New Mexico was ceded to the United States in 1848, at the end of the war with Mexico, but not until 1912 did President William Howard Taft sign the proclamation that promoted New Mexico from territory to state. Why did New Mexico’s push for statehood last sixty-four years? Conventional wisdom has it that racism was solely to blame. But this fresh look at the history finds a more complex set of obstacles, tied primarily to self-serving politicians. Forty-Seventh Star, published in New Mexico’s centennial year, is the first book on its quest for statehood in more than forty years. David V. Holtby closely examines the final stretch of New Mexico’s tortuous road to statehood, beginning in the 1890s. His deeply researched narrative juxtaposes events in Washington, D.C., and in the territory to present the repeated collisions between New Mexicans seeking to control their destiny and politicians opposing them, including Republican U.S. senators Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana and Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. Holtby places the quest for statehood in national perspective while examining the territory’s political, economic, and social development. He shows how a few powerful men brewed a concoction of racism, cronyism, corruption, and partisan politics that poisoned New Mexicans’ efforts to join the Union. Drawing on extensive Spanish-language and archival sources, the author also explores the consequences that the drive to become a state had for New Mexico’s Euro-American, Nuevomexicano, American Indian, African American, and Asian communities. Holtby offers a compelling story that shows why and how home rule mattered—then and now—for New Mexicans and for all Americans.

Impresiones de un Surumato en Nuevo México by Manuel Sariñana represents a remarkable literary recovery. For the first time, the novella is presented in its original Spanish and in English, painstakingly translated and annotated by Phillip B. Gonzales. Manuel Sariñana came to the New Mexico territory from Mexico to work as a Spanish-language journalist. While covering politics, he wrote and published Impresiones de un Surumato en Nuevo México as a picaresque work, a common genre in Mexico that uses satire to narrate a drama based on concrete social issues in the author’s immediate vicinity. In his preface, Sariñana makes his intent clear: to address the unseemly manner in which New Mexico’s Democratic Party attempts to gain leverage in elections. But, in a caricature of two immigrant peons, he surreptitiously takes to task how nuevomexicanos look down on people from Mexico. Gonzales provides a critical introduction, an interpretation of Sariñana’s piece, and a historical framework to contextualize the author’s experiences and the events alluded to in the novella. The result brings this important work of fiction to a new generation of readers.

Política offers a stunning revisionist understanding of the early political incorporation of Mexican-origin peoples into the U.S. body politic in the nineteenth century. Historical sociologist Phillip B. Gonzales reexamines the fundamental issue in New Mexico's history, namely, the dramatic shift in national identities initiated by Nuevomexicanos when their province became ruled by the United States. Gonzales provides an insightful, rigorous, and controversial interpretation of how Nuevomexicano political competition was woven into the Democratic and Republican two-party system that emerged in the United States between the 1850s and 1912, when New Mexico became a state. Drawing on newly discovered archival and primary sources, he explores how Nuevomexicanos relied on a long tradition of political engagement and a preexisting republican disposition and practice to elaborate a dual-party political system mirroring the contours of U.S. national politics. Política is a tour de force of political history in the nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands that reinterprets colonization, reconstructs Euro-American and Nuevomexicano relations, and recasts the prevailing historical narrative of territorial expansion and incorporation in North American imperial history. Gonzales provides critical insights into several discrete historical processes, such as U.S. racialization and citizenship, integration and marginalization, accommodation and resistance, internal colonialism, and the long struggle for political inclusion in the borderlands, shedding light on debates taking place today over Latinos and U.S. citizenship.