Married To A Daughter Of The Land

Spanish-Mexican Women And Interethnic Marriage In California, 1820-80

Maria Raquel Casas

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780874177145
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The surprising truth about intermarriage in 19th-Century California. Until recently, most studies of the colonial period of the American West have focused on the activities and agency of men. Now, historian María Raquél Casas examines the role of Spanish-Mexican women in the development of California. She finds that, far from being pawns in a male-dominated society, Californianas of all classes were often active and determined creators of their own destinies, finding ways to choose their mates, to leave unsatisfactory marriages, and to maintain themselves economically. Using a wide range of sources in English and Spanish, Casas unveils a picture of women's lives in these critical decades of California's history. She shows how many Spanish-Mexican women negotiated the precarious boundaries of gender and race to choose Euro-American husbands, and what this intermarriage meant to the individuals involved and to the larger multiracial society evolving from California's rich Hispanic and Indian past. Casas's discussion ranges from California's burgeoning economy to the intimacies of private households and ethnically mixed families. Here we discover the actions of real women of all classes as they shaped their own identities. Married to a Daughter of the Land is a significant and fascinating contribution to the history of women in the American West and to our understanding of the complex role of gender, race, and class in the Borderlands of the Southwest.

CHAPTER 1

Spanish Women as Cultural Agents from Medieval Spain to the New World Frontier

ALTHOUGH THIS BOOK IS A VERY SPECIFIC STUDY of a certain place and time, we should not forget the important and relevant issues embedded in the subject of intermarriage as a whole. In its broadest context, intermarriage, or sexual union with an outsider, stranger, or “alien other,” lays bare the racial, religious, and sexual anxieties of all societies in their efforts to define, maintain, uphold, and regulate the boundaries of ascribed group identity. By its very nature, intermarriage challenges, contests, and disrupts the collective cohesion of self-defining groups. From ancient times to the present, intermarriage has been a universal aspect of human societies, and, consequently, legal and social prohibitions against these unions reflect the ways societies treat those different from themselves. Intermarriages do not necessarily need to be sites of cultural conflict or socioracial anxiety, but socially and culturally they were—and still are—often linked to negative, destructive, and marginalizing outcomes and experiences.

Nowhere has the persistent and troublesome nature of intermarriage been greater than in the consequences of European conquest and colonization throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas, beginning in the fifteenth century and extending into the early twentieth. It is within this long, deep historical moment of European colonization that the phenomenon of intermarriage in nineteenth-century California must be understood. Comprehending how identities shift and the mechanisms that accelerate, contribute to, and facilitate these shifts is central to redefining and reconditioning our “knowledge system,” perception, interpretation, and definition of race and ethnicity.

Because most people in the United States are overly familiar with the English colonization process, which discouraged interracial and interethnic unions, my study draws on the overlooked heritage of Spanish colonization, which fostered racially mixed societies in the Caribbean, elsewhere in the Americas, and in Asia. Rather than seeing Californianas in isolation, it is important to recognize them as the last generation of women engaged in a process of Spanish colonization that began in the eighth century on the Iberian Peninsula. For seven hundred years, Spanish Catholic society continually refined its strategies for resisting and then ousting the entrenched invaders, the Muslim Moors. In this lengthy process, the role of Spanish Catholic women as settlers and colonizers gradually changed. Comprehending these strategies in medieval Spain is the first stage of understanding the Californianas and how they understood their legal rights, marriage, kinship, and social relationships and, ultimately, what shaped their understanding of their own cultural identity.

In theoretical terms the study of intermarriage has been dramatically reconceptualized away from the structuralist theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who posited that in precapitalist societies intermarriage functioned as an instrument of alliance formation between less powerful political groups and more powerful allies. To Lévi-Strauss intermarriage was a stabilizing factor in moments of political transition, with women becoming the means by which men literally and symbolically maintained peaceful relations with outside groups. With the growth and advancement of cultural studies, the view of women's role in intermarriage has widely expanded. For the purpose of this study, I draw on the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Hommi Bhabha, and Robert J. C. Young. Rather than emphasizing the utilitarian role of women in intermarriage, these scholars shift the focus of the unions to a larger cultural and gendered perspective, where they examine individuals within prevailing cultural and behavioral practices and the particular societies’ derived social meaning. For example, Bourdieu's discussions of strategies and agency in investigating social life and of cultural logics as a dialectic between outside observers and native conceptions is particularly relevant to the study of intermarriage. Indeed, he defines matrimonial strategies as “the product, not of obedience to a rule but of a feel for the game which leads people to ‘choose’ the best match possible given the game they have at their disposal, that is, the aces or the bad cards (especially girls), and the skills with which they are capable of playing.”¹ As my study shows, Spanish-Mexican colonial women were avid matrimonial cardplayers.

Bhabha, on the other hand, is mainly interested in cultural hybridity and how it subverts the authority of colonialism. His idea of a “Third Space” where “the ‘hybrid’ moment of political change” moves away from a subjective, binary position of the “Self” and the “Other” and emerges into “something else besides which contests the terms and territories of both” addresses this process. Ambivalence marks the “Third Space,” because it ensures “that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew.”² Race as such a cultural sign within colonialism greatly influences the development of hybrid identities; therefore, mestisaje is one of the conditions that need to be constantly read anew precisely because of their ambiguous state and multifaceted meanings. For Bhabha, understanding this in-between state is crucial to understanding how colonial identities are formed. Because Europeans derived truth and consciousness mainly through vision and visual representations, race and phenotype played crucial roles in the imposed taxonomies and hierarchies developed throughout their colonies. The definitions of Europeanness and whiteness were rewritten through colonial exchanges to exclude the “darker” peoples of the Americas, Asia, and Africa, but mestisaje continually challenged these definitions of identity and even of whiteness itself.

For Robert J. C. Young, race is the most elemental category of nineteenth-century colonialism. He regards the colonial process as a “machine of desire” fascinated with the frenzied “interminable copulation, of couplings, fusings, coalescence, between races,” and he notes how this form of sexual exchange “and its miscegenated product, which captures the violent, antagonistic power relations of sexual and cultural diffusion, should become the dominant paradigm through which the passionate economic and political trafficking of colonialism was conceived.”³ Colonial economics thus involved not only the exchange of goods, but also the exchange of bodies, so women become central agents in “any theory of reproduction.”⁴ Once sexuality was perceived by the colonizers to lie at the core of race, culture, and colonialism, women became central to the historical, colonial narrative.

In comparing New World colonizing practices and experiences of the Spanish and the English, the differences and outcomes are obvious. However, both powers initially faced two challenges: first, how to transport their distinctive European institutions and societies to the new colonial sites and replicate them there, and second, how to manage and control an expanding frontier zone. Both powers succeeded in these efforts, and women and marriage played critical roles in their larger colonizing processes. A consideration of the evolution of and differences between colonization and marriage policies under the Spanish and British legal systems helps to explain some of the main differences between these two societies and cultures.

Unlike the Euro-Americans, who by the 1820s were eagerly distancing themselves from their colonial past and redefining themselves as a self-reliant, democratic, ambitious people (in contrast—as they saw it—to the backward, traditionally minded, submissive Spanish and French colonials, who remained shackled to royal authorities), Spanish colonials kept refining and reforming their own cultural identities over time and space. Californianas in the early nineteenth century were not merely the great-great-granddaughters of the conquest of Mexico, but were also the last generation of women who valiantly made their lives on violent frontiers, supported by rights and privileges that their Spanish forebears had painstakingly negotiated and defended in order for their families to survive and thrive in medieval frontier zones.

Throughout early modern Europe, marriage and the family were used as metaphors for proper church and state governance. In sixteenth-century England, with the ascendancy of Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, common law held that “domestic relations” ordered not only relations between husbands and wives, but between masters and slaves; therefore, marriages were best characterized as “little commonwealths.”⁵ As dependent subjects within these “little commonwealths,” wives were expected to rely on their husbands to protect and rule their interests and to represent them in public. Social customs and cultural constructions prescribed that all women become wives at some point in their lives, and under the British legal system women and wives became a conflated social and legal category. By the eighteenth century, the English defined marriage as “lifelong, faithful monogamy, formed by mutual consent of a man and a woman, bearing the impress of the Christian religion and the English common law in its expectations of the husband to be the family head and economic provider, his wife the dependent partner.”⁶ Marriage turned a man into a husband and a woman into a wife, as well as defining how men participated in the civil and political world as heads of households and owners of property. For some men, marriage assured them of citizenship and expanded their participation as members of the body politic. The Church of England maintained that Scripture and Christian doctrine dictated that men hold authority over women and that a proper marriage required the masterful husband to control and protect his submissive wife, servants, and obedient children. Marriage, as both a private and a public institution, symbolized larger community ties; once a couple initiated the ceremony of marriage, a seemingly private act, they appeared before the public, who in turn recognized and supported the couple's bond and commitment, welcoming them into the community at large. Marriage thus became not only a reflection of two individuals’ commitment and bond to each other, but also reflected the community's self-interest in maintaining social control.⁷

Other European societies also instigated and implemented marriage policies to control the reproduction and formation of a body politic and to define communal belonging. Moreover, in modern nation-states citizenship symbolized proper authoritative roles and established racial and ethnic boundaries. Who was allowed, as well as who was not allowed, to marry whom influenced the development and definition of “the people,” reinforcing the idea that proper marriage could only take place between intraracial and intra-ethnic groups. Interethnic marriages did occur on occasion in European countries, but it was in the New World and in other colonial societies that marriage policies dramatically shifted to meet the changing racial and social environment. Rarely have historians of the United States emphasized the interconnectedness of marriage and frontier expansion, nor did Euro-Americans in the nineteenth or early twentieth century understand the competing marital systems they encountered as they moved westward across the continent, quickly dismissing alternate systems as either primitive, as they described the practices of Native Americans, or inferior, as they deemed those practiced by the Spanish-Mexicans and the French.

In the standard U.S. historical narratives, whenever marriage, English women, and the “American frontier” are discussed, the commentaries primarily revolve around how the shortage of women in frontier communities opened up marriage markets, so a single woman was assured of finding a mate regardless of her class. Consequently, women became wives at a younger age than in England and spent most of their lives in a family unit. The scarcity of females forced colonial authorities to entice and import women to the colonies, but these recruiting efforts often proved futile or largely unsuccessful. Not that the English were very innovative in their recruiting efforts: in Virginia, they imported single women and auctioned them off for eighty pounds of tobacco each; in very rare cases, single women in New England received title to tracts of land, but this practice quickly fell into disfavor. In order to settle the frontier while maintaining a fixed and cohesive definition of English identity, the colonial authorities preferred to attract and recruit men with wives through the practice of granting married men larger land grants than single men received.⁸ The structures of what a proper family and marriage meant to the English were quickly transported and implemented in the colonies; it was families that would settle the Anglo American frontier. Indeed, defining and controlling the legal and public status of unmarried, single women—femmes soles—proved a thorny issue for British colonial authorities.

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, British custom and law regarded private and public space as “realms of activity in which both men and women participated.” Therefore, unmarried women in British and colonial society literally embodied a cultural contradiction and existed in a liminal state.⁹ If they were single and without a male intercessor, either a husband or a father, women could make contracts, own and devise property, head a household, and enter into expanded economic activities, which was especially the case for widows. While single women's legal status was relatively unambiguous, their social and economic activities were filled with cultural tensions, because they challenged the prescribed notions of masculinity and femininity. Possessing female bodies, women were naturally defined as dependent and domestic. However, with no male authority to check or represent her in public, a single woman who worked outside the home, made contracts, legally represented herself, or petitioned to protect her legal rights challenged the patriarchal order. But since it was mainly in urban areas that single women could eke out a living if they chose to remain unmarried, and since few single women were attracted to make their lives on the frontier, the relative absence of single women outside settled towns conditioned how Anglo Americans along the frontier culturally defined proper women's roles.

After the American Revolution, westward expansion, as outlined by Thomas Jefferson's Ordinance of 1785, was primarily concerned with establishing self-government, building a nation of freeholders, and encouraging male settlers to move west. From 1785 to 1890, when according to Frederick Jackson Turner the American frontier supposedly ended, the United States was transformed into a collective society and culture; developed its unique characteristics of optimism, self-reliance, rugged individualism, and economic opportunism; and forged the institutions of democracy and equality. According to Turner's thesis, the frontier was an ever-shifting line that separated civilization from wilderness. It was also a place and a process in which competition over resources and between invading and invaded peoples followed various stages of development that ended in the establishment of urban, populated areas. By 1890, when America's frontier line was said to have been erased, Turner maintained that civilization had spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific and that conquered peoples were on their way toward extinction or were reluctantly being assimilated into American society. Women, while valued as reproducers and helpmates in transforming the wilderness into a more civilized setting, played a marginal role, their experiences overshadowed by masculine interests and goals. Settlers and their families were considered the natural means of expanding the nation's economic, territorial, and political interests, but women as wives were deemed to play an insignificant role in the greater historical and national movements. Single and unmarried women as settlers were rare, and the scarcity of women ensured that women married and remarried quickly along the frontier.¹⁰ The dominance of Turner's thesis in western studies is unquestionable, but the issue of intermarriage leads both to a critique of the thesis and to a new emphasis on processes that are overlooked by it.

Although a tremendous amount of revision has occurred in rewriting the history of women in the West, within the general American psyche the image of “white” western women has undergone little change from what Dee Alexander Brown typified in his classic 1958 work The Gentle Tamers. Accordingly, “white” women's “only real reason for going west was to found a new home, and the dream of many an emigrating female was a snug log cabin nestling in some pleasant valley.” Once settled on the frontier, women's natural “maternal force against which the males’ brute force could not contend…ultimately brought the Wild West under complete domination of the female sex.” Because of their scarcity, women were treated as “white goddesses” who developed a taste for the privileges their idealized status afforded them.¹¹ To Brown and other historians of his generation, the West became the most favorable social and political climate for American women.

Although historians have repeatedly challenged these outdated narratives, the stereotypes, myths, and images of Euro-American women persist. Anglo Americans need to be reminded that Spanish women were also settling west of the Mississippi and implementing their own cultural ideas of domestic ideology and race. Spanish-Mexican women also emigrated to the frontier in search of homes and security, but an adobe with Indian servants and land rights to a rancho were the hopes and ideals of these women. Why they had such a different understanding of the frontier from their Anglo American counterparts must be understood from the Spanish point of view. For eighteenth-century Spanish settlers, the frontier was not a mere line, but a zone of interaction “where the cultures of the invader and of the invaded contend[ed] with one another and with their physical environment to produce a dynamic that is unique to time and place.”¹²

The marriage and colonization practices intrinsically intertwined in Spanish culture were very different from those of the British. Because Spain had been engaged for seven hundred years in expelling the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula before encountering New World peoples, intermarriage as a form of negotiation and accommodation had long since emerged as a crucial element of Spanish medieval identity and culture. Spain's constant contact with different racial, religious, and cultural groups made the definition and implementation of racial categorization and the country's particular social system easily translatable into the New World. Whereas the British found intermarriage with the indigenous peoples they encountered distasteful, the Spanish, through centuries of practice, more easily accepted and incorporated new peoples. That is not to say that these relationships were entirely peaceful and harmonious, but Spain's lengthy and continuous experience with cultural accommodation, acceptance, and racial/cultural mixture in order to maintain physical control over conquered lands strongly influenced the cultural practices of Spanish frontier societies.¹³

By the time Spanish colonies were established throughout the New World, women had become integrated participants and intermarriage a valued practice that supported and sustained military and political control over conquered lands and peoples. Within this historical narrative, Californianas’ ideas of marriage and all that it symbolized were layered by ten centuries of frontier practices. As such, intermarriage was an “interior frontier” connoting distinctions ...