ABSTRACT
While Love refers to the cattlemen of Old Mexico as “greasers,” a term he also uses to identify Anglo-American roughnecks, he reveals as well a contradictory border-crossing tie to the Mexicans and Mexicans Americans whom he met as part of the “diasporic intimacies” of the Old West (Boym 2001: 254). Love’s autobiography is often pigeonholed as a generic hybrid, part postbellum slave narrative in the tradition of Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and part Beadle’s dime novel (M. Johnson 2002: 98; Scheckel 2002: 223), but Love in lighting out for the territories also cast down his bucket, as he notes, in the “herring pond” of Old Mexico, discovering a practice of racial uplift from rags to meager cowpoke riches that often involved moments of transnational-and transgressively so-identifi cations at the same time it lays claim to a white national manhood.
