Archives of Dispossession

Recovering the Testimonios of Mexican American Herederas, 1848–1960

Karen R. Roybal

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781469633824, 9781469633817
• eBook ISBN: 9781469633831
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

One method of American territory expansion in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands was the denial of property rights to Mexican landowners, which led to dispossession. Many historical accounts overlook this colonial impact on Indigenous and Mexican peoples, and existing studies that do tackle this subject tend to privilege the male experience. Here, Karen R. Roybal recenters the focus of dispossession on women, arguing that gender, sometimes more than race, dictated legal concepts of property ownership and individual autonomy. Drawing on a diverse source base—legal land records, personal letters, and literature—Roybal locates voices of Mexican American women in the Southwest to show how they fought against the erasure of their rights, both as women and as landowners. Woven throughout Roybal’s analysis are these women’s testimonios—their stories focusing on inheritance, property rights, and shifts in power. Roybal positions these testimonios as an alternate archive that illustrates the myriad ways in which multiple layers of dispossession—and the changes of property ownership in Mexican law—affected the formation of Mexicana identity.

Index

Acculturation, autonomy retained in, 23

Agency, women’s: Bóne y López’s sense of, 40; Cabeza de Baca’s, 102, 106, 110, 123, 130; contemporary activists’, 128–29; in culture, 11, 15; González’s, 81, 83, 84–88, 90–91, 94–95, 130; in papelitos guardados, 18; in property ownership, 3, 6, 11, 13, 21, 35, 48; Ruiz de Burton’s, 56–57, 65, 130; writing as tool of, 130

Alamar, Don Mariano (fictional character), 55, 59–67

Alonso, Ana María, 44

Alternative spaces, for women’s history, 11–12, 14–20

American exceptionalism, 5, 26

Androgynous style: Cabeza de Baca’s, 103–17; MacLeod on, 103, 112–13

Anglo Americans: influx into Texas, 78, 86–88, 93–94; privileges in U.S. legal system, 42; property acquisition through marriage, 9–10, 27, 28, 95–100; Ruiz de Burton’s criticism of, 51, 59, 60; view of Indigenous peoples, 4; view of Mexican Americans, 4, 45–46, 140n32

Antonio Sandoval land grant, 43

Anzaldúa, Gloria, 18, 126, 127, 133, 144n40

Appropriation, cultural, 11; Bancroft and, 1; Cabeza de Baca’s resistance to, 105–7, 109, 131; Ruiz de Burton’s resistance to, 1–3, 51; struggle against, 3

Appropriation, land, 25. See also Land grant(s); Land-grant adjudications

Aranda, José F., Jr., 68

Archive, 10–24; alternative spaces for women’s history, 11–12, 14–20; embodied memory and culture in, 15–16, 17, 35, 42–43, 113–14; enduring site and material of, 15, 73; feminist reframing and recovery of, 3, 6, 12; intersectional approach to, 14, 18–19; marginalization of female testimonios in, 2, 34, 51; memory as, 30, 32; “migrant,” 16, 75–76; need to acknowledge female voices in, 3, 10–11, 12, 14–15, 19–20; official, delving into, 20–24; oral history and, 14, 17–18, 34–35, 42–43; overlooked resources in, 23–24; papelitos guardados in, 18; power and creation of, 31; reconceptualization of testimonios in, 14–19, 30, 32–36; as repository of recuerdos, 12, 14, 136n18; revisionist histories in, 6; women’s history through property disputes, 3, 11, 13–14, 17–24

Arellano, Anselmo F., 117

Arellano, Juan Estevan, 102

Arizona, women’s property rights in, 8

Article X, of Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 5

Austin, Stephen F., 86

Autobiography: in “memory-bilia,” 35; in oral history, 17; in testimonios, 14, 17, 19, 32

Autonomy, acculturation vs., 23

Ballí, Doña Rosa María Hinojosa de, 9

Ballí, María Salomé, 9

Ballí family, matriarchal landowners of, 9

Bancroft, Hubert Howe: appropriation by, 1; assistants of, 135n1; inclusion of women’s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Engendering the Archive
• One: Mexican American Women’s Alternative Archive
• Two: Testimonio in the Writings of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton
• Three: Jovita González Stakes a Claim in Tejas History
• Four: The Not So “New” Mexico
• Conclusion: Negotiating Fragmented Subjectivities from within the Archive
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index