About the Author

Alberto Varon is Associate Professor of English and Latino Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. He is author of Before Chicano: Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 1848-1959 (2018).

Reviews

Varon examines an emerging hybrid synthesis of U.S. and Mexican republicanism as well as the instabilities inherent to a malecentered conception of citizenship.
*Society for US Intellectual History*

Brings to bear archival work and print culture studies to uncover and analyze the cultural, historical, and literary texts involved in the making of Mexican American manhood and its correlation to notions of citizenship. Dr. Varon studies Spanish-language newspapers and political proclamations; fugitive narratives and short-story collections (some here analyzed at length for the first time); under-studied memoirs and long-ignored novels; and canonical figures in early Chicana/o literary histories. Dr. Varon expertly combines several fieldsincluding American and Critical Race studies, recovery and archival work, and American literary scholarship and Chicana/o and Latino/a studiesto render the books study of the past presciently critical of contemporary debates about immigration, citizenship, and the presumed rights of Mexican Americans.
*Jesse Alemán,co-editor of The Latino Nineteenth Century*

Varons groundbreaking, beautifully written literary and intellectual history of Mexican-American manhood illuminates the ways in which Mexican Americans made claims to the public sphere by engaging with questions of citizenship, racialization, and transnational imagined communities. The book seamlessly brings together the rich literatures on feminism, nationalism, political theory, and queer theory in order to offer a brilliant, timely, and compelling historical narrative of belonging.
*Raúl Coronado,author of A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture*

While other authors, like J. F. Perea, George Fredrickson, Jeanne Powers, and Eladio Gómez, have studied questions of Mexican American citizenship prior to the Chicano movement, Varon’s creative approach focusing on manhood, as well as the breadth of the period studied, constitute a welcome contribution to the development of knowledge in this field of study.
*Chiricú Journal*