ABSTRACT
In 1896, New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt wrote a complimentary note to Stephen Crane, a rising literary newcomer just then beginning to enjoy, and suffer, the full brunt of accolades from the publication of The Red Badge of Courage. Crane had sent Roosevelt a draft of a new short story, 'A Man and Some Others', about a lone Anglo sheepherder, Bill, who gets gunned down by a group of Mexican Texans in the no-man's lands of South Texas. Then Roosevelt responded to say that he had enjoyed the story, but that he had a disagreement with the way things had turned out. 'A Man and Some Others' also stages a dialectical relationship between cultural dissipation and personal annihilation, bringing forward the particular contours of the double anxiety invested in Mexicans within the ideological realms of 'America'. Mexicans in US-America understood only as 'cultural' or 'linguistic' threats address only half of an anxiety given persistent voice by national essentialists.
