In Unspeakable Violence, Guidotti-Hernández tackles the role of violence in historical narratives of the US–Mexico borderlands. The book challenges nationalist/colonialist accounts in Chicana/o and Mexican historical narratives. Guidotti-Hernández posits the notion of “utterances” to explain how scholars frequently gloss over the often not-so-obvious hints of violent occurrences in the archival record, and thus reproduce the violence in their own interpretation of historical events. For example, she provides a detailed analysis of the texts that tell the story of Josefa/Juanita, who was lynched in 1851 for killing a white US man, showing that in the available archival materials witnesses and writers treated sexuality and rape as unspeakable subjects and, thus, only refer to rape indirectly. This deep reading shows how scholarly narratives of Josefa/Juanita's story do not take into account the ways that race intersects with gender and sexuality, and thus ignore the role of sexual violence in Josefa/Juanita's actions on the night of the murder.

Guidotti-Hernández argues that Chicana/o and borderlands studies frequently employ nationalist frameworks that privilege mestizaje as a group categorization that only exists in resistance to violence wielded by Anglos. This resistance model, Guidotti-Hernández points out, creates a colonizer/colonized dichotomy, and perpetuates the Chicano nationalist idea that Mexican can only be mestizo, and mestizo is the same as indigenous. This binary model elides a more complicated power analysis of how people of color enact violence against each other by utilizing state and colonial power, and by siding with Anglos to their own benefit, even if momentarily. Additionally, Unspeakable Violence critiques how Chicana feminisms, even while expanding the field to understand transnationalism and intersectionality, have also reproduced nationalist narratives that rely on a uniformly Chicano/Mexican/mestizo identity.

In the first section of her book, Guidotti-Hernández examines three examples of “unspeakable violences” both in the archival documents and in scholars' representations of the events: the sexual, racial, and citizenship dynamics at play in the events and representations of the lynching of Josefa/Juanita in southern California; the role of citizenship, race, and nation in the context of overlapping colonialisms (Spain, Mexico, and the United States) in the Camp Grant Massacre; and the simultaneity of racism and feminism in Jovita Gonzalez's writings that complicates her position as a writer of an alternative Chicana feminist narrative of the region. The second half of the book centers on the Yaqui Indian Wars in the Arizona–Sonora borderlands region and argues that the Yaqui play a central role in shaping both Mexican and US modernity. She draws on Mexican policy and military archives to discuss how state violence against the Yaqui has been erased in the creation of Mexican and US national narratives, and thus has denied these nations' systemic acts of genocide. It is these narratives that are also reproduced by Chicano nationalist narratives.

Guidotti-Hernández revisits a common methodological question that social historians have been grappling with for decades: when we must rely on institutional documents and other archival materials produced by those in power, how might we use them for evidence of the experiences and choices of those who did not leave many (if any) firsthand archival materials? Guidotti-Hernández builds on historian Vicki Ruíz's argument that while institutional documents reveal more about those who produced the documents, they can be read against the grain for indications of the choices women of color made in the larger context of their social, cultural, and political environments.Footnote ¹ Guidotti-Hernández utilizes literary theory to frame her methodological interpretation of archival materials such as newspapers, state records, and court testimonies, as well as literature and scholarly narratives of historical events. While this approach allows her to make a necessary critique of the field of Chicana/o history, her focus on discourse limits her engagement with larger, well-established historiographies of the region and of social processes such as lynching, citizenship, sovereignty, and global imperialism.

Still, Unspeakable Violence is a well-researched analysis of gender, race, and colonialism with a focus on a wide variety of Mexican, indigenous, Spanish, and Anglo historical actors. Her discussion opens the door to other scholarly inquiries. For example, what if we take this approach to transnationalism further, and place the local US–Mexico border region within a more global context? Such a question might force us to examine the borderlands not just as a region where colonial legacies and diasporic communities of Mexico and the United States overlap, but also as a place where Atlantic and Pacific worlds meet, where people of African and Asian diasporas also came to interact in the complex borderlands world.