Lived ethnicity: archaeology and identity in Mexicano America.

Building on theories about the importance of national identity to ethnicity, this paper presents a case study of a region where national contests were intimately tied to personal identity. In the mid-nineteenth century, southern Colorado, long a part of Spain and then briefly Mexico, was conquered by the expanding United States. Material remains and historic documents attest to its residents' ensuing struggles over place, identity, and citizenship. Bilingual newspapers proclaimed that the region's Hispanics, who continued to call themselves Mexicanos , were just as ‘American’ as residents of other new US territories. Yet much of their material culture was rooted in centuries-old Hispanic traditions. The archaeology of a late nineteenth-century Mexicano site in the region provides an example of how material culture, social ties, and landscape were mobilized by people for whom a former nationality became an ethnic identifier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]