ABSTRACT
Many regions presently claimed by the US political body as states, territories, protectorates, or by other terms, are recently conquered spaces, and thus, the presence of much of the dominant cultural symbology (the English language, a Christian calendar, and so on) in those communities is comparatively new. This chapter endeavors to offer an amplified perspective on the construction and iteration of the supposed multicultural patriotisms in the US political space. It examines cultural conquest: how normative social devices like official and unofficial languages, political systems, cultural narratives, and other mores are put into practice in spaces subsequent to military invasion, land seizure, or other annexation. The chapter departs from those tendencies by interpreting the residents of spaces claimed by the US political body as fluid, malleable, extra-institutional communities. Isolation within culturally engineered spaces during childhood and adolescence, then, is a powerful social resource for implementation of collective myths.
