TY - JOUR AU - Ramírez, Jorge Omar PY - 2023/02/22 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - California Imaginada JF - A Contracorriente: una revista de estudios latinoamericanos JA - A Contracorriente VL - 20 IS - 2 SE - Articles / Artículos DO - UR - https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/2056 SP - 25-46 AB - <p>Imagined California</p><p>California has historically been imagined by "the other" from the colonial period to the first post-revolutionary processes of national consolidation. This essay analyzes the imaginative origins of California as a determining element for the creation of creative subjectivities in the region.</p><p>The historical period it covers begins with the "discovery" of the peninsula and its perpetuation in the global imagination as an island for more than half a century, and ends in the 1950s, when the centralist government gave the territory the title of federal entity naming it state number twenty-eight of the Mexican republic. This historical journey is analyzed through the perspective of Fernando Jordán, who traveled the length and breadth of the peninsula in the 1940s for the publication of his book El Otro México; <em>Biography of Baja California</em>. This piece is analyzed by means of the main points: the census, the map and the museum, appropriate from the book by Benedict Anderson <em>Imagined Communities</em>, with the intention of understanding Jordán’s book as an attempt to incorporate into the national logic a region &nbsp;with specific historical characteristics: late colonial processes, almost null struggle for independence, differentiated national conflicts. A region in constant political and geographical rearticulation, divided between two concepts of nation that fight to consolidate their sovereignty in this space whose identity has historically been tied to imaginative processes.</p> ER -