“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."
~Kirsten Silva Gruesz, author of Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing
"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 With insightful analysis of fabricated historical documents, Huizar-Hernández questions the uses of archival authority to support logics of inclusion and exclusion."
~Rodrigo Lazo, coeditor of The Latino Nineteenth Century
"Recommended."
~Choice
"Arguably one of the most important books on Arizona history written in the last decade."
~Tombstone Epitaph
"Borderlands Professor Brings Fresh Light to an Arizona Land Fraud," interview with Anita Huizar-Hernandez
~Tombstone Epitaph
"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."
~Southwestern Historical Quarterly
"Forging Arizona is a significant contribution to archival studies, Arizona, and borderlands history."
~Journal of Arizona 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."
~H-Net
"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.'"
~Pacific Historical Review
