Border Bodies

Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Borderlands

Bernadine Marie Hernández

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781469667904
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Hispanisch-Amerikanische Studien

In this study of sex, gender, sexual violence, and power along the border, Bernadine Marie Hernandez brings to light under-heard stories of women who lived in a critical era of American history. Elaborating on the concept of sexual capital, she uses little-known newspapers and periodicals, letters, testimonios, court cases, short stories, and photographs to reveal how sex, violence, and capital conspired to govern not only women's bodies but their role in the changing American Southwest. Hernandez focuses on a time when the borderlands saw a rapid influx of white settlers who encountered elite landholding Californios, Hispanos, and Tejanos. Sex was inseparable from power in the borderlands, and women were integral to the stabilization of that power. In drawing these stories from the archive, Hernandez illuminates contemporary ideas of sexuality through the lens of the borderland's history of expansionist, violent, and gendered conquest. By extension, Hernandez argues that Mexicana, Nuevomexicana, Californiana, and Tejana women were key actors in the formation of the western United States, even as they are too often erased from the region's story.

CHAPTER ONE The Oikopolitic

The Father of All, Brokering of the Californiana Body, and the “Natural Order of Things” in Alta California

Alfred Robinson always addressed his father-in-law, Don José de la Guerra y Noriega, as “Mi Querido Padre” (My Dear Father) in his letters. The letters ended with “Sus Querido Hijos” (Your Dear Children).¹ But there are three exceptions to these warm salutations in Robinson’s letters where he uses the less affectionate “Mi Suegro” (My Father-in-Law). The first time we see this more detached correspondence is in a letter he wrote to Don José de la Guerra y Noriega from New York on October 21, 1847, a little more than a year after the start of the Mexican-American War (April 25, 1846). He plainly relayed the news “Que Acabo de recibir noticia de Washington que mi conocido el Comodoro Jones, de antiqua memoria, sale pronto, para el fiar de tomar el mando de las fuerzas navales que por lo presente ocupan la costa de las Alta California” (“I just received the news from Washington that my friend, Comodore Jones, of ancient memory, is soon leaving to take charge of the naval forces that at present occupy the coast of Upper California”).² In one letter to de la Guerra from New York on November 22, 1846, Robinson decried the “injusto” against his beloved Californios. But Robinson had a different tune in a September 20, 1846, letter to his brother-in-law Pablo de la Guerra (Don José de la Guerra y Noriega’s fourth son); here, he was more optimistic about the war, claiming that since the war was well underway and the Americanos looked toward a victory, money would not be lacking in California, and in place of hides and tallow, there would be coins in all parts of California.³ The road would indeed be paved in golden coins now that the United States had come to civilize the West. At the end of Robinson’s letter to his brother-in-law Pablo, he told him that he should wait to marry until a “gringa” came with the expedition.⁴ This was in stark contrast to his own love for Californianas (or Californio women) before the outbreak of the war; indeed, Robinson married de la Guerra’s third daughter Ana María Antonia de la Guerra (also known as Anita) when he saw Californios on the road to wealth and success.⁵

Robinson’s character and respectful demeanor toward the de la Guerras shifted as the war progressed. No longer the dutiful “son” of de la Guerra, as represented by his harsh shift in tone toward his father-in-law and his salutation of “Suegro,” Robinson anticipated significant political and economic changes in the borderlands. The U.S. invasion threatened the de la Guerra estate, and the economic system in California was transforming at a fast pace. Robinson’s slip of the tongue could easily go unnoticed, but it signifies two things. First and most obvious, it signifies the specter of defeat for the Californios from the vantage point of an American. Robinson no longer needs to honor de la Guerra in the same manner as he did before the U.S. invasion—although he still does—because de la Guerra is no longer of political or economic benefit to him. Second, it exemplifies this economic shift; Robinson no longer has a need for such affections as “Querido Padre” because he no longer benefits from his wealth in the form of his marriage to Anita. This slip of the tongue reveals the shift in the sexual economic structure of the Southwest through the brokering of Californiana bodies.

The change in familial salutations shows a pivotal shift in the management of the household under de la Guerra’s authority. The wealthy, elite landholding, and patriarchal de la Guerra ran a tight ship in terms of his family’s spirituality and religion, their political reputation, and their engagement in economic ventures. When Robinson married Anita de la Guerra, both Robinson and de la Guerra saw great economic, social, and cultural potential in teaming up together through the marriage to Anita. However, once the United States invaded California, everything shifted. Before the U.S. invasion, one way de la Guerra maintained control of his estate was by brokering off his daughters to extranjeros (Anglo-Americans and Europeans) who could potentially expand his wealth. The reproductive and sexual labor that the de la Guerra daughters performed not only affected de la Guerra’s economics, but it also bridged the household sphere (oikos) with state relations (polis). The oikopolitic that de la Guerra creates through his daughters’ bodies exemplifies the limited notion of Marx’s “natural” reproductive labor and the unseen and violent nature of racialized subjects’ sexual labor, as I explain in later chapters. The importance of Californiana bodies in keeping economic systems afloat demonstrates the centrality of women, gender, patriarchy, and sexuality in imperial expansion, and it also reveals the ways in which culture and class informed the policies and practices of capitalism and expansion.⁶ Scholars have long been interested in discussions of nineteenth-century Californio elites, their never-ending critique of U.S. invasion, and their displacement after the war. However, that analysis tends to miss how many elite landholding Californios invested in and endorsed the free market. Clearly de la Guerra was not the only man to broker his daughters’ bodies off to extranjeros, nor was elite Californio culture the only place this practice existed. However, the de la Guerra women are foundational female figures at the center of a free-trade economy in the West. This chapter begins my study not only because it chronologically makes sense (the de la Guerra family were operating on capitalist principles long before the West was considered a capitalist region), but also because the de la Guerra estate functioned at the interstices of the household and political economy, allowing the patriarch to broker his daughters for economic gain but under the guise of private life, which would later become the province of biological reproduction and what is natural and proper about affective and domestic labor. The de la Guerra daughters perfectly encapsulate how sexual capital functions in the West, but they also exemplify how bodily qualities (sex, sexuality, heteronormativity) become codified in relation to the circulation of capital and the accumulation of wealth.

This chapter unveils the value-laden body of the Californiana as it becomes the basis for an economy of sex regulated by hierarchies of race and class. I center the female Californiana body to explore the political economy of Alta California and reveal a history of the sexual and gendered economic systems of elite landholding Californios. Scholars have defined these practices as the brokering of classes between Californios and Euro-Americans and Europeans, but I argue that household management for the de la Guerra estate meant access to the bodies of their “proper” daughters, which opened up social capital for de la Guerra himself. To do so, I rely on the 1878 California Recollections of Angustias de la Guerra Ord dictated by Mariá de las Angustias de la Guerra Ord; letters written to Don José de la Guerra y Noriega by his daughter Ana Maria Antonia de la Guerra, better known as Anita de la Guerra; and Teresa de la Guerra de Hartnell’s testimonio dictated on March 12, 1875, to Henry Cerritu. I utilize the Greek understanding of oikonomia, which distinguishes the management of the household (oikos) from that of the state (polis), to suggest that the de la Guerra estate functioned at the interstices of the household and political economy, allowing the patriarch to broker his daughters for economic gain but under the guise of private life. I label this intersection the oikopolitic. For Aristotle, oikonomia was the foundation of politics, but it was also a completely different realm because “it was composed not by the hierarchal logics deemed proper to the oikos but conditioned by the premise of equality between free, adult men.”⁷ Oikos, which is synonymous with “household,” spoke to the natural way households were supposed to function, but oikonomia extended beyond the familial space because it included unrelated servants and slaves.⁸ While the de la Guerra estate was most definitely a household in that it housed the servants and peons on the hacienda, de la Guerra’s oikonomia existed in the ways he used the Californio female bodies of his family for economic leverage and political power, which “turns on a series of architectural, affective, geopolitical and not least, contractual shifts in what have been simultaneously intimate and global reorganizations of divisions of labor.”⁹ Through the brokering off of his daughters, de la Guerra merged the loci of the household and political economy, which would later become the province of biological reproduction and what is natural and proper about affective and domestic labor. These household economics are then “poised analogous to the processes of socio-economic reproduction existing at the level of the nation-state.”¹⁰ Marx takes the Aristotelian philosophy of the oikos and uses the concept to critique the political economy of capitalism, making use of the oikos (household) and nomos (governing law), to iterate the labor theory of value. Said differently, Marx uses the same construction of Aristotelian philosophy to interrogate the differences between productive labor, that which produces value, and reproductive labor, that which does not. I build off Marx on Aristotle first to claim that the de la Guerras crafted an oikopolitical realm for themselves, and second to examine Marx’s “naturalized” reproductive labor within the household that lies in stark contrast to racialized subjectivity. The de la Guerra estate was advanced in merging the two, while pointedly contrasting with racialized sex, which has always been unseen, abstract, and both productive and reproductive. I build off Angela Mitropoulos’s work to term this merging as oikopolitics: “an attentiveness to personal comportment in a simultaneously political and oikonomic register.”¹¹ This chapter is not so much concerned with the agency of the de la Guerra daughters in their marriage arrangements, as that word has lost much of its meaning in recent years, but rather with what happens within the mitigated relationships of the oikopolitics.

While marriage arrangements for economic gain were common in different geopolitical spaces and places, scholars of the Southwest borderlands are divided into two main camps on the significance of interethnic marriages in nineteenth-century California. One astute suggestion interrogates the brokering of classes between extranjeros and Californio elite landholding families that eventually led to acculturation and assimilation of the Californiana bride. The other, a more feminist reading, views the Californianas as the negotiators of exchange for their own bodies by choosing to marry these outsiders.¹² But as Deena Gonzalez states, rather than “write about these relationships in terms that imply that women, worth nothing, married men worth something, and that Spanish-Mexican women gained mobility as their Euro-American men in turn gained entrance into Spanish-American society,” this chapter rests at the intersection of these two popular arguments by examining how their bodies, whether volitionally or not, merge through the oikopolitical.¹³ Rather than thinking of these interethnic marriages as ushering Californios into a modern future because of the white male counterpart, I contend that this was a mode of political economy actually centered on the power of the Californios. This chapter reads these Californiana elite bodies as surplus value, not in the Marxist sense, but rather containing an excessive amount of value for cultural, social, and economic capital.

Aristotle, Marx, Race, and Sex

The meaning of oikos, the etymological root of the word “economics,” has shifted over time, but we must understand its meaning in order to historicize and interrogate the naturalized configuration of sex, intimacy, and reproductive work. The crux of oikonomia centers hierarchy that rests on the management of others. While the debate continues among economic historians on whether or not the Greek understanding of oikonomia is akin to the current understanding of economics, it is an instructive placeholder for the shifting relationships between economics, politics, sexuality, class, and race.¹⁴ The oikos, in its classical Greek understanding, was not a synonym for the family but a word for the household.¹⁵ For Aristotle, oikonomia was the study of household management. Within politics, there is a clear distinction for Aristotle between the management of a household and the management of the state. For Aristotle, the oikos (household) is juxtaposed to the polis (city/state); however, the oikos is the foundation of the polis in that the oikos produced the bare necessities of life; with the generation of ...