Abstract:
This thesis encompasses an analysis of various narratives regarding popular heroes of the region that now compromises the Southwest of the United States and the frontier with Mexico between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries to demonstrate the development of distinctively regional narrative tradition shared among the oppressed groups of the region, the legend of the hero of the resistance. Hegelian dialectics will be used as the theoretical framework to analyze the legendary narratives of four historical persons: Popé, a shaman among the indigenous Tewa Pueblo people of New Mexico in the seventeenth century, the Hispanic “bandidos” Joaquín Murrieta and Tiburcio Vásquez of California in the nineteenth century, and the Mexican fugitive Gregorio Cortez in Texas in the twentieth century to demonstrate a narrative tradition of legends of heroes of the resistance shared among all subaltern cultures of the region, both indigenous and Hispanic, as a means of challenging the narratives of the hegemonic cultures of the Southwest, most notably the hegemonies of the Spaniards and, later, of the Anglo-Americans. From these conflicts, five fundamental elements of the hero of the legends of the resistance can be derived which generate a shared narrative form among the subaltern cultures of the Southwest. The complex interactions between the cultures of the Indigenous Peoples, Spaniards, Mexicans, Hispanics, Afrodescendants, and Anglo-Americans in the frontier zone of the Southwest will also be discussed in detail as a characteristic that distinguishes the narrative tradition of legends of resistance in the Southwest from other narrative traditions in other cultures in other regions of the world.
