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Politicizing Spanish-Mexican Domesticity, Redefining Fronteras: Jovita González's Caballero and Cleofas Jaramillo's Romance of a Little Village Girl
Frontiers, 2007 by McMahon, Marci R
Literary scholar Jean Franco's study of women's struggle for power in relationship to Catholicism and to the nation in Mexico is useful for discussing the ways Spanish-Mexican women of the Southwest were constricted by Catholic hegemony and Spanish cultural beliefs that emerged prior to Cortes. Even though Franco discusses the role that this dual legacy plays for women in Mexico, her work is informative regarding the implementation of Spam's long legacy of protecting Spanish bloodlines by Spanish colonizers in the Western Hemisphere. Franco states that "the virtual confinement of married women to the home had not only been required by the Church but was also intended to insure the purity of blood that Spanish society imposed after the war against the Moors."31 In the U.S. Southwest, Spanish-Mexican women were confined to the private sphere to prevent "contamination" from "Indian" and later "African blood." Historian John M. Nieto-Phillips explains how the objectified Indians and Africans in the Americas were perceived as opposites to the spiritual, racial, and cultural purity of Spanish colonizers and that "individuals who were not born to Catholic, white, and Spanish parents were deemed inferior and were therefore subject to conversion, enslavement, or some other form of exploitation."32 Such representations and racial dichotomies in Cabaliero not only reflect González's keen eye in representing the nature of patriarchy within Spanish colonial communities of the nineteenth century but also function to remind her contemporary readers of her alliance with "whiteness." Gonzalez used such assertions to establish her community's "legal" status against the new group of vilified "illegal" Mexican laborers coming to the United States during the era in which she wrote her novel.
Caballero demonstrates how the Spanish-Mexican code of honor that configures women as objects of "Spanish" property leads men to use the female body as a site of resistance to Anglo-American settlers. As the narrative of Caballero unfolds and the conflict emerges between the Anglo-American soldiers-the "blue-eyed strangers"-and the Spanish-Mexican community, Don Santiago, as the male head of the household, seeks to protect Spanishness and honor through safeguarding objects of colonial domesticity, as well as the highest commodity of Spanish identity-the Spanish-Mexican women. While this desire to sequester women in the private sphere arises from the dual legacy of Catholicism and the Spanish conquest, González shows how this need intensifies with the aim to protect Spanish-Mexican entitlement to land after the treaty. With the treaty's advent, patriarchal authority through ownership of land was called into question, and Spanish-Mexican men feared losing their political and legal entitlement to their homes. In response, Don Santiago sequesters Spanish-Mexican women in the home out of fear that the women of his household will destroy the purity of Spanish bloodlines by intermingling with Anglo-American men.
