In Forging Arizona Anita Huizar-Hernández looks back at a bizarre nineteenth-century land grant scheme that tests the limits of how ideas about race, citizenship, and national expansion are forged. During the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexico War and the creation of the current border, a con artist named James Addison Reavis falsified archives around the world to pass his wife off as the heiress to an enormous Spanish land grant so that they could claim ownership of a substantial portion of the newly-acquired Southwestern territories. Drawing from a wide variety of sources including court records, newspapers, fiction, and film, Huizar-Hernández argues that the creation, collapse, and eventual forgetting of Reavis’s scam reveal the mechanisms by which narratives, real and imaginary, forge borders. An important addition to extant scholarship on the U.S Southwest border, Forging Arizona recovers a forgotten case that reminds readers that the borders that divide nations, identities, and even true from false are only as stable as the narratives that define them. 

ANITA HUIZAR-HERNÁNDEZ is an assistant professor of border studies in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

“Forging Arizona tells a gripping story about inheriting and inventing, about fictionalizing and forgetting. Huizar-Hernández deftly mines the unsettling history of the Peralta Land Grant to make an important contribution to our understanding of the Latinx Southwest and its place in US national narratives."

"In this highly original study, Anita Huizar-Hernández combines the history of western expansion with the concerns of Latino/a/x studies to show how ideologies that forged the US border in the nineteenth century were intertwined with facile notions of ethnic identity. With insightful analysis of fabricated historical documents, Huizar-Hernández questions the uses of archival authority to support logics of inclusion and exclusion."

"Recommended."

"Arguably one of the most important books on Arizona history written in the last decade." 

"Borderlands Professor Brings Fresh Light to an Arizona Land Fraud," interview with Anita Huizar-Hernandez

"Forging Arizona is a highly effective piece of scholarship due in large part to the moral significance of Huizar-Hernández’s work....Dissecting such narratives undoubtedly serves an important role in making larger contemporary political points. Forging Arizona is thus a timely and highly welcome addition to that conversation." 

"Forging Arizona is a significant contribution to archival studies, Arizona, and borderlands history."

"Huizar-Hernández succeeds in her stated intention to explain the relationship between narratives and borders. Borders work well as a thematic hook, as Peralta-Reavis’s racialized and gendered body symbolized the sort of categorical ambiguity that rendered nineteenth-century conquest of the US West incomplete. Huizar-Hernández’s framework of “unsettlement” entails a disruption of the version of US history that naturalizes the Anglo-American dominance over the US West and erases the historical participation and continued presence of peoples of color in the Arizona territory." 

"By the monograph’s end, readers are left making enthralling comparisons between Reavis’s ability to create a false archive in the nineteenth century and concerns of 'fake news' in the twenty-first century....Huizar-Hernandez expertly utilizes the case of Reavis to underline not only 'a historical land fraud but also the fault lines of the late nineteenth-century U.S. racial imaginary.'"