Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest

“In Spatial and Discursive Violence in the U.S. Southwest, Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita present a brilliant critical history of the enclosure of land, water, and other resources while making a powerful argument for the significance of literature as a window into everyday contexts of enclosure. Partly focused on what literature makes visible, the authors also illuminate its powers of invisibility and its elision of the historical and material conditions of enclosure. Sánchez and Pita thus make a field-transforming intervention, suggesting Chicanx literature's origins in the repression of Indigenous people's responses to dispossession.” - Curtis Marez, author of University Babylon: Film and Race Politics on Campus

“Ushering in a timely and fully formed paradigm for the study of spatial and discursive violence, Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita teach readers a valuable and sustained lesson in the all important nuances and responsibilities of applied theory. This is the book Chicana/o literary history has been waiting for.” - Angie Chabram, editor of The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader

"Sánchez and Pita give us tools for understanding the long history of contemporary conflicts, and push us to think more deeply about what liberatory futures may look like." - William Orchard, American Studies

"Sanchez and Pita uplift the importance of cultural production, especially literature, to enable new imaginaries that incite transformation." - John Jairo Valencia, E3W Review of Books

"This book sets in motion innovative incursions into the national and the global from a southwestern standpoint." - Roberto Cantu, World Literature Today

"Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest is both accessible and comprehensive. . . . Sánchez and Pita’s newest book will be ideal for a graduate seminar or even an advanced undergraduate class because of the depth and breadth with which it recounts foundational history and literature in Chicana/o/x Studies. It is innovative yet approachable for a nonspecialist. In addition, their analysis of the commons points to new modes of enclosure and resistance in the twenty-first century and the potential for new regional and transnational linkages for future scholars." - Erin Murrah-Mandril, American Literary History

"This text provides historians with an opportunity to see literary analysis as a tool for historical understanding and demonstrates why colonialism must be examined critically. . . . Sánchez and Pita remind readers that the past is never truly settled and that legacies of settler colonialism are not just alive but a part of our daily discourse." - Doris Morgan Rueda, Western Historical Quarterly

"The authors’ ultimate achievement is to show the historical and discursive processes that have led to Chicano/a and Tejano/as having displaced Indians as a denigrated caste in the contemporary United States. This is in itself a worthy exposition to have accomplished." - Leighton C. Peterson, American Indian Culture and Research Journal

"Collectively, the ?authors offer an important intervention for the field of Latinx studies and add to the developing framework of critical Latinx indigeneities scholarship as it challenges us to confront the unsteady relationship between Latinx history and Indigeneity." - Michelle Vasquez Ruiz, Latino Studies

"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. . . . I would recommend this for upper division and graduate Chicana/o studies or literature students to be read alongside recent works in Chicana/o and/or Native American history." - Matt Hinojosa, Journal of American Ethnic History