Karen R. Roybal. Archives of Dispossession: Recovering the Testimonios of Mexican American Herederas, 1848-1960. Gender and American Culture Series. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 186 pp. $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-3382-4; $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-3381-7.
Reviewed by Julia C. Frankenbach (University of Colorado at Boulder)
Published on H-California (March, 2018)
Commissioned by Khal Schneider
In her thoughtful new methodological monograph, Karen R. Roybal urges a “feminist reframing” of research methods used for Mexican American history of the post-1848 period, a time of land-based conflicts frequently described in a male-centric historical voice (p. 3). Intended for Chicana/o literary studies specialists but pertinent to scholars of western US history more generally, Archives of Dispossession shows that Mexican American women actively struggled to maintain control of their herencias, or inheritances, first as landowners in the nineteenth century and later as heiresses to common experiences of dispossession in the twentieth. Roybal joins a growing cohort of historians who have emphasized property ownership as an important component of female power in the Southwest.[1] During the nineteenth century, Mexican women, unlike their American counterparts, exercised full legal control over the sale, management, and transfer of lands to which they held title. Their power to own and control land in the Southwest made them attractive economic allies to Anglo and Mexican men seeking to expand their assets. However, after the conclusion of the US-Mexican War, Mexican women lost their legal status as property owners and were among the first to experience land theft. Roybal locates evidence of their collective loss in court statements, correspondence, memoirs, scholarship, and literature. As substance for an “alternative archive” focused on the matrilineal dimensions of landownership in the West, these varied records reveal Mexican women as chief dissenting figures in the history of American conquest.
In her first two chapters, Roybal examines the testimonies of three Mexican American women who upheld their rights as landowners and, more provocatively, defended matrilineal heirship as a valid legal procedure during postwar land adjudication proceedings. Chapter 1 is devoted to the US Surveyor General’s Office (SGO) records, which include testimonies by two landowning Nuevomexicanas. Roybal argues that the women challenged the all-male SGO board to consider them equals in property ownership. However, the SGO’s hundreds of men’s testimonies suggest that Anglo interrogators demeaned Mexicanos for their reliance on female heirs. Roybal concludes that the SGO testimonies confirm women’s place in postwar struggles to retain land while they also demonstrate the utility of gender ideals for building a new US racial hierarchy in New Mexico. Roybal next turns to the writings of Californiana María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, who lost control of her landholdings after her Anglo husband died unexpectedly in 1869. Constrained by laws that denied her right to inherit and vexed by duplicitous Anglo lawyers, Ruiz de Burton recorded her ordeal in two novels. The first, published in 1872, confidently satirizes Anglo encroachment on the lands of Mexican women, but the second, published thirteen years later, mourns the deleterious effects of relentless land loss on Californio society. Read in order of publication, the novels document the downward trajectory of Ruiz de Burton’s fortunes and hopes for justice, although to what extent they represent other herederas’ experiences remains unclear, especially in light of Roybal’s effort to mark Ruiz de Burton as exceptional in her self-assurance.
Subsequent generations of Mexican American women would not expect to inherit land. Instead, they lay claim to an alternative cultural inheritance generated by common experiences of land loss. In her final two chapters, Roybal argues that women like folklorist Jovita González and writer Fabiola Cabeza de Baca stewarded this unique herencia by taking careful note of its influence on their communities. In chapter 3 Roybal praises the creative efforts of Tejana historian González, who in the 1930s composed a field-changing master’s thesis, multiple short stories, and a novel that challenged her white male colleagues’ nostalgic accounts of Anglo settlement in south Texas. In her final chapter, Roybal argues that Nuevomexicana Cabeza de Baca testified to a cultural herencia even more deeply marked by loss in her 1954 memoir We Fed Them Cactus. Writing in an “androgynous” voice intended to claim narrative authority, Cabeza de Baca mixed the lore, poetry, and personal histories of her elite forebears on the Llano Estacado with archival research. The result was a “gender-modern” literary work that testified to Cabeza de Baca’s sense of privation as a member of a family that had lost its claims to land and social status. Roybal concludes that, despite the various difficulties they faced, all five herederas under study managed to air the frustrations of disinherited Mexican Americans across the Southwest while identifying patriarchy as a key component of dispossession.
While Archives of Dispossession will readily attract Chicana/o literary studies scholars, Roybal’s ideas also enrich western historical scholarship. Her focus on women’s historical influence as potential marriage and business partners, in particular, adds fodder to an important debate about the place of women in the historical development of the trans-Mississippi political economy. Over the last fifteen years, western historians, including James F. Brooks, María Raquél Casa, Juliana Barr, Pekka Hämäläinen, and Anne F. Hyde have argued that indigenous and Mexican women served as important brokers for a West-wide network of trade and power by admitting foreign men into trade relations through marriage and other affinal kinship arrangements.[2] These scholars disagree, however, on whether this mechanism empowered women or systematically exposed them to unwanted imposition by outsiders. Roybal contributes evidence to the latter view by demonstrating that Mexican women actively resisted transfer of their assets to foreign men. Moreover, Roybal extends the study of female disinheritance into the mid-twentieth century, whereby she discovers that women’s notions of herencia shifted in focus from landed property to cultural property. This original finding appears well supported and should inspire further inquiry by intellectual and cultural historians.
Roybal’s limitations stem from her methodological focus, which leads her to draw from existing scholarship for her interpretations of texts. In her chapter on Ruiz de Burton, for example, Roybal relies heavily on the critical perspectives in a 2004 edited volume on the writer’s work (María Amparo Ruiz de Burton: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives, edited by Amelia María de la Luz Montes and Anne Elizabeth Goldman). Roybal does not adequately acknowledge the large number of scholars who already employ the research methods she urges. It is odd, for example, that the book lacks reference to Roybal’s fellow literary scholar Virginia M. Bouvier, who also writes about the limitations of documentary sources on women’s experiences of conquest and advances a similar methodological imperative in her 2001 book Women and the Conquest of California, 1542–1840: Codes of Silence. Moreover, it remains unclear how the five testimonios of interest to Roybal constitute an archive “alternative” to those already well studied by historians. Chapter 1 is especially puzzling because it features court documents that do not seem to mesh with the extra-archival creative and literary writings of the other chapters. If Roybal had limited her study to one source type she may have been able to make a stronger methodological argument about its unique value. As is, her mandate may fail to move some scholars who have pulled from varied source materials more liberally than Roybal does and in support of historical interpretations more comprehensive than hers.
Despite problems in substance, the spirit of Roybal’s directive to read widely and attentively for evidence of women’s perspectives will not go unappreciated. An evocative read, Roybal’s book reminds us that we have each inherited the world in which we live and that, if we are to share it well, we must reckon with the prejudices that shaped it.
Notes
[1]. These scholars include Kathleen Elizabeth Lazarou (Concealed under Petticoats: Married Women’s Property & the Law of Texas, 1840–1913 [New York: Garland, 1986]), Sarah Deutsch (No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989]), Deena J. González (Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]), María E. Montoya (Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840–1900 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002]), Deborah A. Rosen (“Women and Property across Colonial America: A Comparison of Legal Systems in New Mexico and New York,” William & Mary Quarterly 60 [2003]: 355–381), Miroslava Chávez-García (Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s [Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004]), and Antonia I. Castañeda, who has written many important articles and chapters on women’s influence in matters of inheritance and business in nineteenth-century California.
[2]. See James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); María Raquél Casa, Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820–1880 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); and Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).
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Citation:
Julia C. Frankenbach. Review of Roybal, Karen R., Archives of Dispossession: Recovering the Testimonios of Mexican American Herederas, 1848-1960.
H-California, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=51278
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