Conservatives claim that high taxes encourage government inefficiency and waste, and that the private sector uses money more efficiently and less wastefully. Why? Because government has become so large that oversight, coordination, and decision-making are difficult, corruption has become a problem, market discipline is absent, government officials are prone to spending revenue carelessly, and measuring government waste and efficiency is hard. Hence, taxes should be reduced to limit government inefficiency and waste. But this assumes that market actors are less wasteful and more efficient than government and that they don’t suffer from many of the same problems that conservatives attribute to government. There is little cross-national or historical evidence to support the conservative claims. In fact, evidence suggests that cutting government revenues and unleashing market forces can sometimes be disastrous for the economy and society, as the Enron and 2008 financial crises proved.

Conservatives claim that high taxes reduce economic freedom of choice so tax cuts are necessary to increase freedom. But freedom is ambiguous. Freedom from taxation can also enable people the freedom to do things that are detrimental to society, as financial crises and corporate scandals illustrate. Moreover, cutting taxes and therefore the resources associated with social programs can limit the freedom of these programs’ recipients to pursue their dreams and aspirations and to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In that sense, freedom is unequally distributed in America. Poor people have fewer resources and less economic freedom than rich people. Cutting taxes to reduce welfare spending further limits the freedom of less affluent people and does little to increase freedom at the top. This is why cross-national data show that higher taxes are associated with more not less economic freedom. Cutting taxes also limits the government’s ability to provide the public goods that everyone needs.

Conservatives make five claims about why taxes in America should be cut, especially for corporations and the rich. They claim that taxes are too high, hurt the economy, encourage government waste, are unfair, and threaten Americans’ freedom. Their arguments are based on a set of economic ideas called neoliberalism that are much more a matter of fiction than fact. Yet these ideas have become taken-for-granted truths – myths – among conservatives. This chapter reviews the rise of neoliberalism, how it provided conservatives the intellectual foundation for their mythical claims about the benefits of tax cuts, how these myths affected tax policy in the United States, and how politicians have used these myths to justify cutting taxes. Popular as these ideas may have been among conservatives, they are often not supported by cross-national, historical, or public opinion poll data.

This chapter offers an account of literature’s intervention in the money debates of the early twentieth-century United States. It explores the corrosive effects of banking crises and the fear of corrupt trusts through the realist anti-banking novels of writers such as Upton Sinclair; the persistent social shibboleths of gold versus paper money in the naturalism of Edith Wharton and Frank Norris; the teleological failures of speculation depicted in the caricatures of F. Scott Fitzgerald; and the possibilities and limitations of the crisis that precipitated the New Deal, as suggested by the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston. The chapter also explores, through the writing of Mina Loy, the alternative money debates that were receiving increased attention in this period.

In the late eighteenth century, the viceroyalty of New Spain extended its control over Alta California, introducing secular cultural practices like music, dance, and drama which gained popularity among traders, soldiers, and hybrid communities, blurring the traditional boundaries of race, gender, and class. These societal shifts foreshadowed the forthcoming wars of independence (1810–1821) and clashed with missionary liturgy, accentuating the growing divide between monastic orders and secular society. This chapter focuses on the censorship of Fermín de Reygadas’s play, Astucias por heredar, un sobrino a un tío ("Tricks to Inherit: a Nephew and His Uncle"). Initially censored in the viceroyalty, the play was later transported and performed in Alta California, only to be concealed by Hubert Bancroft, who omitted all references to it in his History of California. This play survived two forms of censorship: Spanish colonial moral censorship and Anglo-American disregard towards a text and a performance that did not fit his racialized historiographic narratives. The chapter also explores the play’s staging in Villa de Branciforte near the Santa Cruz mission and concludes by comparing two performances of the play, considering the role of language, location, and early Californio history in contemporary decolonial reenactments.

This chapter explores the complex monetary environment of the United States from the Revolutionary War to the earliest years of the nation. Analyzing a wide variety of political, economic, and imaginative texts that attempted to explain and solve the monetary challenges of the new country – especially the collapsing value of the paper money created to fund the war – the chapter calls attention to the important tension between the representation of money as abstract symbol and as familiar object. For example, arguments in support of and in opposition to the redemption of Continental currency engage both complex monetary theories and allegorical stories about talking coins. Reading popular literature about United States money in the 1770s and 1780s thus reveals a community that was comfortable navigating a diverse array of monetary forms even as the unification of monetary functions made the concept of money increasingly abstract.

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.

Although several scholars have expanded their selection criteria when editing anthologies of Latinx literature, they rarely include writings by colonial Creoles. Focusing on Francisco de Florencia (1620–1695), this chapter argues that his 1694 provincial chronicle of the Jesuits in New Spain deserves to be studied with other colonial texts that have been described as “symbolic precursors” to Latinx writings. Unlike other Spanish explorers and missionaries who traveled to the Spanish Borderlands, Florencia was born there; his hometown was Saint Augustine, he lived most of his life in Mexico City, and he spent almost a decade in southern Europe representing his religious province. Florencia’s frontier crossings offer early modern examples of border crossings, themes that emerge in the ways he deals with transnational experiences and influences, questions of belonging, and a sense of space. Even though sacred (or ecclesiastical) history is often overlooked in studies of Latinx literature, an analysis of the ways in which Florencia engages with earlier Spanish accounts of the Jesuit missions in La Florida is a unique window onto Creole identities in the early modern Spanish world.

The Cambridge University Press Latinx Literature in Transition series is conceived, in part, as a response to the challenges that arise when thinking historically about the field of Latinx literary studies. This first volume in the series undertakes the particularly important task of questioning what have often been presented as the uncomplicated origins of Latinx literature – starting points defined by US history and geography that belie the multiple eras, geographies, cultures, and cosmologies that gave rise to “Latinx” as a storied and complex identity spanning multiple centuries and places. By defining and discussing these complexities and accentuating the transits, transactions, and transcreations of/by multiple peoples over time, we hope to upset the familiar narrative and invoke a much more inclusive, more plural, and less functional origin story for Latinx literature and its creators. Through a focus on very early literary expression and surviving texts, we push the boundaries of what has most commonly been understood and studied as the “history” of Latinx literature.