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Traces of Intimacy charts the shifting racial ideas about Native Americans and Mexican Americans from the Gold Rush to the age of mass incarceration. Developing a reading practice that illuminates how both groups navigated their proximity to each other amid settler colonialism and legal and cultural change, this book provides a relational history of Native and Mexican American racialization. Focusing on the entangled Sierra borderlands of Nevada and California, Jedediah H. Kuhn reads across histories, archives, and cultural texts to reveal that, despite their divergence as racial categories, Native and Mexican Americans have lived intimately as lovers, friends, neighbors, and rivals. As Kuhn demonstrates, these communities have strategically affirmed or denied their intimate connection to survive colonization. Through a series of case studies expanding how we think about intimacy—as recognition, sex, family, imagination, and violence—Kuhn presents a new way of understanding Native and Mexican Americans' deeply entwined pasts, presents, and futures.
Jedediah H. Kuhn is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Rochester.
“In this brave, thought-provoking, and necessary work, Jedediah Kuhn illuminates the fraught borderlands between Native American and ethnic Mexican identity in the United States, showing how members of these two groups have struggled over questions of Indigeneity set in motion by the US invasion of California and Nevada in the 1840s.”—Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History
“Traces of Intimacy is a fascinating read and ingenious interpretation of beautifully eclectic archives that foreground the felt traces of intimate moments between Mexican Americans and Native Americans. Kuhn has written a unique, compelling, nuanced, and sensitive exposition of inextricably tangled lives, providing us critically needed hope and clarity for our times.”—Lisa Marie Cacho, author of Complex Innocence: Defending Defiant Victims of Police Killings
“Too many books that place Native and Mexican American histories in one frame fail one of two ways: they collapse Mexican American Indigenous descent into Indigenous political status, or they treat Native Peoples as already vanished. Kuhn does neither. He reads for the relatives the archive misfiles, follows them through the machinery of blood quantum and federal recognition, and comes out holding the line tribal sovereignty depends on: related, not the same. What he reveals is Indigenous agency under conditions designed to make it illegible. Livability, he calls it: the everyday work of getting by under colonization, read with a generosity our fields too rarely extend. Traces of Intimacy is relational scholarship that gives nothing away.”—Darren E. Lone Fight, Founding Director, Jim Thorpe Center for the Futures of Native Peoples
“Taking a vividly relational approach to racialization, Kuhn provides a theoretically informed and provocative historical assessment of Indigeneity and settler colonialism that will transform our understanding of the relationship between Mexican Americans and Native Americans in the US West.”—George J. Sánchez, author of Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy