Disrupting white representation/speaking back to seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel literature a decolonial history of Santa Fe

This dissertation maps and disrupts Euro-American travel literature about Spanish mestizos from a decolonized position. For almost three centuries, Euro-American travel narratives claimed to tell the truth about the Spanish mestizos of Santa Fe. A textual analysis of 17th, 18th, and 19th century travel literature about Santa Fe, reveals a racial project that worked to normalize white supremacy. Clearly reflected in these travel accounts is the racialized colonial thinking of first Spanish and then Euro-American white culture. The narratives involving Spain and New Spain reveal imperial attitudes about Native Americans and Mestizos, while the Euro-American narratives are almost entirely embedded with the nineteenth century's ideology of Manifest Destiny. This violent genre of literature, which contributed generations of damage to the name and social status of the Spanish mestizos it disparages, is useful only for reading against the grain. Reading against the grain, this dissertation juxtaposes Chicano/Spanish-mestizo experience, community, and culture against the hegemonic stories of the dominant culture. It interrogates and disrupts the normalization of white supremacy. Using Spanish mestizo eyewitness accounts, this dissertation speaks back to, and counters the Euro-American master narrative. Revealed through the course of this examination, is the colonizer's pattern of invoking "civilization" as an alibi to invade and conquer. By disrupting such narratives, a Chicano point-of-view is extracted, presenting a very different story - and a history for the twenty-first centur