This chapter moves beyond a captivity scholarship based almost entirely on the experiences of White or White-descent captives and their Indian captors to study an account of nineteenth-century borderland captivity in the US Southwest, where – contrary to what the plethora of Anglo captivity scholarship indicates – most captives were of Mexican and/or Indigenous descent. To do so, I read Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and the Goodness of God (1682) alongside María Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would’ve Thought It? (1872). This Mexican-American historical romance novel and, I would add, fictionalization of an Indian captivity narrative, retells the history of Mexican dispossession at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War through fictional Mohave captive and emerging Mexican American elite, Lola Medina. Within a broader rethinking of the captivity narrative genre, I argue that captivity narratives helped produced proto-Latinx subjects as racially discrete individuals, even while the factual condition of nineteenth-century captivity forced individuals of Latin-American descent into ambiguous relation with other racialized communities.

Puritan New England was not isolated from other European empires. It sat between the colonies of New Netherland and New France and, thanks to New Englanders’ participation in the broader English culture of anti-Catholicism, was acutely conscious of Spain’s presence in America. Rivalries and relations with these different European colonies, as well as their Indigenous allies, left their mark on New England literature. Even though few of those nonpuritan peoples ever visited New England, captivity narratives, anti-Catholic polemics, criticisms of the Dutch, praise for the Huguenot victims of French Catholicism, and fear and suspicion of the Anglican establishment they had left behind in England testify to the ways that the broader world figured in New England culture. A closer look at some of the sources generated by the encounter with their various North American neighbors also points to the diversity within New England. Paying attention to the frontiers, away from the cultural center around Boston, it becomes clear that there was no complete agreement on how to respond to the non-English peoples across the border. These connections highlight how New England was both part of the wider English world as well as a distinct subculture within it.