Traces of Intimacy

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 American 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.