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

As Jaramillo's autobiography reveals, rhetorical assertions of Spanish domesticity could not slow the material decline of Spanish-Mexicans or close the socioeconomic gap between Mexican and Anglo-American communities.72 Yet, while it might appear that Gonzalez and Jaramillo accommodated AngloAmerican racial discourses and fantasies of Spanishness that masked widespread poverty and racial tensions between Anglos and Mexicans, they managed to resist aspects of their colonization and refute colonialism's basic tenet of domination by making themselves authors of their own history. The role of the domestic sphere in their contestations must not be understated. Both texts reveal the important role of the domestic sphere as a site of negotiation for Spanish-Mexican women living amid colonialism and twentieth-century immigration projects that utilized discourses of white/nonwhite and legal/illegal to demean and marginalize all people of Mexican descent. Gonzàlez's and Jaramillo's narrative representations of the Spanish-Mexican private realm illustrate the importance of "homeplace in the midst of oppression and domination, of homeplace as a site of resistance and liberation struggle."73 Thentexts illustrate that the home, while it can function in the safety of the private sphere, can also be used as a space of cultural resistance against ethnic and racial injustice. Despite attempts to colonize their homes and communities, both Gonzalez and Jaramillo powerfully critique the nation's persistent desire to define the Spanish-Mexican domestic sphere as "nonwhite" "foreign," and "illegal" at a time when racial and gendered divisions were still being ruthlessly maintained.

NOTES

This essay was greatly improved by comments, support, and encouragement from the following friends and colleagues: William Arce, Karen Bowdre, Priscilla Ovalle, and Joshua Smith.

1. Jovita Gonzalez, Caballero: A Historical Romance Novel, éd. José Limon and Maria Cotera (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), 54; italics mine.

2. Jovita Gonzalez wrote Caballero with Eve Raleigh (pseudonym for Margaret Eimer) during the 19305 and 19405. The original manuscript of Caballero is part of the E. E. Mireles and Jovita Gonzalez de Mireles Papers in the Special Collections and Archives Department of the Mary and Jeff Bell Library, Texas AStM University-Corpus Christi (TAMU-CC). The Mireles Papers were donated to the TAMU-CC Library in 1992 by Isabel Cruz, who under the urging of local historian Ray J. Garcia, a member of the Nueces County Historical Society, was advised to restore the papers. After Ray J. Garcia advised Thomas H. Kreneck, special collections librarian and archivist at TAMU-CC about the Mireles Papers, they were made available to researchers. When editors José Limon and Maria Cotera confirmed the existence of the manuscript at TAMU-CC, they prepared it for publication under the title Caballero: A Historical Romance Novel in 1996. Thomas H. Kreneck, "Foreword," in Caballero, éd. José Limon and Maria Cotera (College Station: Texas AScM University Press, 1996), ix; Leticia Magda Garza-Falcon, Gente Décente: A Borderlands Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 79-