Desperadoes: Illegal Representativity

Not quite belonging to one law or the other, riding between two conceptions of order, legality, and illegality, Mexican Americans find themselves living between systems of fluid conceptions, where various weltanschauungs must be negotiated among the different elements that, whether from Mexico or the United States, are imposed on them. In this chapter I examine the negotiation and construction of legality from a Mexican American perspective. This is a direct product of the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which the United States committed to recognize the property and rights of all people of Mexican descent who remained