Politicizing Spanish-Mexican Domesticity, Redefining Fronteras: Jovita González's Caballero and Cleofas Jaramillo's Romance of a Little Village Girl

Jaramillo's autobiography Romance of a Little Village Girl ultimately upends the image of Spanish-Mexican women as passive recipients of the feminization and domestication of their communities. Like her folkloric activities, her autobiography illustrates the importance of the domestic sphere in negotiating dominant Anglo racial discourses circulating during her lifetime.53 During the 19505, when Jaramillo wrote Romance of a Little Village Girl, anti-Mexican hysteria and racial discourses of legal and illegal immigration that began hi the 19305 reintensified when several interest groups claimed that "illegals" were once again a menace to the working-class "American" community in the United States. These groups believed that a new influx of Mexican immigrants that came to the United States in the 19405 under the "Bracero Program"54-a contract labor program intended to bring Mexican laborers to the United States temporarily-were a danger to the social, political, and economic stability of the country.55 The goal of the Bracero Program was to incorporate Mexican workers as temporary migrants who would not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of domestic farmworkers. Yet rather than bringing Mexican laborers to the United States "legally" and temporarily, the program led to an influx of thousands of "illegal" Mexican migrants who began to work and live in the United States. Many Mexicans were put in a situation where they entered the U.S. illegally, because only one out often applicants ever received a contract under the Bracero Program. Racial discrimination toward this new wave of undocumented Mexican immigrants led to a program-known as Operation Wetback-to deport Mexicans to Mexico.56 With Operation Wetback, as Juan Ramon Garcia notes, all people of Mexican descent saw their citizenship and legal status questioned. Even though the campaign was aimed at "illegals " Operation Wetback targeted one racial group, placing the burden of proving citizenship on all people of Mexican descent.57 Similar to the 19305 and 1940s when all people of Mexican descent found their citizenship suspect, Operation Wetback once again placed legal U.S. citizens and residents of Mexican ancestry in a tenuous status. Jaramillo's esteem of a "pure" Spanish ancestry in Romance of a Little Village Girl therefore illustrates a desire to position her "Spanish" culture as "elite" and "white" against the Anglo conception, commonly accepted during the 19505, of all Mexicans as laborers, nonwhite, and illegal.

Like Gonzalez's novel, Jaramillo's autobiography represents her SpanishMexican community in a nostalgic discourse that ultimately constructs a fantasized view of the past that overlooks the social history of the Southwest. Such moments of nostalgia disregard the profound Native American influences on the Southwest border region and the complex racial-caste system that grew out of Spanish colonization and intermarriage. In the following passage, Jaramillo configures her home and community as an isolated paradise that ignores this complex social history. In Jaramillo's social Utopia, Spanish-Mexicans freely practice their traditions and customs, "uncontaminated" by the outside world: "In this little valley of the Arroyo Hondo River, situated in the northern part of the state of New Mexico, hemmed in by high mountains and hills, sheltered from the contamination of the outside world, the inhabitants lived peacefully, preserving the customs and traditions of their ancestors. Here in this verdant little nook the authoress was born and reared. . . .58