So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomxicano Communities, 1834-1958

by A. Gabriel Meléndez

Based on exhaustive archival research, this study spans the history of newspapers in the Southwest's Mexicano communities from the arrival of the press in New Mexico to the last edition of Santa Fe's El Nuevo Mexicano. Part I details the education and formation of a generation of Spanish-language journalists instrumental in creating a culture of print in nativo communities. Part II offers in-depth analyses of the texts produced by los periodiqueros, establishing them thematically as precursors to the Chicano literary and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Moving beyond reinscribing Nuevomexicanos into history, Melendez's insights on print discourse, orality, and literacy provide a new theoretical framework. He sees newspapers as cultural production and the work of the editors as an organized movement against cultural erasure and toward adaptation amid the massive influx of easterners to the new Southwest.

268 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001