Playing Cowboys and Indians in the US–Mexico Borderlands: Race, Landscape, and Capital Fictions

The Boy Rancher Series by Willard F. Baker echoes the themes of masculinity Indigenous tropes that characterized entertainment targeted towards white American boys visualizing the adventures along the borderlands. In this fictional western series, boys had the opportunity to play the detective, solve mysteries, and triumphantly save the day from the menacing savage Indian, a trope that Americans fantasized over. During the 1920s, the United States was undertaking new American Indian citizenship and land dispossession policies, while Mexico was in revolution. Wars, the Indian, the borderlands, and consumption, colored Americans' imagination. Early twentieth-century children's entertainment novels helped inform and provide a playful space for young boys to learn about the Other while reinforcing concepts of masculinity, race, and civilization. Using the historiographies of early-twentieth-century US literature and the US-Mexico Borderlands, I will contextualize the construction of landscape and Indigenous tropes in The Boy Ranchers to highlight the development of US imperial identities of gender, race, and place.