Gary Totten (Faculty Affairs) has published an article, “McTeague and the Afterlives of Empire,” in the journal Arizona Quarterly. Totten discusses Frank Norris’s novel 1899 McTeague and its Mexican American character Maria Macapa in the contexts of the 1846-48 Mexican-American War and the Californio testimonios gathered afterward as part of Hubert Howe Bancroft’s history of California. Maria’s dispossession and death in the novel reflect the brutal effects of U.S. empire while also highlighting contradictions in Norris’s theory of fiction, which, even in its representation of raw and unfiltered “life,” excludes various kinds of truth, such as Maria’s story.