposite comparison would be a novel (or tv show or movie or comic) published at the height of the Vietnam War that had sympathetic Viet Cong as the protagonist—or one today with noble Afghans or Iraqis. Unimaginable now, of course. 14/

Naturally, the author, Charles Averill--who was also the main popularizer of the myth of Kit Carson--has to go and ruin things by inserting a white guy, Herbert Harold [sic], into the story. For plot reasons Herbert gets on the good side of Raphael and Buena. 15/

After Herbert's introduction RANCHERO becomes about Raphael, Buena, and Herbert fighting against the evil schemes of Raleigh, an Irish deserter from the US Army and a bandit leader, and his fearsome lieutenant “Montano the Monster.” 16/

Note for later: Montano the Monster is a “Mexican half-breed,” as ugly as an orangutan, and possesses superhuman strength. As we'll see, this is important to the story. 17/

RANCHERO’s prose style is similar to that of the dime novels, and the novelette is by turns theatrical and Gothic when it’s not melodramatic. If you can stomach dime novel prose, you probably will have a good time with RANCHERO. (It's not available online, sorry). 18/

One thing RANCHERO never is, is boring. I mean, check out Raleigh’s death speech. You don’t get this type of quality villainous rhetoric just anywhere: 19/

RANCHERO is also about the near-future, when the treaty between the US & Mexico is negotiated and signed, arguably making the novelette science fiction. (Okay, maybe not). But the peace treaty didn’t exist yet in reality—RANCHERO was positing one. 20/

In RANCHERO the US diplomat Nicholas Trist—a real person (1800-1874) who was the historical architect of the US-Mexico treaty—is the novelette’s moral & democratic consciousness, the voice of reason who argues for a just and mutually beneficial peace between the US & Mexico. 21/

Trist consistently reminds the US characters that the US government must create a peaceful and reconciliatory end to the war, which he notes is spoiling what he calls the “romantic lands of Mexico.” This isn't empty rhetoric, either--it's honestly meant. 22/

This concession to reality regarding the effects of the US military on the environment and civilians of the country it is warring on was common enough among war novelettes but not to be found in British war penny dreadfuls. Or in today’s US media, for that matter. 23/

One element of interest in RANCHERO is Rafael's sister Buena. She dresses like a man, pretends to be “Miguel Morena” while campaigning against the invading Americans, and uses lasso, whip, and gun on her enemies. She acts “fearlessly and perilously” at all times. 24/

Buena ends up falling in love with the Anglo Herbert, predictably enough. That’s a part of the standard “race romance” plot of the time, in which white men would fall in love with women of another ethnicity and eventually marry them. 25/

But! Buena is aggressive, forthright, and stereotypically masculine, while Herbert is written as passive (which is to say, feminine according to stereotypes of the 1840s). RANCHERO does this deliberately, with pleasing (for modern readers) results. 26/

A common trope in “race romances” involving Mexican women was for the women to pose and dress as men for some or much of the story. Usually the women were allowed to be brave and heroic before being conquered by the marriage plot. Some were even superheroines--before marriage 27/

I’ve mentioned the “marriage plot” before: the way in which 19th century stories and novels--US & UK--would present a woman as independent, heroic, and admirable before marrying her off and, in the text, reducing her to a mere wife, an appendage of her husband. 28/

RANCHERO partially partakes of this. But Buena remains aggressive and manly after marriage. Herbert’s sister Alfredine marries Raphael; Alfredine is shown to be Buena’s Anglo counterpart, while Raphael is “small” and “womanlike” despite his martial virtues. 29/

Predictably enough, at novelette’s end Buena and Herbert go to Herbert’s “old family plantation” in Virginia. But Alfredine stays in Mexico with Raphael, helping Raphael learn “to love our race, instead of hate.” 30/

Needless to say, a Mexican man marrying an American woman and having a happily-ever-after in Mexico, as a Mexican couple (rather than an American couple), was not common in the novelettes and was *extremely* rare then and thereafter in US popular fiction. 31/

RANCHERO is not some marvel of modern progressive politics, of course. Despite the pleasing gender inversions, the novelette has some racial issues—issues typical of its time and which still hold sway in the US today. 32/

RANCHERO differentiates between the Mexican elite, who are portrayed as light-skinned and the direct descendants of the Spanish aristoracy, and the Mexican people, who shown as the product of centuries of interbreeding between Spanish soldiers and native Mexicans. 33/

A lot of American fiction—both mainstream and popular—before and during the war was openly sympathetic with the Mexican people, portraying them as oppressed by the elite and deserving of American “liberation.”

But not RANCHERO. 34/

RANCHERO’s sympathies are entirely with the Mexican elite, because the elite are racially “pure,” while the Mexican people are racially “degenerate.” All the main characters in the novelette agree with this point of view, which RANCHERO taken as a given. 35/

Even Raphael agrees with this position. His father was a white American (though Raphael doesn't know his exact identity), and Raphael says that it is “this mingling of the American and Mexican blood” that allowed him to “escape the taint” of Mexico’s “degenerate sons.” 36/

RANCHERO emphasizes that Raphael’s (unknown) father was “pure American.” The fathers of the other characters were not pure—which in the world of RANCHERO is important. The mixed ethnicity and descent of the villains is repeatedly stressed by the author. 37/

Montano is half-Mexican, which RANCHERO says is the reason for his wickedness, villainy, and (oddly) his superhuman strength. Worse still is Raleigh, who is an Irish immigrant to the US—and for RANCHERO and its readers that fact says everything we need to know about Raleigh. 38/

RANCHERO was written and published in the late 1840s, when the US was experiencing its greatest wave of Irish immigration. The Potato Famine began in 1845; by 1847 one-third of the population of Boston was Irish immigrants. 39/

By 1850 the Irish made up a quarter of the population of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

The reaction by Anglo-Americans to the hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants was predictably bigoted. 40/

The Irish were forced to compete with free blacks for the same jobs and were made to live in the same urban areas as free blacks, and most middle-class Anglo-Americans equated the Irish with the free blacks. 41/

"The figure of the Irish soldier was Janus-faced in mid-nineteenth century war literature, for representations of the Irishman as faithful martyr to the US cause were countered by images of the Irish as traitors to the white republic.” 42/

(Previous tweet taken from Shelley Streeby’s AMERICAN SENSATIONS, which is well worth reading).

The source of Raleigh’s villainy is his Irishness. Worse, it turns out that the father of Raphael and Buena was Raleigh himself—which therefore infects them with his Irishness. 43/

The dying Raleigh says, “the blood of all of ye will bear the taint [of Raleigh’s Irish blood].” RANCHERO was definitely not alone in seeing the effect of Irishness as being a negative one—but by the early 1860s this had changed. 44/

Quoting Streeby again, “The 1840s and 1850s were crucial years in the making of the Irish worker into a white worker, for during those years whiteness was increasingly redefined to include the Irish.”

(Requisite recommendation for Ignatiev's HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE). 45/

To sum up, the following passage from Jaime Javier Rodriguez’s THE LITERATURES OF THE U.S.-MEXICAN WAR, which is far too long for me to quote tweet:

46/

Thanks for reading, everyone! If you’re interested in more stuff like this, I have a Patreon (patreon.com/jessnevins). This month’s topic: the sworn virgins of Albania. 47/fin