Identity politics of the captivity narrative after 1848

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Author: Andrea Tinnemeyer

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Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848

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Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848

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an dre a tinnemeyer

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University of Nebraska Press Lincoln & London

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Portions of chapter 1 previously appeared in a different form as “Rescuing the Past: The Case of Olive Oatman and Lola Medina,” in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives, ed. Amelia Mar´ıa de la Luz Montes and Anne Elizabeth Goldman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004): 169–83. Portions of chapter 2 previously appeared in a different form as “Enlightenment Ideology and the Crisis of Whiteness in Francis Berrian and Caballero,” Western American Literature 30.1 (2000): 21–32. Portions of chapter 3 previously appeared in a

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different form as “Embodying the West: Lyrics from the U.S.-Mexican War,” American Studies

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46.1 (2005): 5–22. © 2006 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

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All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ⬁ 䡬

Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data Tinnemeyer, Andrea. Identity politics of the captivity narrative after 1848 / Andrea Tinnemeyer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8032-4400-9 (cloth: alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8032-4400-2 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism.

2. Captivity narratives—United

States—History and criticism.

3. Politics and

literature—United States—History—19th century.

4. Women and literature—United States—

History—19th century.

5. Mexican War, 1846–

1848—Literature and the war.

6. Identity

(Psychology) in literature. 7. Group identity in literature. I. Title. ps217.c36t56 2006 810.9'355—dc22 2005023635

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To Eddie and Riley

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Contents

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ix . . . Acknowledgments xi . . . Introduction

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1 . . . 1. Mis(s)taken: Identity Politics of Captivity Narratives in the Spanish Borderlands 19 . . . 2. Domestic Captives: Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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Acknowledgments

[First Page] As I take stock of the number of people and institutions that have aided me in the completion and publication of this book, I am truly amazed and humbled. It began as an idea in José F. Aranda Jr.’s seminar at Rice University and later, under his guidance, turned into a dissertation. He has remained a central reason why I am the scholar I am today, and I know that even as I write this, I have much more to learn from him. He is the most generous mentor I can imagine. My other dissertation committee members—particularly Scott Derrick, who was generous with his time and very insightful in his comments—were instrumental in the editing process. María C. González, who always believed in me, gave me the courage to make some of the book’s larger claims about reimagining the nineteenth century in the United States. I am thankful for the wisdom, patience, and generosity of Walter Brem, curator for the Latin American Archives at uc Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Walter helped me to navigate a wealth of primary materials and is directly responsible for me learning about the historical connection between Olive Oatman’s captivity and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s ﬁctionalization of it in Who Would Have Thought It? Utah State University, and especially my colleagues Jeff Smitten, Melody Graulich, Brock Dethier, Pat Gantt, Steve Siporin, and Evelyn Funda, have provided me with research time to conduct primary research and also to revise the manuscript. The fhe in the English Department guided me through revisions of chapter 1. They taught me the right way to revise: over wine and cheese. Fellow scholars, who I am happy to have as friends, read portions of

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the manuscript: Laurie Clements Lambeth, John M. González, Anne E. Goldman, Amelia de la Luz Montes, Jesse Alemán, Pallavi Rastogi, Genaro Padilla, Kay Heath, and Janet Myers. I’d also like to express my thanks to Mark Busby and Dick Heaberlin, who co-directed an neh summer institute on the borderlands that helped to solidify many of the book’s ideas. Jean Stuntz, Marc Rodriguez, Stephen Collins, Ben Johnson, Kevin Fernlund, and several others all contributed to lively discussions in and out of the seminar classroom. Our outside speakers—the illustrious and wise David Weber, Frank de la Teja, José E. Limón, Dan Flores, and Scott Slovik— helped to complicate the borderlands in terms of its geography, history, [-10], (2 cultures, and literatures. The outside reviewers for the University of Nebraska Press and my editor, Ladette Randolph, provided insight and encouragement in this Lines: 2 project from the beginning. ——— I remain deeply and profoundly touched by the years of support, * 151.7 guidance, and love of my parents and family. Thank you, Mom, for ——— being a model for a woman successfully accomplishing her dual life as Normal a mother and a teacher with grace and humor. Thank you, Dad, for * PgEnds: coming to all of my conferences that were in town. Thank you, Brad, for being a very loving brother. To my mother-in-law, Ok Seung King, [-10], (2 and my father-in-law, Carl, thank you for embracing me as part of your family. Finally, I’d like to express thanks to my husband, Eddie, and to our beautiful and amazing son, Riley, who have been supportive and understanding during long nights and absences.

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acknowledgments

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Introduction

In 1829 Josefa Carrillo, cousin to future California governor Pío Pico, was ready to be married at her family home. The altar had been constructed, Friar Antonio Meléndez was on hand to ofﬁciate, and the bridegroom, Henry Delano Fitch, a native of Massachusetts, was anxious to take Josefa’s hand in marriage. Suddenly, Don Domingo Carrillo interrupted the ceremony under orders of then–California governor José María de Echeandía. The priest and bridegroom both ﬂed the scene, leaving Josefa stranded at the altar. Thanks to her cousin, Josefa and Henry were reunited that very night and set sail for Valparaíso, Chile, where they were married. When they returned to California nearly a year later, Fitch was placed under house arrest and the couple was separated for three months. Fitch tried unsuccessfully to sue Governor Echeandía, then he and his family settled in San Diego and opened up a business. This romantic and true tale is narrated (albeit in mediated form) by Josefa Carrillo de Fitch herself and housed in the testimonios collected by Hubert Howe Bancroft. 1 It is singular for its narrative and its narrator. Rarely do we get history from the conquered; much rarer, still, history by a Mexican woman. In Carrillo de Fitch’s testimonio, we witness resistance to an Anglo-Mexican union, the intervention of the Mexican government, and captivity occurring at “home.” This is decidedly a different story from those promulgated in ﬁctional form in dime novels and analyzed in this book. It does not unite marriage and territorial expansion together as pro–Manifest Destiny literature would do a mere ﬁfteen years later with the start of the U.S.-Mexican War.

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It is, however, a tale of captivity, which is a genre with a long and complicated history in the United States. As this book argues, captivity narratives abounded at the time of the U.S.-Mexican War, not only as residual resurrection of anti-Indian propaganda intended to sway public opinion during Indian Removal but also as real and metaphorical forms for glossing the U.S. invasion of Mexico and the forced annexation of one third of Mexico’s northern territory as liberating acts. 2 Captivity narratives once traced their origin to Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 publication, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God. In her narrative, Rowlandson—or rather her editor, Increase Mather—relates what would become stock images and tropes of her ﬁfteen-week captivity by the Narragansett Indians. Richard Slotkin identiﬁes these elements as they appear chronologically: “a devilish visitation, an enforced sojourn in evil climes under the rule of man-devils, and an ultimate redemption of body and soul through the interposition of divine grace and the perseverance of the victim in orthodox belief” (130). Captivity was, in the Puritan mindset, a testing of the victim’s moral rectitude and worthiness as elect; accordingly, reading a captivity made the reader a surrogate to the same trials and tribulations and reinforced religious conviction for those among the ﬂock who were straying or backsliding. In its narrative frame—Increase Mather’s highly pedantic and overdetermined introduction and Rowlandson’s ﬁrst husband’s ﬁnal sermon—Rowlandson’s narrative is less her own story than a moral lesson, less a personal narrative than a paradigmatic genre for articulating an Anglo-European, and later Anglo-American, identity in the “New World.” Central to the captivity narrative, whether framed conventionally or tailored for Manifest Destiny, are the circumscribed gender positions of the three quintessential ﬁgures—captive, captor, and rescuer. Not surprisingly, the genre readily molds itself to the nation-building project at hand. June Namias outlines the diachronic dimensions of the captivity narrative in terms of the culturally scripted behavior exhibited and celebrated by its female captives. Regardless of the captive’s conduct— whether she effects her own rescue as Hannah Dustan or turns into the “Frail Flower,” waiting patiently between fainting spells for her male rescue party—her behavior will always be interpolated to naxii

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tional purpose because, in its multiple versions, the genre’s allegiance to U.S. imperial gain prevails. All variation within the captivity narrative results in the same set of overdetermined meanings. And yet, as Eric Lott cautions in Love and Theft against static readings of minstrelsy and as Christopher Castiglia convincingly argues in Bound and Determined against reductionist interpretations of captivity narratives, desire on the part of the audience, if nothing else, deﬁes any single or singular set of meanings. Castiglia questions why ﬁctionalized captivity narratives were so popular among women readers at midcentury if the genre merely reinforced limited and limiting gender stereotypes. Lott cites the chaos at midcentury produced by class warfare, the slave question, the Mexican question, and an overdependence on the homenation metaphor as examples of national discontinuity; no nation is ever homogeneous in thought and desire at any given time; no time period can be treated monolithically. The captivity narrative, as a genre fashioned to imperial purpose, serves as a dynamic register for national dissonance, for resistance against Manifest Destiny, and for cautionary tales of unchecked territorial expansion and genocide. In the 1830s and 1840s, a substantial number of captivity narratives from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were reprinted. Such contemporary authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry David Thoreau revisited ﬁgures like Hannah Dustan, resurrecting the past into a usable present. As critics like June Namias and Katherine Stodola-Derounian have noted, the explosion of captivity narratives in the book market served to promote and justify Indian Removal under the Jacksonian presidency. Tales of brutal torture and death, similar to Mather’s use of the black legend to distance the Puritan colonial project from its Spanish predecessor, were circulated to testify to the exceptionalism of the United States in its colonial endeavors to remove American Indians and to annex one third of Mexico. The captivity narrative negotiated issues of geography, religion, race, and gender. It created a usable past out of moments of national or territorial crisis by fashioning a mechanism for ritualizing the return of the former captive. Some of the central ﬁgures in captivity genre are particularly illuminating in this book: Pocahontas, La Malinche, Mary Jemison, Hannah Dustan, Olive Oatman, and John Tanner. Introduction

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When discussing Uncle Tom’s Cabin with my students, I was struck by the passage detailing the ingenious and counterintuitive means George Harris undertakes to secure his own freedom by traveling north disguised as a slaveowner. George darkens his skin a “genteel brown,” a move quite unlike the narratives of racial passing that would predominate texts by Charles Chesnutt and be carried into the Harlem Renaissance by Nella Larsen, among others. It was not the darkening of his skin that caught my attention, however. Rather, it was the kind of racial reading that George received in the novel while in “brownface.” Stowe describes him as “Spanish-looking.” In that moment, it occurred to me that the U.S.-Mexican War was not an isolated event of U.S. imperialism affecting residents of the Spanish borderlands alone. Here, in the quintessential text about the Civil War, was the key to this current project—an investigation of the U.S.-Mexican War’s contribution to mid- to late-nineteenth-century identity politics. George in brownface registers as Spanish because for Stowe, Spanish does not signify on its own; it is merely a placeholder for the racial uncertainty that exists in the gray areas of the black-white binary. Put differently, the preoccupation with blackness and whiteness, promulgated by slavocracy, so dominated popular notions of race that there was an absence of vocabulary to discuss the identities of residents in the Southwest who, at the end of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, became de facto U.S. citizens. 3 The Search for a Usable Past in 1848 and 1776 The U.S.-Mexican War was a central event in shaping the nation’s perceptions of itself early on as an imperial power that could operate with impunity by invoking the principles of Enlightenment: freedom, individual rights, and so on.4 In proportion to its inﬂuence, too little has been written on the war that doubled the U.S. territory and annexed nearly one third of Mexico. In this project, I intend to demonstrate the U.S.-Mexican War’s inﬂuence on the national imaginary, on the way in which the nation projected and imagined itself, its myths of exceptionalism, egalitarianism, and democratic principles. In the capture of northern Mexico, not only the lands and destinies of residents living in the former Spanish borderlands were uncertain; the nation’s xiv

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perception of itself became ﬂuid, and the boundaries of gender and citizenship were found to be porous. The dearth of cultural studies texts probing exclusively and deeply into the U.S.-Mexican War and its national impact might have roots in the war’s portrayal at the time. By invading Mexico, the United States undertook its ﬁrst campaign of imperialism on an international scale. It might seem there was no precedent for such an act. There were no historical moments to invoke and liken it to; it was a singular event. But, as we well know, this was not the case. In fact, the U.S.-Mexican War was very similar—and played out in very similar fashion—to the American Revolution. In both cases, war was justiﬁed by Enlightenment principles, heavily sprinkled with religious doctrine. What were the Puritans doing in Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” if not fulﬁlling a divine providence that would be called “Manifest Destiny” less than a hundred years later? Appealing to higher principles of liberation and freedom, in the case of both the Revolutionary War and the U.S.-Mexican War, meant the encroachment on others’ lands, the subjugation or genocide of native peoples, and a reinvigorated racial hierarchy to guarantee the legal disenfranchisement for all those who survived the warfare. Both nation-building events, this project argues, addressed racial difference in very similar ways as well: they relied heavily on the captivity narrative. The image of the sexually and physically vulnerable white woman, removed from the safety of her own community and family, symbolized the threat inherent in the Native tribes surrounding the Puritans’ colonies. As Namias quite rightly points out, the female captive story was not always told the same way; changes in cultural tastes and public policy directly shaped the characterization of the captive, her physical and emotional reaction to her capture, and the depiction of her captors. By the mid-nineteenth century, Namias documents a dramatic shift in the captivity narrative paralleling the rise in domestic ﬁction and the “Cult of True Womanhood”; she terms the heroine of this particular period the “Frail Flower.” Unlike her predecessors, such as the Amazon, the Frail Flower is prone to fainting spells and must be rescued; her mental constitution renders her incapable of scheming or planning her own escape. It is during the mid-nineteenth century that Eliza Allen and Olive Oatman pen their stories of captivity; and yet Introduction

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Allen will become her own rescuer by dressing in drag while Oatman will suffer in wait to be rescued. On its surface, the captivity narrative seems quite predictable: girl gets captured, taken away by darkskinned heathens, rescued by her own ingenuity or a white-skinned hero, and happily returned to her community. The moral of each tale could be easily derived: the heathens pose a threat to the very essence of American life and must be eliminated. In this telling, as Castiglia argues in Bound and Determined, the ﬁgures of the white woman and her native captor remain one-dimensional. Why, he asks, would captivity narratives maintain their popularity, especially among white female readers, if they merely reinforced the stereotype of the helpless woman in need of a man to rescue her? Because, as Castiglia writes, the tales were not so simple, nor were their meanings so static. Indeed, to fully comprehend how complex captivity narratives can be, we must be attentive to the circumstances of their cultural production and to the responses they mobilized. Castiglia goes so far as to argue that they are the female equivalent to adventure stories and that in their telling, white women gain agency and voice as they employ the medium to rail against the patriarchal constraints that keep them captive once they’ve returned home. Like Castiglia and Namias, I believe that the captivity narrative is not stagnant or utterly predicable in its use or its meaning; rather, it is a dynamic genre whose complexities provide an ample medium for cultural critique, a revision of race relations, and, perhaps most of all, a means of elucidating the U.S.-Mexican War’s complex and oftentimes contradictory signiﬁcance in the national imaginary. The captivity narrative becomes, like the slave narrative for the Civil War and black-white relations, the vehicle for articulating and interpreting racial conﬂict in the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexican War. In each of the following chapters, captivity appears as a multivalent phenomenon. In particular, I seek to examine modes of captivity that redeﬁne the formal, political, and geographical boundaries of “captivity.” At times, it aligns interracial marriages between Mexican women and AngloAmerican men with Manifest Destiny; it tests the boundaries of “foreign” and “domestic” by relocating geographic and racial boundaries; it protects cross-dressing soldiers through the alliance of familial and national embodiment; and it expresses the panic produced by the destaxvi

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bilization of categories of whiteness and U.S. citizenship. Regardless of its speciﬁc message, the captivity narrative, because it is a genre of racial encounter and border crossings, appears at moments of national unrest and change. The U.S.-Mexican War represented such a moment of national identity crisis in part because of the incorporation of one third of Mexico’s territory and its residents. The southwestern territory annexed after the war had a three-hundred-year-old history of captivity, ransom, and exchange, as James Brooks argues in Captives and Cousins. During the Mexican period (1821–46), the government recognized and participated in the trafﬁcking of captives, horses, and other goods. The U.S.-Mexican War did not halt this tradition but rather expanded the identities of the captives; and yet the transfer from Mexican to U.S. ownership markedly transformed the dynamics of the captivity (Brooks 258–60). To Lorenzo Oatman’s despair (Olive Oatman’s brother, who called for federal support in his attempts to ﬁnd and rescue his sister), the U.S. government refused to participate in this centuries-old system. Article XI of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war between Mexico and the United States, outlawed the exchange system in the old Spanish borderlands: “It shall not be lawful, under any pretext whatever, for any inhabitant of the United States to purchase or acquire any Mexican, or any foreigner residing in Mexico, who may have been captured by Indians inhabiting the territory of either of the two republics; nor to purchase or acquire horses, mules, cattle, or property of any kind, stolen within Mexican territory by such Indians.” To be clear, this article did not constitute a national refusal to rescue captives. In fact, in acknowledgment of the exchange of money, people, and livestock, the same article outlines how the former enemy nations will deal with captives along the newly formed border. Those held in Mexico will rely on the Mexican government to secure their release while Mexican captives held by Native tribes in the United States will be under the U.S. government’s jurisdiction. The difference between ransom and rescue may not seem substantial, but I argue otherwise. Restoring captive bodies to an expanded national body threatened the corporeal integrity of the family-nation alliance central to sentimental literature. Further, the notion of captivity, particularly with respect to the value placed on a human captive’s safe return, has larger implications for Introduction

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national values and for the racial and gendered dimensions of the national body. By invading Mexico, I argue, the United States held its own myths of democracy and egalitarianism hostage, ransomed by its methodical deployment of the mimetic relationship between women and nation. An overreliance on the correlation between the national symbolic and particular embodiments, however, reveals the tenuous hold of the white nuclear family, threatened from within by the zealous attempts to maintain racial and familial purity and respectability, and from without by the empire-building of Manifest Destiny. In Love and Theft, his brilliant text analyzing the national, class, and racial dynamics of blackface minstrelsy before the Civil War, Eric Lott cautions against an overarching reading of the masses and their desires for this form of popular culture; he transcends simplistic readings of minstrelsy as racist, demonstrating that they cannot account for the wide range of reactions and emotions attending the audiences of these shows. Lott’s cautionary statements are relevant to my analysis of Mexican-Anglo relations. There were contradictory impulses in midnineteenth-century America: Whigs, for example, opposed the war because of their dislike for militarism but unquestioningly accepted Democratic diatribes concerning the Mexican race’s inability to embrace democratic principles. There was love: Church registers in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for example, contain names of Anglos and Mexicans who joined together as man and wife, for better or for worse. People on both sides of the newly formed border were “captivated” by each other; desire for land, prosperity, and class ascension were sexualized in both romantic and violent ways. There was also theft: Some of these marriages were nothing more than gold-digging in the marriage market; legislation in the war’s aftermath sought to disinherit Mexicans from their property and their lands. But ultimately, as Lott argues, a wide range of feelings prevailed in a time period marked by national tensions over the slave question, the woman question, and the Indian question that were beginning to rupture what Stephen Hartnett calls the “ﬁction of antebellum America.” For a nation in crisis, adding the Mexican question to a laundry list of racial, gender, and class problems only further increased the din of voices fraught with anxiety and dissent. The suffrage movement, Jacksonian republicanism, xviii

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and even the aftermath of the Civil War—particularly the plasticity of U.S. citizenship evidenced by the Fifteenth Amendment—all brought to bear on the war’s reception at its apex and on its place in the national imaginary afterward. Mexico’s most sustained appearance in the U.S. literary imaginary coincided with its independence from three hundred years of Spanish colonialism. 5 In 1821 Mexico became a republic, and its struggle for independence was treated as analogous to America’s own revolution less than ﬁfty years prior (Johannsen 179). Despite this political link between the two ﬂedgling republics, an ambivalence developed in the literary portrayal of characters of Mexican descent. Sifting through early-nineteenth-century U.S. texts, Cecil Robinson notes how class heavily inﬂuences racialization: “While the ordinary Mexican encountered every day in the border country was treated with unremitting scorn, the aristocratic owners of the large haciendas in the interior of Mexico were objects of interest and curiosity to the writers of the dime novels, who treated them with a combination of hostility and respect” (26). Critic Sandra Myres surveys literature from this twenty-ﬁve-year span (Mexico’s independence to the U.S.-Mexican War) and concludes that “a number of accounts of Mexican life in Texas, New Mexico, and California helped to convince Americans that the Mexicans were unworthy to occupy such fertile and potentially productive territories.” For Myres, “such attitudes presaged nineteenth-century nativism and prepared the way for the expansionist ambitions that a later age would label Manifest Destiny” (74, 73). Like Robinson, Raymund Paredes identiﬁes “two apparently contradictory notions of Mexican character [that] ﬂourished simultaneously in American literature” (iv). “When the U.S. sought a foil for its scheme of national expansion,” Paredes believes the “jingoistic and energetically contemptuous” accounts of “Mexico and her people” ﬂourished as the literature promoted a “justiﬁcation for the destruction of Mexican life in the West” (139). In the ﬁrst chapter of Identity Politics, I explore recovered author María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s use of a historical captivity narrative— the famous story of the Oatman massacre and the ﬁve-year ordeal of Olive Oatman—to negotiate a space for californianas in the post-1848 United States. Ruiz de Burton’s plotline of Lola Medina’s captivity Introduction

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by Apaches and Mohaves depicted in Who Would Have Thought It? draws from The Captivity of the Oatman Girls, thus employing the genre in its more traditional sense and use as a national story about acceptance and rescue during expansion. By casting a Mexican heroine into the role traditionally played by white women, Ruiz de Burton not only makes a case for the “whiteness” of Mexicans but also for their status within the United States as equals, as family. Chapter 2 addresses the romancing of the war in dime novels and recovered literature by expanding on the work of Shirley Samuels in Romances of the Republic and Doris Sommer in Foundational Fictions. Both Samuels and Sommer expose and analyze the pattern of marriages between former enemies as a means of signifying reconciliation on the level of the domestic. Absent from Samuels’s exploration of literature following the American Revolution and Sommer’s study of postwar Latin American literature is the central issue of my chapter—race. Rather than marriages across political lines, the unions depicted in Timothy Flint’s Francis Berrian and Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero transgress racial boundaries to embrace interracial marriages as a romantic gloss for expansionism, greed, and U.S. imperialism. Interracial marriages between Mexican women and Anglo-American men occasioned a transformation of the captivity narrative, which ironically became the genre to quell fears of miscegenation. Like their white counterparts, the Mexican heroines in Francis Berrian and Caballero are cast as imperiled captives, held against their wills by darkskinned men (their Mexican fathers and would-be suitors). In this revised version of the captivity narrative, no particular agency is afforded to Mexican women except by such female authors as Jovita González and Eve Raleigh, who were dissatisﬁed with its patriarchal constraints in the twentieth century and cast their stories back to the originary moment of the U.S.-Mexican War in the mid-nineteenth century. Examining the underlying gender dynamics of captive/captor through the ﬁgure of the female soldier signiﬁcantly affected constructions of white masculinity. Chapter 3, “Embodying the West,” investigates the uses of war songs and patriotic poetry to shore up white masculinity outside of the domestic. A majority of the lyrics and accompanying sketches focus on the Mexican soldier’s body, which is xx

introduction

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drawn in hyperbolic relationship to the civilizing properties of the domestic: either barbarous due to the lack of civilizing inﬂuence or effete from its unchecked power. For Leslie Fiedler, in Love and Death in the American Novel, the frontier—here northern Mexico—constituted an ideal landscape for exploring white male–dark male dyads, due in no small part to the absence of the feminizing force of settlement. Over and against gendered notions of the domestic, which resonate more strongly and more complexly during war, Fiedler examines “going native” plots. The homosocial captivation with the dark male body expressed and alleviated anxieties about white masculinity. By casting Mexican men as both barbaric and effete, the war song lyrics reveal [-21], (13) the contradictory impulses of fear and desire that haunted the war’s consequences—the absorption of Mexican territory and residents into the United States. Lines: 86 to 8 Conspicuously absent from the rescue plots analyzed in chapter 1 ——— is the True Woman, the nineteenth-century version of the republican 14.0pt Pg ——— mother. As Priscilla Wald remarks, true womanhood represented an Normal Page “allegedly national ideal of womanhood to which white upper- and * PgEnds: Eject middle-class women had almost exclusive access. She embraced and transmitted the virtues of piety and sobriety. . . . She was paradoxi[-21], (13) cally submissive and in absolute control of the domestic arrangements and the moral well-being of her family” (186). Above all, she constituted the national standard against which “foreign” and “immigrant” women were judged. In chapter 4, “Masquerade of Manifest Destiny,” I take up the symbol of the True Woman, the silent partner whose absence is necessary for the interracial rescue-marriage plot. In that her presence, in her absence, remains central to the union of politics and romance, the True Woman poses the greatest threat to this domestic allegory of love and desire. Ned Buntline’s The Volunteer; or, The Maid of Monterrey (1846) and Eliza Allen’s The Female Volunteer (1851) remove their heroines from a conventional sense of the domestic by rescuing themselves from the domestic carceral, and even from female dress, as they become cross-dressed soldiers in the U.S.-Mexican War to expose the “organic” element of female frailty within the captivity paradigm. Their tales of female soldiers pressure the limitations of the True Woman’s “control over domestic arrangements” by renegotiating Introduction

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the mutually informing tension between “foreign” and “domestic” that Amy Kaplan discusses in “Manifest Domesticity.” Fears about the repercussions of expansionism, particularly the opening up of U.S. citizenship, are the subject of chapter 5, “Testifying Bodies,” in which I examine the two institutions central to identity formation and conﬁrmation—the nation (through the courts) and the family. Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy (1871), a novel whose time frame tackles the dizzying events from the war’s end to the California Supreme Court case of People v. Hall (1854), encapsulates a critical moment in the Southwest, and California speciﬁcally, when national and personal identity were in crisis. Harte tests the domain of the legal system and the family romance as an allegory for the nation’s ability to absorb former Mexican citizens. Citizenship and the nation’s progeny are held captive by these two institutions that compete for primacy to become the central governing institution for bestowing and legitimizing identity.

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Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848

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1. Mis(s)taken Identity Politics of Captivity Narratives in the Spanish Borderlands

[First Page] To all our expostulations they only replied in substance that they knew why we objected to [being tattooed]; that we expected to return to the whites, and we would be ashamed of it then. —Royal B. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls (1857) And yet I was too proud to tell you that the blackness of my skin would wear off, that it was only stained by the Indians to prevent our being rescued. —María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872)

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raveling overland from Independence, Missouri, in 1851, at times taking the Santa Fe Trail, the nine-member Oatman family, which had broken from the Mormon Church (they belonged to a splinter sect called Brewsterites who followed James Colin Brewster), were seeking their own “promised land of Bashan in the extreme southwestern corner of New Mexico Territory, where the Colorado River neared the Gulf of Mexico” (Dillon 46). 1 Their party dwindled due to further religious factioning, which resulted in the Oatmans diverting from the Santa Fe Trail to take the Kearny-Cooke military road to the Gila Trail (47). By the time they arrived at the mouth of the Colorado and Gila rivers, eighty miles from Fort Yuma (the exact location where the ﬁctional captives of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? were rescued), the Oatmans’ food supply was almost nonexistent and their hopes were low. As one of the only surviving

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members of the famed Oatman massacre, Olive Oatman recalls some Apaches approached her father: “They asked for more [food] and this my father denied them, telling them that it would famish us. . . . They carried huge clubs, which they brought out and brandished in the air screaming and, leaping like so many deamons [sic], began their cruel slaughter” (Oatman 10).2 All but Olive and Mary Ann were murdered; their brother, Lorenzo, was left for dead. Olive and Mary Ann were forced to travel long distances to where the Yavapais lived, while Pimas nursed Lorenzo back to health and later returned him to members of the migrant party (Ira Thompson became his guardian). As Olive describes in her lecture notes, within a year they “were sold [to a] partie [sic] sent by the Mohave Chief to pay for [them]” (Oatman 16). Extreme drought marked Olive and Mary Ann’s residence with the Mohaves, and several tribe members died of starvation; Mary Ann Oatman was among the dead. Mary Ann’s death was not the only event to mark Olive’s time in captivity. Both sisters’ chins were tattooed with ﬁve lines traveling vertically from their lower lips. Sketches and photographs of Olive accentuate these telltale signs of captivity, and speculation continues regarding their signiﬁcance.3 In the mid-nineteenth century, however, Olive’s chin tattoo may have garnered as much interest from spectators who ﬂocked to her lectures as her harrowing tale of ﬁve years among the Yavapais and Mohaves. 4 Olive Oatman’s tale of captivity and rescue in the Spanish borderlands ﬁrst appeared in print in 1857; a ﬁctionalized version with several signiﬁcant similarities was produced again in 1872 with the publication of Ruiz de Burton’s ﬁrst novel, Who Would Have Thought It? In it, Ruiz de Burton tells the ﬁctional story of Doña Theresa Medina, a pregnant woman whose daughter, Lola, born ﬁve months after her mother’s capture, was rescued at the conﬂuence of the Gila and Colorado rivers by an East Coast party collecting specimens of Southwestern ﬂora and fauna. Mohaves surrounded Dr. Norval and his party, but they were spared only because Norval promised to treat the wounds of the chief and his two sons. Lola’s mother approached Dr. Norval at the Mohave camp and told him “that she had been carried away from Sonora, in Mexico, and she had never had an opportunity to escape until now; that she had made an oath to the chief not to escape because in that 2

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way he would relax his vigilance, and she be enabled to send her little girl away” (35). Before Norval could secure her release, however, Doña Theresa died. Her dying words: “Thank God Lolita is away from those horrid savages!” (36). An important detail of their captivity, withheld until late in the novel, is the skin dye applied to the face and hands of mother and daughter to prevent their rescue. Like Olive, Lola and her mother were trafﬁcked between the Apaches and Mohaves and, signiﬁcantly, both captivities were inscribed on their bodies. Lola and Olive were physically stamped by their time in captivity, and this mark would be the crucible through which they would have to renegotiate reentry into Victorian American [3], (3) society. Olive’s tattoo functions as an indelible reminder of her time in captivity and of her proximity to “savages.” Wearing the mark of the savage in the form of a chin tattoo stands in for other forms Lines: 34 to 3 of commingling with the Mohaves. Lola Medina’s skin dye, however, ——— proves temporary, as does her association with American Indians. 14.0pt Pg ——— In the narratives of Olive Oatman and Lola Medina we witness Normal Page the same dynamics at play that animated the ﬁrst U.S. captivity nar* PgEnds: Eject rative published after Mary Rowlandson and two of her children returned home over two hundred years ago. As historian June Namias [3], (3) argues in White Captives, our deﬁnition of this genre is grounded in Rowlandson’s account; such an origin, however, unwittingly privileges East Coast racial encounters between Native tribes and early Puritan settlers. 5 Richard Slotkin’s classic Regeneration Through Violence prominently placed the West and the Southwest in the national imagination, but tales of abduction in this expanded geography remained indebted to the Puritan tradition. In outlining the pattern of captivity literature, Slotkin highlighted both its racial and religious components: “It contains a devilish visitation, an enforced sojourn in evil climes under the rule of man-devils, and an ultimate redemption of body and soul through the interposition of divine grace and the perseverance of the victim in orthodox belief” (130). The two captivity narratives discussed in this chapter—Olive Oatman’s historical abduction (1851– 56) and the ﬁctional story of Lola Medina (originally published in 1872 and republished in 1995)—take place in the old Spanish borderlands and thus expand the boundaries of citizenship as they chalCaptivity Narratives in the Borderlands

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lenge racial and religious components of the metonymic relationship between woman and nation. White Slaves and the Black Legend The captivity narrative, with all its historical ties to colonialism, offers an apt trope for railing against Manifest Destiny, or colonialism of the U.S. variety, because in their multiple forms, captivity narratives repeatedly reveal that what is at stake in the fate of captive females is nothing less than the reproduction of the nation. Michelle Burnham posits that “Since captivity typically takes place in colonial contexts of cultural as well as military warfare, [its] rhetorical opposition serves to justify the political and social antagonism that both propels and results from the sentimental representation of captivity” (2). Namias divides the representations of female captives into three historically marked tropes, predicated on an ideological connection between national concerns and the representation of its captives. She identiﬁes the time period spanning the Oatman and Medina captivities (1820–70) with the emergence of what she terms the “Frail Flower,” a literary model that coincided with “the rise of True Womanhood and the mass marketing of sentimental ﬁction” (36). “Frail Flower narratives,” Namias continues, “include brutality, sadomasochistic and titillating elements, strong racist language, pleas for sympathy and commiseration with the author’s suffering, special appeals to her sad lot as a distressed mother, and occasional invectives against dirt and sex among Indians” (37). Note, however, the absence of religious appeal in Namias’s Frail Flower. “By the 1830s,” Namias argues, “a culture of delicate femininity had . . . inﬁltrated much of the ideology of white middleclass womanhood and an ever-present God had become modiﬁed and removed . . . for some captive women” (46). By playing upon the literary model of the Frail Flower and its deemphasis on religion, Oatman (through Rev. Royal B. Stratton) and Ruiz de Burton are able to center their narratives within the national imaginary and “whiten” their captives in the process. As mentioned earlier, Oatman’s family belonged to the Mormon Church and later to a splinter faction within it; Lola and Doña Theresa Medina are californianas, upper-class women who belonged to the rare social category of 4

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“white Mexicans,” but they are also Roman Catholics. In fact, Doña Theresa makes Dr. Norval, an East Coast Protestant, promise to raise Lola in the Catholic faith (36). Mrs. Norval’s strong reaction to Lola’s black face is nearly topped by her anti-Catholic sentiments that are reminiscent of the black legend. In both cases, the captives’ religious identities relegate them to the fringes of the national imaginary; what better way to identify them as representatives of the U.S. nation than to write them into what Nancy Armstrong considers to be a paradigmatic genre. However, this is tricky business for Ruiz de Burton since the United States has just invaded her land, laid claim to her ranch, and threatened her privileged existence and claim to whiteness. It’s also a dodgy connection for Oatman to cultivate because of her religious afﬁliation with the Mormon Church. 6 In her lecture notes, Oatman suppresses all reference to Mormonism. Instead of revealing the religious motives for their emigration west, Oatman compares her father’s ﬁnancial fate with that of “thousands” in 1842 who were “bereft of all . . . fortune and reduced to insolvency” (2). The family’s trek is thus folded into the larger western migration tradition, motivated by economic and health reasons. 7 “He became convinced that if he would live to bless and educate his family, or would even enjoy tolerable health, he must immediately seek a climate more congenial with his state of mind and body and thereby recuperate his waisting [sic] energies” (2). To account for the split in the emigrant party, which was actually due to dissent within the Mormon Church, Oatman is purposefully vague, referring to “religious peculiarities and strange prejudices of certain restless spirits in our company” (4). Olive and Lola belonged to groups outside the national imaginary; their use of the nation-building genre of the captivity narrative served their claim to symbolic citizenship. Ruiz de Burton articulates a narrative of resistance against U.S. imperialism, or what she called “Manifest Yankee trick,” in a profound, paradigm-shifting manner by recasting the captivity narrative in terms of the U.S.-Mexican War, when the border between both countries was just being set and the border patrol was formed to police for “Indian raids.” In Cartographies of Desire, Rebecca Blevins Faery argues that “the ﬁgure of the white woman captive has been a primary site for the construction of race, gender, and national identity in U.S. culture” (25, Captivity Narratives in the Borderlands

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emphasis mine). Historian James Brooks expands Faery’s analysis of the captivity narrative by locating it in the “captive exchange traditions of the borderlands”; he sees “the solitary girl of virgin purity, whose exact ethnic and kin afﬁliations seem deliberately shrouded, [to be] the focal point for expressions of masculine violence and sentimentality” (7, emphasis mine). Despite this difference of opinion regarding the racial identity of the female captive, Faery and Brooks both emphasize the captive’s centrality in representing a larger group identity. In his recent book Captives and Cousins, Brooks provides a comprehensive study of captivity, exchange, and the redistribution of wealth in the borderlands. For the Native tribes inhabiting the current state of New Mexico, the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–48) did little to change a two-hundred-year-old practice: “The captive exchange system [merely] expanded to include new victims: Americans, European immigrants, and African-descended slaves moving westward in the wake of the Mexican-American War” (Brooks 259). Families whose members were abducted after the war complained to local authorities that the U.S. government didn’t compensate them for their losses as the Mexican government had (258–60). This point is key to my argument, because the shift in federal policy regarding the trafﬁcking of human beings, outlawed in the peace treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, reveals much on the subject of national identity: how the United States saw itself and how it wanted to be seen after 1848. The war annexed one third of Mexico’s territory; with the addition of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Utah and Colorado, the United States nearly doubled in size. The peace treaty between the two nations offered U.S. citizenship to all former Mexican citizens and promised to honor Spanish and Mexican land grants. The passage of the Land Commission Act in 1851 denied several landowners rights to their own property. 8 Ruiz de Burton personally suffered the consequences of the war when Rancho Jamul was taken from her; despite several years of ﬁghting in the U.S. court system and an eventual victory, Ruiz de Burton lost her lands paying court fees incurred during the lengthy litigation. 9 Ruiz de Burton was residing in San Francisco when accounts of the Oatman massacre and Olive’s rescue began to appear in local newspapers. I contend that Oatman’s story permitted Ruiz de Burton to 6

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address several issues regarding the status of Mexican residents in the newly annexed Southwest: religious difference, full cultural and political acceptance into the United States, and, based on the latter point, the problematic insistence on the whiteness of californios. 10 In short, the terms negotiated for Olive’s reabsorption into Anglo society (religion, guardianship, sexual purity, and loyalty to Anglo-American culture) made her captivity, and all the attendant media attention thereafter, the ideal foundation for Ruiz de Burton to redress grievances after the U.S.-Mexican War. Olive’s Return

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In February 1856 the newspaper presses in California were working at a feverish pace. News reached all over the newly formed state of the deliverance of Olive Oatman, who had been rescued after ﬁve years in captivity. The Los Angeles Star, San Francisco Herald, and Golden Era, among others, published sensational accounts of Oatman’s abduction and rescue, including an interview with the former captive. The California public was familiar with Olive and her sister Mary Ann because of attempts by their brother, Lorenzo, to seek both the state and federal government’s aid in their rescue (Rice 98). Prior to Olive’s rescue, Lorenzo Oatman petitioned Congress to fund a search party charged with locating the only other remaining members of the Oatman family besides himself. 11 With Olive’s return to civilization, Californians voiced their criticism against Governor J. Neely Johnson in the very newspapers that printed Lorenzo’s plea. Olive’s ﬁve-year captivity, the famed massacre of her family, and her celebrated return to Anglo-American society initially elicited reactions of pity. Women in San Francisco’s elite society were called upon to offer their inﬂuence, maternal and ﬁnancial, to erase the vestiges of Olive’s ﬁve years of captivity and reacquaint her with an adoptive family and culture. A correspondent from the Daily Herald in San Francisco called for “some of our philanthropic San Francisco ladies [to] offer their services to either provide a home for her, or [to] use their inﬂuence in procuring her admission to the Orphan Asylum” (Rice 98). Quite swiftly, however, the tide of public opinion shifted to tawdry speculation about Olive’s chastity. As an explanation for crying Captivity Narratives in the Borderlands

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spells after her rescue, rumors began circulating that Olive mourned her Mohave children—two sons borne to her and the chief’s son. This rumor was supposedly corroborated, thickened with detail by Olive’s fellow emigrant and old friend, Sarah Thompson. One newspaper account published two months after her rescue discounted the rumor quite plainly: “She has not been made a wife . . . and her defenceless situation [has been] entirely respected during her residence among the Indians” (Golden Era, April 27, 1856). Similar disclaimers or retractions were printed regarding Olive’s adherence to Victorian standards of chastity. Allusions to Olive’s virginity limited her capacity to return to Anglo society. In Stratton’s conclusion to the Captivity of the Oatman Girls, he anticipates the text’s use in developing further legislation “upon the best method to dispose of these fast waning tribes,” writing that “one of our own race, in tender years, committed wholly to their power, passed a ﬁve-years’ captivity among these savages without falling under those baser propensities which rave, and rage, and consume, with the fury and fatality of pestilence, among themselves” (286, emphasis in the original). Albert Hurtado reads this passage as protecting not only Olive’s virginity but the purity of the Mohaves as well (71). Repeated themes of polite decorum and civility cautioned against a certain line of questioning and against treatment of Olive as an oddity on display: The lady-like deportment of Miss Oatman, her pleasing manners and amiable disposition, are the wonder and remark of all who see her. She fully realises that she is an object of curiousity, and . . . has more delicacy than many who, although they may pretend to the usual question of politeness and civility, rush to see her and stare at her, with about as much sense of feeling as they would in a show of wild animals. She has no objection to being seen and converses ﬂuently in her native tongue with those who treat her kindly, giving many interesting particulars of her captive life. (Golden Era April 27, 1856, emphasis mine) When Olive and her brother were reunited, they traveled with their cousin Harvey Oatman to Yreka, California, in 1856, where they met 8

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Rev. Royal B. Stratton, a Methodist minister who became instrumental in the publication of Olive’s sensational tale and the promoter of her lecture circuit. 12 What readers in 1856 did not know were the circumstances of Olive’s abduction, the death of her sister, and the other events that brought her into the hands of the Mohaves as a slave. In the following year, the ﬁrst edition of Captivity of the Oatman Girls was published in San Francisco, the second (also in 1857) at the same San Francisco press, and the third (1858) in New York (DerounianStodola 37). 13 During the years leading up to and spanning the Civil War, Olive Oatman was on the lecture circuit, talking of her harrowing adventures in such cities as Syracuse, Victor, East Bloomﬁeld, Little [9], (9) Falls, and Rochester, New York. 14 Upon her arrival at Fort Yuma on February 29, 1856, Capt. Martin Burke interviewed Olive with a particular “personal curiosity of her Lines: 79 to 8 treatment whilst among the Indians” (Kroeber and Kroeber 311). The ——— interview itself, which appeared in the Los Angeles Star on April 19, 14.0pt Pg ——— 1856, before being reprinted in other newspapers like the San FranNormal Page cisco Bulletin, seems truncated and limited by Olive’s reintroduction * PgEnds: Eject to the English language. As noted by the interviewers, “her memory [was] very defective apparently, and [she was] not able to pronounce [9], (9) more than a few words in English; [therefore] it has been very difﬁcult to obtain [more] at the present time, for in answering questions purposely put directly opposite, she invariably says ‘yes’ to both” (qtd. in Kroeber 311). The interviewers adroitly treat her level of comfort and familiarity with English in terms of pronunciation, and her reticence, silence, and incomprehension in the face of the questions put to her are attributed to a defective memory. Moreover, Olive’s response to a direct question regarding the Mohaves’ treatment of her and her sister—“answered ‘very well’ (from her manner seemed perfectly pleased) they had never whipped her but always treated her well”—warrants no commentary (qtd. in Kroeber and Kroeber 312). Instead, the line of inquiry shifts to focus on Mary’s death from starvation, as if to counter her assessment of the Mohaves’ dealings with her. 15 Kroeber reads the interview against statements of heathenism and cruel psychological as well as physical mistreatment repeated in the captivity narrative and concludes that the “sensational Captivity Narratives in the Borderlands

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narrative” is “written by Reverend Royal B. Stratton . . . its keynote being ‘Olive’s misery among the degraded savages’ ” (309–10). Critic Kathryn Derounian-Stodola agrees, charging that the reverend inﬂated and over-sentimentalized the rhetoric and also demonized the native peoples in his quest to promote Christianity and increase his church’s coffers. 16 The cloud of speculation regarding Reverend Stratton likewise hangs over Ruiz de Burton’s ﬁctional Reverend Hackwell, who not only threatens to deplete Lola’s inheritance but to force her into marriage, and thus threaten her virginity and her reputation. The silencing of Olive’s voice appears in manifold forms in Who Would Have Thought It?: Lola’s captivity narrative is ﬁrst told by Dr. Norval, the repeated defense of Lola’s bloodlines is ignored by the New England community, and Lola’s mother’s testimonio is lost for years in the dead-letter ofﬁce. Olive’s interview, widely reprinted after its initial appearance in the Los Angeles Star, bears comparison with the interrogation and examination of Lola Medina, the ﬁctional captive of Ruiz de Burton’s ﬁrst novel, particularly with respect to parentage and in an assessment of ethnic afﬁliation. By the time Ruiz de Burton wrote Who Would Have Thought It?, the United States remained preoccupied with the aftermath of the Civil War. For the residents of the New England area, where Ruiz de Burton and her husband, Capt. Henry S. Burton, settled after their move from California, no prevailing discourse adequately explained the complex and conﬂicting dynamic between mexicanos and Anglo-Americans; indeed, Ruiz de Burton was most successful at articulating a Mexican identity to an audience trained in the geographical and racial binaries of the Civil War by maneuvering her Mexican protagonist, Lola Medina, through the racial identities well entrenched in the national imaginary. The reader ﬁrst encounters Lola enshrouded in a red shawl. When it falls to the ground, the ﬁgure revealed is that of a “little girl very black indeed” (16). Lola’s shawl, and the bizarre striptease regarding her racial identity that accompanies both its removal and the eventual fading of her skin dye, are quite sharply juxtaposed by accounts of Olive’s scant clothing and humility when returned to Fort Yuma. 17 Lola’s multiple layers, when stripped off, do not reveal a shameful, naked core but rather disclose an identity that is both class- and race10

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inﬂected as white. A sketch of Olive’s return depicts her severely undressed, not just for Victorian standards, but even for current American prudery. Newspaper accounts relate how “she was dressed in the scanty costume of the Mohave females, and upon the approach of white men, with instinctive modesty, prostrated herself in the sand, and refused to rise until provided with more becoming wardrobe” (Golden Era March 16, 1856). Olive belittles herself in the moments anticipating her return to Victorian dress and customs; Lola, who is imagined to be an Aztec, an American Indian, or a “mixture of Indian and Negro,” already wears the appropriate clothing and disdains to reply when treated roughly (20). By the 1872 publication of Who Would Have Thought It?, travel narratives and early ethnographies situated in the Southwest had already drawn conclusive associations between clothing, ethnic identity, and moral standing. 18 Against the Enlightenment model of the “noble savage,” whose premise of people living in Edenic bliss was buttressed by comparative degrees of “undress,” Mexican women were described as creatures willing and grateful to play Eve to the white male’s Adam. The image of a bare-chested female, which Faery convincingly argues to be a complicated emblem of the Americas, appears in different form in captivity narratives: the nude American Indian female’s heaving breasts “[signify] the validating welcome the white colonists received from the Indians” and “the captive white woman’s nakedness . . . signiﬁes the violence of dark savagery against her person” (176–77). Ruiz de Burton’s heroine displays manners absent in members of the New England community, who themselves take on such “savage” characteristics as Jemima Norval’s infernal imps and ex-Reverend Hackwell’s “private menagerie” of “wild beasts.” Lola’s ethnic and class status is hyperbolically superior to that of her New England neighbors, so much so that the French waiting maid Mina prefers to serve her rather than Ruth, and “the Indian paint” that occasions inquiry into Lola’s ethnic identity is discovered by the novel’s end to have “kept her white skin under cover, making it whiter by bleaching it” (232). And yet most of the work of proving Lola’s status involves her class position, because she remains in black face for the bulk of the novel. Ruiz de Burton suspends an account of Lola’s skin dye until the felicitous completion of the marriage plot between her and Julian Norval; Captivity Narratives in the Borderlands

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as a result, members of the Norval family and surrounding community engage in a farcical interrogation of Lola’s ethnic identity. Close inspection of her phenotypic traits—especially her lips and hands—mimics the racist, pseudoscientiﬁc discourse prominent in the nineteenth century as “scientists” sought to quantify racial distinctions and classes through an arithmetic of blood and a taxonomy of races. Norval family’s conjectures and attempts to corral and label Lola reﬂect national race-based preoccupations—the savagery of American Indians and the enslavement of Africans and African Americans. 19 Lola’s racial ambiguity penetrates the linguistic realm when Mattie misinterprets Lola’s silence during this interrogation—in which Mattie, Lavinia, and Reverend Hackwell, among others, bat around possible identities for her—as Lola’s ignorance of English. When Reverend Hackwell hands Lola a buttered piece of bread, “presented with a smile,” she politely thanks him “in very good English” (20). Alarmed, Mattie suddenly realizes that Lola has heard and understood their conversation carried on in front of her; Lola’s silence is no longer racialized (meaning that it is no longer attributed to her racial identity) but is instead recast along class lines. Dr. Norval had already explained Lola’s silence to Ruth, clarifying, “[Lola] not liking your manner . . . disdains to answer your question” (20). In Ruiz de Burton’s novel, Dr. Norval takes over the tragic story of Lola and her mother. Doña Theresa’s own account, lost in the deadletter ofﬁce, only circulates within the circumscribed readership of her immediate family. And as for proﬁt, Lola certainly gains ﬁnancially from her captivity—her mother having parlayed her status as the chief’s wife to gain gold and jewels for Lola’s future—but it is Jemima Norval, her daughters, and the ex-Reverend Hackwell who attempt to squander Lola’s fortune and claim it as their own. As Sánchez and Pita note in their introduction to the novel, “The wealth Doña Theresa hoards as her daughter’s ‘dowry’ is entirely naturalized and masks the plunder of Indian lands and resources” (lxi). On the Fringes of Whiteness For Ruiz de Burton, the mystery of Lola’s ethnicity provides the vehicle for negotiating a Mexican identity within a New England community 12

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and readership who imagine ethnic identity along a black-white axis. Beth Fisher believes “Ruiz de Burton’s interest in using the captivity theme to validate a hierarchical, caste-segregated social order becomes more clear as she connects the threats posed to Theresa (and Lola) by the Mohaves to threats posed to Lola within the Norval home” (61). Both Fisher and Anne E. Goldman consider Lola’s captivity extended rather than terminated when she enters the Norval compound. Goldman views Lola’s “second remove” as Ruiz de Burton’s attempt to disrupt the centrality of the New England home as the site of civility and whiteness. Fisher sees Lola imprisoned by bourgeois greed (embodied in the ﬁgure of Jemima Norval, who uses Lola’s inheritance to satisfy her class-climbing ambitions) as symbolic of the ﬁnancial and territorial gains of the United States after the U.S.-Mexican War. Fisher, like Sánchez and Pita, draws upon the historical account of two “light-skinned Mexican women” abducted during Indian raids on the Jamul Ranch in 1837 as the basis for Lola’s captivity (61). 20 Whiteness is shored up against the savagery of the American Indian captors, and in this manner Ruiz de Burton’s employment of the captivity narrative serves (as Nina Baym has argued about ﬁctional accounts of captivity) to whiten the heroine by stark contrast (21, 96, 121). Ruiz de Burton is not, however, merely defaulting to a well-entrenched, and gendered, plotline of racial encounter between American Indians and Anglo-Europeans. Her narrative of Lola and Theresa’s captivity certainly does draw upon this well-known genre ﬁguring women between ethnic and geographic borders, but Ruiz de Burton compels her audience to recognize and acknowledge Lola’s identity and, in extrapolated form, that of all Mexicans who became de facto American citizens at the culmination of the U.S.-Mexican War. Her purpose was not only to claim whiteness for Mexicans of “pure Spanish blood” like Lola but to rightfully and legally claim U.S. citizenship and its supposedly attendant rights and privileges. If the captive woman symbolically represents the nation under attack and in need of protection, then the casting of a californiana in that role insists upon the californios’ national and ethnic identity as American and white. The adoption of Lola by the Norvals, like the pleas for members of San Francisco’s elite to take in the orphaned Olive, return them to white, well-heeled society and thus conﬁrm their gender and ethnic Captivity Narratives in the Borderlands

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status. Historian William Rice reports that a “San Diego family offered [Olive] a home, where care and instruction, it was remarked, would enable her ‘to resume that position in society which ﬁve years of savage bondage has deprived her’ ” (98). Lola is clearly presented as a girl, too young for her sexual identity to emerge and thus removed from the threat of miscegenation and from the trope of the fallen woman. Her mother absorbs this role instead. In the case of Olive, her status within the Mohave community remains a mystery. One rumor identiﬁed her as the wife of the chief’s son and the mother of two sons. Part of this question regarding Olive’s “honor” seems to revolve around her age.21 Not wishing to perpetuate the stereotype of mexicanas as sexually [14], (14 licentious creatures, a myth propagated by travel narratives into the Southwest, Ruiz de Burton carefully separates Lola from her mother, writing the latter into the role of ravaged female martyr. Lola’s chastity, Lines: 1 taken together with the timing of her birth and her young age when ——— rescued by Dr. Norval, is further substantiated by what is read as her 14.0p ——— mother’s ultimate sacriﬁce. In Mohave custody, Lola’s mother is taken Normal on as the chief’s wife and given the names “Euitelhap” and “ña Hala” * PgEnds: (the latter translated as “my lady”) (Ruiz de Burton 34). The close ties between both captives and the chiefs function to raise the status [14], (14 of these women beyond anonymous slaves to exceptional members of the Mohave tribe. Yet this status does not translate back into white society, where the women are imagined as being deﬁled and degraded because of their carnal knowledge of “savage” man. Indeed, Lola’s mother mysteriously dies before she can be carried off to freedom with her daughter. Dr. Norval interprets her sudden death in the following manner: “She did not wish to see her family now, after ten years of such life as had been forced upon her” (35). When Doña Theresa’s testimonio is ﬁnally recovered from the deadletter ofﬁce and delivered to her husband and father, the reader learns more explicitly of Doña Theresa’s fate while among the Mohaves: “I forgive the horrible savages who inﬂicted upon me the most terrible torture that the human soul can know—the agony of living in degradation forever on earth” (202). Husband and father weep over Doña Theresa’s ﬁnal words and, gazing lovingly at her portrait, imagine her to say, “Do not weep for me. Do not mourn. I am an angel now. I 14

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was always pure, for my soul did not sin, although I was insulted by a savage.” If Ruiz de Burton had read Oatman’s account, perhaps what would have interested her are the following: Olive’s tattoo, her capture outside the bounds of the United States, her questionable sexual status upon return, and the bleeding of Mexican and American Indian languages and customs. 22 Combined, these elements provided sturdy material for building a case against the U.S. government, its policy of Manifest Destiny, and its failure to ratify and maintain the promise outlined in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. As mentioned in Article XI of the treaty, the United States was responsible for policing the newly deﬁned border between Mexico and the United States against Indian raids and for outlawing the economy reliant upon ransoms paid for hostages. Both Lola and Olive are in Mexican territory when captured. As Washburn notes in his introduction to Oatman’s text, “The Oatman party was in Mexican territory (the Gadsden Purchase had not yet occurred)” (ix). The ﬁrst article of the Gadsden Purchase establishes the boundary between the United States and Mexico, stating explicitly that the border proceeds “in a straight line to a point on the Colorado River twenty English miles below the junction of the Gila and Colorado rivers; thence up the middle of the said river Colorado until it intersects the present line between the United States and Mexico.” Since this treaty was not signed until 1853, ﬁve years after the ﬁctional capture of Doña Theresa and two years after the historical capture of Olive and Mary Ann Oatman, both sets of captives were in Mexican territory at the time of their capture. Regardless of the territorial ownership of the land in question—the conﬂuence of the Gila and Colorado rivers—which is the site of rescue for Ruiz de Burton’s characters and that of attack and capture for the Oatmans, the U.S. government is severely chastised for not preventing the attack. The narrator of Who Would Have Thought It? conjectures, “If Mexico were well governed, if her frontiers were well protected, the fate of Doña Theresa would have been next to an impossibility. When it is a known fact that savages will devastate towns that are not well guarded, is there any excuse for a government that will neglect to provide sufﬁcient protection?” (201). One recalls Lorenzo Oatman’s failed petition to California governor J. Neely Johnson for assistance Captivity Narratives in the Borderlands

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in recovering his sisters and the California newspapers’ published admonishments of Governor Johnson for not acting in a timely manner. Lola’s reunion with her father and maternal grandfather occasions Ruiz de Burton’s redressing of grievances after 1848. The fate of Doña María and Lola is blamed on the U.S. government and its unprotected frontier (201). Here Ruiz de Burton alludes to Article XI of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which addressed the issue of captivity and the trafﬁcking of human beings in the following manner: “It shall not be lawful, under any pretext whatever, for any inhabitant of the United States, to purchase or acquire any Mexican or any foreigner residing in Mexico, who may have been captured by Indians inhabiting the territory of either of the two Republics” (qtd. in Griswold del Castillo 191). The U.S. government established the ﬁrst border patrol to police against Indian raids and to safeguard against the trafﬁcking of individuals across the newly erected border. My book, along with Ruiz de Burton’s reframing of the captivity narrative, shifts the geographical and racial imaginings of the nation or, more speciﬁcally, the domestic. For Ruiz de Burton, both American Indians and Anglo-Americans are the invaders who enter Mexico’s domestic space, capturing wives and marrying into Mexican families for proﬁt and ﬁnancial gain. Captivity narratives have functioned traditionally as the crucible through which “white” women have crossed cultural and racial borders, gained agency and notoriety through the publication of their harrowing tales of life among “savages,” and critiqued patriarchal constraints. In their assessment of the racial dynamics of Hobomok and Hope Leslie, Nina Baym and Priscilla Wald have argued that a negative dialectic fuels the whitening of captive heroines. For Christopher Castiglia, the captivity, or more speciﬁcally its telling, affords white women a degree of agency otherwise unavailable. To the narrative of an Anglo-American captive assiduously returned to Victorian society through repeated renunciation of miscegenation, desires to return to Mohave society, and the indelible mark of a chin tattoo, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton grafts a tale of a mexicana whose moral and class standards far surpass those of her adopted New England community, whose chastity is endangered by an ex-reverend, and whose physical markings of captivity prove temporary. By drawing on or from the famous Oatman captivity, Ruiz de Burton weaves yet 16

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another critical connection between East and West. By narrating a story that deals with border crossings in the vein of a quintessential American trope—the captivity narrative—Ruiz de Burton gives us a critical story of the border that draws upon a different history from the one commonly told or known in the nineteenth century. One such story is the capture and return of Olive Oatman. Ultimately, Ruiz de Burton’s revision of the captivity narrative operates under a different geographical and racial imaginary than the one commonly animating captivity narratives. It focuses attention on the Southwest territory, on the broken promises of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, on the primacy of the Southwest territory in nation[17], (17) building, on U.S. imperialism, and on the U.S.-Mexican border. The conditions for a post-1848 United States are the subject of the next chapter, which examines the yoking of marital and martial plots Lines: 130 to and casts the U.S. ofﬁcer in the added (but equally critical) role of ——— husband. The circumstances for admission into the United States as * 207.7200 war brides of U.S. ofﬁcers negotiate many of the same issues addressed ——— in the present chapter, but toward different ends. Romance, as this next Normal Page chapter argues, was a key, multivalenced term that naturalized Mani- * PgEnds: Page fest Destiny as liberation rather than invasion, reframed the captivity narrative as racial and political rescue, and created a different register [17], (17) for the problematic notion of whiteness.

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2. Domestic Captives Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

[First Page] We are certainly a progressive and aggressive people. An indestructible feature in the American character is a love of territorial aggrandizement; and we care not how far we shall go toward the east or the west, the north or the south; the banner of the “stars and stripes” is morally wide enough to shelter the world. We believe that this is a great country; that the ground is not yet ours upon which shall be erected its outer walls; and we have almost persuaded ourselves that the sexton who shall blot us from the roll of nations will be deeply interested in the consummation of human affairs. —George P. Buell, Esq., Western Democratic Review (1854)

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he ﬁrst U.S. novel set in Mexico, Timothy Flint’s Francis Berrian (1826), chronicles the titular character’s adventures in Mexico, where he rescues a Mexican damsel in distress from a forced marriage to a Comanche, battles for Mexico’s independence from Spain, saves the Mexican damsel’s entire family from drowning, redeems the Mexican damsel again from an arranged marriage with a dastardly Spaniard, and tutors newly emancipated Mexicans in the U.S. version of republicanism (Johannsen 179; Robinson 23). Predictably, Francis’s hard work is rewarded with marriage to said damsel, but not before she proves her mettle as a “True Woman” by passing a class in Republicanism 101. In its suturing of warfront and homefront through the multivalenced rhetoric of romance, Francis Berrian anticipates midcentury dime novels whose martial and marital plots afﬁrm the raced and gendered aspects of Manifest Destiny.

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Flint’s excessive use of mutually reinforcing rescue plots—military and romantic (physical and ideological)—became the template for dime novels, authored by Ned Buntline and others, whose primary function was to domesticate U.S. imperialism through the interracial marriage plot. The mass-produced tales satisﬁed the nation’s thirst for sentiment and patriotism with a singular plotline: they opened on the battleﬁeld where the two armies were pitted against each other in deadly combat and happily concluded in true comedic tradition with the hero’s nuptials to a beautiful, wealthy, and grateful mexicana. The dime novel’s narrative pattern of stitching war plots with marriage plots—so that romanticized territorial absorption became a family affair—was, in part, a refashioning of the Pocahontas myth. 1 Following the legend of her heroic, romantic rescue of colonist John Smith, Pocahontas, and by default all women of color, function as cultural brokers, uniting former enemies through a scripted deployment of their bodies. 2 As the seminal captivity narrative in the United States, the legend of John Smith and Pocahontas anthropomorphizes the landscape into a highly sexualized and, equally important, silent American Indian female that Rayna Green terms “an intolerable metaphor for the Indian-White experience” and “an unendurable metaphor for the lives of Indian women.”3 In captivity narratives’ service to colonialism, Pocahontas’s rescue of Smith resonates with the erotics of expansion and the fulﬁllment of divine providence. Similar to the “whitening” process analyzed in this chapter, Pocahontas’s exceptionalism simultaneously removes the threat of miscegenation while retaining her “Indianness” for deployment when politically expedient. For midcentury readers, including those of the genteel Godey’s Lady’s Book, this story of eroticized racial betrayal reverberates strongly with the myth of La Malinche/Malintzín/Doña Marina/La Chingada, Hernán Cortés’s translator/concubine/lover/rape victim who is symbolically cast as traitor to the Aztecs and key to the Spanish conquest. 4 As the metaphorical embodiment of a colonized geography, Pocahontas and Malintzín haunt the interracial marriages advanced in dime novels and critiqued in Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero. There is, however, one central difference between the Pocahontas myth and the eroticizing of territorial conquest through the ﬁgure of the mexicana—political incorporation.5 Granted, Thomas Jefferson advo20

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cated intermarriage between American Indians and whites in an often quoted passage from an 1808 speech: “You will mix with us by marriage, your blood will run in our veins, and will spread with us over this great island.” 6 Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of antimiscegenation laws, coupled with a legacy of red-white relations forged in violence and bloodshed, demonstrated the nation’s preference for war over love in its relationship with American Indians. Jefferson’s Enlightenment fantasy of absorption reveals a kind of “racial cannibalism” wherein whites gain land etc. from American Indians while the latter seem to disappear through the melting of “you” into “us.” 7 In essence, Jefferson romances yet another form of what Leslie Fiedler termed the “Vanishing American.” 8 Over a hundred years after the death of the historical Pocahontas, her mythical function as an eroticized political broker endured in the legislative acts of both the United States and Mexico, which fashioned interracial marriage into a political tool, especially in areas that were sparsely populated or that might otherwise be subject to foreign invasion and colonization. 9 Historian David J. Gutiérrez notes ironically how the “ ‘success’ of Mexico’s colonization law of 1824, [o]riginally passed in an effort to encourage immigration to the sparsely populated Texas frontier, soon attracted thousands of American immigrants” and created a population imbalance where “American immigrants probably outnumbered Mexicans in Texas by as much as ten to one” (19). Texas’s independence from Mexico in 1836, orchestrated by such famous Anglo settlers as Stephen F. Austin, clearly revealed the dangers underlying large-scale population schemes, and in the years following the U.S.-Mexican War the disparity between Manifest Destiny’s intent and its results would become increasingly clear. The perverse outcome of expansionism is the subject of my ﬁnal chapter, “Testifying Bodies.” Early Mexican legal policy not only invited Anglo-Americans into the Southwest, it explicitly identiﬁed interracial marriages between Anglo men and Mexican women as a means for enlarging its citizenry. Article 27 of Mexico’s naturalization law speciﬁes: “All foreigners who come to establish themselves in the Empire, and those who, following a profession or industry, in three years, have sufﬁcient capital to support themselves with decency and are married, shall be considered naturalized; those who, under the foregoing conditions, marry Mexican Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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women, acquire a special right to have their letters of citizenship given them” (emphasis mine). As a longstanding practice, arranged marriages in Mexico created “union[s] of two properties, the joining of two households, the creation of a web of afﬁnal alliances, and the perpetuation of a family’s symbolic patrimony”; marrying into Mexican families thus secured unions, such as those between citizen and nation (R. Gutiérrez 227). Although the dime novels would polarize arranged and interracial marriages, the two unions shared economic and political functions. Including marriage to a Mexican woman as one of the requirements for Mexican citizenship revealed how the Mexican nation imagined foreigners settling in its territory as entering the national family through marriage. And so they did. Historians have estimated that “seventy-ﬁve percent of the male foreigners who came to New Mexico between 1820 and 1850, and whose names appear in church records of those years, did marry Mexican women” (4). 10 In addition to offering land grants as an incentive for American emigrants to become naturalized Mexican citizens, “the central government of Mexico promulgated a series of decrees inhibiting the trade activities of foreigners. One of these highly restrictive laws . . . made effective in April 1844, forbade foreigners from engaging in the retail trade. However, it contained a clause which exempted those foreigners who were naturalized citizens, those who were married to Mexicans, and those who were residents of Mexico with their families” (McDowell Craver 29). With the U.S.-Mexican War, these marriages became much more problematic. What might have been marriages of convenience for the Anglo husbands wishing to avoid taxation directed at “foreigners” or to gain land grants available only to Mexican citizens would be refashioned after the war as unions beneﬁting the Mexican heroine, bringing her into enlightenment and the principles of humanism associated exclusively with the United States. Dime novelists like Timothy Flint recast territorial expansion and its romantic gloss, marriage, through the lens of Enlightenment ideology and American romanticism so that the Anglo suitor did not appear an opportunist or a “foreigner” (Flint’s protagonist bears the title of “Mexican patriot” although he is an Anglo-American seeking the romance and adventure he’s read about in Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe) but rather as 22

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savior, fulﬁlling the moral imperative dominating the captivity narrative by taking a Mexican bride. For female authors Jovita González and Eve Raleigh, the sexism inherent in the genre, coupled with its failed promise of liberation, made it the ideal medium for critiquing paternalism in their day. In their coauthored historical romance, they revisit 1848 to recast the parameters for civilization and U.S. citizenship, claim whiteness for themselves and their heroines, and peel away the veneer of romance from marriages of convenience. Against the dime novel’s traditional focus on the white male protagonist, González and Raleigh privilege the interior spaces of the Mendoza y Soría household and its female members. From this vantage point, the Anglo-Americans appear as the outsiders that they were, and the racial dynamics employed to “whiten” Mexicanas draw upon the Spanish caste system as well as the rescue plot from a semifeudal patriarchy. Both Francis Berrian and Caballero people their narratives with upper-class, white mexicanas because “their class position, European cultural background, and ‘white’ racial status privileged them over other women of color and opened an avenue for some to eventually assimilate into the dominant culture through intermarriage with European-American immigrants” (Almaguer 209). As Almaguer notes, the absorption of upper-class “white” mexicanas into the national imaginary was contingent not only on their economic position but also on other markers of exceptionalism, such as participation in the sentimental bodily discourse (economy) of paling and blushing, in a desire for political and sexual emancipation, and through the racial dynamics of the captivity narrative. Flint deploys the trope of whiteness through multiple literary strategies to pathological ends. Captivity’s dialogic of whiteness does more than prepare Martha for republicanism and symbolic citizenship; it anchors the racial and political identity of its protagonist hero, Francis. Initially, Flint emplots Martha’s whiteness through a very conventional framing of the captivity narrative—a Comanche warrior named Menko carries Martha off into Apache territory with the intent of making her his bride. 11 In this ﬁrst of a series of rescues, Francis, Menko, and Martha assume the conventional raced and gendered roles that are hallmarks of the captivity narrative. 12 As the canonical ﬁgure who poses both a physical and sexual threat to Martha, Menko abMexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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sorbs the opportunism and violence associated with U.S. imperialism and territorial gain. Most telling, rather than have Menko’s swarthiness contrast with Martha’s whiteness—the genre’s traditional racial dialogic—the Comanche secures Francis’s whiteness. Menko articulates the red-white dyad along lines of masculinity by comparing his own bravery and sexual prowess to Francis’s cowardice and civilized impotence, embodied in his “white skin” (1: 91–92). Thus we witness the deployment of the traditional captivity narrative less as a means of re-racializing Martha and precipitating her marriage to Francis and more as a literary strategy for securing Francis’s racial position. 13 The ﬁgure who seems to naturalize the romance of Francis and Martha along racial lines is, not surprisingly, a Comanche woman in love with Francis iconically named Red Heifer. 14 Her role as unrequited lover parallels the self-sacriﬁcing role Pocahontas assumes in nineteenth-century renditions of the legend in which she pines over John Smith and her actual husband, John Rolfe, is conspicuously absent.15 Given the mid-nineteenth-century theory that American Indians were a different species, made popular in the United States with the publication of Dr. Charles Caldwell’s 1830 Thoughts on the Original Unity of the Human Race, the use of interracial marriage as a solution to territorial expansion was counterintuitive. Flint maneuvers this everchanging racial terrain, threatening to undo the very tools of interracial consolidation his novel champions by casting the potential unions of Martha and Francis to Red Heifer and Menko as foils for the novel’s true romance. In a brief, truncated speech in which Red Heifer declares, “[Martha] white. You love,” the narrative shifts terrains from the racialized wilderness to the interiority of the Alvaro household (1: 72). Martha’s “second remove” to her family home links conventional uses of the captivity narrative to its domestic frame through the policing of her body. Flint forges a seamless bond between the novel’s political investment in U.S. republicanism and its domestic preoccupation with the marriage plot through their shared economies of sentiment. Nowhere is this suture more evident than in the double use of the somatic performance to register patriotism on the battleﬁeld through the shedding of blood and elevated sentiment in the domestic sphere through the culturally inﬂected practice of paling and blushing. Ac24

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cordingly, both male and female bodies serve as the nexus for family and nation; their embodiment of individual and collective subjectivities necessitates transparency so that they may screen and reﬂect the proper sentiment. Thomas Jefferson associated legibility with racial identity in the following manner: “Are not the ﬁne mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or lesser suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?” (186–87). Finer emotions that may exist in African Americans but are nevertheless veiled for Jefferson are declared entirely absent by other racial theorists. Indeed, legibility became such a powerful metaphor for making the invisible visible that in its supposed absence the stereotype of sexual licentiousness, observable by the absence of blushing, found legitimacy. The obsession over a narrating and narratable body, one that would confess itself in a socially scripted language, was a central preoccupation of the midcentury pseudosciences of phrenology and physiognomy. 16 Patriotic and romantic feelings blur in the transparent body as it becomes a palimpsest for national sentiment. For Francis, the shift from battlefront to homefront is likewise facilitated by his body’s ability to register its performance in both nationally inﬂected theaters. Thus, Francis’s paling from blood loss in battle with Menko resonates on the national level just as powerfully as his blushes in courtship rituals with Martha. 17 Francis’s battle wounds, rather that sites of emasculation (as was the case with war-song lyrics about Gen. Santa Anna, examined in chapter 3), make visible the extent of his republicanism. His wounded body narrates an exchange of blood for freedom, which is a central component of republicanism. 18 As the Alvaro family’s reading of Francis’s body attests, however, the trope of the body-as-palimpsest is porous, open for interpretation. The Alvaros express “deep and unaffected concern . . . about my wounds and visible paleness. My country, my religion, every thing, was overlooked in contemplating my exposure, and its joyous termination” (1: 98). The Alvaros’ reading of Francis’s injured body does not register political, religious, and racial difference; it decouples the sentimental allegory of body as nation.19 To close off alternative readings of Francis’s “white” body, Flint creates Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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an ideal readership through organized lessons in the American business of republicanism. The very markers of difference previously ignored by the Alvaro household, Francis’s country and his religion (Protestant, of course), predictably become bones of contention between himself and the male members of the family. This process of racial differentiation is coterminous with a subplot intended to separate both Francis and Martha from the male members of the family. As Almaguer argues in Racial Fault Lines, “Far from being articulated in a straightforward symmetrical form in which class and race were merely parallel structures, racialization was bound to class formation in complex ways that gave racial conﬂict its decidedly class- and gender-speciﬁc form” (209). Gender and class status were two determining factors in the portrayal of Mexican males as “dark, skulking, ‘inferior’ rancheros” and Mexican women as noble characters displaying many of the traits associated with U.S. national character (Johannsen 189). This gendered and classspeciﬁc construction of race for Mexicans allowed Anglo soldiers to intervene as suitors, potential husbands, and saviors for Mexican heroines; marriages to Anglo soldiers were thus construed as rescues from captivity in Mexico’s semifeudal patriarchy where fathers and future husbands arranged unions. 20 “The Mexican women of these stories, beautiful señoritas all, seem to have been in accidental proximity to the rest of their race. Their proper place was beside the blond and noble giants from the north who have rescued them from the connivings of deceitful, cowardly and dowry-seeking Mexican suitors” (Robinson 26). Racialized by association with Mexican males, these heroines were just as easily re-racialized when they became the brides of Anglo soldiers. Once again, Flint relies on the racial dialogic of the captivity narrative to brand Enlightenment philosophy as an undeniable and untainted symbol of white America. Historically, some Mexican political ﬁgures did look north to the United States in the aftermath of their independence from Spain (Rodríguez Díaz 42; Pitt 3). The Mexican Constitution parallels many of the articles housed in the U.S. Constitution. However, with each newspaper article reporting on Americans’ racist disdain for Mexico and its citizens, the country gained insight into the underlying ethnic dimensions of the U.S. brand of republican26

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ism. The ironic notion of claiming exclusive rights to “freedom” and “natural rights” was not lost on Mexicans opposed to U.S. invasion. Rather, Mexican newspapers struck directly at this oxymoron of owning freedom by referencing the nation’s continued practice of slavery years after it was outlawed in Mexico. El Republicano echoed Manifest Destiny’s use of Christianity by characterizing the end of chattel slavery, a feat accomplished by Mexico and a moral call to arms against the United States, as “the saintly equal to what the gospel preaches” (September 19, 1846). 21 Martha’s “natural” inclination toward the sentiments of Enlightenment and its medium, the English language, work assiduously to return morality and “whiteness” to the philosophy. In Flint’s novel, the choice of Shakespeare (Caliban) 22 and Rousseau (noble savage) as central ﬁgures of Martha’s education in Enlightenment thought unwittingly registers the pathological need for a racial Other to undergird a philosophy advocating humankind’s innate capacity for progress (1: 130, 214). 23 Taken in this vein, the Conde and Don Pedro’s shared description of republicanism as a deadly contagion anticipates a postcolonial critique of the Monroe Doctrine’s imaginings of Western hemispheric democratization less as a liberation and more as colonization. As Partha Chatterjee writes in his postcolonial critique of nationalism’s use of Enlightenment, “Nationalism . . . seeks to represent itself in the image of the Enlightenment and fails to do so. For Enlightenment itself, to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal, needs its Other; if it could ever actualize itself in the real world as the truly universal, it would in fact destroy itself” (qtd. in Bhaba 293). The racial trace, the specter of the Other, is so central to the “whitening” process that it erupts, almost unconsciously, in the novel’s reliance on the captivity narrative and in the colonial images of cannibals (an anagram of Caliban) and noble savages. For the interracial marriage plot, these racial ﬁgures of the Enlightenment (Menko, Red Heifer, and now Don Pedro) must become the Other for both Francis and Martha. In the makeshift classroom, Flint tests the Enlightenment theory about environment controlling the rate of development among communities. The racialized and gendered dialectics of Enlightenment operate in the ﬁgure of Don Pedro, Francis’s only male student and, coincidentally, his rival for Martha’s affections. In contrast to Martha’s Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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natural inclination toward the English language, Don Pedro proves a poor student. As he leaves the political experiment, Don Pedro throws insults over his shoulder at Francis, thinly disguised as attacks on the English language: “He observed that a foolish fashion had controlled him to think of learning [English]; but that it was a harsh, hissing, and vulgar language, ﬁt only to be spoken, as it was, by barbarians. He thence digressed to the people of the States, and he spoke of them with increased asperity, adding, that the only difﬁculty in reducing the rebellious creoles to proper loyalty and submission, arose from the contiguity and the infectious example of the States” (1: 164). Don Pedro’s speech against the English language and the political structure of the United States implicitly links the accoutrements of republicanism with the ﬁght for independence from Spain being waged by the “rebellious creoles.” 24 Given this imagined connection, Francis’s tutoring of Martha in the language and philosophy of the United States can only lead to her own rebellion against arranged marriage, a custom dependent upon the “proper loyalty and submission” of daughters to their fathers and future husbands. Conﬁrming Don Pedro’s characterization of republicanism’s “infectious” quality, Francis’s remarks about the United States and its political character “produced an effect with the mother and daughter” (1: 108). They subsequently pale at the very sight of him. This somatic reaction, quite involuntary, signiﬁes their afﬁnity for Francis and their very “natural” or unaffected emotional ties to the romantic tenets of republicanism. Martha herself recognizes the connection between republicanism and knowledge of the language in which its poetry and philosophy are written. Francis models Enlightenment indoctrination, the romantic fervor necessary for rebellion, when he refers to his own “delight in unfolding to such a pupil the treasures of our great master-minds” (1: 163). Martha links English to Enlightenment ideology, represented by the ﬁner feeling she treasures, when she professes: “Your language has opened to me a new world, and your beautiful poets have convinced me that I have a new heart. . . . You have just opened the ﬁrst pages of the book of knowledge before me, and have raised the eagerness of desire” (1: 168, emphasis mine). Martha’s sexuality is safely channeled into political thought, just like the nineteenth-century de-sexed version of Pocahontas. In effect, these two women of color continue to function 28

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as political brokers but without raising the specter of miscegenation. Martha discusses Francis’s inﬂuence on her patriotism in the following manner: “I sometimes ﬂatter myself that I am a Patriot by instinct. I have been deeply engaged in the American history. What a great country! What a noble people! There is something independent . . . in the appearance . . . of these people” (2: 193, emphasis mine). The naturalized rhetoric of patriotism “by instinct” echoes the inherent nature of Enlightenment ideology and romanticism and its beliefs in “natural rights” while also expressing Martha’s predisposition for political whitening. She confesses to hold the ideals of the United States instinctively and expresses a conviction that outer appearance and countenance will reﬂect these beliefs. The last phrase of her quote— that independence is perceptible in the appearance of Americans—is worth comment because the visible “signs” of assimilation into the United States have been previously addressed with Francis and his somatic response to battle. Martha’s immersion in political whiteness occurs when she acts upon the lessons of the American Revolution and actively seeks her own independence from Don Pedro before Francis rescues her a third time. Martha’s melodramatic cry that submitting to an arranged marriage with Don Pedro “does violence to her feelings” echoes the rationale given for patriotism within the novel’s ﬁrst pages—a willingness to die for a particular cause (2: 168). While imprisoned by Don Pedro, Martha grabs a knife, intent upon resorting to violence to gain her independence; her willingness to physically combat her captor and regain possession of herself contrasts sharply with the passivity exhibited during her captivity by Menko. Martha’s radical shift to active soldier poised to ﬁght for her own freedom can only be attributed to her indoctrination in Western philosophy. 25 Dime Novels The economy of emotions, signaled by the sentimental practice of blanching and blushing, not only serves to domesticate Manifest Destiny, it casts patriotism as a biological predisposition. The heightened emotions roused by wartime and Enlightenment rhetoric reinforce the double-time of nationalism because they exist within its empty, hoMexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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mogeneous time frame. In other words, Martha’s instinctive desires for U.S. republicanism seem to have always existed; they merely required the right stimulus (enter our hero, Francis) for their expression. Midcentury dime novels deploy the political desire circulating in Flint’s Francis Berrian through the sexual attraction of mexicanas and AngloAmericans. Arranged marriages to Mexican men, which perform the captivity function previously executed by American Indians, become the sexualized political vehicle for channeling mexicanas’ emotions. Harry Hazel’s Inez the Beautiful; or, Love on the Rio Grande, a Mexican Military Romance, published in 1846 at the outset of military conﬂict, follows the boilerplate aspects of the genre: American ofﬁcer rescues mexicana from sexual threat posed by a Spanish ofﬁcer, Mexicana repudiates Spanish ofﬁcer’s advances, rescues American ofﬁcer, and reunites with him on the battleﬁeld, where her military father and her future husband meet and negotiate for the daughter’s hand in marriage. 26 Hazel, pseudonym for Justin Jones of Jones Publishing Ofﬁce, features the two military battles, Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, which marked the opening of hostilities, as the locations where the heroine’s father, General Olmedo, and love interest, Lt. Charles Devereux, clash and reconcile. Conventional rescue plots, and some not-so-conventional ones, litter the narrative as characters alternate roles between captives and rescuers. As the novel opens, Devereux rescues Doña Inez (the honoriﬁc really applied to older members of the community rather than to young women, but clearly Hazel uses Doña to mark her as exceptional by signaling her class status) from a watery grave even as her Spanish captor, Don José, rows away in the boat she just jumped from to escape his lusty advances. Ever the cavalier, Devereux does not register his damsel in distress’s beauty until she’s regained consciousness (15). But once she awakens, Devereux wonders about the “angelic creature who had taken captive the hitherto impregnable fortress without effort” (16, emphasis mine). As romantic metaphor, captivity strikes a balance of power between the two future lovers. Rescue creates a debt and destabilizes the power dynamic between rescuer and captive: he may have just saved her from drowning, but he has quickly become her captive. Inez’s beauty (described brieﬂy as “features as purely Castilian as ever was seen on the Prado of Salamanca”) and her multiple rescues 30

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of Devereux level the two ﬁgures so that their love can resonate with the egalitarianism that is the hallmark of U.S. republicanism (11). In keeping with the national fantasy of expansionism promoted by dime novels, Hazel’s Mexico is peopled with individuals sympathetic to the American cause. It’s not just Inez—whole portions of Mexico, it would seem, are in love with the United States. Charles and Inez hide away in a hacienda owned by “a Mexican ranchero . . . who was known to be favorable to the American cause” (32). Americans loom large in the minds of the Mexican populace who gather to witness Charles’s public execution. The narrator muses, “Whether they expected to see a giant or not we will not determine, but certain it is, that the stature and formidable appearance, at least, of the ofﬁcers of the Americans had some how or rather become greatly magniﬁed in the minds of the imbecile Mexicans” (33). Even the disappointed crowd who manufacture their own mythic image of American ofﬁcers seem to have fallen prey to the heightened emotions lovers commonly express. These sympathies course through the elite sections of Mexico’s military and sentimentalize the capture of General Olmedo, Inez’s father, as an opportunity for the future father-in-law to enjoy the liberties afforded him by his “generous captor” (47). General Olmedo’s “prison-house,” the narrator reveals, “covers the whole length and breadth of our great and glorious Republic” (51). Free reign within the U.S. territory, which is itself under expansion during and after the war, sounds less like incarceration and more like Mexico’s post-1848 destiny. A testament to the metonymy between individual marriage plot and territorial annexation, Inez and Charles both pray for peace and await the termination of military conﬂict so they can unite in marriage (39). Don José Terceiro, Charles Devereux’s adversary in battle and love, assumes the role of racial Other so that Inez, her father, and other like-minded Mexicans can be deracialized, or at least positively contrasted to the brutality of the Spanish-born ofﬁcer. Described early on as “pure Castilian,” Don José quickly reveals his true nature as a “brute” and “monster” who, Inez declares, is “unworthy [of] a thought of [Devereux’s] noble mind” (18). Don José’s assumption of multiple disguises throughout the novel functions as a palimpsest for U.S. racial attitudes toward Mexico. The ﬂuidity of Don José’s identity testiﬁes to the ambiguity of Mexican identity in the national imagiMexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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nary. In addition to playing the part of the Spanish gentleman, José impersonates a priest, an American ofﬁcer, and a Comanche (27, 38, 41). Don José’s disguises touch upon many of the issues animating national debate over the nature of Mexican identity: the priest alludes to the question of whether Catholics could be incorporated into a nation of Protestants, the Mexican-defector-turned-American-ofﬁcer raises the question of Mexicans’ loyalty to the United States, and the American Indian disguise acknowledges the mestizo identity of most Mexicans. In comparison to the dizzying false identities of José, Inez’s brief appearance in Mexican uniform (which will be taken up in more detail in chapter 4) avoids the taint of a scandalous act unworthy of true womanhood status by ennobling her male disguise as necessary to ensure her father’s protection on the battleﬁeld. Inez’s impersonation of a Mexican swordsman is less about her ability to deceive lover and father than a demonstration of her ﬁtness as a national subject on and off the battleﬁeld. She is the mysterious shooter who kills Devereux’s guard; she is the unknown rescuer who strikes a blow against José just at the moment he was to strike Devereux with his sword. The Mexican people cannot but wonder at her identity and instead imagine that the Devil has taken the side of the Americans (34, 46).27 It certainly plays with the God-ordained tenor of Manifest Destiny to portray the Devil, instead of God, as the hidden hand helping the Americans to victory. It also speaks to the inability of Mexicans to recognize and celebrate the strength of their own female citizens. Historically, this is categorically untrue, for as Lizbeth Haas and other historians have noted, Spanish and Mexican law recognized a substantial degree of rights and privileges for its female citizens, rights and freedoms that were immediately lost after 1848. 28 “Spanish and Mexican law gave [women] the right to control their property equally with male siblings; upon marriage, women retained as their own the property they brought into the arrangement, and if they were widowed they inherited half the property and wealth accumulated during the marriage” (Haas 81– 82). The privileges of married Spanish and Mexican women contrasted starkly with the position of their American counterparts. It was not until 1851 that Anglo-American married women were granted property rights, and this act narrowly applied to residents of New York. The 32

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connection between Mexican women’s freedoms and Anglo-American women’s oppressions will be addressed in my study of the ﬁgure of the female soldier in chapter 4. Arranged marriage appears in Inez the Beautiful not as a ﬁlial obligation between Inez and General Olmedo but as a hazardous trap laid by Don José, who would soil her reputation not as wife but as his mistress: “You will not be allowed to roam beyond the apartment which will be shortly assigned thee,” Don José warns Inez. “There thou shalt receive all attention—but mind ye—only from thine own sex—save when it be my pleasure to grace thy apartment with my presence. What a happy life thou wilt live—you will be my fond, my loving, my beautiful turtle dove—and I will take the same precious care of thee the aviary master does of his birds. They can ﬂy and ﬂutter within their cage, but not beyond it” (42). José’s description strikes a balance between traditional banishment to a nunnery (she will only receive attention from her own sex) and sexual captivity outside the bonds of marriage (he only visits the apartment, rather than living there as one would imagine a husband doing, and comes and goes at his own pleasure). Nineteenth-century readers would recognize instantly the caged-bird metaphor as a well-worn symbol of domestic incarceration. Tellingly, Charles makes no claims regarding married life with Inez after the war. Instead, the description of the general’s “captivity” anticipates the future of Mexican-Anglo relations following the war: the “mark of respect and attention . . . extended to [the general] by the hospitable Americans” is the fate awaiting Mexico’s elite (51). Despite, or perhaps because of, the dime novel’s preoccupation with intermarriage as a romanticization of invasion and territorial absorption, the anxiety of its racial consequences remains and manifests itself in the indirect racialization of the mexicanas. Rather than tutoring in Locke, Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare, mexicanas in the dime novels prepare themselves for political afﬁliation with the United States through a deployment of the captivity narrative as racial escape. In other words, by casting arranged marriage to a Mexican ofﬁcer as a captivity plot, the dime novels racialize (i.e., assign racial portent to) the captive’s escape. She ﬂees a Mexican identity and thereby renounces national ties. In such an indirect manner, the Mexican captives are deracialized, and the threat of miscegenation invoked by the prospect Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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of interracial marriage is neutralized. Indeed, one could argue that this conﬁguration racializes arranged marriage to a Mexican ofﬁcer by virtue of the mexicana’s ﬂight from them. By the mid-nineteenth century, the stories of Pocahontas and La Malinche were signiﬁcantly rewritten to suppress the idea of racial mixing. Rather than brides to John Smith and Hernán Cortés, the two mythical ﬁgures were faithful companions who demonstrated their loyalty to the colonizing power on open battleﬁelds rather than in enclosed domestic chambers. Godey’s Lady’s Book celebrates Doña Marina in glowing terms as “the beautiful Indian interpretess,” “beautiful . . . readywitted . . . young captive,” and “the faithful interpretess of Cortés.” 29 Even though “The Life and Adventures of Ferdinand Cortes,” which appeared in 1855, makes mention of his son, Don Martín, symbolically the ﬁrst mestizo as he is the child of Doña Marina and Cortes, he is not connected to her. What remains, as with Flint’s use of Shakespeare and Rousseau, is the racial trace, in this case an employment of the rhetoric of cultural mixing without its racial consequences, an amalgamation along political rather than cultural lines. Although they end with marriage between Anglo soldiers and Mexican heroines, U.S.–Mexican War dime novels never comment on or depict the next generation. The racial consequences of the post-1848 honeymoon do not appear on the printed page. 30 The unsexing of Pocahontas and La Malinche reveal an ambivalence toward national intimacy effected by women’s capacity to produce and reproduce the nation. They occupy the signiﬁcant and problematic gap between citizen as abstraction and citizen as embodied, gendered, and raced. 31 The Marriage of Texas Written in the 1920s and 1930s as a collaborative effort by Jovita González and Eve Raleigh, Caballero tackles the racial and gender consequences operating under the theoretical conﬂation of family and nation that Doris Sommer deﬁnes as “foundational ﬁctions”: “The variety of social ideals inscribed in the novels are all ostensibly grounded in the ‘natural’ romance that legitimates the nation-family through love. [Sommer] suggest[s] that this natural and familial grounding, along with its rhetoric of productive sexuality, provides the model 34

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for apparently non-violent national consolidation during periods of internecine conﬂict” (76). González and Raleigh, however, do not follow this literary pattern without reservation. Most of the conventions established in Francis Berrian and animating midcentury dime novels are invoked and critiqued a hundred years later in their historical romance through the following plotlines: Angela and Red McClane’s marriage of convenience, Susanita’s rescue of Alvaro from the Texas Rangers, and Luis Gonzaga and Captain Devlin’s homosocial relationship. In all three subplots, González and Raleigh intervene in the racial and gendered construction of the Mexican female body. Through their use of the double time of historical romances, González and Raleigh launch a feminist and political critique against both the semifeudal patriarchy of tejanos as well as the more liberal U.S. patriarchy that continues to deny them the basic rights and privileges promised nearly a century ago. Concomitant with their de-romancing of the national allegory to rescue the ﬁgure of the mexicana from her overdetermined role in the U.S.-Mexican War is the de-romancing of U.S. republicanism itself. For González and Raleigh, the romantic element of the dime novel extended beyond the courtship plot to characterize the United States as an ideal republic, operating under the political and social egalitarianism central to its own Enlightenment. Through the rhetoric of Enlightenment ideology, romanticism, and moral superiority, mexicanas appeal for enfranchisement. 32 And they use these very terms—citizenship and whiteness—precisely because they were the subject of debate after the 1848 treaty and thus held public weight and immediacy. Early in the novel, Caballero’s patriarch, Don Santiago, articulates his dominion over his children’s destinies and simultaneously divulges both his own and the novel’s preoccupation with marriage: “There would be match-making, betrothals. A wife for Alvaro, a husband for Susanita. A husband for Angela, [he] had determined” (36). Conspicuously absent from Santiago’s matchmaking scheme is his eldest son, Luis Gonzaga, whom he refers to throughout the novel as a marica (milksop) and a woman (141, 157). Alvaro, although saved from the noose by his sister, Susanita, later dies at the hands of a Texas Ranger before he can return to the hacienda and engage in the marriage plot. Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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Don Santiago’s two daughters, Susanita and Angela, wed, but in their choices of Anglo husbands, their father considers them racial and political traitors. Luis Gonzaga leaves Texas for Maryland to study art with an Irish-Catholic doctor, Captain Devlin. José Limón views “each relationship [as] a rejection of Don Santiago’s patriarchal right to dictate and arrange his children’s liaisons” (345). By the novel’s conclusion, Don Santiago’s hacienda is nearly abandoned, with his peons deserting him for wage-earning positions in American households, his daughters marrying Anglos, and his eldest son moving to Maryland and later to Spain. The next generation’s desire to direct their own choice of a suitable mate, rather than defer to the dictates of their father, clearly resonates with the dilemma of domestic captivity central to the dime novel; however, rather than separate the two sexual threats against the heroine into the potential rape by an American Indian (Menko in Francis Berrian) and forced marriage by a Mexican (Don Pedro in Francis Berrian), González and Raleigh conﬂate the two in the ﬁgure of Alvaro, whose sexualized power is so unchecked that he poses a sexual threat to the female inhabitants of his own hacienda.33 His death at the hands of a Texas Ranger over their shared sexual relationship with a Mexican prostitute places him at the mercy of his own sexual and racial “logic.” For González, the racial dynamics of freedom contained in the interracial marriage plot are problematic to say the least. Like Chicana critics preceding and following her, González had to negotiate hazardous terrain between racial solidarity and feminist critique. As Norma Alarcón, Cherríe Moraga, Emma Pérez, the late Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Chicana feminist scholars have argued, launching a feminist critique within Mexican American culture is potentially perilous.34 The cultural nationalism of the Chicano Movement silenced female voices just as larger, political nationalisms had, but with a significant difference. For Chicanas, the charge of sexism against their fellow Chicanos was labeled as divisive—a pitting of wills among people already disenfranchised outside their community. Pérez adopts a rather fatalistic view of the possibility for gender equality within nationalist movements when she writes, “If indeed we consider rhetoric about feminism within nationalist movements, we seem doomed to repeti36

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tion over the centuries” (31). A Chicana feminist becomes, as Cherríe Moraga laments, a malinchista, sexual traitor to her own people. 35 In revisiting the dime novels’ Mexican-Anglo romance, González knowingly resurrects the controversial intracultural ﬁgure of La Malinche. González intervenes in the mythmaking of La Malinche by exposing the mechanisms that polarize readings of her as either a rape victim or a sexual traitor. The ﬁgure of the mexicana as a sexual bridge between Anglo-American immigrants and tejanos in mid-nineteenth century border culture—the ﬁgure of the female held captive by her own race and rescued by a male member of the “superior” race— cannot but evoke strong images of La Malinche. As a folklorist of Texas border culture, González would surely be aware of the implications the dime novels’ captivity paradigm had on Mexican American folk culture. She intercedes in the conventional treatment of mexicanas by exposing the sexed and raced repercussions of arranged marriage plots that construct the false dilemma facing women straddling two cultures. The novel’s patriarch, Don Santiago, reveals that such halcyon days only existed for landed elite males. For women, peones, and men unwilling to engage in a brutal world of domination inherited from three hundred years of Spanish colonial rule, any act of resistance automatically bore the stain of racial betrayal. This simplistic reading of national and racial identity is predicated on the national allegory promoted in dime novels in which the male protagonist, in this case the Mendoza y Soría patriarch, embodies the nation. By inhabiting a male rather than a female body in the national symbolic, González and Raleigh successfully disrupt the Malinche myth. If Don Santiago symbolizes Mexico, then the marriages of his daughters to Anglo-Americans do not register as a racial betrayal. Instead, the marriages follow the socially “natural” order of things—daughters leave their fathers to marry their husbands. When Don Santiago renounces his daughter, Susanita, after her heroic rescue of Alvaro, she counters, “Even though you no longer see me as a daughter, I still see you as a father” (283). 36 This revision of the interracial marriage plot functions on two levels: for a Mexican American readership, it removes the stain of malinchismo from Susanita’s and Angela’s marriages; for an Anglo-American readership, it frustrates the romance of a racial rescue in the form of marriage. In other words, by liberating Susanita and Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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Angela from the cult of true womanhood and its burdensome tether to the nation, González and Raleigh provide their heroines with the kind of freedom and agency only promised in the interracial marriage plot. De-romancing the captivity narrative effectively liberates the novel’s mexicanas from an overdetermined plot device that denies them the very freedoms and rights it ostensibly offers. Raleigh and González wrote their novel at a time of increasingly restrictive immigration policies (Operation Wetback) and antimiscegenation laws so that the only marriages that can be imagined between Anglos and Mexicans are those that take place a hundred years prior. 37 In Texas in the 1840s, the category of “white” was as much in ﬂux as that of “Mexican.” In the Geography of Marriage, Lawyer William Snyder explicitly addresses how statutes regarding the legality of certain unions varied dramatically from state to state. In Texas, Snyder notes, marriages were forbidden on the basis of incest, bigamy, and miscegenation. In the case of the latter category, miscegenation is deﬁned exclusively as the marriage between “any person of European blood or their descendants” and “Africans or the descendants of Africans,” who are also referred to as “a person of mixed blood descended from negro ancestry to the third generation inclusive” (304). However, what is much more striking and speaks directly to the issue of whiteness as a ﬂuid category is the statement that follows: “All persons not included in the above deﬁnition of negro are deemed in law white persons” (304, emphasis mine). Through a negative dialectic, the term “white” comes to signify exclusively “not negro.” By opening up the category of white, all races, like Mexican and American Indian, are ostensibly eligible to legally claim the rights and privileges enjoyed by whites. 38 In Caballero, this legal expansion of the category of whiteness shifts the marriages of Don Santiago’s two daughters to Anglo soldiers from interracial to international unions. In other words, because Angela and Susanita are legally classiﬁed as white by virtue of the fact that they are “not negros,” their matrimonial ties to Red McClane and Robert Warrener do not cross racial lines but rather serve to unite and conﬁrm national and political alliances. Accordingly, much of the book’s energy that would have to be directed toward whitening the women through class privilege and their European ancestry can 38

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instead be channeled into their political assimilation of U.S. republican ideology. As a stroke of genius, González and Raleigh’s attention to the interiors of the domestic sphere and its inhabitants resonates with the tradition of sentimental and domestic novels. As this genre was deemed the exclusive domain of white women who staged their ample capacity as true women, Caballero’s use of this type of novel already assumes the “whiteness” of the Mendoza y Soría women. 39 The novel metonymically represents Mexico and its patriarchal traditions (such as arranged marriages) in the character of Don Santiago. Tracing the father-daughter relationships reveals the shifting ties and alliances between Mexico and the United States, represented by the two Anglo-American suitors/soldiers. Because the family romance stands in for “natural” allegiances to the nation, marriage enacts a transfer in national identiﬁcation. 40 By representing Mexico through the patriarch, the marriages of Susanita and Angela are predetermined to be acts of racial and national betrayal. The whitening of the Mendoza y Soría daughters when wed to Anglo husbands occurs primarily because of the false dilemma Don Santiago constructs between the two national and racial identities—Susanita and Angela can either submit to his power and enter into arranged marriages with Mexican men or they can become outcasts to their family and their nation by wedding the enemy. Don Santiago’s ultimatum is reminiscent of the false dilemma buttressing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which considered Mexicans who did not declare their national ties within one year of the treaty’s ratiﬁcation to be U.S. citizens by default. 41 In both situations, marriage is a constant and the husband’s racial identity determines his wife’s. In the marriage of Angela and Red McClane, love and romance are subsumed to pragmatic concerns: future economic prosperity and the application of religious convictions through social service and religious conversion. Angela describes the dynamics of their relationship in the following way: “I do not think we will need what you call love to make a successful marriage. We are different, the Señor McClane and I” (285). A marriage that both respects and maintains cultural and racial difference is, according to historian David Montejano, more in keeping with the Anglo-Mexican relations forged in the “semi-arid region west and south of the Nueces,” the territory on which the ﬁctional Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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Rancho de la Palma is situated (25). As a member of the merchant class, Red McClane embodies those entrepreneurs who arrive in Texas and “benignly and paternally serve as intermediaries between the natives and the new authorities.” In fact, Red McClane advises Don Santiago to take the title of magistrado in exchange for his control of the future votes of the Mexican community. Because of his intermarriage to Angela, McClane is “seen as [a] trusted protector by the native people” (25). In comparison to Warrener’s motives for intermarriage, which resonate with the romantic, egalitarian tenor ﬁrst introduced in Flint’s Francis Berrian, McClane’s marriage satisﬁes the economic and political incentives cited by Montejano for the merchant class in this region of Texas. “Warrener’s marriage . . . was love that was an end in itself. . . . McClane’s was a link in power, a staff of respectability, a means to an end” (317). Don Santiago clearly identiﬁes McClane’s motives for marrying Angela and the role she herself will assume: “All this concern over the misery his countrymen are visiting upon the poor Mexicans is to further his personal ambitions.” He tells Angela, “You are to be the Lady of Mercy so that he will have their allegiance for his schemes” (312). Rather than Catholicism posing an obstacle for the Protestant ﬁancé, McClane makes it a tool for entry into elite Mexican society. 42 Angela and Red’s marriage is colored by American pragmatism; like a business partnership, it allows each to pursue his/her own interests. What is so alluring to Angela about a marriage to Red McClane is the freedom it permits her. In this respect, the McClane marriage mirrors the Warreners’: both women gain an independence identiﬁed exclusively as American. Ironically, Angela’s marriage to Red permits her to pursue her religious beliefs. Angela wishes to enter the convent but is forbidden by her father. Oddly enough, marrying Red McClane (an act that would seem directly opposed to the chaste life of a nun) provides her the freedom needed to perform works of charity in the name of God. A married Angela is more of a nun than an unmarried Angela under Don Santiago’s roof. Again, the novel plays upon, and in this case renders absurd, the degree of freedom afforded by marriage to an Anglo-American. Put differently, Angela’s union with McClane examines the degree to which emancipation narratives can enter and 40

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interpret intermarriages. It questions why rights and privileges have to necessarily be the exclusive property of Anglo-Americans. Indeed, Doña Dolores’s marriage for love to Don Gabriel, originally arranged to marry her niece, Susanita, brings the aunt happiness and freedom outside the interracial dynamics of the dime-novel plot. Caballero inverts the gendered captivity narrative depicted in Francis Berrian by casting Susanita in the role of a rescuer who saves her brother, Alvaro, from the hanging noose. Through Robert Warrener, her future husband and a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, Susanita learns of her brother’s impending death at the hands of the Texas Rangers. She rides through the night, unchaperoned by a woman but attended by a male mozo, before arriving at the site of her brother’s incarceration and scheduled hanging. Although she aids in her brother’s release from ranger custody and thus saves his life, her acts are met with anger: “Riding all night alone with a peon, you a Mendoza y Soría! . . . Couldn’t you let me die instead? It would have been an honor to our name, dying for my people and my country, now you have dishonored us forever” (270). Susanita’s liberation of her brother deﬁes Mexican patriarchal custom, but, more profoundly, it subverts the founding principles of Alvaro’s actions as El Lobo, a bandito ﬁghting against the Texas Rangers. “A true lady,” Don Santiago informs his daughter, “knows that her honor must be kept unsoiled above all else, because it belongs also to her family, is part of a proud name and the ﬁrst obligation to the master of the house” (279). Patriarchy’s investment in the cult of true womanhood, González and Raleigh plainly state, amounts to oppression. “Honor!” the narrator rails, “It was a fetishism. It was a weapon in the hand of the master, to keep his woman enslaved, and his ﬁngers had twisted upon it so tightly he could not let go” (280). As Antonia Castañeda claims, “[The Victorian woman] was the norm by which historians judged Mexican women, individually and collectively, and thus one of the norms by which they judged Mexican society” (147). González and Raleigh work this nineteenth-century litmus test for national inclusion of women of color from both angles: they display the interior of the Mendoza y Soría household to reveal how domestic science is applied in the tejano home and thus prove the worthiness of the family’s female members for symbolic U.S. citizenship, 43 yet Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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they also denounce the cult as oppressive to women by depicting the tyrannical hold Don Santiago and Alvaro have over every member of the hacienda, regardless of gender or rank. 44 Their abusive form of patriarchy threatens to erase the markers of difference central to the maintenance of class and gender distinctions carried over from Spanish colonialism. However, Susanita’s rescue of Alvaro does not solely resonate with the dishonor of his family name; it disrupts the very mechanisms put in place to justify and fuel patriotism—family honor and duty to one’s people and nation. That Susanita’s saving of Alvaro destroys these factors belies the critical role of women in nationalism. For Alvaro to fulﬁll his duties to family, fellow citizens, and country, Susanita and other women like her must operate within the circumscribed dictates of true womanhood, which include obedience and dependence. 45 Susanita’s unchaperoned ride to the site of her captured brother stands in direct contradiction to the belief that patriotic acts are performed in the name of women incapable of taking such actions themselves. What Alvaro has in fact exposed is the underpinning narrative seeking to justify interracial marriages at the expense of Mexican men. Alvaro breaks open the hidden purpose behind the transformation of the captivity narrative into the arranged marriage, which equates marriage to an Anglo soldier with emancipation or liberation. Following the logic of this complicated pattern of substitution, marriage becomes a politically whitening act because for the women to wed Anglo soldiers, they must ﬁrst express a desire to unite themselves with like-minded individuals who respect their individual autonomy. In fact, the novel notes numerous times how liberal Anglo husbands are with their Mexican wives. 46 The marriages of both Susanita and Angela to americanos contrast with the romantic lives of their brothers, Alvaro and Luis Gonzaga. It would logically follow that if marriage serves Susanita and Angela as a political act that confers U.S. citizenship, then the two brothers could employ this same vehicle to solidify or maintain their national identities. However, the marriage plots seem to be strictly available to the two Mendoza y Soría sisters; in Caballero, marriage is a genderspeciﬁc act whose performance only serves to construct relationships between Mexican women and their new nation, the United States. 42

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The one “true romance” in Caballero involves Susanita and Robert Warrener. As an exaggerated foil to the Warreners, the marriage between Inez and Johnny White draws on the literary tradition of captivity narratives set in convents, where the captive’s sexuality is liberated. True to this genre, Inez’s union serves to place her forever on the mantel as a trophy bride whose ﬁrst, and perhaps only, English words are: “Geeve me a kees” (273). In comparison with the tutoring of Martha Alvaro in Francis Berrian, in which the acquisition of the English language expands consciousness, providing Martha with the “proper” linguistic register to articulate and exercise the ideals of republicanism, Inez’s knowledge of English contains her in the stereotypical role of exotic Other. 47 Inez’s characterization places her within the stereotype of the “Mexican” woman Castañeda identiﬁes in the Mexican period (1822–46) as “immoral and sexually and racially impure” to the “morally, sexually, and racially pure” “Spanish” women like Susanita. González and Raleigh take up the issue of natural rights in connection to literacy and the English language in the emancipation of Manuelito, the grandson of Paz (205). This is furthered by the clandestine correspondence of Susanita and Warrener and Angela and Red. The language learned, however, is either one of servitude or else love, which puts the female in the service of her husband. In Inez, A Tale of the Alamo, Florence and Mary strive to educate the “little savages” who occupy their classroom, but to comic effect. The Mexican pupils make such mistakes that their teacher cannot stiﬂe her laughter; as proof of their unenlightened status, they refuse to believe that the moon orbits the earth as both circle around the sun (102–3). Where language seems to be stripped of its power dynamics and yet remains emotionally charged is in the discourse of art shared by Capt. Carl Devlin and Luis Gonzaga. Homosocial Possibilities González and Raleigh were well aware of the heterosexual, whitening trajectory of the historical romance and thus set the alternative, homoerotic “romance” of Capt. Carl Devlin and Luis Gonzaga, the only member of the Mendoza y Soría family whose ethnic identity remains unchallenged, against a veritable tour de force of interracial Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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marriages. The male-male romance in Caballero deﬁes the interpolating force of the dime-novel plots in their service to Manifest Destiny and the romancing of expansionist politics. In the dime novels, Mexican and Anglo are pitted against each other on the battleﬁeld and in the parlor. Any male-male bonding is sacriﬁced on the altar of interracial romance. And yet the larger domain of dime novels (Flint gained prominence for his later work on the Indian Wars and Daniel Boone; Cooper romanced dark-white dyads in midcentury), captivity and the specter of the endlessly rape-able white woman foreclosed all homosocial bonding. In the absence of a white woman as the desired object in a triangle between Anglo and Mexican, Devlin and Luis ﬁnd peace, camaraderie, and perhaps more. As a historical romance, Caballero spans the time period of increased racial “science” from the mid-nineteenth century to the latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century study of sexology, two ﬁelds that critic Siobhan Somerville has linked together brilliantly in her Queering the Color Line. The two pseudoscientiﬁc phenomenon shared not only a methodology—measurement (physiognomy and phrenology)—to render the invisible visible, but they concentrated on the same corporeal sites—the sex organs (17, 19). The link between physiognomy and sexology elucidates the male-male romance of Luis Gonzaga and Captain Devlin in ways that a dime novel of the midnineteenth century and a sexology text of the early twentieth century could not do alone. 48 As Somerville notes, questions of sexuality were traditionally divorced from issues of race; the two, however, were intimately intertwined in the ﬁgure of the virgin white female, whose sexual purity was violently ensured by the lynchings of hypersexualized black male bodies. As Michel Foucault demonstrated in The History of Sexuality, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a gradual shift in thinking about sexuality so that a person’s sex acts came to constitute an identifying marker for a person; thus the invention of “heterosexual” and “homosexual.” As the novel’s approximation of queer identity, Devlin and Luis defy the mid-nineteenth-century dime novel’s reliance on the fantasy of American national unity. In the twenty-ﬁrst century, we get a fully articulated theory of the dynamic between homosexuality and nationality. At the heart of McCarthyism was the belief that homosexuals posed 44

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a national threat; accordingly, gay military and intelligence personnel were rooted out of their positions in the name of national security.49 In the mid-nineteenth century, however, no such theory existed. Rather, the notion of homosexuality at the time was an enigma in U.S. criticism. Much more was known about the treatment and general consideration of homosexuality (almost exclusively male-male desire and love) in England, which had characterized sodomy as an offense so heinous as to warrant death. 50 In the absence of a full historical and cultural understanding of views on homosexuality at mid-nineteenth century in the United States, we can, in good faith, examine how the moment of writing Caballero, the 1920s and 1930s, may have informed the authors’ imaginings of its potential in the relationship of Luis Gonzaga and Captain Devlin. Certainly, the male-male romance departs from the dime novel’s convention of pitting men from the warring nations in a competition for Mexican women and land. Considered in this light, their commitment to live together and leave the nation would obviously cast them outside of their respective countries. As expatriates in Spain, Devlin and Luis can hardly be national representatives. Their absence from the battleﬁeld, parlor, and nation does not make them traitors, however. Instead of the parlor, they have Padre Pierre’s ofﬁce and the cantina. Instead of national allegiance, they prove their skills as artists. They prove that love, passion, and excitement exist outside of the twinned war and marriage plots. Even before Devlin and Luis meet for the ﬁrst time, Luis Gonzaga is positioned peripherally in relation to family and nation based on these two institutions’ shared masculine construct. Presented early on as a dandy, “eighteen and without an affair, never even kissing the servant girls he sketched,” Luis suffers an “old loneliness” within him that changes dramatically to a “feeling that he belonged” when in Devlin’s company (104). What further distances Luis from his father and a certain brand of nationalism is his neutral stance toward the U.S.Mexican War and Americans in general. He learns from his father that Americans are “coarse, sometimes clever enough to simulate gentility,” but his developing relationship with Devlin, a fellow artist, contradicts his father’s nationalist ideas (103). At one solidifying moment, “Luis, to his confusion, found his hand in that of the American. . . . It was a Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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terrible thing to do, [Luis thought] the more so because it did not seem terrible at all” (105). Indeed, the fact that Devlin attends mass and is an Irish Catholic who will eventually take Luis to Maryland, a state founded by Catholics, counters a nationalist narrative altogether by positioning other belief systems such as religion and art over those of the nation. It also introduces another colonial history, that of Spanish colonialism, to counter the political, religious, and cultural dominance of the Puritan model, which drives Manifest Destiny. In a subsequent encounter between the two men, art challenges nationalism by reconﬁguring the axis of identity. Note the alternative “territory” that Devlin offers Luis once the latter has delineated his own position as a “traitor to [his] father and [his] country.” In response, Devlin offers a completely different cartography, “ ‘I should make a good map,’ Devlin said, ‘So many feet, so many miles, here a hill, there a valley’ ” (156). The creation of an intimate corporeal geography removes Luis and Devlin from the embattled landscape of Texas as a ﬁrst and critical step to constructing subjectivities “in relation to a speciﬁc culture in a particular place” (Inness 259). The creation of an alternative geography not on the Disturnell Map, which plotted out the border between the United States and Mexico, reﬂects contemporary gay and lesbian theories of identity and space. Lesbian theorist Joyce Trebilcot argues that “dykes especially cannot be expected to live in worlds made by others. A commitment to being a dyke is partly a commitment to making up one’s own world, or parts of it, anyway” (138). In their intimate, alternative geography, “Their hands were locked. . . . They were neither Mexican nor Anglo Saxon but artists” (156). This spontaneous ritual of solidarity will be invoked later in the novel as a source of strength on which Luis Gonzaga will draw when he makes his declaration of independence against his father, Don Santiago. Because the relationship between Devlin and Luis exists independent of the pattern for national consolidation, their “romance” bypasses the whitening process associated with historical romances featuring interracial marriages. The equality promised in the “romance” of the U.S.-Mexican War never materializes, of course. Instead, we get an unequal power dynamic rendered “natural” by the gendered positions of husband and wife. Tellingly, no dime novel consciences the union of an Anglo46

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American woman to a Mexican male because as a synecdoche for international peace, the Mexican would prevail. The homosocial romance of Luis and Devlin, then, is the actualization of Manifest Destiny’s promise of rescue, enlightenment, and egalitarianism. Indeed, the conversations between the two artists are informed, even directed by, Enlightenment discourse. Further, the language spoken is one of ﬁner feelings, sentiments common to domestic novels but divorced from their national portent. Given the very uneven relationship between Mexico and the United States at the time they wrote Caballero, it is not surprising that the one relationship which embodies egalitarianism divorces itself from the national politics of the war and removes to Spain. Indeed, by employing the historical romance to narrate the story of the U.S.-Mexican War, González and Raleigh make interracial unions between Mexicans and Anglos inevitable. By bringing race to bear on the pattern for national cohesion, they reveal the underlying assumptions of the historical romance—whiteness and heterosexuality. The historical romance has traditionally addressed conﬂicts like the American Revolution and the Civil War in which only political differences need to be resolved through marriage and race remains a non-issue. In the case of Caballero, when “two peoples of different races, customs, and traditions come in contact with each other,” according to Jovita González, “disagreements, misunderstandings, and quarrels are bound to occur,” and marriages are a much more daunting task. 51 For if the purpose of the historical romance is to promote national consolidation by bringing people together as families, and the nation in formation is the United States, then where do Mexicans ﬁt into this formula? For the most part, González and Raleigh have, according to Limón, “an unconscious sense that the new social formation must, for the foreseeable future, admit the Mexican in a still-subordinate position, attenuated by the care and respect that the idiom of romance and marriage make narratively possible” (351). 52 This subordinate position, I believe, is predicated on the gender of the racial others marrying into Anglo families. The marriages of Susanita and Angela to Robert Warrener and Red McClane, respectively, follow a whitening pattern common in other historical romances whereby the heroine’s identity is either physically Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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or socially whitened when she marries an Anglo. Caballero conforms to this literary convention in its heterosexual plots but not in its homosocial “romance” between Devlin and Luis. The “romance” of Luis and Devlin constitutes an alternative to this pattern, as witnessed by the juxtaposition of Luis and Susanita’s letters home. Luis, imagining his art in the Spanish style, will produce paintings reﬂecting his race and ethnicity; Susanita, assimilating into her Anglo life with husband Robert Warrener, literally reproduces her whitening process when she gives birth to a “baby [that] is blond and so white” (333). Interracial romances in Caballero begin with the Anglo soldiers at Fort Brown and the Mexican girls of marriageable age catching glimpses of each other on the street. During one such moment, Susanita spies her future husband in the ﬁgure of Robert Warrener, a soldier who has come to Texas, interestingly enough, to ﬂee a marriage arranged by his parents and would-be in-laws (46). The forbidden courtship that develops out of this chance meeting serves as a foil for the homoerotic relationship of Luis and Devlin, who also have an unplanned encounter that ends similarly with interest piqued on both sides and Luis departing from the scene, blushing despite the remonstrations of his brother Alvaro, that he has better things to do than “look at a gringo’s face” (48). In reﬂecting on this brief meeting, Devlin remarks, “I hope I meet that boy again under more pleasant circumstances. I like him. Rather more than merely like him.” Part of Devlin’s desire to see Luis again stems from his recognition that Luis “looks like a poet or an artist should look and did” (48). In opposition to the masculine romance’s fascination with “killings and cruelties,” Luis Gonzaga identiﬁes a consolidating romance constructed out of art and its creative, rather than destructive, properties. Just as he reached out to pull the gun from Simón’s hands, Luis Gonzaga reaches out to his father, turning him around so they are face to face when he delivers the news that he is leaving Rancho de la Palma with Devlin. The scene purposely echoes the two previous ones in which Luis restrains his father’s violence. Conjuring up an image of Padre Pierre standing at his right and Devlin “holding his hand, the clasp strong and warm,” Luis ﬁnishes his confession to his father: “Papá, I wish to study art. I want to go to the Americano towns of Baltimore and New York” (197). Traditionally, dime novels do not 48

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contain subplots that rescue Mexican men; the use of the captivity narrative to romance U.S. imperialism is a particularly gendered and sexed phenomenon. In Caballero, Don Santiago’s yoke proves oppressive to his youngest son, Luis, who ﬁnds escape in a male-male romance. Luis physically intervenes in violent scenes orchestrated by his father and, in so doing, establishes the means for his own escape from the constructs underwriting the historical romance and nationalism, which imagine a man ﬁrst engaging in battle before becoming engaged in marriage. Indeed, by interceding in violent moments, Luis reverses the pattern in which men profess political beliefs by their willingness to die for them, a sentiment repeated by his brother, Alvaro. Luis Gonzaga’s multiple intrusions into scenes of violence directed by his father also register on the level of genre, where they signify interventions into the historical romance. But the gender dynamics of such ruptures in the genre are not fully realized until, in Luis’s absence, Susanita ﬁnds herself the only person who can rescue Alvaro from the Texas Rangers’ noose. The homosocial relationship between Luis and Devlin parallels the historical romance and the heterosexual marriage plots that serve as foils for this alternative “romance.” Their relationship surpasses the racial and sexual assumptions underlying the historical romance. By the end of Caballero, both men leave the United States for Spain, renouncing all national ties in favor of the links forged through a life of art. Having successfully escaped the trappings of the historical romance, Luis Gonzaga emerges by the novel’s end as a citizen of the world. What is so compelling about the homosocial relationship in the midst of the historical romance revisiting the U.S.-Mexican War is its ability to dispel the myths on which such a romance is predicated. In this disjuncture between symbolic and embodied, in the unsexing of interracial marriage plots, lie the homosocial and the homosexual. The homosocial relationship between Luis Gonzaga and Captain Devlin unmoors itself from the national romance of a reframed captivity narrative. Mixed bloods, mestizos, and homosexuals all constitute the legacy of Manifest Destiny through their embodiment of difference— their ability to decouple body from nation because they defy the homogeneous urge for absorption, undifferentiation (the abstract “person” in the Constitution). Luis and Devlin’s romance decouples the Mexicanas in Post-1848 United States

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metaphorical link between body and nation, between family and nation. The ﬁgure of the Mexican male and the anxieties of beset white manhood are the subject of the next chapter. Unlike the romance of Devlin and Luis presented in Caballero, the male-male dynamic of popular war songs was animated by an intense desire for difference and its hierarchical structure. In its analysis of war-song lyrics and patriotic poetry, “Embodying the West” draws from the dynamics of minstrelsy and the American Revolution that masked white male privilege and the political and pseudoscientiﬁc racial doctrines on which it relied.

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3. Embodying the West Lyrics from the U.S.-Mexican War

[First Page] The Leg I Left Behind Me (sung to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me”)

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I am stumpless quite since from the shot Of Cerro Gordo peggin’, I left behind, to pay Gen. Scott, My grub, and gave my leg in. I dare not turn to view the place Lest Yankee foes should ﬁnd me, And mocking shake before my face The Leg I Left Behind Me.

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ithin the pages of the Rough and Ready Songster, 1 a collection of song lyrics from the U.S.-Mexican War, is a sketch of a Mexican soldier meant to illustrate, in simple pen and ink, the easy business of fulﬁlling Manifest Destiny. 2 Dominating the drawing is the common iconography of illness: a sling, patch, and bandages. The body is failed, defeated, unmanly. What identiﬁes the body’s owner is, not surprisingly, another wound—a wooden leg. This artiﬁcial limb, combined with a tripartite hat, unquestionably identify the wounded body as Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna, Mexico’s own Napoleon. In place of a uniform, Mexico’s military leader wears a loincloth that resembles a diaper covering the ultimate site of emasculation, the groin. These physical markers gloss the pseudoscientiﬁc disciplines of phrenology and physiognomy—popular in the United States in the midnineteenth century—which strove to factually bind outward appearance with the unseen qualities of morality and intelligence. Questions

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regarding the racial identity of Mexicans, a central debate after the peace treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo conferred citizenship onto former Mexican citizens, would turn to these quasi-scientiﬁc models to deny rights and privileges. But even before the war’s end—perhaps because of the “double-time” of Manifest Destiny, which presupposed territorial capture as early as 1845—the Mexican question illustrated the nation’s volatility. 3 The nationalism of Manifest Destiny could not contain all of the meanings generated by the Songster’s preoccupation with the Mexican soldier’s body, depicted in its lyrics as well as its drawings. Anxieties about race, class—indeed, the very identity of the nation—were grafted onto the failed bodies of Mexican soldiers. As Raymund Paredes discovered in his survey of American literature, no singular image of Mexicans dominates.4 Indeed, the depiction of Mexicans in U.S. ﬁction varies within a particular moment, reminding us as critics and historians that no time is ever without its own dissonance. 5 Far from a singular voice of militaristic might and righteousness, war songs did not necessarily harmonize with the jingoism of Manifest Destiny. The popular products of material culture—dime novels and war songs—reﬂect their polysemous nature, their ability to reproduce and mollify the disparate tensions and desires of what Michael Rogin termed the American 1848. 6 Evinced in the lyrics and in the borrowed melodies of songs from previous wars, the convictions driving the U.S.-Mexican War were ambiguous and oftentimes contradictory. Eric Lott argues “so visible were the social contradictions in American life from the start of the Mexican War in 1846 . . . that earnest analogies and casual representations, generic conventions and allegorical ﬂights of fancy—social ﬁgurations of almost every kind—threatened a formidable visitation of unwelcome meanings and resonances” (169). As an indication of the tumultuousness of the country at midcentury, its wrestling with slavery and its class warfare waged between the industrial North and the agrarian South, the Rough and Ready Songster references the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and, through its use of minstrel song, the slave question. On the surface, the U.S.-Mexican War seems, like all military conﬂicts, to evoke scenes of battles past and to create a seamless narrative of U.S. military strength and national history. However, the preponderance of these other historical referents, coupled 52

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with their very key racial and imperial characteristics, bespeak a larger uneasiness with Mexicans and their potential for U.S. citizenry. Indeed, the U.S.-Mexican War is a singular event in that it marked the country’s entry into imperialism on an international scale and potentially opened up the category of citizen beyond the 1790 deﬁnition of free, white male. 7 Certainly, the nation had invaded other territory before, but never on the scale of 1848 and never with a mind to incorporate the residents of that territory as legal citizens. 8 At midcentury, the domestic metaphor was ubiquitous, but its saturation in the national consciousness was also dangerous, for any modiﬁcation or challenge to the domestic would be to large-scale effect.9 At ﬁrst glance, the war songs collected in the Rough and Ready Songster seem to champion the cause of Manifest Destiny, yet further investigation of the lyrics and melodies reveals a messy tangle of references to racial, national, and class-based tensions plaguing the United States. This sense of chaos, of a nation more divided than united, manifests itself in the various guises assumed by the Mexican male body in the songs, and in what Lott terms the “racial ambiguity” of the musical form. Thus, it is only ﬁtting that the medium of popular song should be the forum for sounding out issues of national identity on micro and macro levels in relation to the newly expanded landscape. Texas: Marriage for Love In 1836 Texas gained its independence from Mexico and functioned as a republic—independent of both the United States and Mexico—until annexation by the United States in 1845. The ﬁght for independence accelerated the U.S.-Mexican War and ﬁrst introduced the nation to the ﬁgure of Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna. To resolve the dispute over the Texas-Mexico border (Mexico claimed it to be the Nueces River, and the United States insisted on the Río Grande–Río Bravo), President Polk sent Gen. Zachary Taylor with troops to occupy the land under question, the Nueces Strip. Mexico recognized this maneuver as a declaration of war. Not surprisingly, several U.S.–Mexican War songs, reproduced in the Rough and Ready Songster, mention the dispute over Texas. In one particularly telling song, the annexation of Texas is cast as a marriage to the United States. Lyrics from the U.S.-Mexican War

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Uncle Sam’s Song to Miss Texas —tune “Yankee Doodle” Walk in my tall haired Indian gal, Your hand, my s[t]ar-eyed Texas, You’re welcome to our White House hall, Tho’ Mexy’s hounds would vex us; Come on an’ take some Johnny cake, With lasses snug an’ coodle; For than an’ Independence make, A full blood Yankee Doodle. Yankee Doodle is the word, Surpassin’ all creation, With the pipe or with the sword, It makes us love our nation. My overseer, young Jimmy Polk, Shall show you all my nieces, An’ then the cabinet we’ll smoke, Until our eagle sneezes; If Johnny Bull’s fat greedy boys, About our union grumble, I’ll kick up sich a tarnal noise, ’Twill make ’em feel quite humble. Yankee Doodle, & etc. If Mexy, back’d by secret foes, Still talks of taking you, gal, Why we can lick ’em all, you know, For Freedom’s great millennium, Is working airth’s salvation, Her sassy kingdom soon will come, Annexin’ all creation. Singing Yankee Doodle, & etc.

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“Uncle Sam’s Song to Miss Texas” accomplishes with relative ease a sophisticated reconﬁguration of the Southwest Territory through the guise of adoption, “salvation,” and love. Texas, depicted as “my tall haired Indian gal,” is inaugurated into the high social circle of 54

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“our White House hall.” The annexation is allegorized as a romance, perhaps even imagined in the very structured frame of a novel of manners, which is preoccupied with marriage plots among the wealthy and beautiful and particularly attentive to the coming-out season.10 But what is imagined to be a marriage of love is really one of money. Not surprisingly, class tensions brewing nationally—reﬂected here in the juxtaposition of the White House and a political merger alongside mention of johnny cake and dialect (represented by the apostrophe for certain missing letters in words and by misspelled words)—surface in a song about the U.S.-Mexican War. 11 After all, many believed the addition of northern Mexico (or all of Mexico, for there were advocates for annexing the entire Mexican nation) would provide an easy answer to the problems of class disparity by opening up the territory to the disenfranchised. 12 The Southwest as willing bride to Uncle Sam satisﬁed the national fantasy of a nurturing, sustaining landscape. As Richard Slotkin notes in The Fatal Environment, the city and the frontier, here the pre-1848 United States and northern Mexico, existed in a dialectic: The particular forms taken by the developing political economy of the Metropolis—its modes of production, its system for valuing social and economic goods, its peculiar culture and history of social relations, its characteristic political institutions—inform the decision to seek the Frontier wealth, and determine the kind of people that will go (or be sent) to the colonies, the kinds of resources they will be interested in, the ways in which they will organize their exploitation and governance of the territory, and so on. (42)

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Following Slotkin’s keen insight, the “Metropolis” manufactured the public’s conception of expansion and eventual interaction with and in the former Spanish borderlands. Within the song’s lyrics, expansion is the panacea for class and racial differences. In taking Texas’s hand, Uncle Sam extends the promise of equality and projects onto the newly acquired territory, the Frontier, a wealth of opportunity and natural resources capable of ﬂooding class and racial conﬂicts. Yet residual class and racial distinctions appear in this song’s reference to President Polk as “my overseer.” Lyrics from the U.S.-Mexican War

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Just as the annexation proves inevitable, “for freedom’s great millennium / is workin’ airth’s salvation,” the marriage between Miss Texas and Uncle Sam occurs offstage. Perhaps the third line, “your hand my star eyed Texas,” does the work of this union. After it, Texas is deracialized as “gal” rather than “Indian gal”—a feat attributable to annexation/marriage—and, in accordance with the captive-captor paradigm discussed in the previous chapter, 13 she is promised support and protection from Mexico: If Mexy, back’d by secret foes, Still talks of taking you, gal, Why we can lick ’em all, you know, For Freedom’s great millennium, Is working airth’s salvation. 14

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The song’s reference to “Johnny Bull,” a term for Britain, alludes to England’s schemes to control the cotton industry in Texas.15 Miss Texas marries for love; the United States will gladly protect her from future captivity, ﬁgured here as reabsorption into Mexico or annexation by Britain. The melody for “Uncle Sam and Miss Texas,” “Yankee Doodle,” erupts into the lyrics and gives voice to the anxiety haunting Texas annexation—the loss of U.S. republican government through its inauguration into the British business of colonialism. Britain’s schemes for Texas as either a partner in cotton trade or a colony both propel and caution its inclusion into the United States. Whigs opposed “the idea of United States colonial rule in the area, for this would endanger the republican form of government; the power of the president would be enhanced, militarism would be rife, and the corruption would sap the vitals of free America” (Horsman 238). Whig fear stemmed primarily from anxieties over racial amalgamation. The Charleston Mercury asked if “we expect to melt into our population eight millions of men, at war with us by race, by language, manners, and laws?” (238). For members of the Whig party, American militarism did not bolster the national physique by ﬂexing some military muscle against Mexican soldiers but rather threatened American republican government both by the incorporation of Mexicans and by annexation’s resemblance to British colonialism. By invading Mexico, the United States proved itself 56

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less the liberating force of “Yankee Doodle” and more the imperial ﬁgure of Johnny Bull. And lest we overlook it, the tone sharply turns to militaristic sacredness, the religious language of war that so profoundly imbued the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, in its ﬁnal line, “annexin’ all creation.” The song’s lyrics mitigate against this latter image of America as a colonial force (“for than an’ independence make / a full blood Yankee Doodle”). The qualiﬁer of “full blood” is quite telling, since the standard racist remarks against Mexicans as a “half-mongrel race” focused on the nation’s common mestizo background. Indeed, after the U.S.-Mexican War, the ratiﬁcation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo stalled over the “Indian question.” 16 Following its independence from Spain, Mexico had awarded citizenship to its indigenous population. If the United States ratiﬁed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave Mexican citizens the option of becoming U.S. citizens, then all Native peoples in the southwest territory would be de facto members of the U.S. citizenry, an outrageous solution given the Indian Removal policies of President Andrew Jackson just years prior. 17 With annexation, Texas sheds its “Indian gal” status and becomes “full blood[ed] Yankee Doodle.” This transformation, marked both in this military song and in the dime novels of the U.S.-Mexican War, is made possible by the “whitening” power of marriage to an Anglo soldier. Texas’s re-identiﬁcation as “a full blood Yankee Doodle” reveals the potential inﬂuence of Enlightenment ideology and cleanses the taint of colonialism from the U.S. invasion by hearkening back to the nation’s founding principles. 18 Thomas Paine and other voices central to the American Revolution were deeply invested in the notions of natural rights and innate equality among men, tenets that also emerged during Texas’s ﬁght for independence from an oppressive Mexican government. 19 Given that the democratic government of Mexico was itself suffering under military despotism and martial law, Stephen F. Austin characterizes the insurrectionary actions of himself and his fellow colonists—who take up arms and travel to Anáhuac to demand the release of the wrongfully imprisoned—as patriotic. 20 Toasting “la federación y la constitución mejicana,” along with General Santa Anna as their defender, Austin and others publicly announced that their loyalties and sentiments lay squarely with the Mexican government Lyrics from the U.S.-Mexican War

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to whom they had pledged their allegiance (Holley 72). Austin champions Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna, even naming themselves the Santa Anna Volunteer Company. This small-scale rebellion is a dress rehearsal for the Texas Revolution of 1836, and is intended to echo the 1776 American Revolution based on shared factors: rights abrogated, lands seized, and elections curtailed (75). In her 1836 emigrant guide, Texas, Mary Austin Holley crafts a usable past out of the American Revolution, thus structuring the Republic of Texas within what Bhaba calls the “double-time” of national narratives. 21 Texas’s independence from Mexico, articulated with the rhetoric common to the American Revolution, focused on the struggle against an oppressive government (Mexico rather than Britain) that denied local representation. This framing of Texas independence as a second American Revolution served a dual purpose—it skillfully marshaled the war into the service of the nation and thus presaged Texas’s annexation by the United States in 1845. Casting these two historical events under the banner and tune of “Yankee Doodle” creates a shared historical past between Texas and the United States and transforms the annexation of Texas into an organic, seamless union. Aside from precipitating the U.S.-Mexican War, the invasion of Texas—and its incorporation into the nation—raised the anxious question of citizenship. What would the domestic look like after 1845? The cheap publication of dime novels, development of the American sheetmusic industry, and unexpected boom in minstrel shows at midcentury all contributed to the suturing of the domestic sphere and an expanded landscape. Historian Robert Johannsen mentions the public craving for Mexican maps and histories of the Spanish Conquest as examples of the war’s impact on cultural and national production at home. 22 Even the midcentury increase in domestic ﬁction was not immune. As Amy Kaplan so brilliantly notes, “The development of domestic discourse in America is contemporaneous with the discourse of Manifest Destiny” (583). 23 Lott illustrates this point by linking the popularity of minstrel shows to the mass publication of dime songbooks, “usually only printed lyrics without music . . . [which] evidently allowed fans of blackface to sing the words at home to tunes they knew by heart from the theater” (171). 24 Stephen Branham remarks on the increased production of pianos at midcentury, many of which were used in homes 58

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as part of a domestic ritual of evening entertainment: “The typical family repertoire included many patriotic and military songs” (131). Sheet-music publishers were able to print lyrics alone not only because theatergoers were familiar with the tunes from the minstrel shows but also because so many of the songs, as has been true for military songs, were adapted to already familiar tunes. 25 Because the metaphor of home and nation so dominated national discourse, the notion of annexation appears as marriage not only in war song lyrics but also in dime novels and in domestic ﬁction set in and during the U.S.-Mexican War. 26 Kaplan argues that U.S. imperialism penetrated the “privileged space of the domestic novel—the interiority of the female subject—to ﬁnd traces of foreignness that must be domesticated or expunged.” This is the dialectic of domestic/foreign on the smallest scale. If one were to imagine this relationship mapped out in concentric circles, the next level would be the protection of the home from the foreign threat posed by domestic slaves and servants. At the largest, national level, Kaplan writes, “ ‘Manifest Domesticity’ turns an imperial nation into a home by producing and colonizing specters of the foreign that lurk inside and outside of its ever shifting borders” (602). In terms of the U.S.-Mexican War, the political—and thus the racial—identities of residents in the Southwest are forged in the constant struggle between “foreign” and “domestic.” In the next tune from the Rough and Ready Songster, you can see how the nation wrestled with the Mexican question, framing it more broadly as parallel to the slave question, not merely because of uncertainty about whether the new territory would upset the balance of slave and free states but also because of the debate over the racial identity of Mexicans and thus their ﬁtness for U.S. citizenship. “Get Out de Way”: Old Dan Tucker and Santa Anna Uncle Sam and Mexico —tune “Old Dan Tucker” Throughout de land dar is a cry, And folks all know de reason why, Shy Mexico’s two-legged b’ars, Am ’tacking Uncle Sammy’s stars, Lyrics from the U.S.-Mexican War

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Chorus wid drum— Den march away, Den march away— Den march away, bold sons of freedom, You’re de boys can skin and bleed ’em. Dey’re kicken up gunpowderation, About de Texas annexation, Since Mexico makes sich ado, We’ll ﬂog her and annex her too. Den march away &c Young Texas came on de Rio Grandy, We showed ’em Yankee Doodle Dandy But when brave Taylor cross de line, He’ll make ’em snort like a steam bullgine Den march away &c Little Texas when quite in her teens, Did give ’em a dose of leading beans, An’ now old Sammy is called out, Dey’ll catch salt-petre sour crout. Den march away, &c Since Texas cut off Sant Anna’s peg, We’ll Amputate Ampudia’s leg, An’ so his carcass de air shan’t spoil We’ll boil it in his own hot oil.

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With a willing bride in Texas, U.S.-Mexican war songs painted the Mexican government, embodied in its soldiers and in Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna, as “foreign,” transforming them into a threat to Mexican women and land. Through these grotesque and disﬁgured Mexican male bodies, the war songs erase the guilt of conquest and western expansion by demonstrating that victory is inevitable, that Manifest Destiny will be fulﬁlled. And yet, creating the spectacle of the Mexican male body as unhealthy and effeminate serves another purpose—it nearly compels miscegenation in the form of Anglo males rescuing Mexican and Mexican American women from Mexican men, as we’ll see in the ﬁnal poem, “They Wait for Us.” Sung to the tune of “Old Dan Tucker,” “Uncle Sam and Mexico” 60

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ﬁxates on the dismemberment of Mexican generals Ampudia and Santa Anna as a metaphor for the splitting apart of the Mexican nation through the annexation of nearly one third of Mexican territory by war’s end. “From the beginning of the forties on, the publication of minstrel songs proceeded at an ever increasing rate. Aside from adaptations of texts to well-known tunes, taken even from operas, there appeared within one decade about two dozen songs which constitute the most indigenous American music apart from somewhat earlier southern folk hymns and the New England hymn tunes and their settings of the late eighteenth century” (Nathan 175). Hans Nathan includes “Old Dan Tucker” among those songs. 27 Daniel D. Emmet, probably best known for writing or plagiarizing “Dixie,” reportedly composed “Old Dan Tucker” at the age of ﬁfteen and performed it during a Fourth of July celebration at Mount Vernon in 1830.28 Perhaps the tune ﬁrst gained national recognition in 1843 when Emmet’s quartet, the Original Virginia Minstrels, performed it at the Bowery Amphitheater in New York. “By the late 1840s agitation around the issue of western lands was such that every invocation of westward movement brought with it the bitter question of whether newly acquired territory would be slave or free, a rather ominous fact given the importance of manifest destiny to northern social aspiration. It is in every respect striking, therefore, that black minstrelsy should have moved to the cultural center at precisely this moment, and . . . by means of the matter of the West” (Lott 203). Although some historians argue that it would not be until Jim Crow days in the South that Mexicans and African Americans were conﬂated, 29 the texturing of “Uncle Sam and Mexico” over “Old Dan Tucker” perhaps hints at the recognition by politicians and U.S. citizens alike that the U.S.-Mexican War would increase southern territory and thus upset the balance of abolitionist and slave states. 30 Overlaying war-song lyrics on top of a minstrel song illustrates racial ambiguity on two levels: there is the mixing of racially marked melodic structure and the unknown racial identity of Mexicans, depicted by many newspaper editorials as a “mongrel race.” In his study of nineteenthcentury music, Richard Middleton draws a key distinction between forms of repetition: musematic repetition, which is characterized by riffs and shouts of African American music, and discursive repetition, Lyrics from the U.S.-Mexican War

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which is a repetition of musical phrasing typiﬁed by Anglo-American popular music. The musematic repetition of “Get out de way” in “Old Dan Tucker,” replaced with the phrase “Den March Away” in “Uncle Sam and Mexico,” keeps racial difference as a key issue at the level of melody. Preoccupation with Mexican savagery on the battleﬁeld maintains this issue at the level of lyrics. Just as the ﬁrst song analyzed takes up a host of issues animating Texas’s annexation, afromestizos, the Black Legend, and the slave question haunt “Uncle Sam and Mexico.” 31 In Recovering History, Constructing Race, Martha Menchaca outlines Mexico’s connection with Africa and slavery via Spanish colonialism.32 As Menchaca writes, [62], (12 Portuguese slave expeditions coincided with Spanish colonialism and the “discovery” of the New World. Thus, black slaves began arriving in Mexico in 1519 (41–48). The result was the creation of afromestizos, Lines: 2 who were a mixture of indigenous and African peoples. When the war ——— ended in 1848, Mexicans’ black roots were a source of panic, based 14.0p ——— on the fear of miscegenation and the loss of white racial purity and Normal national identity. This panic played itself out in the same way that it * PgEnds: did for black men: lynchings, myths of sexual promiscuity and lasciviousness, and propaganda testifying to Mexicans’ general incapacity [62], (12 for civility and other markers of citizenship. Although church and census records bear out a sustained pattern of interracial marriages between Mexicans and Anglo-Americans, these unions threatened the domain of Anglo-American men once territorial conquest was achieved. Indeed, Whig opposition to the war cited the popular “scientiﬁc” racial theories of the day. Just as Mexican claims to land were immediately under question (California instituted the Land Commission to survey and rule on Spanish and Mexican land grants as early as 1851), Mexicans’ claims to a privileged racial position— necessary to gain access to legal rights—were equally suspect. Tomás Almaguer, Martha Menchaca, and others have studied the creation of “white Mexicans” in California who were granted the rights and privileges of U.S. citizens based on their claims to pure Spanish blood. Nonwhite Mexicans struggled through the court systems in their respective states for legal rights. Manifest in these struggles was the desire to marry. As Menchaca notes, the black-white binary was an 62

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overpowering lens for viewing all interracial marriages. If Mexicans were deemed to be black, then their marriages to whites were illegal. Mexicans’ black ancestry was a subject for concern in the question of annexation because of the issue of incorporating black citizens in the U.S. Just as musematic repetition peppers a song with African American shouts, the original lyrics of “Old Dan Tucker” weave into the song’s new lyrics and create a chorus as they test the mettle of Mexican masculinity along lines of black male identity. In the original song, Dan Tucker is a foolish African slave whose “nose so ﬂat, his face so full, / De top ob his head like a bag ob wool.” 33 Fixating on Dan Tucker’s body and its tell-tale racial markers provides racial undertones to a musical tune and lyrical background for soldiers to overlay lyrics about Mexico’s generals. In the song, General Santa Anna is imagined in very violent states of current and future dismemberment. He is effectively castrated, “since Texas cut off [his] peg.” It was well known that General Santa Anna lost a “peg,” one of two prosthetic legs, at the Battle of Cerro Gordo.34 To this day, his leg remains a national spectacle, a site of American heartiness and triumph over the dandy Mexicans. Currently housed in the Illinois State Military Museum, General Santa Anna’s leg is a spoil of war and, as such, cannot be returned to Mexico. It did, however, tour during the World’s Fair of 1851. General Santa Anna’s extravagance, coded as a feminized unﬁtness for war, is related in the story of his lost leg—he was eating a lunch of roasted chicken when an infantry unit from Illinois surprised him and he was forced to make a hasty retreat without chicken or the leg—and in the popular song “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” his other famous surprise during the Battle of San Jacinto, which also led to a hasty retreat, this time without his pants. 35 In both instances, the songs create an image of Santa Anna as unﬁt for military service. General Santa Anna’s defeats at both battles are synecdoches for Mexico’s losses: Texas independence in 1836 and the annexation of the Southwest territory in 1848. Further, his physical body and its well-noted shortcomings—his height as well as his prosthetic leg—gloss the inadequacies of Mexican soldiers and the Mexican government. 36 The threat of boiling General Ampudia’s leg in his “own hot oil” retaliates against Mexican cruelty by supposedly mastering the sadistic Lyrics from the U.S.-Mexican War

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art of decapitation and mixing in just a dash of cannibalism. Texturing the song over “Old Dan Tucker” furthers the cannibalism reference, as the original song’s chorus concludes: “You’re too late to come to supper.” The (black) legend behind this verse refers to Ampudia’s order to decapitate a disobedient ofﬁcer under his command in the Yucatán. This head was then boiled in oil (it is unclear if this action was taken at Ampudia’s request or under the soldier’s own initiative) and stuck on a pole as a warning to other insubordinate soldiers.37 In “Uncle Sam and Mexico,” the U.S. Army sings of its ability to outdo the savagery of the Mexicans, which involves amputation, decapitation, cannibalism, and emasculation. Unlike the “Yellow Rose of Texas,” which indirectly addresses General Santa Anna’s prowess as a lover, “Uncle Sam and Mexico” directly attacks his virility, with the line “dey’ll catch salt-petre.” Also known as potassium nitrate, saltpeter was reported to prevent erections, and legends abound that military food was dusted with saltpeter to limit the number of rapes committed during wars. In the song, saltpeter clearly enhances the emasculating overtone. Perhaps we should read the reference to cutting off Santa Anna’s peg and “catching salt-petre” as direct reactions to his virility; he is emasculated precisely because his virility is inappropriate—he is sexual with a light-skinned African American woman. 38 Emasculation, in the case of Santa Anna, manifests itself through hypermasculinity, thus canceling out his maleness. In reading these two songs alongside each other, coupled with a knowledge of the widespread practice of interracial marriage between Anglos and Mexicans, we recognize the nuanced and ﬂuid nature of antimiscegenation laws. 39 They Wait for Us—Spanish Brides The Spanish maid, with eye of ﬁre, At balmy evening turns her lyre And, looking to the Eastern sky, Awaits our Yankee chivalry Whose purer blood and valiant arms, Are ﬁt to clasp her budding charms. The man, her mate, is sunk in sloth— To love, his senseless heart is loth: 64

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The pipe and glass and tinkling lute; A sofa, and a dish of fruit; A nap, some dozen times a day; Sombre and sad, and never gay. Originally published in the Boston Uncle Sam on June 20, 1846, “They Wait for Us” appears among a handful of patriotic poems in McCarty’s compilation National Songs, Ballads, and Other Patriotic Poetry and is unique for the absence of any language of war, mention of bravery, or reference to a particular battle or victory. And yet, this patriotic poem becomes the culmination of the work performed by the war songs: it quite deliberately feminizes Mexican men as a means of sanctioning romance and marriage with Mexican women. The description of the “Spanish maid” is a far cry from the “tallhaired Indian gal” of the ﬁrst song discussed; this transformation should be read as a precursor to an international rather than interracial union. The Mexican man, “her mate,” is described as the corruption of wealth—decadence. He is “loth” to love; we might imagine that his heart has become “senseless” from overindulgence in the lute, the pipe, the glass, the nap, and the dish of fruit. Not only does the laundry list of luxuries overstate his decadence, but their elevation in value above the Spanish maid evidences the inappropriateness of his wealth and, more signiﬁcantly, his desires. He is effete. Historian Antonia Castañeda interprets this poem in the following succinct manner: “The meaning is clear—Mexicans cannot appreciate, love, direct, or control their women/country” (149). 40 In the absence of an attentive lover, the Spanish maid pines for “Yankee chivalry,” with “purer blood and valiant arms.” Clearly, the racialization cuts across gender and class lines; yet unlike Cecil Robinson’s argument, class status does not secure whiteness for the Mexican male. 41 He in fact is “senseless” from an inability to balance his various temptations, so much so that he has neglected his mate. This image of the dandy Mexican male is not, however, far removed from the reading of General Santa Anna. This racialization of Mexican suitors arises from the preoccupation with arranged marriages, a Spanish custom among the aristocratic class, and a profound desire to remove the land-grubbing charLyrics from the U.S.-Mexican War

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acter from Anglo colonists, gold diggers in their marriages to Mexican women. There exists, however, another aspect of the characterization of Mexican men that is not fully addressed in the criticism of Myers, Paredes, or Robinson—the Mexican dandy. Travel writers in the Southwest consistently remarked upon the elaborate costuming of Mexican men, caballeros and rancheros, and their stubborn sense of pride that was nearly always translated as arrogance. It is in the ﬁgure of the Mexican dandy, who is likewise the rival suitor of Anglo soldiers in U.S.–Mexican War dime novels, that we witness the crossover between literature and war songs. Overly attentive to his dress, to the silver studs on his charro suit (and, I might add, we would not be aware of these sumptuary details were it not for the writers who painstakingly recorded them in their own travel narratives), the Mexican ranchero is routinely described in derisive terms as a dandy. 42 This reading is, of course, shot through with the anxieties of the colonists not encountering their fantasy in the Southwest—a de-peopled frontier at best or, at worst, a hostile “savage” population that can be overcome easily. There was no literary precedent for writing about the original inhabitants of the Southwest; they had to be invented to secure the rights of Manifest Destiny that animated them. Not only were such Anglo travelers as Charles Lummis and Richard Henry Dana dismayed by the presence of three hundred years of Mexican, Spanish, and indigenous cultures, they were perhaps even further bewildered by the opulence of Spanish landowners. Thus, the ﬁgure of the Spanish dandy was formed. He was extremely arrogant, superﬁcial, interested only in his appearance and in pleasure. 43 Indeed, if we consider Leslie Fiedler’s thesis that the frontier was speciﬁcally characterized in literature as a male space created in the absence of women’s “civilizing forces,” then we recognize the mechanism that emasculated the Spanish don. The ﬁgure of Old Rough and Ready, which appears as the frontispiece of the Rough and Ready Songster (1848), embodies the United States. He is tall, conﬁdent, leaning a bit leisurely against a fence. In light of the above discussion of the emasculation of Spanish dons, we can recognize ironically how a U.S. military aesthetic of clean lines, and an almost European uniform, functions as the standard by which all subsequent ﬁgures will be judged. In direct contrast to his name, 66

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“Rough and Ready,” Zachary Taylor appears reﬁned and relaxed. He takes pride in his appearance, but he does so through the masculine civilizing structure of the military; his leisurely pose stems from his conﬁdence in inevitable U.S. victory rather than in the ennui that befalls pleasure-seekers. 44 Anxieties over the nation’s robustness—its strength as an international force invading Mexico, an ongoing inferiority complex with Britain, and the racial tensions of slavery and the slave question in the newly acquired Southwest—in short, all these anxieties about a nation on the verge of the Civil War are gendered as masculine and displaced onto the ﬁgure of the Mexican male. It is not enough for [67], (17) Anglo soldiers to turn suitor and woo Mexican women; they must prove themselves on the battleﬁeld as well. White male panic turns Lines: 297 to Mexican foes into one of two images: the fearsome, barbaric heathen ——— represented by Generals Santa Anna and Ampudia who rape women * 28.0pt Pg and order decapitations, and the effete or dandy, also represented by ——— General Santa Anna, whose moral character and fortitude have deNormal Page generated through overindulgence in luxuries. In her analysis of the PgEnds: TEX gendered politics toward Spain that attended the Spanish-American War, Kristin Hoganson writes of the seemingly contradictory attacks [67], (17) on the enemy’s masculinity: “Like the stereotypically savage Spaniards, the seemingly childlike and feminine Spaniards seemed to exemplify perverted gender roles” (50). Far from an exclusively male discourse, war songs borrow heavily from the feminine realm of sentimentality, which, as Shirley Samuels argues, was a “national project: in particular a project about imagining the nation’s bodies and the national body” (3). What better discourse to address the literal and metaphorical question of the post-1848 national body than sentimentality? After all, marriage as a domestic metaphor for annexation appears in two of the three texts, and in both cases, as in the dime-novel plots, the unions are characterized by mutual feeling and set in opposition to arranged marriages. But, as Gillian Silverman has so brilliantly demonstrated in “the paradox of sentimentalism,” this discourse of political egalitarianism can also reinforce racial and socioeconomic hierarchies. 45 Lyrics from the U.S.-Mexican War

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Vanishing Americans: “The Indian Race of Mexico” When Waddy Thompson, minister for the Whig administration in 1842, traveled to Mexico, he projected the disappearance of Mexico’s native population: “That the Indian race of Mexico must recede before us is quite as certain as that that is the destiny of our own Indians.” 46 Although he was opposed to aggressive expansionism, Thompson imagined Mexico’s indigenous population mysteriously disappearing in a manner akin to James Fenimore Cooper’s vanishing race. 47 In Home Fronts, critic Lora Romero recognizes that much of the anxiety about racial difference, land entitlement, and miscegenation was grafted onto the bodies of American Indian characters who were depicted hurling themselves en masse headlong off of cliffs and other precipices.48 As Romero argues, the top-heavy, suicidal American Indians conveniently rid the United States of themselves, voluntarily abandoning their former lands to the more hearty Americans for cultivation and further western expansion. Romero cleverly links the particular form of death—headlong plunging—with the “anxiety over the decorporealization of power [that] compels the advice offered time and again in educational treatises in the early nineteenth century: more emphasis should be placed upon the cultivation of the juvenile body and less upon the development of the juvenile mind” (46). The unhealthy (read “dead”) bodies of American Indians buttress Anglo-American masculinity, which was dangerously undermined by the feminizing teachings of true women. 49 Weak male subjectivity is displaced onto the bodies of American Indians and Mexicans, and Anglo-American males (re)gain their physical and mental supremacy. The fantasy of a vanishing race, extended to include Mexico’s indigenous population, would erase the fear of miscegenation and other threats to the newly created notion of Anglo-Saxonism coterminous with expansionism. Here we witness how the dominating metaphor of home and nation can work against its intended purpose. The perpetual struggle between foreign and domestic is inadvertently sustained by this act of U.S. imperialism, and the threat to the domestic becomes the threat of the domestic. In other words, the newly acquired territory is immediately feminized (as in the marriage of Miss Texas to Uncle Sam and the pining Spanish maid in the last poem) to shore up the masculin68

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ity of an overdomesticated Anglo-American male population; Mexican men are dandiﬁed to the same effect. Mexican women are deracialized and depicted as eager brides to Anglo suitors. An overreliance on the domestic metaphor, however, is not without cost. Taken together, the war songs and patriotic poetry collected in the Rough and Ready Songster and National Songs, Ballads, and Other Patriotic Poetry attempt to simplify and mollify the fears of white masculinity and the sanctity of the national family romance surrounding the U.S.-Mexican War. They dress up annexation in wedding clothes and take Texas to the altar; they castrate or otherwise emasculate Mexican men through their obsession with Santa Anna’s leg, and they oppose the effeteness of Mexican wealth—coded as male—with the body of Zachary Taylor, Old Rough and Ready. What results from these lyrics and poetry is a national discourse of Manifest Destiny that sugarcoats marriages of convenience, the disenfranchisement of landed Mexican families, and the gold-grubbing desires that animated the U.S.-Mexican War. As I have argued, the culmination of these documents of popular culture—war songs, patriotic poetry, and dime-novel plots—converge over the issue of gold, speciﬁcally the gold discovered at Sutter’s Mill soon after the U.S.-Mexican War. Taken together, these elements of mid-nineteenth-century popular culture work assiduously to justify gold digging of various kinds: interracial marriages intended to fatten up the pockets of Anglo settlers and a war that doubled the U.S. territory. The topics covered in this chapter speak to the anxieties that a fractious and contentious midcentury—divided by class, race, gender, and religion—presented to American soldiers doing battle with Mexico. Far from a monolithic fantasy of body and nation, the war-song lyrics give voice to national concerns over how the United States as an imperial power will deﬁne itself against its former colonizer, Britain, and how the war’s aftermath will maintain the national sense of continuity and racial purity. White males stood to lose the most from a post-1848 world; Mexicans, American Indians, current and former slaves, and women all posed threats to the national symbolic and to the very limited deﬁnitions of U.S. citizen. In the following chapter, I investigate the impact that challenges to the static national symbolic of Lyrics from the U.S.-Mexican War

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body to nation, woman to nation, had on notions of white manhood and Manifest Destiny in general. By looking at the ﬁgure of the female soldier, who troubles “normal” gender roles, chapter 4 continues the work of this chapter by redeﬁning foreign and domestic, reframing the marriage plot in wartimes, and drawing on the U.S.-Mexican War’s impact on women’s rights.

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4. Masquerade of Manifest Destiny Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

[First Page] One of the cultural functions of the transvestite is precisely to mark this kind of displacement, substitution, or slippage: from class to gender, gender to class; or, equally plausibly, from gender to race or religion. The transvestite is both a signiﬁer and that which signiﬁes the undecidability of signiﬁcation. It points toward itself—or, rather, toward the place where it is not. —Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests (1992)

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n its series “Women of the Revolution,” which ran throughout the U.S.-Mexican War, Godey’s Lady’s Book celebrated women who proved their patriotism. In one particular account of the life of Elizabeth Gilliam, who is identiﬁed in the article’s subtitle as aunt to John C. Calhoun, Mrs. R. F. Ellet recalls how Mrs. Caldwell (she married Robert Gilliam near the end of the Revolutionary War) effected the safe escape of herself and James Creswell from “a body of Tories.” Ordering two horses to be saddled and made ready, she disguised James as a young girl, replete with bonnet to hide his face. Mrs. Caldwell and a cross-dressed James rode safely to a neighbor’s house, even passing by the Tories on their way (339–40). In this brief anecdote are all the elements of this chapter: cross-dressing, the reemergence of the American Revolution in 1846, and the gender and racial dynamics that a war unwittingly generates. As Garber’s opening quote recognizes, cross-dressing marks various movements or displacements across aspects of identity. As a signiﬁer of the unpredictability of identity, of its discursiveness and thus

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mutability, transvestites become the ultimate symbol of ﬂuidity and are thus apt ﬁgures for the concurrent debates over the Mexican and woman questions at midcentury. In previous chapters’ examinations of the linkages between war and love plots through the reframing of the captivity narrative, the female ﬁgure is passive, the relationship dominated by the compulsively heterosexual desire of mexicanas and Anglo soldiers/suitors. These “foundational ﬁctions” rely on the absent white female, whose position as “True Woman” is assumed by her “enwhitened” Mexican counterpart. What about the homosocial and homoerotic desires between white and Mexican women? What happens when the woman is armed and cross-dressed on the battleﬁeld? How do the reemergence of the Amazon and the politics of 1776 elucidate female-female “romances,” both homosocial and homoerotic, in 1848? A preponderance of U.S.–Mexican War dime novels contain at least one scene in which Mexican heroines dress as soldiers and prove their mettle on the battleﬁeld. 1 During a time period in which captivity narratives follow Namias’s archetype of the Frail Flower (captive as victim) rather than her predecessor, the Amazon (captive as rescuer), the ﬁgure of an active female engaged in battle, rescuing or defending her lover and her father, seems amiss. 2 Within the Amazonian tales, inaugurated by the publication of Hannah Dustan’s narrative in 1697, we ﬁnd accounts of women scalping American Indians, shooting them, stabbing them as they sleep, and in other ways physically resisting capture and gaining freedom. 3 By the 1830s, Namias argues, this category gave way to the Frail Flower, whose fainting spells and general passivity resonated with the cult of true womanhood. Gone, it would seem, were the Amazons, and yet they were stock ﬁgures in the war’s dime novels, in the nation’s revisiting of the American Revolution, and in such female soldiers as Deborah Sampson. The woman warrior, supposedly doomed to the pages of history books and to dusty memory, was very much alive. In fact, in Godey’s Lady’s Book—a conservative magazine dedicated to upholding the virtues of true womanhood—dime novels and, indirectly, the ﬁgure of the cross-dressed soldier (invariably contained within their pages) were recommended heartily to readers. The magazine’s endorsement was not the only way in which Godey’s participated in a reconﬁguration 72

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of femininity based on conditions of the U.S.-Mexican War. Edited by Sarah Hale, the magazine published poetry, editorials, and serials on all things related to Mexico and the War. In the larger context of the magazine’s virtual silence and disengagement during the Civil War just a few years later, Godey’s active engagement and promotion of the U.S.-Mexican War and Manifest Destiny are all the more remarkable and noteworthy (Kaplan 592). It is only ﬁtting that cross-dressing be discussed in a book dedicated to elements of the captivity narrative, since both cultural rituals deal directly and obsessively with exchange and, in its abstract form, surrogacy. Beginning with Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, in which she was asked to name the price for her own ransom, and continuing into the nineteenth century with questions about the cultural currency of women, at the center of debates over the value of women is the notion of their literal and symbolic place within the nation. After 1848, when Mexicans were ostensibly offered citizenship and its attendant rights, the merging of Mexico and the United States had unexpected consequences for Mexican and Anglo-American women. In its capacity to reference multiple substitutions, the cross-dresser is the ideal ﬁgure for unpacking the counterintuitive relationship between Mexican and Anglo-American women at midcentury. Divorced from the black-white binary so dominant in the national imaginary, the brown-white dynamic informed by the U.S.-Mexican War explains more fully why white women looked to Spanish and Mexican women when constructing arguments for suffrage and legal rights, why the readers of Godey’s Lady’s Book enjoyed the ﬁgure of the cross-dressed mexicana soldiers in the dime novels celebrated in Hale’s journal, and why the mexicana in a signiﬁcant number of texts is cast as an AngloAmerican woman in brownface. In Godey’s “Editor’s Book Table” section, Sarah Hale writes approvingly of Arthur Woodleigh: A Romance of the Battle Field in Mexico (1847): “Everything connected within the Mexican War is replete with interest, and Mr. Greely has succeeded in working up a very pretty tale, by mingling characters taken from the two nations” (June 1848, emphasis mine). “Mingling,” as Hale puts it, glosses a forced marriage between Paquita, the unrequited lover of Woodleigh, and Richard Ashmun, the villain who “ruined” her and fathered their illegitimate child. Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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More interesting still, however, is the “mingling” that transpires in the cross-dressed ﬁgure of Clara Myers, Arthur’s ﬁancée, who follows him into battle ﬁrst cross-dressed as a soldier named Robin, and later in brownface as Doña Altamira, a wealthy, veiled Spanish woman. Paquita and a cross-dressed, brownfaced Clara allude to the perhaps counterintuitive female-female dynamics mediating white feminism. Rather than imagining the mexicana’s ﬁtness for true womanhood, the dime novels indulge in the fantasy of the erotic and exotic Mexican woman whose performance on and off the battleﬁeld make her equally captivating to male and female readers. The female-female attraction depicted in Eliza Allen’s The Female Volunteer, in which two Mexican sisters fall for Allen disguised as George Mead, does not merely reverse the kind of eroticized preoccupation with the Mexican female body that accounts for the popularity of dime novels in Godey’s. 4 Much as the minstrel show informed relations of white masculinity along and across racial lines, the dime novels’ female-soldier storylines became the medium for articulating white feminine identity, including the nativism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments” and the creation of New York’s Married Women’s Property Act in 1851. In multiple and signiﬁcant ways, Mexican women became liberating ﬁgures for white womanhood. In his reading of the dynamics of humor in minstrel shows, Eric Lott draws on Freud’s triangulation of the joking process to illustrate how the minstrel theater’s objectifying gaze of the black male shored up white masculinity. In other words, the white male audience member and the white performer in blackface, who comprise two of the three ﬁgures in the triangle, “share a dominative relationship to a black man” (Lott 163). In this reading of the gaze, the black man’s body— or merely its metonymic referent in the corked-up face, outlandish clothing, and antics of the performer—constitutes the medium and the means of white masculine domination. 5 Overlaying this geometry of power onto the dime novel and its ﬁgure of the Spanish maiden-turnedsoldier reveals a similar dynamic at work: the cross-dressed soldier exceeds both racial and gender boundaries and in her transgressions becomes either the object of national reconciliation, at times rekindling desire between Anglo soldiers and the Anglo women who have been left behind, or else a direct threat to Manifest Destiny’s masquerade. 6 74

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Through its black-white binary, minstrelsy directly addressed the dynamics of slavery and indirectly expressed apprehension over the nation’s ever-widening class divisions associated with northern industrialization. The genre’s use of cross-dressing actors, who deliberately ﬂouted racial and gender lines in their skits, touched upon the growing unease with the woman question that gained national recognition with the Seneca Falls Convention at the war’s end in 1848. 7 In the anxieties over the national body with respect to the U.S.-Mexican War, however, dime novels, war songs, and the ﬁgure of the Mexican female soldier supplant the minstrel show. Dime novels’ persistent references to minstrelsy (e.g., Alabama Joe, dancing Jim Crow, characters assuming disguises that cross racial and gender boundaries, etc.) reveal the deep connections between the two popular forms of entertainment. 8 The presence of minstrel elements in dime novels guides readers through recognizable, formulaic caricatures informing and reﬂecting national ambiguities about the war and its possible consequences. The ﬁgure of the Mexican soldadera is no exception. For men, she is the feminization of Mexico; she is not, to be sure, the “world’s mother” of minstrel shows whom Lott analyzes, but she is born out of the same anxiety female agency produces in white males (147). For white women, she becomes a fantasy in much the same way that Christopher Castiglia views the female captive. For Castiglia, the female captivity narrative not only constitutes a form of female picaresque, allowing for women and their readers to travel widely and enjoy adventures, it also creates the possibility of female solidarity and community across racial and cultural lines. 9 Some of this community-building comes in the form of reading publics who gather to discuss the narratives (in this manner, Castiglia follows Habermas’s idea of reading publics), but there is also the kind of female bonding that happens under the duress of captivity. Anglo-American captives like Mary Jemison ﬁnd companionship in their American Indian female captors, who become a second family.10 In deﬁance of the narratives’ singular political purpose of reinforcing racial, cultural, and religious divides, female captives blur lines by forging enduring bonds. Castiglia examines the racial and gender dynamics of white female captivity narratives in terms of “marginals” and “liminars,” in which white women’s gender egalitarianism, experienced in the communitas Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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of captivity among American Indian women, renders them as marginals of gender but liminars of race (44–45). In other words, they can enjoy a previously unknown gender equality among men and women in their adopted tribe but remain separate, and supposedly superior to, this newfound communitas based on racial supremacy. The push-pull of gender and race that marks white women’s relationship with racial others has been a central component of understanding the difﬁcult and problematic yoke of suffrage and abolition. As scholars have argued, white female agency is oftentimes purchased at the expense of black female identity. 11 Captivity narratives, which introduce white females to matriarchal tribes and to previously unknown divisions of labor and responsibilities, confound this white-dark dyad. 12 In the same spirit, the introduction of white women into the culture of Spanish and Mexican womanhood meets with similar effects: white women recognize that their supposed inferiors enjoy many of the liberties, rights, and economic freedoms denied to their white counterparts. Mirroring the experience of communitas during captivity, the brownwhite binary explored during and after 1848 confounds the traditional coloring of cross-racial female dynamics. This aspect of the captivity narrative—its counterintuitive function as a genre of cross-cultural female solidarity—informs the dynamic of the Mexican soldadera championed in dime novels and constitutes an entirely different framework for understanding the literature and metaphors of midcentury feminism. The connection between the end of the U.S.-Mexican War and the Seneca Falls Convention (both events occurred within months of each other in 1848) is not merely coincidence. At this ﬁrst national conference for women’s rights, organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the latter’s famous “Declaration of Sentiments” was ﬁrst delivered. Stanton’s clever use of the Declaration of Independence as a founding document for the liberation of women calls upon the sentiments of 1776 to give political thrust to the campaign for female suffrage. In its construction of the American Revolution as a usable past for the women’s movement, the Seneca Falls Convention echoes the Democrats’ deployment of 1776 to cast the invasion of Mexico as a liberating act. As I’ve already argued in chapter 2, the idea of liberation drew heavily on the captivity narrative, imagining the Anglo soldiers as rescuers of Mexican women 76

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doomed to the domestic form of incarceration: arranged marriage. The multiple invocations of the American Revolution for the U.S.-Mexican War helped to stitch the two martial and national moments together. As further testament to the historical connections between 1776 and 1846, Allen draws on the stories of heroic women from the Revolution, Molly Pitcher and Deborah Sampson, as role models for her adventures in Mexico. The coexistence of these two historical moments, intended by Democrats to paint territorial invasion as liberation, has unexpected results in the female soldier. The two texts addressed in this chapter, Ned Buntline’s dime novel The Volunteer; or, The Maid of Monterrey (1847) and Eliza Allen’s The Female Volunteer (1851), depict a Mexican and an Anglo-American female, respectively, on the battleﬁeld; both texts share a blending of romantic and military plotlines, and yet they speak quite differently to the parameters of the captive-captor paradigm. The specter of the female soldier on the battleﬁeld, bravely facing the dangers of warfare, directly challenges the cult of true womanhood at its zenith around midcentury. 13 Instead, these tales, whether ﬁctional or not, stand as a corrective to the belief that patriotism was predicated on very circumscribed behavior for women. For Buntline and Allen, the U.S.-Mexican War provided women with an exciting tradition outside the domestic sphere; they needed merely to follow in the footsteps of their predecessors: the wife of President Gamarra of Peru (who “not only held a Colonel’s commission in the cavalry, but repeatedly led her regiment into action, and greatly distinguished herself for skill and bravery”) and Deborah Sampson (Buntline 40; Allen 15). Despite a wealth of predecessors, according to Julie Wheelwright, author of Amazons and Military Maids, the female soldier is decidedly outside of, and even opposed to, the domestic. The women warriors’ ﬂouting of gender conventions, according to Wheelwright, is predicated on “women’s desire for male privilege and a longing for escape from domestic conﬁnes and powerlessness” (19). Wheelwright’s argument that female soldiers are attempting to take on men’s privileges by dressing like them relies on the strict separation of gendered spheres.14 According to this logic, a female outside of the domestic is no longer a female; a cross-dressed soldier represents the physical manifestation of an internal desire to be a man. Given Wheelwright’s premise, then, the Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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gender dynamics of the female soldier disqualify the captivity narrative as a potential plot device romanticizing imperialism as interracial marriage. Wheelwright’s insistence on the adventure aspect of the female warrior echoes Castiglia’s claim about the agency available for women within the captivity narrative: “[They] offered American women a female picaresque, an adventure story set, unlike most early American women’s literature, outside the home . . . [and] allowed women authors to create a symbolic economy through which to express dissatisfaction with the roles traditionally offered white women in America, and to reimagine those roles and the narratives that normalize them, giving rise ultimately to a new female subject and to the female audience on which she relies” (4). I would respond: What happens when the captivity narrative and the story of the female soldier coalesce? For Wheelwright and Castiglia, it appears, the answer is the same: because she is outside of the domestic sphere, she gains a degree of agency, the ability to critique the gender politics of her society, and adventure usually unavailable to women. My concern, however, is not so much with the freedom enjoyed by the female soldier but rather with her capacity to revolutionize the captivity narrative and the gendered and racial assumptions of Manifest Destiny. Where does the female soldier ﬁt into the belief, expressed powerfully by John O’Sullivan of the Democratic Review, that the United States was destined by Providence to overspread these lands? Is she a patriot? If so, what do her capture and rescue mean? What about her ability to transgress racial and ethnic boundaries in her role as a soldier? For cultural critic Marjorie Garber, gender, above class and race, is the central component of identity, so that a threat to or exposure of its cultural construction has ripple effects on other identity corollaries: namely, class, race, and religion. To this list I add national identity, not only an individual’s nationality but the nation’s image of itself. How is it that gender could be more central to national identity than race, particularly in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, when President Jackson had signed a national death warrant for all American Indians and having African ancestors was enough to enslave someone? For national identity, gender is more crucial than race because of the unmarked category of the white family unit. Masculinity and feminin78

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ity have always already been coded as white. 15 To threaten notions of domestic subjectivity on individual and national scales was to endanger the gender construction of national identity. To render white women masculine or less than feminine, to take them out of the domestic sphere and the cult of true womanhood and place them in a male uniform on the borderlands between Mexico and the United States, was to undermine the gendered construction of nation and threaten to expose the underlying principles of Manifest Destiny. Foreign and Domestic In both of the texts discussed, patriotism is not a given. Allen’s lover, William Billings, is a poor Canadian who takes up arms for the Americans to gain social status and win the hand of his true love. Buntline’s heroine, Edwina, becomes a lancer for her “adopted country.” She owes no loyalty to Mexico; she is a Texan. Even the novel’s hero, Blakely, brieﬂy toys with the idea of quitting his army position to marry Edwina. And Gorin, Buntline’s villain, becomes a commissioned ofﬁcer under General Santa Anna and ﬁghts against his former comrades. National afﬁliation is not assumed in these two texts because the central characters are female soldiers; they have removed themselves from the domestic space and, by enlisting, have disrupted their roles as captives in need of rescuing. Who, then, stands in for the nation? In “Manifest Domesticity,” Amy Kaplan has made a convincing argument that homefront and warfront are not so far removed; domestic ﬁction participates directly and symbolically in acts of U.S. imperialism. As Kaplan argues, the nineteenth century was replete with “manifest domesticities”—domestic novels that helped to deﬁne the ever-present tension between the “foreign” and the “domestic.” For Kaplan, however, even in her reading of E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, which is set during the U.S.-Mexican War, African slaves, represented by Black Donald, and not Mexicans, are the domestic sphere’s “foreign” element. Capitola’s defense against Black Donald in her bedchamber parallels the unseen work of the novel’s male soldiers engaged in the U.S.-Mexican War.16 In The Female Volunteer and The Volunteer, however, the female soldiers represent the “foreign” in the “domestic” in that the battleﬁeld rather than the home is the preWomen as Men and 1846 as 1776

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vailing metaphor for the nation. In crossing gender lines, the soldiers become “foreign” and pose a threat to the static images of the domestic so critical during times of war and, paradoxically, expansionism. In Susan Magofﬁn’s Down the Santa Fe Trail, which chronicled her journey into the Southwest before and during the war, the “domestic” is ever present, lending her a discourse for articulating the strangeness and familiarity, the uncanniness, of being a stranger in a strange land. 17 With respect to Kaplan’s notion of manifest domesticity, however, Magofﬁn distinguishes herself by purposefully incorporating New Mexican domestic practices into her developing identity as a newlywed. For Buntline’s heroine and Allen, the domestic is makeshift, temporary, forfeited for independence and self-sufﬁciency. Buntline seems to anticipate the reader’s reaction to an absent domestic sphere when he writes of an intimate tête-à-tête between Edwina and Anita: “We will look into the tent of which we have just spoken, and see how the daughter and sister of warriors dwell; perchance some of our boudoir-loving readers will shudder, but if they do, we can’t help it” (40). Despite a tent outﬁtted with Mexican blankets and two saddles, the narrator professes, “yet we have seen city girls dressed far more slovenly than they.” “Foreign” glosses geographic distance from the city rather than the racial and cultural difference of two Mexican women, whose upcoming nuptials to Anglo soldiers already position them as symbols and agents of the domestic. In Allen’s narrative, the absence of a domestic—its attendant detail to dress and feminine hygiene—is essential to her conversion from Eliza Allen to George Mead. Edwina’s transformation into a lancer in the Mexican army does not compromise her femininity; Eliza’s, however, depends upon a purposeful neglect or forgetting of hers. The litmus test in The Volunteer is how to make Edwina a True Woman who embraces and transmits national virtues and beliefs. Accordingly, the novel makes a concerted effort to keep her inside the domestic, to the detriment of her family and Mexican masculinity. Edwina vows not to leave the war “until [she] can ﬁnd men who will not ﬂee before they have at least tested the strength of their foes—twice ha[s] [she] been deserted by [her] cowardly followers; once through their dastardly conduct, left to the mercy of the enemy, to whom [she] should have fallen a victim had it not been for the generosity of one of 80

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their ofﬁcers who saved [her]—who gave not only life but liberty” (18). In the absence of a captor/unwanted suitor in the narrative present, The Volunteer undermines the masculinity of Edwina’s brothers but not her Anglo suitor, Blakely. Edwina’s twin brother, Bonaventura, exhibits physical characteristics that defy his brave acts in battle: features that are “regular and delicate as a woman’s,” hands that are “small and white,” and a smile that is “sweet and pleasing” (26–27). Buntline’s Mexican characters, in accordance with Wheelwright’s theory, merely exchange gender identities. Edwina’s close proximity to the domestic, despite her early rebuffs of Blakely’s love, also undergirds the marriage plot. In The Volunteer, Edwina’s continual use of female attire (her change into a male uniform occurs only twice and is marked, while her costume for the remainder of the novel, feminine, goes without comment) aligns her with the domestic, but, more powerfully, it is her close relationships to her two brothers who are also on the battleﬁeld that circumscribes the Canales family within the “domestic.” This is quite a feat—turning the “foreign,” in this case a family of soldiers in the Mexican army, into the familiar, the “domestic.” Buntline’s counterintuitive use of the “domestic” can occur because, like the American soldiers, the Mexicans have African servants who become the “foreign” that paradoxically maintains the domestic. Furthermore, folding the Canales family (not just Edwina) into the enlarged “domestic” naturalizes territorial annexation as welcomed international union while undermining the masculinity of the two Mexican brothers. In other words, the domestication of the Canales family does the same work as the captivity narrative but without the capture. Indeed, Bonaventura says of the upcoming nuptials between his sister and the American soldier, “He has made a captive of my sister!” (90). Blakely saves Edwina from a country ﬁlled with effete, cowardly men, including her brothers, who retreat in battle and leave her alone to ﬁght. Edwina’s bravery is purchased at the expense of her male compatriots, leading the reader to conjecture that her patriotism only deﬁes gender inscription in the absence of men capable of fulﬁlling their roles. The marriage plots between the female soldiers and their male compatriots seemingly foreground the domestic. Marriages cannot function within the captive-captor paradigm because the female soldiers Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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have already ﬂouted too many of its principles. The domestic’s reemergence registers on a national level in the form of a felicitous union (marriage and territorial annexation); and yet, I would argue that the troublesome image of the female soldier undermines this paralleling of family and nation to rearticulate the metaphor in terms more empowering to women. Indeed, the wedding of marriage and military plots relies heavily on the passivity of the female and the land. What does it mean if the female is combative, active? How does this shift the reading of the United States’ annexation of the land? Are men, both Mexican and Anglo-American, unsexed by female cross-dressing?

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Reluctant Groom In Arthur Woodleigh, fulﬁlling the marriage plot unsexes men and women alike, drawing attention to the aggressive desires of Manifest Destiny that it attempts to romance. Arthur and Richard look to the U.S.-Mexican War to rescue them from marriage. Arthur has ﬂed to the war after falsely believing he’s killed a Spanish rival in a duel (53). Richard, who hounds Paquita until he can bed her, spends just as much time in the narrative running away from her entreaties for marriage. The women are forced onto the battleﬁeld in order to fulﬁll the marriage plots; doing so unsexes them and threatens their virtue. Paquita is racialized as the fallen woman who absorbs the role of hypersexualized Mexicana so that Clara as Robin and Doña Altamira can be unsexed, prime for wedded bliss with Arthur. The racial dynamics among women in The Volunteer are in lockstep with Manifest Destiny: Paquita plays the white man’s Eve to Clara Myer’s–Robin’s–Doña Altamira’s Virgin. Described as “a young woman with features of the most perfect symmetry and beauty, and a ﬁgure of the most voluptuous formation,” Paquita has “a world of passion couched in her jet black eyes that caused an involuntary thrill in the breast of the gazer” (13). This passion, bubbling just below the surface, does not get channeled properly in a marriage plot to Arthur, whom she falls in love with while nursing his battle wound. Arthur confesses that Paquita “might incite to love a colder nature than his” (16). Arthur’s emotional responses, however, are nearly impossible to predict: in celebration for a military victory, Arthur anticipates the 82

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fandango in Monterrey: “There’s nothing that will stimulate a man’s ambition half so quickly as the glance of a pretty woman” (23). Like Julius Marion in The Prisoner of Perote, Arthur Woodleigh is ﬁckle, as easily seduced and overexcited at the thought of a military win as he is at the conquest of a Spanish maid. The shaky emotional terrain traversed by ﬁckle, ﬂighty American soldiers like Woodleigh and Marion contributes to the well-worn dyad of madonna/whore that characterizes the novels’ females. Traditionally, the fallen woman redeems herself from her moral fall through death. She begs and receives forgiveness and then quickly exits the world of the living. Paquita, however, ﬁghts for her honor and for her seducer to become her husband, not for her own sake but for the future of their unborn child. Brandishing a knife before Richard Ashmun’s eyes, Paquita warns “the betrayer of men and deceiver of women . . . [that] the blow may fall when ’tis least expected!” (39). Clearly, in the ﬁgure of Paquita, who also warns Arthur of Ashmun’s plots against him and thus indirectly serves as his rescuer, we witness the return of the Amazon. 18 Although she ﬂexes her muscle too late in the narrative to “save” herself, she still takes up arms against Ashmun in the name of family. In fact, she becomes Ashmun’s captor. Along with the Guerrilla Queen and her loyal army, Paquita takes Ashmun captive and offers him a ﬁnal ultimatum: marriage or death (66). Under the guise of mother rather than fallen woman, Paquita conforms perfectly to the Amazon archetype of the Revolutionary period except that the enemy she protects herself from is her husband. Arthur doesn’t seem to be worth the effort Clara puts into bringing him to the altar. Her sacriﬁces to the marriage plot tellingly read like suicide when the discarded military uniform she wore as “Robin” is discovered near the water’s edge and fellow soldiers prematurely mourn the “young lad’s” death. Clara Myers, who unsexed herself for the bulk of the novel as the cross-dressed soldier Robin, declares herself to be “a poor, weak woman [who] shudders when [she] reﬂect[s] upon all that [she] ha[s] endured for [Arthur’s] sake” (58). This cry for pity happens after Clara has accomplished her goal of marrying Arthur. It’s a return to the Frail Flower that comes ex post facto: she’s already been a soldier in the war, and she’s already played the part of a Spanish heiress. Now, as the wife of Arthur Woodleigh, Clara takes on the role Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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of Frail Flower. Why? Why does she need rescuing after marriage? Far from a paragon of military manhood, Arthur Woodleigh disappoints the formulaic war-marriage plots to emasculating ends. He enlists to distance himself from marriage to Clara and runs away right after their exchange of wedding vows, when Doña Altamira lifts her bridal veil and reveals herself to be Clara (57). None other than General Taylor, who orders Woodleigh’s court martial when the latter returns to camp dressed as a Mexican soldier after a considerable absence, questions his loyalty to the U.S. Army. In fact, Arthur is wounded and drugged so often that he rarely engages the enemy in combat. Old Rough and Ready chastises Arthur: “A considerable part of your time, also, instead of being devoted to military tactics, and exercises calculated to ﬁt you for the ﬁeld, has been employed in an endeavor to entrap the affections of a young woman of Spanish origin, with a view to her ruin!” (21). As a deserter and seducer, Arthur corrupts the expected roles of soldier and suitor. The emotional ardor with which Anglo-American ofﬁcers are expected to apply in battling Mexican soldiers and wooing Spanish maidens overburdens the minds of dime-novel heroes Arthur Woodleigh and Julius Marion. Instead, the two men approach the battleﬁeld with the passion of a lover and ignore or rebuff the affections of the Mexican women in love with them. The women fulﬁll their parts ﬂawlessly: they preserve the life of the Anglo ofﬁcer from impending doom and wait patiently for recognition of their services in the form of wedding vows. Woodleigh and Marion, their minds too overwrought with the romance of Manifest Destiny, confuse the battleﬁeld with the parlor and engage their enemy as they should their lovers. “Never did lover await with greater anxiety the appearance of the one beloved than did Arthur Woodleigh the approach of the day that was to restore to him the laurels which his own indiscretion had temporarily wrested from him” (21). Similarly, Julius Marion ﬁnds his “new mistress” in the U.S.Mexican War (14). The romance plot of Arthur and Paquita was performing according to script: she attended him after his near-mortal wounding, and every meeting between the two allows Paquita’s visage to register her true feelings for him. “Poor girl!” the narrator sighs, “for the ﬁrst time in her life she found that she loved. . . . It was the dread of losing 84

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forever the only object upon which her heart had ever centered its affections that gave her cheek so pale a hue” (15). In the economy of sentiments analyzed in chapter 2, paling and blushing among young lovers is an early indication of the purity of their affections for one another. In this case, however, Arthur does not reciprocate. Although “not insensible to the attentions as well as the attractions of the Spanish maiden, as yet his feelings had not ripened into a warmer sentiment than that of admiration.” Instead, his attentions are drawn to solving the mystery of Robin, his faithful military companion, whose actions toward Arthur “all served to increase the young ofﬁcer’s perplexity.” The presence of an Anglo-American female rival, even in the ﬁgure of the cross-dressed Clara-as-Robin, sabotages what might have been a more conventional dime novel adhering to the twinned plotlines. Moreover, the emotional disconnect between Paquita and Arthur leads indirectly to her fall. In The Volunteer, the backstory of a vengeful, rejected lover who does not “rescue” the Mexican damsel through marriage erupts into the central plotline when Gorin begins to pursue Edwina/Helen to seek retribution for a broken heart. His disappointment at having his suit rejected by her turns deadly when he murders her parents by setting ﬁre to their home while they are inside. Once Gorin learns that the three Canales children (Edwina and her two brothers) survived his attack, he vows revenge. He is so consumed by this past injury that he forfeits his position as captain with the U.S. Army, loses his commission as captain with Santa Anna, and becomes a renegade, a “robber.” Gorin’s failure at international romance has dire consequences for his national identity. His role as suitor, rather than as soldier, seems to have been central to establishing him in the national imaginary. By stripping Gorin of any national afﬁliation, Buntline makes him a threat to the revised captivity narrative. If he doesn’t stand for the United States and its principles, then his failed attempts to marry or join with Edwina do not reﬂect badly on the nation. And yet Gorin’s violent nature, coupled with his lack of loyalty to any nation or person, make him a perfect symbol for Texas in its days as a republic. Furthermore, he stands in as a warning about Manifest Destiny’s potential to go dramatically wrong and lead not to marriage but to rape, violation (his name is easily transposed as Groin); this reading of Gorin and Texas is Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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advanced by Edwina’s role as a soldier. Not the passive, willing victim in need of rescuing, not the oversexed Mexican woman waiting with bated breath for her Anglo lover, Edwina and her plotline with Gorin expose the falseness of this version of the captivity narrative. “Our Kentucky Gals Wasn’t Good Enough for Him” Near the end of The Volunteer, although the U.S.-Mexican War still rages in the background, romance has taken center stage. Blakely writes to his parents: I did intend to bring home a Mexican wife, but I can’t prevail on her to make peace with me, until the war is over, so that I shall come home without her, and get things ready for her as soon thereafter as I can, for I am bound to have her. She is such a beauty! Eyes and hair as black as a thunder cloud; teeth like pearls, a form like a picture, and moreover, she can ﬁght like a tiger! Now isn’t that a wife worth having? But laying aside joking, my dear parents, I am indeed engaged to a noble girl, and shall marry her, as soon as she will have me. (83) This passage is particularly rich for Blakely’s use of natural imagery to render Edwina’s beauty for his parents, an overuse of which likens her to a tiger and makes her seem less feminine than animalistic or uncivilized. The language could easily be employed in the description of a “noble savage,” particularly given its reliance on elements of nature. Buntline recognizes the absurdity of cataloging beauty along racially inﬂected registers when he writes “all joking aside.” Tellingly, this occurs after his statement that Edwina “can ﬁght like a tiger.” Her bravery on the battleﬁeld needs to be glossed through naturalistic rhetoric precisely because it is so unnatural. For Blakely, Edwina’s role as a lancer in the Mexican army, rather than her identity as a Mexican, potentially hinders their marriage. He writes that she is postponing the wedding until after the war. This casts him into a feminine role: he is not only waiting for her but returning home in advance to “get things ready for her.” Edwina by no means capitulates to the model of the willing bride 86

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central to the captive-captor wedding, and so the narrative seeks a surrogate. When Blakely’s parents learn of the upcoming nuptials, they become preoccupied by the absence of a pool of eligible white brides. The novel seems at pains not to have Edwina replacing a white sweetheart. For his parents, Edwina’s racial identity is paramount to their acceptance of her as a daughter-in-law, and his mother’s mantra, repeated twice within as many pages (“I can’t see why some of our Kentucky gals wasn’t good enough for him”), registers on both national (via regional) and racial scales. Before Blakely’s departure to the battleﬁeld, Buntline writes that “George left no sweetheart behind him to mourn his absence” (10). Once she’s received his letter, Blakely’s mother reviews the list of available women only to be told that they are both (all two of them) engaged. What are we to make of the absence or unavailability of an Anglo-American mate? Obviously, and this follows the logic of emigration that would be used a century later with the Bracero Program, the Mexican wife would not be taking the position from an able-bodied Anglo-American. The novel bears this reading out, since his mother only seems satisﬁed with the choice of a Mexican bride when the list of eligible bachelorettes from their town is exhausted. Is it only possible for Edwina to become Blakely’s wife if there is no white “other”? I am thinking here speciﬁcally of the logic of interracial marriage on the frontier. In the context of the high ratio of white men to unattached white women, interracial marriage is condoned as a kind of necessity, with the implicit understanding that were there eligible white women to be had, surely men like Kit Carson would ﬁnd a suitable mate among his racial equals. 19 If, however, the Mexican bride is to be groomed (forgive the pun) into the image of a “whitened” bride, then the white woman’s absence is mandatory. Reading the novel backward from this moment, then, it seems the way to view Edwina is as a surrogate white bride. The question the novel attempts to answer is not so much how she can become a white bride but rather how she can come to stand in for the nation. Part of the work of making Edwina an American occurs before the novel’s opening; she is a native of Texas, and, in the year prior to the novel’s publication, Texas was annexed into the United States, so she is an American by default. But what of her dedication to her “adopted country” of Mexico and her position as a lancer in its army? Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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Acting as a soldier in the Mexican Army effectively unsexes Edwina and shields her from the typical stereotype of the oversexed Mexican vixen promoted in travel literature. 20 Julie Wheelwright casts crossdressing for the female soldier as a zero-sum game: “This process did not allow them selectively to disregard sex-assigned characteristics. They traded roles rather than forged new ones” (12). Inherent in this transformation, Wheelwright continues, is the female warrior’s unsexing: “[Her] acceptance was often based on denial of her sexuality and great emphasis was placed on her virginity or sexlessness in popular representations.” It is in this light that we might better understand Edwina’s reluctance to admit her love for Blakely or to hasten the marriage plot. To her friend Anita’s question about her feelings for Blakely, Edwina replies: “I have other things to think of besides love. I have dark and deadly wrongs to avenge—and think you that I can love a countryman of those who have wronged me and mine? No. Mexico has gained in our family no common friends—we are wedded to her cause, not that we love her, but that we hate her enemies” (40). Edwina characterizes herself as bride to the Mexican cause rather than as potential bride to Blakely; she uses the very language of the revised captivity narrative to debunk its assumption that love can overcome international crisis. She exercises her free will not in choosing an Anglo husband, as depicted in the last chapter, but rather in not choosing a husband, by remaining in the war. However, like all good dime novels of the time, The Volunteer ends in marriage—a double ceremony shared with Anita and Edwina’s brother, Bonaventura. There is little fanfare attending the nuptials; Blakely calls for the Army chaplain (later referred to as a priest) to perform the ceremony. In this way, the novel sidesteps the tricky issue of religion that plagued numerous Mexican-Anglo marriages. Anglo men who married into Mexican families were expected, during the Spanish and Mexican periods, to convert to Catholicism. With the war and the use of such marriages to anglicize Mexican brides, Catholicism could deny them access to true womanhood. Garber’s quote from the beginning of this chapter is elucidating here: cross-dressing could mark all kinds of transgressions. Tellingly, even as the novel overcomes obstacles to its own use of the captive-captor paradigm, it does not dwell on their 88

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postnuptial lives. We do not see them set up their new home together; we don’t witness her ﬁrst meeting with her Kentucky in-laws. We must remember, though, that Buntline published The Volunteer in 1846; he abandons their marriage outside the narrative because he cannot project how the war will end nor how relations between the two nations will be in the postwar period. Female Soldier and Suffragette: The Fantasies of the Soldadera Ned Buntline’s The Volunteer presents an unapologetically one-sided examination of Edwina’s ﬁtness for true womanhood that ignores the relational status of white and brown women. The other side of this equation—how the promises of 1848 will become manifest—might remain unexamined in the novel, but it was a central question to the suffrage movement. Cross-dressing functions as a metaphor for the reversal of “natural” behaviors or gendered scripts; unwittingly, the very metaphors and historical moments invoked during the war became central to the arguments of feminists at midcentury. Directly and indirectly, Godey’s registered the war and its effects on notions of “femininity.” The series on the women of the Revolution made good use of the Revolutionary War to place women in an ongoing struggle in the national imaginary, as agents of the nation from its early, violent beginnings. Evoking Revolutionary women at the time of the U.S.Mexican War hearkens back to the promises of universal privileges and natural rights embraced by the Revolution and articulated in Enlightenment rhetoric. The former Mexican territory becomes a space for potential female insurgency and newfound agency. The connection between the war and the upsurge in feminist agitation begins in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments.” In her speech, which overlays demands for women’s rights onto the seminal document of U.S. emancipation from Britain, Stanton casts the United States, rather than King George, as the oppressive force denying women their innate rights and freedoms. Just as the country had recently liberated Mexico from its tyrannical rule under Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna, so, too, does Stanton call for the liberation of women from the tyranny of domestic servitude. The Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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connection between the language of abolition and suffrage has been thoroughly covered and critiqued. What remains unacknowledged and unexamined, however, is the strong and binding tie between the war’s aftermath and midcentury events in the women’s movement. In her famous speech, Stanton states: “[The U.S. government] has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.” The “foreigners” are Mexicans who, under Articles VIII and IX of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, had been given the option of becoming citizens of the United States. Stanton’s anger at voting privileges being extended to “ignorant” and “foreign” men before white women would be echoed a few scant years later after passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments gave black men the vote. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, then, not only represented opportunities for former Mexicans citizens recently annexed into the United States, it also marked a sea change in national policy concerning citizenship by broadening the category beyond the scope of free white males. The offer of franchise to Mexican men gave hope to women looking for full rights and privileges; the Mexican heroine of dime novels provided a fantasy of female liberation to white women whose patriotism was ostensibly limited by the cult of true womanhood. Three years after the Seneca Falls Convention, 1851 brought the Massachusetts Women’s Convention and Godey’s response to it in a twopart political satire. Once again, the U.S.-Mexican War mediated the suffrage movement. The newly acquired states of Texas and California ﬁgure prominently in both the April and December articles on the “Men’s Rights Convention.” Against the tide of state representatives to the convention who voice their anxiousness at the prospect of women’s rights and offer their own homespun solutions to the woman problem, Mr. Bowieknife of Texas and Mr. Placer from California offer an openborder policy, welcoming the troublesome women into their territories. Although the recent war of 1846–48 is not directly mentioned, its inﬂuence nevertheless is keenly felt. “I hope all the ladies will come to Texas,” opines Mr. Bowieknife. “We have hearts and arms for all of them. ‘If all other States reject ’em, Ours will freely, gladly take ’em.’ ” Mr. Placer, from California, continues that he was for “no half-way 90

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measures. It was his opinion that all the women ought to be seized and sent to California; it was a new country, and the miners wanted wives. When they were once there, he thought they could be managed. Judge Lynch was an active man. Show them that there was only the difference of a letter between altar and halter, and, if they would not marry, why let them hang!” (“Men’s Rights Convention”). Texas and California open their arms to unruly, masculine women not only because they represent the uncivilized frontier where gender scripts are rewritten but also because, as former Mexican territories, they have a history of women behaving outside the bounds of true womanhood. In other words, the proliferation of mexicana rescuers in dime novels, all set in Mexico, reframe the territory as potentially emancipatory for women. California might be the land of opportunity following the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, but it is also the place for women to shufﬂe off the bonds of true womanhood as they’ve read about their Mexican counterparts doing. This is certainly true in Allen’s The Female Volunteer, where the California diggings provide her with a wealth of opportunity. Unlike her male compatriots easily swindled out of their recently acquired gold, Allen beneﬁts from her hard labor in the mines and is the only member of her party to keep a wage for her work. In terms of the feminist movement, Allen’s ability to earn a working wage is a concern central to Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments”: “He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.” The question of income, to include property rights, resulted in New York passing the ﬁrst Married Women’s Property Rights Acts in 1851. This document, which would serve as a touchstone for future state legislation in the opening up of women’s rights, was predicated on the events of 1848, albeit somewhat indirectly. The brown-white dynamics of the dime novel concern themselves exclusively with the fulﬁllment of the marriage plot and thus only address male-female romance. In this conﬁguration, mexicanas are imagined as static ﬁgures, prey to the semifeudal practices of Spanish and Mexican patriarchy and all too eager to prove their capacity for true womanhood as war brides. The unevenness of this conﬁguration has been addressed in other chapters. Indeed, white men gained land, social prominence, and avoided taxation by marrying into wealthy Mexican families. In this case the mexicanas, rather than Anglo men, Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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were the rescuers. Similarly, the considerable disparity in civic and economic rights enjoyed by Spanish and Mexican women versus their white counterparts cast mexicanas as rescuers to the white feminist movement. In the case of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1851, the land rights of Spanish and Mexican women were cited as precedent. “Women’s sense of entitlement rested, in part, on the fact that Spanish and Mexican law gave them the right to control their property and wealth and to litigate on questions related to their person, their families, and their holdings. Daughters had the right to inherit property equally with male siblings; upon marriage, women retained as their own property they brought into the arrangement, and if they were widowed they inherited half the property and wealth accumulated during the marriage” (Haas 81–82). The public debate prior to the ratiﬁcation of the state constitution of New York in 1848 speciﬁcally mentions the Spanish-origin laws in Texas as its basis. 21 The Villain to Romance: Arranged Marriage The Female Volunteer, published in 1851, beneﬁts from a postwar perspective to neatly tie international peace to reconciliation of the newly extended family. Buntline’s hero is propelled to war by a national calling of arms; Eliza Allen blames the cultural practice of arranged marriage as her reason for leaving home, becoming George Mead, and enjoying adventures in the old Spanish borderlands. As delineated in the text’s considerably lengthy subtitle, Allen ﬁghts in the battle of Cerro Gordo and digs for gold in California before accomplishing her “single desire” for undertaking such “wonderful adventures”— marrying her true love, William Billings. 22 Allen’s text reads like a female version of the adventure tale, with a healthy dose of rebelliousness brought on by forbidden love motivating her every escapade. In the preface, Allen frames The Female Volunteer as a “warning to parents to be more cautious than many are [in making] the choice of a partner for life” for their children (7–8). In her revision of the captivity narrative, Allen casts two villains: the social practice of arranged marriage and the Mexican nation. 23 The custom of arranged marriage, however, is not exclusively associated with Mexico, as it was in Francis Berrian and Caballero. In fact, when some wealthy Mexican ladies fall for Allen as 92

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George Mead, their father wishes to honor his daughters’ hearts by considering Mead as a potential son-in-law. The United States does not embody Enlightenment ideals of free will and individual choice in matters of love; Mexico does. As an Anglo-European woman, Eliza Allen does not need William Billings, her future husband, to rescue her; she saves him. Homefront and warfront are especially conﬂated in The Female Volunteer, where a forbidden love affair sparks Allen’s entrance into the U.S.-Mexican War and her adventures terminate with the long sought-after parental blessing of her union with William. Allen’s foray into the masculine plot as a soldier in the U.S.-Mexican War comes, interestingly enough, through the sentimental plot of forbidden love. Describing herself as a “most willing and loyal subject” of love, Allen places the marriage plot above all other consolidating systems, such as family and nation, that would command her fealty and call her into action. Despite Eliza and William’s pledge of eternal devotion to each other, her parents oppose the marriage based on William’s lower-class status and their fear that such a union would reﬂect badly on their position as one of the most prominent families in Maine. 24 Because the United States, rather than Mexico, is the nation promoting and supporting the semifeudal custom of arranged marriage, Allen’s narrative does not fall victim entirely to the jingoistic views of Manifest Destiny. Indeed, the novel’s indirect indictment of restrictive gender roles, thinly veiled as an argument against the tradition of arranged marriage in which parents direct the future of their female offspring, registers soundly with feminist complaint. Neither William nor Eliza enlists in the U.S. Army for political reasons. In keeping with many narratives in which marriage is denied to lovers of contrasting classes, William departs from Maine, joining the U.S. Army in the hopes of accruing a social status worthy of his ﬁancée and her parents. The war becomes less a political event of national import than a scaleddown version of Manifest Destiny, particularly the idea that as a soldier in the war, William Billings can beneﬁt (materially and otherwise) at others’ expense. War becomes an opportunity: William intends it to be the means to his class ascension and his marriage to Eliza, and Eliza gains the freedom and agency afforded by a male persona while tracking him. Divorced from its political portent, the war occupies an Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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ancillary position in the narrative with one very crucial exception—the spirit of Manifest Destiny driving the military campaign imbues Eliza’s transformation into a volunteer soldier. William’s parting letter to Eliza reveals the extent to which love has replaced nation, how his willingness to brave death proves his love and devotion to her rather than his fealty to his adopted nation. Quite plainly, William vows that it is “for [Eliza’s] sake [that he] has become an alien from his native land and a stranger to relatives and friends” (14). The U.S.-Mexican War, and Mexico in particular, serve as sites of exile, a testing ground on which William will prove the depth of his love and commitment to Eliza. Conspicuously absent from William’s letter are any references, however oblique, to the principles under dispute in the war. Rather, William imagines his journey south to Mexico aiding Eliza’s situation with her parents; he intends his tour in the U.S. Army to have a domestic rather than national impact.

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Eliza Allen in Brownface Nowhere in Eric Lott’s impressive Love and Theft is there an image of a white female minstrel performer. According to Siobhan Somerville, this is due to her absence from the stage until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, a quick survey of dime novels set during the U.S.-Mexican War reveals a pattern of white women in brownface, or surrogate mexicanas. Avaline Allerton, the protagonist in Harry Halyard’s The Heroine of Tampico (1846), has been raised in Mexico and is subject to Mexican patriarchal law of arranged marriage; Blondinita Blackler (as her name suggests), in Halyard’s 1848 The Mexican Spy, is merely reared by a Mexican man whom she assumes to have been her father but later is redeemed by her wealthy Anglo-American birth father. Eliza Allen’s transformation into George Mead, which appears divorced from racial masquerade in its crossing of gender boundaries, inherits and is informed by the dime-novel tradition of brownface. Eliza’s conversion into George Mead, the ﬁctitious character she invents for herself, is detailed, whereas Edwina’s in The Volunteer occurs offstage. Eliza’s transformation can be marked because as a wealthy Anglo-American, she inherits true womanhood, whereas Edwina’s eth94

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nicity might deny her access to this symbolic position in the nation, so her change into male attire goes unmarked. In the solitude of her family’s house while her relatives are away attending to an ill brother, Eliza becomes George. She remarks upon her own radical transformation from “reclining on a sofa of exquisite ease” to “now [being] led up in that little but gallant band, to face a magazine charged with all the angry missiles of slaughter and death” (23). Again, because of Allen’s uncontested access to true womanhood, class, not gender, is the axis traversed in her makeover. Shifting from “ease” and “recline” to “being led” alarms Allen and gives voice to national anxieties about the class-climbing possibilities expansionism offers. Acquiring Mexican territory might provide William with a newfound wealth that smoothes the path to marriage with Eliza, but it also threatens to undo or blur class distinctions central to Allen’s family and to Eliza’s exceptionalism. With her ﬁrst enlistment expired and the object of her adventure (reuniting with William) still unfulﬁlled, Eliza volunteers again to follow under the command of General Scott. It is during her second tour of duty that race joins class as the two axes traversed during her time as George Mead. The effects of the war on Eliza Allen are primarily registered on her face: “My appearance also had so changed in every respect, that, with my tawny and bronzed face, disheveled hair, and enlarged and blistered hands—all of which I had purposely neglected, in order to hide the appearance of my sex—I was now unrecognizable. I had also succeeded in altering my voice to much coarser sounds; in fact, I was so entirely altered, that I question if my own mother would have known me” (25). Because “tawny” and “bronze” are the very terms Allen uses to describe Mexican soldiers, her conversion outlined in the above passage resonates with racial undertones. Allen’s racial transformation into what I term “brownface” is heavily indebted to the ﬁgure of the soldadera in dime novels. Indeed, in The Heroine of Tampico and Arthur Woodleigh, the Anglo-American heroine becomes a surrogate mexicana or else assumes the disguise of a wealthy Spanish maid. (My ﬁnal chapter will address how the conﬂuence of the family romance, cannibalism, and the ﬁctional captivity plot conspire to transform a fallen white woman into a mestiza heiress.) Although never directly stated but nevertheless implied through a Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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negative dialectic, the reader is meant to understand that Allen’s complexion prior to the war was white—a hue implying both racial and class status. The markers of Allen’s “unrecognizability” are indices of “neglect,” which presuppose that femininity requires vigilance and attention. 25 Racial fears of incorporating eight million Mexicans into the United States are expressed through the rhetoric of neglect. If the United States is not vigilant, its stronghold on whiteness will loosen. Finally, the purposeful neglect of the markers of femininity—her complexion, hair, and hands—is sufﬁcient to alter her appearance. Remarkably, neglect does not require one to remain constantly on guard, prepared to perform at any given moment; rather, it is a purposeful forgetting, a strategic letting go that allows Allen to slip from female dress to masculine uniform. Kaplan’s interplay of foreign and domestic is instructive here: Allen becomes Mead by embracing the foreign in its multiple manifestations: masculinity, military life, and Mexican soil, and an emboldened mexicana identity. While engaged in battle under the command of General Scott, Allen’s treatment of the war shifts dramatically, and patriotic rhetoric saturates her descriptions of the battle of Cerro Gordo. Borrowing heavily from the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, Allen recounts how the U.S. soldiers were “destined to purchase victory at its dearest rate . . . here our proud eagle, as if to sanctify its destiny, was to be baptized in blood, and the palm of its triumph consecrated in a halo of glory” (26). In a highly wrought passage, Allen dramatically turns from her own voice to one that is decidedly patriotic and imperialistic, capitulating to the beliefs undergirding Manifest Destiny. Notice the religious language (“baptized in blood”) in Allen’s own description of the battle of Cerro Gordo; in this fashion, God, or Divine Providence, reveals itself in the victory of the United States over Mexico. As God’s chosen people, the United States is merely fulﬁlling God’s plan by attacking its neighbor to the south and capturing one third of its territory. Eliza Allen shifts to this language of Manifest Destiny precisely when a wound she receives on the battleﬁeld threatens her life and her secret identity. One would imagine this pivotal moment in which Allen proves the mettle of her character, her willingness to face death at the hands of the Mexican soldiers, as the scene of her triumph over social convention and the conﬁning roles in place for women. I believe that 96

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her shift in voice is strategic, however, aimed at interjecting her into the patriotic plot as a vehicle for the fulﬁllment of Manifest Destiny. It isn’t that Allen shifts to Manifest Destiny rhetoric because she is bereft of a discourse for articulating the plotlines of women soldiers; indeed, when she decides to follow William as a female soldier, she relies on the predecessors whom she had read in the past: “I had read the life of Deborah Sampson, who served in the ranks as a soldier in the revolutionary army for several years and was honorably discharged without her sex being discovered; I had also read the life of Lucy Brewer” (15). Rather, her reunion with William, the reported goal in her enlistment, happens too quickly so that she is forced to call upon other rhetorics to delay and condone her continued masquerade. The heroine of Tampico returns to female dress immediately following her heroism on the battleﬁeld. Once her lover has been rumored dead, Clara quits her male disguise as Robin and resumes feminine costuming. Allen’s battle injuries are serious enough to place her in a makeshift hospital, coincidentally next to her “long lost William.” Their reunion, however, is delayed; indeed, when convalescing in Don Alfonso’s hacienda in Mexico City along with William, Allen “did not dare to converse with him for fear of discovery” (31). Instead, still camouﬂaged as George Mead, Allen tests William’s devotion for her by positioning him as a worthy recipient for the love that Don Alfonso’s daughters express for Allen in drag. Similar to the primary plotline in which forbidden love prompts Allen’s place on the battleﬁeld, Don Alfonso’s daughters, who are never named, offer George Mead their hospitality and “whatever sum [he] may please to name” for remaining with them for “a year or more” (32). Don Alfonso prefaces this proposition with the following passage: “Our respective countries are at war, and, as dutiful citizens, we are compelled to defend the rights and honor of our ﬂag; but between you and I, as individuals, I presume and hope there is no unfriendly feeling.” Don Alfonso offers love outside of the “foundational ﬁctions,” love that reinforces Enlightenment ideals untethered to national loyalties. This farce threatens to undo the very trajectory of love and war on which Allen’s cross-dressing as George Mead rests by positing romance as the preferred alternative to war. Indeed, readers accustomed to the dime novel, in which battles engender marriage plots, will recognize Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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Don Alfonso’s proposal as keeping within this genre whereas Eliza Allen, in going to war to reunite with her husband-to-be, operates under the reverse assumption—that forbidden love necessitates the war plot, which will ultimately be resolved into the marriage plot. William, however, establishes himself a worthy lover by avowing to George that he can “never; in prosperity or adversity, in [his] own or a foreign land . . . entertain the most distant thought of any other” (35). Just as Eliza has proven herself on the battleﬁeld—and will indeed continue to prove herself outside of battle but yet attired as a male soldier— William, in refusing the advances of Don Alfonso’s daughters, reveals the extent of his devotion for Eliza. Victims of “Cupid’s grand mistake [who received] his dart into their hearts for one of their own sex,” Don Alfonso’s daughters introduce the foils of inappropriate love, described by Allen as “farcical,” and renders the possibility of lesbian affection or attraction an impossibility (32). Allen does not dwell very long on this moment of homosocial, if not homosexual, desire; she decides to treat the moment of samesex attraction as comic. Nevertheless, the desire does move toward reconciliation, even union. As Wald argues, the True Woman became a litmus test for “foreign” women entering into the United States; what a telling way to expose the politics of sentiment—by having the Mexican women fall in love with their supposed ideal rather than the Anglo men who provide them de facto access to it. Too, the Mexican domestic, rather than its American counterpart, is more a model of Enlightenment. Don Alfonso honors his daughters’ request to keep George in their home, unlike Eliza’s parents, who deny William a place as son-in-law within theirs. In the brief scene of female-female desire, Allen constructs a triangle of emotional responses intended to reafﬁrm heterosexuality and white privilege. She accomplishes this task simply by substituting William for herself as the mexicana’s object of desire. The peace that Don Alfonso extended to Allen on behalf of his daughters is immediately followed by international peace between Mexico and the United States and an end to the war. However, Allen continues to remain in male attire, joining William and other soldiers in their march to the seaboard; they take passage to New Orleans and then to New York, where they “were regularly discharged and paid off” (36). The reason for Allen’s continued disguise as George 98

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Mead is soon revealed as the soldiers, with money in their pockets, celebrate their victory over Mexico through drinking and gambling, much to the horror of Allen. As the cross-dressed True Woman, Eliza responds to their descent into vice by taking on the role of moral guide, vowing to protect the soldiers’ characters, including William, who had enlisted ironically “with all his ﬁery ardor, for not only his honor and country, but the safety and protection of his wife and children” (24).26 The position of moral authority over husband, fellow men, and future citizens of the United States is a central strength that suffragettes drew on in order to launch their demands for the franchise. Indicative of the ancillary position the war ironically takes in Allen’s narrative, her masquerade as soldier George Mead does not terminate with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Peace and the reunion of Allen and Billings do, however, prompt Allen to accommodate her strategy for remaining in male attire. Indeed, the fortuitous reunion of Allen and Billings while recuperating from wounds suffered at the battle of Cerro Gordo should signal her return to female dress and her “true” identity, yet Allen manages to repeatedly defer her masquerade’s conclusion. Allen is quite cagey about maintaining her disguise, citing such ambiguous reasons as “fear of discovery,” “risk[ing] all consequences,” “fear[ing] that it would only disquiet William, make [her] case more hopeless, and render [her] ruin inevitable” (37–38). And it is perhaps through the repetition of these weak excuses to remain as George Mead after the war and after reuniting with William that alert the reader to the startling conclusion: that Allen employs both the war and her forbidden love for William as brilliant conceits masking and enabling her true desires—to orchestrate her own life and to manipulate her environment to her own advantage. Masking the underlying motivation for her extended jaunt in male guise, Allen cleverly assumes a leadership role over her fellow soldiers, including William, who are easily swindled through drinking and gambling. Although still operating as George Mead, Allen adopts the rhetoric common to temperance pamphlets and other moral writings warning about the sinful effects of these two vices and maintains her access to true womanhood.27 This shift in Allen’s voice occurs because of an odd moment of stasis in the narrative. No longer on the battleﬁeld, nor called to perform any particular activities as soldiers, the men Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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have just been released from their military contract with the nation and are thus free to return home to their families, resuming the lives they led before the war. In the multiple citations of her characters’ drunkenness, Allen creates an environment in which men are plagued by the demon of drink and in need of the moral guidance only she can provide. The presence of alcoholism among the soldiers and commanders seems to serve another purpose in positioning Allen advantageously with respect to her male comrades. 28 She becomes doubly exceptional—not only is she a female soldier, but she is morally superior to those around her, including her ﬁancé, William. When the men, including William, lose their entire army pensions in card games with “two genteelly-dressed men,” they begin clamoring for other ﬁnancial opportunities to regain their money, and once again Mexico, speciﬁcally the recently acquired California, appears as the “land of opportunity.” “One proposed to go to California, where there was plenty of gold, and where they could soon retrieve all their misfortunes, and return with loads of riches” (38). Having gambled away the money earned as soldiers in acquiring half of Mexico’s territory, including California, Allen and the other soldiers turn once again to the former Mexican landscape for additional ﬁnancial opportunities and for a delayed return to “civilized” life. In fact, although gambling and drinking are described in the narratives as vices, they are nevertheless tied, if indirectly, to the very civilization that Allen and her troop of soldiers wish to avoid. It is no accident that the two swindlers possess the external markers of civilization: they are “genteely-dressed” with “very ﬂattering manners” (37). Two ships sailing from New York to California provide all with an escape from the predatory nature of civilization into the promised land of the gold diggings. The ﬁrst ship, on which William and all the other soldiers sail, wrecks in the Paciﬁc and is saved when Allen’s ship, following the same course a day after the ﬁrst departed, discovers survivors in the water and on a nearby island. Once again, William and Eliza are reunited, and once again Allen maintains her identity as George Mead. Organizing Thomas Acron, Isaac Crown, and William Billings into a digging party after their rescue, Allen furnishes them with the tools and provisions necessary so they could “start early in the morning for the gold region” (49). 100

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Unlike the battleﬁeld and hacienda of Mexico and the dangerous civilization found in New York, the gold mines of California occasion an entirely different topospatial dynamic between Allen, Billings, and the other soldiers. What the diggings and the battleﬁeld hold in common is the myth of an entirely male landscape; Allen’s presence in the diggings, however, provides more narrative description than did her tours with the U.S. Army. The agenda for traveling to California, to regain the money lost to gambling and drink in New York, inadvertently places Allen into a position of moral and class authority since she not only retains her army pension, having abstained from the vices all the other men entertained, but is born into a wealthy family. Her class status affords her a privileged position while in the California gold mines. Living and traveling in close quarters with William and the other men in the gold diggings, Allen worries that “some casual accident [might] lead to [unveiling] her fatal secret” (52). Instead, Allen delights in the access to William her disguise affords her, which would have been scandalous if she were not dressed as a soldier, “lying on our pallet, side by side, he, ﬁlled with the happy thoughts of Eliza, as he would call her.” Her disguise allows her to be privy to William’s unexpressed feelings for her, to witness his love for Eliza as an outsider would, and to be free from the gender-speciﬁc rules of decorum in lovemaking. Once in Boston, the corrupting agents of civilization, described by Allen as the “most depraved and abandoned of human beings,” “soon began to feast and ﬂatter us with the utmost attention” when they discover that Allen’s group recently arrived from California. Allen again occupies an exceptional position as the only member of the golddigging party to immediately recognize the elements of seduction and betrayal structuring sentimental literature. “Having succeeded in their ﬁrst attempt to stupefy them with liquor, they now resorted to the next, which was to swindle them out of their money with cards and dice” (55). The exact same vices, liquor and gambling, constitute the design behind the elaborate show of manners, congeniality, and hospitality. All along, Allen “saw the snare most fearfully laid,” but “had to make her cautions general” since she “could not well single [William] out as a special object of [her] anxiety.” In an article on the failed antigambling movement of Jonathan HarWomen as Men and 1846 as 1776

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rington Green, Ann Fabian writes: “Green’s vision of gamblers’ exaggerated lust for gain, his descriptions of their callous rejection of all sentimental ties in a constant search for wealth, and his portraits of their characters’ distorted by the endless transfer of cash, all helped to tame the struggle for money that was becoming characteristic of middle-class men” (145). Green focuses primarily on victimized youth and their grieving parents, drawing on the “interconnected economic and emotional ties between parents and children” (147). In The Female Volunteer, gambling threatens the “proper equation of money and character” that prompted William to enlist in the ﬁrst place. If Allen’s parents had not rejected William’s suit because of his low economic standing, the two lovers would never had tried their luck on the battleﬁeld. Gambling glosses attempts by William—and, through extrapolation, the American nation—to proﬁt from the war at all cost. Fabian casts the antigambling writings of Jonathan Green against the “evolving class structure of the culture of the antebellum North” and quotes one of Green’s contemporary critics, who recommends his literature as “highly useful to young men, especially to those who design to travel south or west” (147, 150). Gamblers, charlatans, and people of questionable moral standing populate the California tales of Bret Harte published in the Overland Monthly; Harte’s Gabriel Conroy will be taken up in the last chapter. William’s misrecognition of Allen, coupled with his gullibility to fall victim to repeated schemes intended to separate him from his money, are meant to contrast his naïveté with her experience. In fact, descriptions of William such as the following threaten the integrity of Allen’s cover story, reuniting with her true love: “Knowing that William was of a conﬁding and unsuspecting nature, who was not disposed to deviate from the path of rectitude, but whose difﬁdent and kind disposition could too easily be abused by designing and corrupt associates, I felt the greatest solicitude on his account” (55). Having indirectly achieved the primary objective of her adventure as George Mead, Allen shifts tactics and cloaks herself in the guise of nurse, conﬁdant, and general protector to William. Yet at this moment in Boston, when a susceptible William is poised to become the victim of a swindle a second time, Allen does nothing to intervene directly or speciﬁcally on his behalf. In fact, I would argue that Allen takes 102

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advantage of this opportunity just as she did in Mexico City: to test the mettle of William’s character. A Return to Female Dress and Sentimental Rhetoric

Unable to sway the men to pack their bags and leave Boston for fear that the events transpiring in New York would repeat themselves, Allen resolves herself to one ﬁnal scheme intended to keep William from moral fall. Having dismissed the most direct means of intervening on William’s behalf and “mak[ing] known [her] real character,” Allen manufactures an alibi for her absence from the hotel, requesting that William watch over the trunk containing her fortune from the gold [103], (33) mines. Allen does not, however, give her fortune over to William for safekeeping but instead takes it with her on her supposed journey to Lines: 186 to visit relatives. She proceeds to a dressmaker’s shop, where she procures ——— “an entire lady’s wardrobe of rich and costly materials” along with * 21.0pt Pg “a gentleman’s ﬁne cloak and a fur cap, which could, at a moment’s ——— Normal Page notice, be changed, so as either to appear as a gentleman’s cap or a lady’s traveling hat” (58–59). Her last public appearance as a man * PgEnds: Eject is purposely staged, but neither to a dramatic nor a pragmatic end. The elaborate staging of her unveiling and return to female attire and [103], (33) identity is as contrived as the snares laid out by swindlers in New York and Boston. The effect, really, is to demonstrate the extent of Allen’s control even at the very moment when she appears to be relinquishing it by returning to her “real character.” Alone in a private chamber, Allen divests herself of her male attire and identity for the last time and prepares for the romanticized reunion with William and the resumption of the marriage plot. The constructed nature of Allen’s anticipated narratological climax is displaced onto her return to female attire: “The transition was almost as odd as the one I had experienced nearly three years before; but when I had completed my new dress, which seemed so strange that it made me feel awkward and unnatural, and viewed myself before the mirror, I could not but be astonished at the sudden and striking change” (59). The “awkward” and “unnatural” feelings elicited by Allen’s return to female costume reﬂect the deﬁning characteristics of her three-year masquerWomen as Men and 1846 as 1776

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ade as George, which had become so naturalized in the narrative that it went unmarked at times. Accordingly, her reclamation of her female identity takes on dramatic overtones, as when she “purposely throw[s] open [her] cloak, in order to reveal her sex” so that she will be conducted to the ladies’ car on the train back to Boston, the site of her reunion with William (60). Allen’s unmasking brilliantly doubles as an unmasking of the gender and sexual conventions associated by Marjorie Garber with crossdressing: throwing open the cloak to reveal a female body arrayed in gendered clothing effectively undoes the pleasure associated with hiding and revealing the phallus in male cross-dressing, and effectively commands the striptease toward an entirely different line of pleasure. Unveiling her female identity under the purposely ambiguous cloak is indeed a striptease because William is not yet her audience, and so the narrative divests itself of another layer of its own narratological clothing. This moment of supposed unveiling could go unnoticed in the narrative, so Allen repeats the image once again as she registers at a different hotel in Boston, “with [her] cloak thrown open” as Eliza Billings, assuming William’s surname as his sister rather than as his wife. This clever trick protects Allen from any scandal that might come from William calling on her at her hotel room. But it is also another narrative striptease because what is revealed when the cloak is thrown open is still a disguise, not the real Eliza Allen, but another persona. She reveals this one excusable and very understandable disguise to William in the note she writes to him to be delivered by messenger. Like her preface, her letter to William addresses the issue of truth and authenticity and thereby assures William and the reader full disclosure: “It may be, that you will be inclined to doubt [the letter’s] authenticity, but, be assured that it is genuine, and that it comes from her to whom you once proposed constancy and ﬁdelity” (60–61). Note that even at the brink of full disclosure, a moment threateningly close several times in the adventure, Allen continues to maintain a separation between herself and William’s version of her. While in the tent with William in California and in their sick beds in Mexico City, Eliza Allen as George Mead witnessed William’s love and devotion to her as a divided character who secretly enjoys the praise William gives her but publicly must maintain a distance from 104

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that identity. It is crucial that these moments transpire on Mexican or former Mexican soil, because the environment of war prompts such divisions, such schisms between public and private, foreign and domestic, by the very mechanisms of nationalism. A soldier abroad, particularly a female masquerading as a soldier abroad, gains access to a script of abstraction or representation whereby s/he publicly assumes an identity quite distinct from a private persona during the theater of war. The anonymity of soldiers in war, whose uniforms identify them by nation only and not by anything more speciﬁc than a name, provides the ideal setting for Eliza Allen’s transformation into George Mead. The sentimental tableaux of family reunion mark the ending of [105], (35) Allen’s The Female Volunteer and Buntline’s The Volunteer. Unlike the “foundational ﬁctions” examined in chapter 2, however, these two narratives of female soldiers do not reproduce the aftermath of the Lines: 203 to U.S.-Mexican War without reservation. The women in battle rescue ——— themselves and appear liberated from the principles of true wom* 235.8700 anhood, which they draw from only to save themselves from racist ——— and sexist critiques. Edwina’s and Eliza’s transvestitism threaten to Normal Page break the bond between national production and reproduction, the * PgEnds: Page embodiment of the United States after 1848. [105], (35)

Women as Men and 1846 as 1776

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5. Testifying Bodies Citizenship Debates in Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy

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California Gold Seeker to His Mistress Yet weep not, sweet, for I will toil Beneath the blazing sun,

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The Californian mine, Though poor will seem the precious store Till I have made it thine. —Benjamin Park

F

or the bulk of Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy (1871), the characters search for Grace Conroy, originally believed to be dead, only to discover her in brownface in the courtroom, offering testimony on her brother’s behalf at a murder trial. Grace’s captivity is not a tale of abduction like those analyzed in the ﬁrst chapter, nor is it one of emotional rescue analyzed in chapter 2. Rather, it is Harte’s meditation on the consequences of Manifest Destiny on U.S. identity and a recognition that just as captivity narratives reveal the discursiveness of identity, so too does Manifest Destiny. Captivity’s service to romancing Manifest Destiny has already been covered in previous chapters. In this ﬁnal chapter, I’d like to turn to the ways in which Manifest Destiny captures and captivates the United States to the extent that all institutions set in place to corral and stabilize identity—in particular the nation, the family, and the law—are themselves called into question.

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In Gabriel Conroy, Manifest Destiny creates an ontological dilemma whose repercussions are individual and national. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and the California Supreme Court case of People v. Hall (1854) provide illuminating frames for interpreting Harte’s obscure novel: a narrative populated by impostors, hustlers, two-timing women, and cannibals all embroiled in legal and illegal ﬁghts over rights to a silver mine. Within the swirl of identity theft, Harte implicates Manifest Destiny’s legacy, demonstrating that the Mexican question had overarching ramiﬁcations for Chinese, American Indians, and the two central institutions codifying identity—the family and the legal system. The chaos that ensues from [108], (2 emigrants distancing themselves from the Starvation Camp (Harte’s thinly disguised use of the Donner Party) and positioning themselves as rightful heirs to a silver mine parallels posturings over the “foreign” Lines: 3 and the “domestic” occurring at midcentury on a national scale. ——— Gabriel Conroy opens at the end of the war with Mexico and con14.0p ——— cludes in 1854, the year of People v. Hall but, just as important, the Normal year that saw the ratiﬁcation of the Gadsden Purchase and a revisita* PgEnds: tion of citizenship issues raised by the peace treaty between Mexico and the United States. 1 As late as 1790, the United States had declared [108], (2 that citizenship was exclusively reserved for “free white persons.” 2 On the surface, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo appeared to extend citizenship to all former Mexican citizens, but because it threatened to challenge the “white only” composition of U.S. citizenry, ratiﬁcation stalled over the Indian question. Harte attempts to answer the multifaceted Indian question that applied to Mexicans (mestizos) and Chinese through the characters of Grace Conroy, who takes on a mestiza identity to avoid a social fall because of an unwed pregnancy, and Ah Fe, a Chinese immigrant whose barred testimony could exonerate a murder suspect. In a ﬁctional account of People v. Hall, Harte demonstrates that the legal system’s overzealous defense of whiteness—in its attempts to restrict the privileges of citizenship to Anglo-American males—threatens to strip all inhabitants of the newly annexed Southwest of their identities. Tying these two plotlines together—the racial masquerade of Grace Conroy and the murder trial of Victor Ramirez— is the political aftermath of the U.S.-Mexican War. 108

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Gabriel Conroy ﬁctionalizes the war’s repercussions in California and dwells particularly on the legal and racial implications of legislation like Article IX, which extended U.S. citizenship to all former Mexican citizens. Harte’s novel reﬂects the war’s tumultuous impact on American Indians, Chinese, and Mexicans, who jockeyed for positions of political and social legitimacy through vexed engagements with whiteness and racial otherness. Gabriel Conroy critiques the war’s bearing on U.S. race relations by decentering whiteness through legal maneuvers for citizenship rights and by disrupting the family romance, which served as a cradle for national consolidation. 3 Set in a newly formed mining town overcrowded with gamblers and charlatans making multiple false claims about their familial relationships to inherit a silver mine, Harte’s Gabriel Conroy provides a ﬁctional Petri dish for observing the legacy of Manifest Destiny: the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), the Foreign Miners’ Tax (1850), formation of the Land Commission (1851), the Gadsden Purchase (1854), and People v. Hall (1854). The novel chronicles the lives of ﬁctional survivors based on the Donner Party catastrophe: Gabriel Conroy, his sister Grace (a.k.a. Doña Dolores Salvatierra, a.k.a. Mrs. Peter Dumphy), Philip Ashley (a.k.a. Arthur Poinsett), Peter Dumphy (the cannibal and, not coincidentally, a lawyer), Victor Ramirez (Julie’s jilted lover, whose death occasions the novel’s sensational court case), and Julie Devarges (a.k.a. Grace Conroy). Three events transpiring between members of the emigrant party signiﬁcantly impact the subplots of the novel: before he dies, renowned scientist Dr. Devarges bequeaths his silver-mine claim to Grace Conroy; Grace leaves the party with Philip Ashley, her lover who impregnates and subsequently abandons her. Devarges’s ex-wife, Julie, impersonates Grace and then marries Grace’s brother, Gabriel, in the hopes of reclaiming the silver mine. The real Grace Conroy assumes a mestiza identity as Doña Dolores Salvatierra, and only returns to reclaim her identity as Grace when her brother is put on trial for the death of Julia’s ex-lover, Victor Ramirez. Indeed, Ramirez’s death (a bizarre suicide in which he falls upon his own knife and thus invokes the image of the top-heavy American Indians analyzed in Romero’s Home Fronts) culminates in a lengthy murder trial in which Harte puts U.S. legislative acts on trial. In this manner, Mexicans effectively become the “new” vanished race. This Citizenship Debates in Bret Harte

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chapter takes up the legal ramiﬁcations of the conﬂation of Mexican American and American Indian identities. All in the Family Although both family and national romances in the nineteenth century expanded to include differences in gender, they did not accommodate differences in race. 4 Indeed, for Anglo Americans the family romance was a homogenizing myth designed to insulate and protect the family from racial difference. 5 Ensuring legitimacy and inheritance necessitated measures to safeguard the republican family from any external (read racialized) sexual threat.6 Ironically, although race was imagined by Anglo Americans as a corrupter of family and, therefore, national romances, the rigorous campaign for circumscribing whiteness within the familial unit posed an even greater threat by inadvertently encouraging the transgression of powerful social taboos speciﬁc to the family. For Harte, these taboos include incest and the characteristically western form of the con, characters posing as family members to inherit rights to a silver mine. These multiple maskings and unmaskings undermine the sanctity of the Anglo-American family and, in so doing, reveal the extent to which this source of national identity is ultimately corruptible by the same forces shaping the new wealth in the post-1848 Southwest. Prior to the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, the unspoken necessity of absorbing people of color into the citizenry of the United States helped populate the landscape with individuals loyal to the nation who would take up arms against any enemy and ﬁght, at least for the land they occupied. Mexico, and Spain before it, employed similar tactics to assure their literal presence in regions distant from the capital or center of government. 7 In the view of the U.S. and Mexican governments, the Southwest was a relatively barren region whose geographic proximity to both nations made it a contested territory by default. Both nations would wrestle for a stronghold in the region—Mexicans by offering citizenship and land grants, the United States by Manifest Destiny. To fortify their claim to the southwestern territory, both governments were willing to accept members of the other nation into their citizenry; this drive to occupy the contested landscape meant sanctioning 110

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(whether directly or indirectly) interracial marriage. 8 After the war, in the post-1848 United States there was no longer a need to recruit people wholesale into the citizenry, and the incidence of interracial marriage, quietly tolerated in the past out of necessity, was no longer permitted. In its doubling of U.S. territory, Manifest Destiny brought about the crisis that attorney William Snyder and others address. Former Mexican territories like California and Colorado would pose the greatest threat to the domestic model because matrimonial law was based upon Mexican laws.9 The church ﬁrst instituted marriage laws by publishing lists of relatives forbidden to join in marriage. States passed legislation to prohibit and punish instances of incestuous unions between people linked by consanguinity or afﬁnity. In cases of incest, rulings in southern courts in general reveal the assumed connection between family and nation. Judges were reticent to intrude upon or undermine patriarchal rule. As further testament to the bond between family and nation, the Mississippi high court in 1872 characterized incest as a transgression against “domestic virtues” and “the obligations of a citizen” (Bardaglio 33). In the South in particular, where slavocracy conﬂated family and racial servitude and where countless slave owners raped and impregnated black female slaves, the policy against incest became all the more complex and insidious. The insular properties associated with the family romance are predicated in part on the specter of the racial other. Yet the guarded, homogenizing function of the family romance to maintain and reproduce whiteness fostered the very practices it sought to avoid. The strategic incorporation and deployment of racial otherness, whether American Indian or Mexican, paradoxically signiﬁes the consequences of a national preoccupation with the republican family and its racial purity. 10 When legal documents declare Grace Conroy to be among the dead at Starvation Camp and her lover abandons her while she is pregnant with his child, the insulating practices of the republican family work against her. Grace’s return to the family as a fallen woman would taint the national family’s laws of legitimacy and inheritance; thus, she must take recourse outside the national domestic as an adopted member of a Mexican family. Grace’s liminal position between families (the illegitimate one to which she gives birth, the Conroy family who Citizenship Debates in Bret Harte

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replaces her with Julie Devarges, and the mestizo identity she takes on in her adopted family) speaks to the uncertain position of California residents after 1848. In the mimetic relationship between white women and American nation, it is only ﬁtting that Harte cast Grace as victim of the family romance and the overzealous legal system in the battle for identity, legitimacy, and inheritance. The Legality of Whiteness Populated by californios, mestizos, American Indians, and Chinese, California adopted its own state constitution to determine how it would legislate citizenship after the treaty, which granted U.S. citizenship to all individuals eligible for Mexican citizenship.11 One year after the treaty, California’s state constitutional convention debated how racial lines were to be drawn; such decisions involved the extension of enfranchisement and other citizenship rights. At the convention’s close, Mexicans were deﬁned socially as “white” and extended citizenship, whereas California Indians were deemed “nonwhite” and therefore ineligible for citizenship. 12 The 1854 case of People v. Hall classiﬁed Chinese as “Indians” and therefore nonwhite (Almaguer 9, 10). The adoption of a “white” heroine into a Mexican family—Grace Conroy’s acceptance into the Salvatierra family as Doña Dolores— should be read as a domesticated version of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, particularly Article IX declaring the “incorporation” of former Mexican citizens into the United States. Coupled with the family’s monomaniacal focus on whiteness, the legislative acts produced after 1848 all but script Grace’s assumption of a mestiza identity. In an inverse relationship, the rapid depeopling of American Indians and Mexicans from the national landscape further enabled characters like Grace Conroy to “go native.” In a carbon copy of the treaty, in which adoption serves as a domesticated version of incorporation, the racial and political identities of the adoptee in Harte’s novel mirror those of Mexicans, ostensibly welcomed into the U.S. national family. Strikingly, the central dilemma of racial identiﬁcation facing Grace Conroy and focusing upon the ownership of whiteness reﬂects the very real predicament confronting Mexicans and American Indians after the California state constitutional convention created the term white Mexican. 112

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California’s subsequent interpretations of the treaty’s very broad, ambiguous terms for U.S. citizenship placed racial categories in ﬂux. Speciﬁcally, the category of “white” was dislodged from a ﬁxed racial and social position as many upper-class californios—those who declared their European ancestry through Spanish bloodlines—claimed status as white persons. Legislative acts particular to post-1848 California expelled whiteness from its position as a static racial, social, and legal category by the dynamic interplay between Mexicans and American Indians. Indeed, California passed laws to “disenfranchise Mexicans of Indian descent and to allow only white Mexicans full political rights” (Menchaca 588). Ensuing legislation all but scripted racial masquerade: “The conquered Mexican population learned that is was politically expedient to assert their Spanish ancestry. . . . [Conversely] it became politically expedient for American Indians to pass for Mexican mestizos if they wished to escape the full impact of the discriminatory Indian legislation” (587). The legal posturings of people of both American Indian and Mexican descent chronicled by Menchaca are replicated in hyperbolic form in Gabriel Conroy to such an extent that even the titular character’s identity is called into question on the witness stand. In an attempt to protect his wife’s character, a woman who had previously attempted to wrest ownership of the silver mine by pretending to be Grace Conroy, Gabriel takes the stand and testiﬁes that he is not Gabriel Conroy but actually John Dumbledee. Gabriel Conroy a.k.a. John Dumbledee and People v. Hall Like the original state court case that culminated in People v. Hall, the ﬁctional case that places Gabriel Conroy on trial for murdering Victor Ramirez hinges on the eyewitness testimony of a Chinese immigrant. George W. Hall, a white man accused of murdering Ling Sing, was originally found guilty based on the testimony of three Chinese witnesses. On appeal to the state supreme court, the original ruling was overturned precisely because of the racial identity of the eyewitness. The supreme court of California ruled that because Chinese were not white, they were ineligible to testify against white people. Brieﬂy, the convoluted argument went as follows: “We are of the opinion that the words ‘white,’ ‘Negro,’ ‘mulatto,’ ‘Indian,’ and ‘black person,’ Citizenship Debates in Bret Harte

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wherever they occur in our Constitution and laws, must be taken in their generic sense, and that, even admitting the Indian of this continent is not of the Mongolian type, that the words ‘black person,’ in the 14th section, must be taken as contradistinguished from white, and necessary excludes all races other than the Caucasian” (People v. Hall). 13 This same negative dialectic, in which “Caucasian” is deﬁned primarily by “all races other than the Caucasian,” would later be applied against Mexican inhabitants of the Southwest, of whom a choice few carried the doubly inﬂected title of “white Mexican” for several years following the U.S.-Mexican War. In a chapter entitled “What Ah Fe Does Not Know,” Gabriel Conroy’s lawyer intends to interrogate Ah Fe “to establish the fact of Gabriel’s remoteness from the scene of the murder by some corroborating incident or individual that Ah Fe could furnish in support of the detailed narrative he had already given. But it did not appear that any Caucasian had been encountered or met by Ah Fe at the time of his errand” (2: 134). In keeping with People v. Hall, Ah Fe is prohibited from testifying, even though here it is on behalf of a white man accused of murder. We witness Harte’s treatment of the ruling in the parade of immigrants (Irish, French, and German) whose testimony, utterly useless and tangential at best to the case, is accepted by the court because the immigrants are “white.” 14 The German immigrant’s testimony, however, is most telling as an indicator of Harte’s political agenda: “[The German immigrant] believes a Chinaman as good as any other man” (465). In one succinct sentence, Harte dismisses the supreme court ﬁndings, which describe the Chinese as “[a people] whose mendacity is proverbial; a race . . . nature has marked as inferior, and . . . incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point” (qtd. in McClain 550). Although Harte does not address the supreme court’s tortured attempts to link American Indians with Chinese, members of the Chinese community reacted to the Hall decision by distinguishing themselves from “these Indians [who] know nothing about the relations of society; they know no mutual respect; they wear neither clothes nor shoes; they live in wild places and in caves” (Lai Chun-Cheun letter). There were solid legal reasons for the Chinese in mid-nineteenth-century California to want to distance themselves from American Indians. As noted 114

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earlier, American Indians were denied U.S. citizenship, targeted during the Indian Removal era in the 1830s, and treated as the basis upon which Mexican residents could claim their whiteness. Violence, represented by the death of Victor Ramirez, occasions the novel’s moment of revelation in which the characters’ “true” identities are revealed, their crimes exposed. I read the court scene as the passage in which Manifest Destiny, in all its guises and forms, appears naked and ugly, exposed for both narrator and reader alike to ridicule. Given the history of legislation designed to authorize and perpetuate Manifest Destiny, it is appropriate that Harte should set the novel’s ﬁnal showdown in the courtroom where, like the aftermath of Manifest Destiny, the victimized and displaced Mexican is virtually ignored. The occasion of the trial—Victor Ramirez’s mysterious death—is overshadowed by the ridiculous posturing of Anglo-American characters relating to ownership of the infamous silver mine. Grace Conroy ﬁgures prominently in the novel by offering the most in-depth examination of Manifest Destiny’s impact after the war in the guise of racial masquerade and the appropriation of Mexican land grants by “legal” means. Indeed, it is no accident that the novel tethers the subplot of ownership disputes over the silver mine with the recovery of Grace Conroy. Gabriel Conroy unwittingly settles on the silver mine and, through his foolish actions and thoughts, represents the watered-down version of an Anglo American who receives the spoils from Manifest Destiny but remains ignorant of the insidious means employed to gain them. At the novel’s conclusion, when Grace secures title to the mine based on her inheritance from José Salvatierra, her adopted father, we witness the duplicitous mechanisms of Manifest Destiny—the geographic incorporation of Mexican territory, signiﬁed by the silver mine, and the racial incorporation of Mexican identity, signiﬁed by Grace’s guise as Doña Dolores Salvatierra—and how these two forms of incorporation function together. Grace Conroy enacts an imperialist consumption of Mexican racial and cultural traits when she disguises herself and lives as Doña Dolores Salvatierra. Harte takes his cue in his representation of Grace from such national documents as Article IX of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ﬁgures Mexicans in the United States after the war as a type of racial incorporation and racial erasure. The United States did Citizenship Debates in Bret Harte

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not just stop at incorporating half of Mexico’s territory, it also took its people, its citizens. In doing so, the United States made manifest a kind of racial and cultural ownership of Mexicans to be deployed whenever it served the interests of the nation. Examining the imperialist rhetoric of Article IX of the treaty reveals the extreme degree to which Manifest Destiny permeated the U.S.Mexican War, both fueling patriotic fervor before the war and later justifying violence after peace was met. Witness the manner in which the article imagines “The Mexicans who, in the territories aforesaid, shall not preserve the character of citizens of the Mexican Republic . . . [to be] incorporated into the Union of the United States” (190, emphasis mine). Tellingly, this concept of incorporation does not account for racial difference—nor does it ﬁgure Mexicans as agents of their own nationalities. Although the language of the article is couched as a choice, ostensibly giving Mexicans the option either to retain Mexican citizenship or else become U.S. citizens, the application of this article denied that such a choice existed at all. Incorporation does not imply choice—it in fact implies an unspoken violence, an action that occurs in direct disregard of someone’s choice. Bronze, Copper, and Silver

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Harte exposes how the treaty’s rhetoric negatively impacted the identities of Mexicans by denying them entry into the “American family”; conversely, Spanish documents will keep Grace from her own family and identity. Mrs. Julie Devarges, the widow of Dr. Devarges, intends to use the Spanish report “show[ing] both [Conroy] sisters to be dead and leav[ing] [Gabriel Conroy’s] identity in doubt” to discredit Gabriel Conroy and make claims on her deceased husband’s silver mine (71). Grace Conroy’s identity remains a mystery throughout much of the novel because the Spanish report legally disinherits her from her own identity. When she ﬁrst appears in front of Don José Salvatierra, commander of the presidio of San Geronimo, Grace enlists his aid in ﬁnding her family. From the translation of a Mexican ofﬁcial document, she learns that among the bodies of the deceased was one identiﬁed as Grace Conroy (52). Upon hearing that she is ofﬁcially dead and that Philip Ashley, the father of her unborn child, is “not found,” Grace 116

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faints at the feet of Don José. The next time she appears in the narrative it is in the guise of Doña Dolores Salvatierra, the daughter of Don José and a Native American princess. Grace’s transformation into Doña Dolores glosses the failure of the republican family romance. When Grace originally leaves the emigrant party with Philip Ashley, a false biological relationship between the two is manufactured to protect Grace’s reputation. At Philip’s insistence that Grace’s beauty “offers an explanation of [their] companionship that the world will accept more readily than any other, and the truth to many would seem scarcely as natural,” she takes his name (35). But what momentarily appears to be a marriage proposal turns instead into an insidious creation of familial ties—Philip declares that Grace shall be his sister. This benign covering for an illicit love affair offers no protection to Grace once she has been impregnated and summarily abandoned by Philip. In her pregnant condition, to repeat the lie that she and Philip are brother and sister would be to condemn both her and her child to the scandal of incest. This tenuous status exists not only for Grace’s baby but also for Grace herself. Now a “fallen woman,” legally declared dead and without any immediate family to assist her or shield her from social judgment and sentencing, Grace must turn to other sources for her identity and reputation (which was inextricably tied to a woman’s identity). By passing as Doña Dolores, Grace Conroy escapes the family romance, gains social respectability, and becomes heiress to one of the largest haciendas in California, whose landholdings include the infamous silver mine. In a Spanish document, written up by José Hermenizildo Salvatierra (Grace’s adopted father) but not presented until the novel’s conclusion, her racial transformation is revealed: “Wishing to keep her secret from the world and prevent recognition by the members of her own race and family, by the assistance and advice of an Indian peon, Manuela [Grace], consented that her face and hands should be daily washed by the juice of the Yokoto—whose effect is to change the skin to the color of bronze” (496, emphasis mine). The application of a bronzing agent saves Grace from a social fall and even opens up the means for her to ascend in social class without the sexual implications of marriage. Ironically, because of the family’s preoccupation with whiteness, Citizenship Debates in Bret Harte

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Grace’s bronze appearance is her only escape from the family romance. Harte demonstrates the invisibility afforded by a mestiza identity when Arthur Poinsett, Grace’s former lover, fails to recognize her. As Doña Dolores, Grace summons Arthur to her hacienda under the pretext of soliciting his legal advice on claims to the silver mine. When he ﬁrst sees her, “Arthur’s heart leaped with a sudden throb . . . the outline of the small face was a perfect oval, but the complexion was of burnished copper!” (156). Recalling the moment of George Harris’s passing in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where brownface makes him appear “Spanish-looking” and thus invisible as an escaped slave, Grace’s invisibility behind her copper hue creates an interesting trajectory and speaks volumes to racial registers in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Brownface signiﬁes racial indeterminacy, ambiguity along the blackwhite binary. And for Arthur to react viscerally to her beauty but fail to recognize beyond the copper hue his own former lover is to render the effects of the national family’s racial purity absurd. To read Grace’s racial passing through the family romance is to recognize the creation of two illegitimate familial relationships (ﬁrst, the sibling relationship between herself and her lover, and second, the relationship between the father and the baby) that leave Grace completely bereft of a legal, legitimate identity. Having consumed and exhausted all the socially acceptable familial roles open for an Anglo American female, Grace takes on the asexual and racialized identity of Don José’s daughter. Assuming pious, nunlike qualities in the guise of Doña Dolores, as attested to by Father Felipe and Doña María Sepulvida, protects Grace’s reputation. Grace’s transformation into Doña Dolores Salvatierra, a mestiza (of indigenous and Spanish ancestry), represents Manifest Destiny’s legacy to the family and the legal system. The family romance’s obsession with homogeneity, sameness, and legitimacy compels self-replicating sameness such that the fallen white woman becomes the “foreign.” Cast out of all the possible family positions she could claim, Grace takes advantage of her only recourse—which is to dye her skin, learn Spanish, and assume the identity of Salvatierra’s “half-breed” daughter. Instead of assuming the character of a socially white member of the gente de razón, a pure-blooded Spaniard, Grace usurps a mestiza identity, a racial identity that retains the stigma incurred for the birth of 118

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an illegitimate child but also contains the ﬂuidity described earlier by Menchaca. In other words, Grace retains her “fallen” character in her alias as Doña Dolores. Yet despite the “fallen” nature of her disguise, Grace indeed inherits more cultural capital as a mestiza in a Mexican society than she could ever hope for as an Anglo woman in the United States: “At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the basic principle guiding American law was that a husband was the natural guardian of his wife’s interests. . . . A married woman was prohibited from bringing legal suits or being sued, from making contracts, and from owning property individually. By the Civil War . . . many states . . . adopted married women’s property acts, which permitted married women to control their own property and earnings” (62). 15 Even as a mestiza, Grace’s “sexual purity” as Doña Dolores makes her the beneﬁciary of legal and economic rights that Mexican and Spanish women had enjoyed for nearly a century before Anglo-American women (Stuntz 545). 16 Introducing people of color into the national imaginary—signiﬁed by interracial adoption—subverts the mechanisms for conferring identity and property. Harte’s novel addresses the post-1848 turmoil in identity and property claims. At one point in the novel, as if to indicate the absurd degree to which this identity crisis had risen, the titular character appears on the witness stand and declares himself to be John Dumbledee, not Gabriel Conroy (460). The racial and familial identities of Harte’s characters are challenged repeatedly, echoing the ambiguous position that Mexicans, Chinese, and American Indians alike held in the nation after the war. In the assembly of foster families, identity is not the only claim at stake. Inheritance, legally expressed through wills and land grants, represents another facet of the family romance encroached upon in the war’s aftermath. Family and national romances, two interdependent stratagems for conferring identity onto individuals, are challenged in the wake of the U.S.-Mexican War. In the chaos that followed the treaty’s dismantling of the domestic apparatus as the stronghold of whiteness, residents of California, regardless of race, sought retribution and refuge in the U.S. judicial system. Individuals petitioned their claims to racial identities and property rights to judges in the belief that a legal decree would secure their rights and privileges, allow them to maintain their lands, and render Citizenship Debates in Bret Harte

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them safe from vigilantes, squatters, and other criminal products of Manifest Destiny. Documents, wills, testimonials, and land grants— several of the legal methods for establishing and securing inheritance, both political and territorial—became the very targets of U.S. imperialism, which drafted legislation intended to reverse past promises to Mexicans and californios (like the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) and to regain territorial control. In 1851 California established the Land Commission as the legal apparatus for overturning Spanish and Mexican land grants. During his time in California, Harte witnessed ﬁrst-hand the devastating effects this legal act, coupled with the PreEmption Act, had on residents of the state. 17 The Land Commission impacts residents of California, calling into question the ownership of the mine and the abundance of land grants signed by Pío Pico. “In 1849, while still Army Secretary of the State, [Capt. Henry W.] Halleck had produced the ﬁrst ofﬁcial report on California land matters, setting forth a negative interpretation. He believed that most California claims were inchoate and the Pico grants totally invalid, if not openly fraudulent” (Pitt 91–92). “Governor Pío Pico, it was rumored, had dreamed up some eighty new land grants after the American occupation and had doled them out to his ‘worthless cronies’; certainly [reasoned Captain Halleck] all such grants must be retracted at once” (Pitt 87). Harte’s Victor Ramirez, former secretary under Governor Pico, forges false land grants on old ofﬁcial stationery bearing Pico’s signature. Harte brings into sharper focus the methodologies for “legally” robbing Mexicans and American Indians alike of their rightfully held lands. The abuse of legal methods to effect illegal gain, the novel argues, jeopardizes the very “claims” individuals make on their own identities. Gabriel Conroy reads like a detective story in which readers and characters must sift through the multiple disguises and identities assumed by its characters. Taken together, these two points—that including racial difference removes one from the family romance and that the legal system can advocate inclusion into the family—reveal the very foundation of the family romance and the basis for the threat posed by Mexicans, Chinese, and American Indians after the U.S.-Mexican War. In Gabriel Conroy, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s guarantee of U.S. citizenship to Mexicans living in the newly annexed territory is explored 120

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through the family romance in the form of interracial adoption. Grace Conroy, a socially and racially white heroine, is adopted into a Mexican family in a ﬁctional reversal of the national narrative scripted for the post-1848 Southwest (particularly California). Whiteness, a social and racial category imagined to be the sole purview of the republican family, is jeopardized when Mexicans are granted U.S. citizenship. In the national family’s desire to socially erase Mexicans’ racial difference (noted by Mexicans’ status in California as “socially white”) and thus maintain a legacy of whiteness, the obsessive preoccupation with sameness raises the specter of incest. While Harte is clearly critiquing these laws, he also seems to privilege a mixed racial identity by allowing his heroine to gain an inheritance and save her social reputation by masquerading as a mestiza.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Dictation of Mrs. Captain Henry D. Fitch (1875) (banc mss c-e 67:10). For readings of Fitch de Carrillo’s testimonio, see Genaro Padilla’s My History, Not Yours and Rosaura Sánchez’s Telling Identities. 2. For more on the resurgence of captivity narratives in the 1820s and 1830s, see Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence, June Namias’s White Captives, Rebecca Blevins Faery’s Cartographies of Desire, and Christopher Castiglia’s Bound and Determined, among others. 3. Unlike the term slavery, slavocracy recognizes slavery as a pivotal economic factor in the United States. 4. The American Revolution of 1776 became a usable past for the U.S.Mexican War. For the United States to avoid appearing too much like its own former colonizer, Britain, the invasion of Mexico was characterized as a liberating act intended to bring Mexicans into the political egalitarianism enjoyed by the United States and a republican form of government. Accordingly, Mexico’s government appeared in newspapers and other forms of popular media as tyrannical and overbearing. 5. As Raymond Paredes argues in his unpublished dissertation, early AngloEuropean colonists like William Bradford and Cotton Mather were aware of Spain and desired to “remove the Spanish presence in the Americas” through “massive missionary activity” (40). As a preacher, most of Mather’s antiSpanish sentiment was grounded in the Black Legend, the Catholic Church, and its leader, the pope. The anti-Catholic spin in Mather’s Hispanophobia produced La Fe del Christiano in 1699, reported by Paredes to be the “ﬁrst book printed in Spanish in New England” (42). Not surprisingly, Bartolomé de Las Casas’s descriptions of Mexico greatly shaped the attitudes of early AngloEuropean colonists; it is no wonder that the marines’ battle hymn invokes an image from the Spanish conquest of Mexico—the Halls of Montezuma. 1. Mis(s)taken 1. The Oatmans’ religious beliefs were largely suppressed in newspaper accounts, in Olive’s lecture notes, and in Stratton’s text.

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2. Actually, it was the Yavapais who, Washburn notes in his introduction to the text, were “commonly identiﬁed with the Apaches by whites in the area” (viii). 3. In Edith Taylor’s article on Mohave tattooing and face painting, the marks on Olive’s chin have religious signiﬁcance, guaranteeing the wearer entrance into “Sil’aid (Land of the Dead)” (5). 4. In her lecture notes, Olive anticipates the audience’s interest: “You perceive I have the marks indelibly placed upon my chin” (19). Critic Kathryn Derounian-Stodola writes that “illustrations played a much more important role in the second and third editions of the Oatman publication . . . the number of engravings rose from twelve to sixteen, and the treatment of the subject generally became more sensational and sentimental” (38). 5. Not only does Namias argue that all three types of female captivity narratives are established by New England tradition, she claims that all these stories are structurally indebted to Rowlandson’s narrative (36, 24). 6. Richard Dillon cites the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, “in which a number of Mormons joined Indians in murdering a non-Mormon emigrant group” and “the Utah War between the Army of the West and the Saints [that] dragged on from 1857 until mid-1858” as two historical events that may have contributed to the suppression of the Oatmans’ afﬁliation with Mormonism (46, 48). 7. For more on the marketing of California and other former Mexican territories as curative geographies, see Jennifer Tuttle’s smart and witty “The Symptoms of Conquest: Race, Class, and the Nervous Body in The Squatter and the Don,” in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, ed. Amelia de la Luz Montes and Anne E. Goldman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 56–72. 8. For exact ﬁgures on lands lost in California as a result of the Land Commission, see Leonard Pitt’s The Decline of the Californios. 9. For more on this subject, see Conﬂict of Interest, a collection of her correspondence edited by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. 10. See Tomás Almaguer’s Racial Fault Lines for more on the history of the social category “white Mexican.” 11. See 34th Congress, 3rd session, H. report 55, and 34th Congress, 1st session, S. Exec. Doc. 66, pages 67–68. 12. Some controversy surrounds Harrison B. Oatman’s assumption of guardianship over Lorenzo and Olive only after Olive’s much publicized rescue. In the interim years, between the initial attack and Olive’s rescue, Ira Thompson functioned as Lorenzo’s guardian. In what Rice describes as “acrimonious correspondence,” Thompson questioned the motives of Harrison 124

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Oatman by asking what had prevented him from caring for Lorenzo from 1853 to 1855 (99). The issue of Lola Medina’s guardianship prior to her family reunion with her father and maternal grandfather in Mexico privileges blood relations and condemns the pecuniary interests motivating her white adoptive family, the Norvals. 13. Rice followed the public reception of Captivity of the Oatman Girls in California newspapers, writing “The Daily Town Talk and the Daily Morning Call approved: ‘We trust it may have a large sale,’ stated the ﬁrst; ‘its contents are very interesting, though painful,’ judged the latter” (99). 14. Rev. Edward J. Pettid, S.J., who edited and typed Olive’s lecture notes and added a bibliography of sources, writes that she “apparently stopped lecturing when she married in 1865” (Introduction). 15. Mary Jemison’s as-told-to account of her life among the Seneca likewise contains favorable readings of her adopted tribe and its members. To counter such readings that were clearly in deﬁance of anti-Indian propaganda, Jemison’s editor, James Everett Seaver, includes a highly questionable chapter on the savagery of her second husband, Hiakatoo, which June Namias and Kathryn Derounian-Stodola believes was crafted by “George Jemison,” a conman who claimed to be Jemison’s “cousin” to secure land from her (185–86, 120, respectively). 16. Pettid seems to support Deroudian-Stodola’s claim, stating the two reasons for her lectures were “one, to promote the sale of the thriller, Captivity of the Oatman Girls; and, to help raise funds for church-building” (Introduction to Oatman’s lecture notes). 17. Lola ﬁrst appears at the Norval household in blackface. Over time, the dye continually applied by the Mohaves fades away, leaving Lola literally spotted. For Olive, however, this bodily mark of her association with “savages” proves indelible. Newspaper accounts all contain the anecdote of soldiers at Fort Yuma passing around the hat to pay for Olive’s new attire. 18. Captivity narratives, beginning with Mary Rowlandson, made much of clothing as a medium reﬂecting civility and chastity. I am thinking speciﬁcally of the Narragansetts’ numerous requests for Rowlandson to knit clothing. “Stripping the captive woman or ripping off her clothing is as much a stock trope in captivity tales . . . as is the habitual nakedness of Native women in representations of the nineteenth century and earlier” (Faery 177). See, for example, Walter Colton, Richard Henry Dana, Susan Magofﬁn, and Charles Lummis, to name but a few. 19. For more on the connections between physiognomy and U.S. expansionist politics, see Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny. Notes to Pages 9–12

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20. See Sánchez’s Telling Identities, esp. pages 143–51. 21. Kroeber speculates that Stratton may have tinkered with Olive’s age to pump up the sensational element of her story and boost sales. 22. Royce Oatman communicated with the Apaches (Yavapais) in Spanish; Francisco, the Yuma Indian who rescues Olive, is ﬂuent in both Spanish and his native tongue. 2. Domestic Captives 1. The larger historical implications of Pocahontas, a ﬁgure central to English colonization of the eastern seaboard, will be taken up in the next chapter’s investigation of the American Revolution as a usable past for the U.S.-Mexican War. 2. Note the strategic omission of Pocahontas’s captivity in the legend. What persists in the national imaginary is the story of Smith’s capture by Powhatan and rescue by his daughter, Pocahontas. For such American Indian scholars as Gail Tremblay and Rayna Green, and for mixed-bloods in general (including Gerald Vizenor, Linda Hogan, et al.), it is the racial legacy of Pocahontas’s capture and subsequent marriage to John Rolfe that informs the seminal tale of red-white relations. 3. See Gail Tremblay’s “Reﬂecting on Pocahontas” in Frontiers 23.2 (2002): 121–23. Tremblay writes a corrective to the “great romance” in part by noting the absence of Pocahontas’s narrative from John Smith’s previous editions to A Generall Historie of Virginia (1624). Furthermore, she points out the discrepancies over Pocahontas’s age and the appreciable age gap between Smith (twenty-seven or twenty-eight) and Pocahontas (between ten and thirteen). In the concluding sentences of her piece, Tremblay states: “And so, in America, another generation plays Indian, imagining native women’s bodies, all tits and ass; our Native cultures a magic show—doomed to feed other people’s fantasies while we face being dehumanized by people who think they can own it all, deﬁne it all, take it all, and leave us with images only a few seem to have the sense to laugh at, to cry about, to loathe” (123). See also Rayna Green’s “Pocahontas Perplex” (714). 4. For more on this connection, see Kari Boyd McBride’s “Native Mothers, Native Others: La Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacajawea,” in Maternal Measures, ed. Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000), 306–16. Just as American Indian scholars focus their resistance on the image of Pocahontas, Chicana scholars like Cherríe Moraga, Norma Alarcón, and others have re-envisioned La Malinche. 5. Rebecca Blevins Faery mentions Virginia’s 1691 antimiscegenation law, 126

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passed soon after Pocahontas’s marriage to John Rolfe, as evidence of the colonists’ fear of racial mixing, which further renders the union of Pocahontas and Rolfe as exceptional (119). 6. Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh (16: 452); letter written December 6, 1813 (11: 353–54). 7. Enlightenment thinkers stressed the concept of humankind’s potential for indeﬁnite progress, a theory that emphasized environmental differences as the cause of variations in accomplishment across the globe (see Horsman 44–46, 104–06). According to this logic, American Indians were poised to progress toward the ideal embodied in the European ideal. For more on the use of Enlightenment’s environmental theory and its inﬂuence on depictions of the “New World,” see Georges Louis Leclerc’s depiction of America and Thomas Jefferson’s reply in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787). 8. See Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960) and The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day, 1968). 9. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson’s analysis of nation-building reveals, but does not critique, women’s function as the medium for cementing political and familial relations that lead to nation-states. For a wellargued feminist critique, see Emma Pérez’s The Decolonial Imaginary, in which she structures an antagonistic relationship between feminism and nationalism, arguing: “If indeed we consider rhetoric about feminism within nationalist movements, we seem doomed to repetition over the centuries” (31). 10. See William R. Swagerty, “Marriage and Settlement Patterns of Rocky Mountain Trappers and Traders,” Western Historical Quarterly 11 (Apr. 1980): 168–69; qtd. in Rebecca McDowell Craver, “The Impact of Intimacy: Mexican-Anglo Intermarriage in New Mexico, 1821–1846,” Southwestern Studies 66 (1982): 1–79. 11. Menko’s actions—taking a Mexican bride, her ransom (a makeshift dowry), and heading for enemy territory—are not unlike those of AngloAmerican men who married into Mexican families, beneﬁted from dowries and naturalization laws, and then took wife and loot (or just loot) to the United States. Note that Menko is the ﬁrst “savage” threat to Martha; by casting a Comanche warrior in this role, Flint relies on early conventions of racial binaries reinforced by the tradition of captivity narratives to remove the taint of opportunism and savagery from Francis’s eventual marriage to Martha. 12. In captivity and “going native” narratives, the racial dynamics of American Indians and Anglo-Americans are decidedly gendered. The Anglo woman in danger of corruption by the savage dark body is whitened in contrast to her Notes to Pages 21–23

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captor (see Christopher Castiglia, Philip Gould, and Nina Baym). The Anglo male, best embodied by Natty Bumppo in the Cooper novels, has a much more tenuous hold on “whiteness” that allows him to “go native” when expedient but then retreat into his “white blood” when necessary. In Flint’s novel, Francis remains conspicuously white throughout, thus making his rescue of Martha, also identiﬁed early on as white, a “natural” conclusion. Rather than Francis insisting upon his own whiteness, American Indians and Mexican characters declare his racialization. 13. James Fenimore Cooper’s “going native” narrative in Last of the Mohicans (1826), in addition to the taint of savagery born by people penetrating the frontier, underlies Flint’s anxieties about his protagonist’s claim to whiteness. In other words, unlike the seventeenth-century captivity narratives set along the eastern seaboard, in which a return to Puritan civilization was ensured by virtue of territorial proximity, Francis’s venture into Mexico is more in keeping with Cooper’s tales of the frontier, where the “civilizing” forces of women are always imagined to be far away. Further, Flint’s protagonist is unwittingly subject to the same georacial logic established and maintained by Spanish colonialism in Mexico, wherein those born in Spain (peninsulares) enjoyed a higher position than those of Spanish ancestry born in Mexico (criollos). 14. Red Heifer’s name alone summons the depiction of American Indians common to nineteenth-century literature as “red” and “bestial.” Again, this portrayal owes much to the national shift from imagining American Indian women as overly sexualized beings who symbolize a justiﬁcation for British colonialism (à la Pocahontas) to a brute, bestial ﬁgure intended to allegorize a national renunciation of racial amalgamation as the answer to red-white relations. Red Heifer’s racialization satisﬁes the collective investment in racial purity and Anglo-Saxonism of the nineteenth century. 15. As Blevins Faery notes in Cartographies of Desire, the nineteenthcentury replacement of Rolfe-as-husband with Smith-as-love-object reﬂects a national move away from the “advocacy of English-Indian intermarriage as a solution to racial conﬂict” (120). 16. Their prevalence in American society continued into the twentieth century, prompting D. H. Lawrence to characterize America as nation fueled by a desire to know (Studies in Classic American Literature). 17. As Lauren Berlant notes, blood circulates as a national metaphor for democratic possibility that must be channeled correctly. The blood shed on American Revolutionary battleﬁelds is symbolically replaced by the new blood of the democratically elected leaders of a new republic (qtd. in Davidson 47). See Michael Davidson, “Strange Blood: Hemophobia and the Unexplored 128

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Boundaries of Queer Nation,” in Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context, ed. Timothy B. Powell (New Brunswick nj: Rutgers up, 1999). 18. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry evaluates this phenomenon by which victory in battle or war is determined by the number of deceased bodies tallied on each side. Blood is shed for political principles, and the nationalistic rhetoric linking the physical body with the disembodied ideals of nationalism is best exempliﬁed by soldiers on the battleﬁeld. 19. For more on Ruiz de Burton’s use of blushing, see John M. González, “The Whiteness of the Blush: The Cultural Politics of Racial Formation in The Squatter and the Don,” in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, ed. Montes and Goldman, 153–68. 20. Many historical romances marry Britains to Americans after the American Revolution or residents of the North and South after the Civil War and thus bypass the dilemma that racial crossings create. I purposely investigate novels uniting Mexicans and Anglo-Americans because I believe they should be included in the canon of U.S. historical romances. For more detailed analysis of novels centering on post–American Revolution romances, see Shirley Samuels’s Romances of the Republic. 21. The quotation appears on page 3. For more, see María del Rosario Rodríguez Díaz’s “Mexico’s Visions of Manifest Destiny during the 1847 War,” Journal of Popular Culture 35.2 (Winter 2001): 41–50. 22. For the seminal analysis of the ﬁgure of Caliban in the Américas, see Roberto Fernández Retamar’s classic “Caliban: Notes Towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” Massachusetts Review 15 (1974): 7–72. 23. Richard Slotkin characterizes the difﬁculty facing western writers who were “cut off from the vocabulary of eastern romanticism, in which heroes might be identiﬁed with the symbolic noble savage, by the nature of his section’s recent and continuing engagement with the task of despoiling and suppressing the Indians. He was likewise faced with the presumption that, as a man of the frontier, he and his heroes were quasi Indians themselves, embodying those negative qualities traditionally associated with Indians” (418). 24. Leonard Pitt notes the Enlightenment’s inﬂuence in Mexico’s independence from Spain: “They began to yearn vaguely for education, the reduction of clerical power, freedom of expression, liberation of bondsmen, the end of colonial status, and self-government. However belatedly, the Enlightenment was overturning the old order” (3). 25. It echoes the famous revolutionary phrase, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Notes to Pages 25–29

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26. Of the four “story-papers” analyzed in this chapter, Inez the Beautiful is the only text not published by Gleason. Along with the Williams Brothers in New York and Boston’s Jones Publishing Ofﬁce, these three publishing ﬁrms monopolized the story-paper market (Johannsen 187). 27. Halyard revisits this trope in The Mexican Spy, in which the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of Maj. Henry Rowlandson from Mexican custody is attributed to the Devil (78). 28. See Jean Stuntz’s “Spanish Law for Texas Women,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 104.4 (2001): 542–59. 29. “Life and Adventures of Ferdinand Cortes, for Godey’s Young Readers,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 50 (1855), and “A Legend of Mexico,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 37 (Nov. 1848): 305. 30. Gertrude Atherton’s novels, like Before the Gringos Came and Los Cerritos, focus on the post-1848 generation. For Atherton, these marriages are doomed and their prodigy are frail, physically or emotionally disﬁgured. 31. Berlant characterizes the stresses produced by these sites, like the two conﬁgurations of citizen, as central to the “American” novels of the 1850s (Anatomy of a National Fantasy 6). 32. As May argues in The Enlightenment in America, there were several stages of the Enlightenment. My use of the term Enlightenment rhetoric is twofold: Enlightenment principles are given lip service before and during the war. These novelists are engaging the nation that has disenfranchised them with the very language that it used when promising liberation, freedom, and innate rights. Second, Enlightenment rhetoric has historically been the basis for redressing the nation’s racism, imperialism, and general disregard for the rights and privileges of any group other than the free white males guaranteed citizenship since 1790. For more on the use of Enlightenment rhetoric to appeal for freedom from the bonds of slavery, see Peter A. Dorsey, “To ‘Corroborate Our Own Claims’: Public Positioning and the Slavery Metaphor in Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly 55.3 (Sept. 2003): 353–86. 33. The narrator catalogs a list of cruelties perpetrated by Alvaro against the hacienda’s peones, including his lustful attentions to Juanita, whose grandparents implore Don Santiago’s help in protecting her (296–97). 34. See Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera; Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary; Alarcón, “Traddutora, Traditora,” etc. 35. See “A Long Line of Vendidas” in Moraga’s Loving in the War Years. 36. The post-wedding correspondence of newlyweds and their parents bears out this reading. Susanita and Angela have not forfeited one set of relationships (parental) for another (marital), as supposed in the dime novel’s construction 130

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of marriage as racial rescue (290–91). Furthermore, in as much as the mexicana bride rescued by her Anglo husband anticipates the racial family conditions of the tragic mulatta that would appear near the century’s end, Angela, Susanita, and Luis Gonzaga all expressly maintain their ties with their mother. 37. I agree with Limón that González and Raleigh project their ideals of social relations into the nineteenth century, but we differ with respect to our readings of such early Mexican and Anglo relations. Limón conjectures, “Had it been published [in the nineteenth century], Caballero would have asked a nineteenth-century reader to view its happy marriages as a plausible projection of the future based on contemporary social relations.” He continues, “The long century could no more have imagined such a possibility, even as romance, than it could have imagined a novel of the postbellum Jim Crow South in which a white man and a black woman found true marital bliss” (346–47). As Tomás Almaguer, Raymund Paredes, Cecil Robinson, and others have argued, nineteenth-century depictions and treatment of Mexicans were far from static or monolithic. Nineteenth-century church records of MexicanAnglo marriages attest to the viability of González and Raleigh’s romance, as does the absence of Anglo-Mexican unions from the long list of marriages prohibited in antimiscegenation laws. 38. What critic Kathleen De Grave has described as “a famous case of passing that is pretty well documented” bears out the living truth of this racial binary in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Texas. Lucy and Albert Parsons, who married in 1872, “evaded the Texas laws banning miscegenation by creating ﬁctional parents” for Lucy (102). Because she could not reveal her racial identity as an escaped plantation slave, she concocted the story that she was “the child of John Waller, a Native American, and Marie del Gather, a Mexican woman” (102). 39. See Claudia Tate’s Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (London: Oxford up, 1992). 40. In “the erotics of politics,” the conﬂation of nation and family is predicated on “ ‘natural’ heterosexual love and in the marriages that provided a ﬁgure for apparently nonviolent consolidation during internecine conﬂicts at midcentury” (Sommer 6). 41. In particular, see Article IX of the treaty in Richard Griswold del Castillo’s The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. 42. Several midcentury texts denied the interracial marriage plot because of religious differences between the couple. Inez, A Tale of the Alamo (1855) devotes entire chapters to debating the biblical precedent for such Catholic beliefs as confession, intercession of saints, and absolution, among others. Notes to Pages 38–40

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43. The novel foregrounds the domestic space by placing a map of the hacienda before the text itself, to guide Anglo-American readers through a foreign domestic terrain. 44. Don Santiago strikes an elderly and loyal peon for bringing him bad news; he shoots and kills a squatter on his land without asking questions or seeking other remedy; he makes rash, unwise matches between his daughters and wealthy members of the community. Alvaro rapes female peones, physically abuses elderly peones, and ignores the pleadings of Juanita’s grandparents, who fear he will rape her and thus rob her of the possibility of marriage (296). 45. See Barbara Welter’s “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” in Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline, ed. Lucy Maddox [132], (1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1999). 46. Included in the gossip of the younger generation of women about the Lines: 1 recently arrived americanos, Inez claims: “These Americanos marry for love, and let their women ride a horse after marriage and give them things” (40). ——— 47. In Inez the Beautiful, for example, mutual feeling overcomes the lan- * 17.0p ——— guage barrier between Inez and Captain Devereux (32). Normal 48. Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, volume 1 of Studies in the Psychology * PgEnds: of Sex, was ﬁrst published in the United States in 1900. 49. The Bowers v. Hardwick Supreme Court case engaged the “debate over whether homosexuals should be allowed to serve in the military” (see Inness, [132], (1 “Lost in Space” 258). 50. See Chris White’s Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality. With the exception of brief readings of Walt Whitman at century’s end, there is no discussion of the general theory of homosexuality in the United States. The book is, however, an excellent source of legal, medical, and cultural material on Britain’s understanding and treatment of homosexuality. 51. Jovita González, “Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties,” M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1930. 52. “Mexicans, Foundational Fictions, and the United States: Caballero, a Late Border Romance,” Modern Language Quarterly 57.2 (1996): 341–54. 3. Embodying the West 1. Naﬁs and Cornish published other texts relevant to the U.S.-Mexican War: T. J. Farnham’s Life and Adventures in California with Travels in Oregon (1849), Life of Francis Marion, Brigadier General of the U.S. Army (1847), and A. B. Lawrence’s A History of Texas (1844). Their songbooks included 132

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Forget Me Not Songster (1835) and Nigger Melodies: Being the Only Entire and Complete Work of Ethiopian Songs Extant (1850). 2. John O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, coined the phrase “manifest destiny” in 1845. He wrote of the United States’ “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” 3. See Bhaba, Nation and Narration (1990). 4. See Paredes’s “The Image of the Mexican in American Literature,” diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1973. 5. Take, for example, the ﬁrst U.S. text about northern Mexico, Zebulon Pike’s 1810 Southwestern Expedition, in which he champions the democratization of Mexico as a government equal to the United States. Far from espousing the expansionist beliefs that led to the war, Pike inspired other writers to view Mexico’s independence from Spain as a revolutionary event on par with the American Revolution. For more, see Lyon Rathbun, “Champions of Mexico in Antebellum America,” Journal of Popular Culture 35.2 (Winter 2001): 17–23. 6. For more on the ability of popular-cultural production, speciﬁcally minstrelsy, to mediate class, regional, and racial tensions, see Eric Lott’s classic Love and Theft, especially chapter 7. For more on the paradoxical nature of sentimental ﬁction, see Gillian Silverman, “Sympathy and Its Vicissitudes,” American Studies 43.3 (Fall 2002): 5–28. 7. See the Naturalization Act of 1790, chap. 3, sec. 1; Naturalization Act of 1795, chap. 20, stat. 2, sec. 1. For more on how Mexican residents had to declare themselves white to receive citizenship rights, see Fernando Padilla, “Early Chicano Legal Recognition in 1846–1897,” Journal of Popular Culture 13.3 (1979): 564–74. 8. The war doubled the U.S. territory by taking one third of Mexico. 9. As early as 1778, John Adams asserted that the “foundation of national morality must be laid in private families” (Diary of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterﬁeld et al. [Cambridge: Harvard up, 1961], 4). 10. For more on literary romances doing the political work of reconciliation after wars, see Shirley Samuels’s Romances of the Republic, which addresses the literature of the American Revolution, and Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions, which examines Latin American literature. 11. Although we might associate Johnny Cake (cornbread or corn pone) exclusively with the South generally and as a staple of an African American diet in particular, Johnny Cake appeared on the table across the United States until wheat became more common. Indeed, as Pamela Goyan Kittler and Kathryn P. Sucher mention in Cultural Foods: Traditions and Trends, Rhode Notes to Pages 51–55

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Island’s legislature ruled during World War II on the state’s spelling of the food, Jonnycake, and on its central ingredient, “ﬁnely ground whitecap ﬂint corn” (402). 12. One such proponent of the “All Mexico” campaign was Jane McManus Storms Cazneau, who wrote for the New York Sun and functioned as a spy and potential peace broker while traveling to Mexico in the middle of the war. For more on Storms, see Linda Hudson, Mistress of Manifest Destiny (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2001). 13. See Andrea Tinnemeyer, “Enlightenment Ideology and the Crisis of Whiteness in Francis Berrian and Caballero,” Western American Literature 35.1 (Spring 2002). 14. In McCarty’s collection, “An’ then annex ’em too, gal” appears as an additional line (101). 15. See Stephen John Hartnett’s Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America for a thoughtful analysis of how the threat of Britain making a colony or a politico-economic ally of Texas spurred debates about U.S. annexation. As Thomas Walker Gilmer’s editorial in the Baltimore Republican and Argus stated quite plainly, “England, whose possessions and jurisdiction extend over so large a portion of the globe, whose inﬂuence is felt everywhere, will either possess or control Texas, if it does not come under the jurisdiction of the United States” (qtd. in Hartnett 112). 16. Sam Houston said in 1848, “The Mexicans are no better than Indians and I see no reason why we should not go in the same course now, and take their land” (qtd. in Horsman 243). 17. Article VIII of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo states: “Those who shall prefer to remain in the said territories may either retain the title and rights of Mexican citizens, or acquire those of citizens of the United States.” 18. The history between race and the Enlightenment principle of natural rights traces its origins in the United States with the Revolutionary thinkers’ use of the slavery metaphor. As Peter Dorsey agues in “To ‘Corroborate Our Own Claims,’ ” use of this metaphor “destabilized previously accepted categories of thought about politics, race, and the early republic” and became the basis for African Americans who petitioned for their freedom (355, 367). 19. As Henry May illustrates in The Enlightenment in America (Cambridge: Oxford up, 1976), the four categories of the Enlightenment (moderate, skeptical, revolutionary, and didactic) occurred chronologically. My point here is more general: the nation fashioned the principles commonly associated with the Enlightenment as their banner for invading Mexico. The American Revolution became a usable past for the U.S.-Mexican War. 134

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20. This group included José Francisco Madero and his surveyor, José María Carbajal, who were imprisoned by Col. Juan Davis Bradburn. 21. As a testament to the mutually reinforcing notions of sentimental literature and nation-building, Godey’s Lady’s Book carried an entire series of articles highlighting the heroic women of the American Revolution during the years of the U.S.-Mexican War. 22. Robert Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas (New York: Oxford up, 1985). 23. Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70.3 (Sept. 1998): 581–606. 24. By 1860 there were at least sixty-ﬁve music publishing ﬁrms (Complete Catalogue of Sheet Music and Musical Works, 1870, ed. Dena J. Epstein). For more on the technoculture of nineteenth-century popular music, see Leslie C. Gay’s “Before the Deluge: The Technoculture of Song-Sheet Publishing Viewed from Late-Nineteenth-Century Galveston,” American Music 17.4 (Winter 1999): 396–421. 25. Branham discusses the use of “Dixie” by both the South and the North during the Civil War, as well as the adaptation of “God Save the Queen” to American revolutionary sentiment voiced in “Come, Thou Almighty King.” 26. The very titles of some of the dime novels bear witness to the formulaic stitching of foreign and domestic through warfronts and homefronts: Inez, the Beautiful; or, Love on the Rio Grande, Arthur Woodleigh: A Romance of the Battle Field in Mexico, and The Bloody Nuptials; or, A Soldier by Chance: A Tale of the Mexican Campaign. 27. Hans Nathan writes that “at the time [Old Dan Tucker] was said to have been sung, perhaps oftener, than any melody ever written” (179). 28. In Sweet Freedom’s Song, Robert Branham traces the ironic history of “Dixie,” which by 1861 “had become the Confederate battle hymn and national anthem.” Branham continues: “Yet in a deliciously ironic twist indicative of the blurred lines of association and allegiance of both the period and popular music in general, the song was composed by an African American and popularized by Dan Emmett, the son of an Ohio abolitionist” (129–30). 29. As historian David Montejano notes in Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, “Intermarriages, which had been common from 1835 to 1880 throughout the region, gradually declined. Distinctions between Mexican and Anglo were drawn in sharp racial terms: the train’s passenger car, according to one passenger, was equally divided, ‘For Whites’ and ‘For Negroes’— which in the south-west of Texas reads ‘Mexicans’ ” (92). 30. In Robert Walker’s Letter on the Annexation of Texas, he focuses on Notes to Pages 57–61

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Mexicans’ afﬁnity with African slaves. For Walker, the Mexican question was the slave question, and he believed the inclusion of Texas in the United States would relieve the slavery issue by drawing free blacks, escaped slaves, and slaves into Mexican territory and outside the United States. In this manner, Walker applies the same “logic” of those who imagined American Indians willingly removing themselves from contested territory. For more on Walker’s letter, see Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny and Stephen Hartnett’s Democratic Dissent. See the Wilmot Proviso for an example of the connection between the U.S.-Mexican War and the Civil War. 31. Slavery became an issue in Mexico’s reaction to Manifest Destiny doctrine. Since Mexico had abolished slavery in 1821, “Mexicans could portray themselves as morally superior to Anglo-Americans proclaiming the extension

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of human liberty while actually seeking to spread the institution of slavery” (46). See María del Rosario Rodriguez Díaz, “Mexico’s Vision of Manifest Destiny During the War of 1847,” Journal of Popular Culture 35.2 (Winter

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mett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977). 34. As reported on the website for the Illinois State Military Museum, Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna paid Charles Bartlett, a former cabinetmaker, $1,300 for two cork legs covered in leather. During the 1838 war between Mexico and France, known as the Pastry War, General Santa Anna’s actual leg was shot. 35. For more on Emily Morgan West, the “Maid of Morgan’s Point,” see Claude Garner’s Sam Houston (1969) and Francis Abernathy’s Singin’ Texas (1983). 36. General Santa Anna was known as a Mexican version of Napoleon.

37. As Peter Linebaugh argues in The Many-Headed Hydra, “Capital punishment embodied the ultimate, spectacular power of the regime of terror” (50). He continues, “In all its forms, terror was designed to shatter the human spirit” (53). 38. It is the legend of the Yellow Rose rather than the song lyrics per se that addresses the interracial escapade. In his 1915 silent ﬁlm Martyrs of the Alamo, Christy Cabanne, protégée of D. W. Grifﬁth, describes Santa Anna as a drug ﬁend who was fond of wild orgies. Cabanne emphasizes this point about 136

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Santa Anna’s unnatural sexual prowess by placing not one but four women who distract him in his tent during the Battle of San Jacinto. 39. For more on interracial marriages between Mexicans and Anglo-Americans, see William R. Swagerty, “Marriage and Settlement Patterns of Rocky Mountain Trappers and Traders,” Western Historical Quarterly 11 (Apr. 1980): 168–69; Rebecca McDowell Craver, “The Impact of Intimacy: Mexican-Anglo Intermarriage in New Mexico, 1821–1846,” Southwestern Studies; Antonia Castañeda, Presidarias y Pobladoras: Spanish-Mexican Women in Frontier Monterey, Alta California, 1770–1821; and Albert Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). 40. Castañeda argues that the early writings of Hubert Howe Bancroft and Theodore H. Hittell, speciﬁcally California Pastoral and The History of California, respectively, were responsible for promoting stereotypes of Mexican women that “have been propagated not only by other nineteenth- and twentieth-century popularizers but also by scholars” (144). For more on Castañeda’s analysis of nineteenth-century characterizations of mexicanas, see “Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish-Mexican Women in the Historiography of Frontier California,” in Chicana Leadership (2002). 41. In With the Ears of Strangers, Robinson writes that class heavily inﬂuences racialization: “While the ordinary Mexican encountered every day in the border country was treated with unremitting scorn, the aristocratic owners of the large haciendas in the interior of Mexico were objects of interest and curiosity to the writers of the dime novels, who treated them with a combination of hostility and respect” (26). 42. See Richard Henry Dana’s description of attending a wedding in California in Two Years Before the Mast as a typical reading of the costuming of Mexican rancheros and hacendados. 43. David Weber attributes the Black Legend to Anglo-Americans’ view of Spaniards as “unusually cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, cowardly, corrupt, decadent, and indolent” (Spanish Frontier in North America [New Haven ct: Yale up, 1992], 336). 44. In Fighting for American Manhood, Kristin Hoganson attributes the bellicose spirit that led to the Spanish-American War to “Darwinian anxieties” that the nation, middle-class masculinity in particular, was degenerating. “[Jingoists] viewed war as an opportunity to build the ﬁghting virtues that allegedly were being undermined by industrial comforts” (12). Leisure depicted in the sketch of Taylor signiﬁed arrogance and the assurance of Manifest Destiny at midcentury but degeneracy and decline at century’s end. Notes to Pages 64–67

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45. See Silverman, “Sympathy and Its Vicissitudes,” 5–28. 46. Waddy Thompson, Recollections of Mexico (New York, 1847). 47. The Mexican newspaper Siglo XIX recognized this very connection between the imagined fates of American Indians and Mexicans, declaring that the Hispanic race would be extinguished in the same vein (Oct. 29, 1848; qtd. in Rodriguez Díaz 46). 48. Romero looks at James Fenimore Cooper’s extremely popular Last of the Mohicans; see Home Fronts: Nineteenth-Century Domesticity and Its Critics (Durham: Duke up, 1997). 49. Catherine Beecher worried speciﬁcally about the unhealthy look of young American lads in comparison with the noble physique of untamed American Indians. She wrote in support of modeling the U.S. educational system on the Greeks; physical as well as mental strength should be taught to create a well-balanced, well-proportioned citizen who was not prone to the top-heaviness of progenies.

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1. Josefa Alcortez cross-dresses as Don Juan Fernandez (The Prisoner of Perote); Margarita Caspareta cross-dresses to rescue her future husband, Charles Blackler (The Mexican Spy); Avaline becomes the heroine of Tampico while dressed as a cavalier (The Heroine of Tampico); Inez defends her father on the battleﬁeld as a Mexican swordsmen in Inez, the Beautiful. 2. June Namias identiﬁes the Amazonian, the female captive who effects her own rescue, with the country’s revolutionary period beginning in 1764 and ending in 1820 with the start of Jacksonian America. Inaugurated by the publication of Hannah Dustan’s captivity narrative, the Amazonian captive rose from a national need, growing out of the Revolutionary period, to bring “women into active combat status in the national war against Indians” (34). As Namias writes, “Husbands went away on long trips; husbands died. In such circumstances, society sanctioned women to serve in their stead for the sake of family survival” (29). In the era of expansionism (1820–70), the “frail ﬂower” predominated as the archetype for the female captive, according to Namias. Corresponding to “the rise of True Womanhood and the mass marketing of sentimental ﬁction,” the Frail Flower “is the poor, hapless woman who is taken unawares. She is shocked and distressed by her capture and by the deaths and dislocations that go with it. What makes her a candidate for the Frail Flower status is that she rarely emerges from her shock, distress, and misery” (36–37). 3. In Hawthorne’s 1836 resurrection of Dustan, her ﬂouting of gender scripts makes her an ideal whipping post for improper women generally (and

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the infamous “damned bunch of scribbling women” obliquely) and shores up Namias’s captivity categories. The appearance of an Amazon-like Dustan in a time dominated by the Frail Flower results in Hawthorne’s characterization of Dustan as a “raging tigress” and a “bloody old hag” (136). For an excellent reading of Hawthorne’s Dustan, see Ann-Marie Weis, “The Murderous Mother and the Solicitous Father: Violence, Jacksonian Family Values, and Hannah Dustan’s Captivity,” American Studies International 36.1 (1998): 46– 66. 4. Godey’s editor’s book table section recommends S. A. Mitchell’s pocket maps, “comprising, as it does, the whole of Oregon and nearly all of California, with a large slice of Mexico, the present battlegrounds of our Army, [to] be of great service to all who wish to obtain accurate notions of that now interesting portion of the continent” (July 1846, 47). Beyond endorsing other texts for their information on Mexico, Godey’s performs its national service in the publication of poetry, editorials, and serial stories on the subject. 5. African American feminists like Hazel Carby and Claudia Tate have brilliantly analyzed the same dynamic at play in the uneasy alliance of abolitionist and feminist rhetorics: the black female body becomes the source and symbol of white femininity. In “Let It Pass,” Pamela Caughie recognizes the continuation of this co-optive pattern between black women’s bodies and white women’s feminism in the contemporary work of Judith Butler. 6. Josefa’s martyrdom to the marriage of Julius Marion and Adelaide Vincent in The Prisoner of Perote and Clara Myers’s Spanish disguise as Doña Altamira to conclude her betrothal to the titular character in Arthur Woodleigh emblematize the function of the Mexican female as a conduit for national peace, represented in the reunion of white-white marriage plots. Like Magawisca in Hope Leslie, she enters the romance plot not as a future bride but as an agent policing and reinforcing marriage’s racial boundaries. Recall that in Hope Leslie, it is the ﬁgure of Magawisca who must pronounce the potential romance between herself and Everell impossible. Still, Magawisca sacriﬁced herself, literally and ﬁguratively, by interposing her arm as Everell was being threatened by the axe. She becomes the sacriﬁcial ﬁgure— just like the nineteenth-century version of Pocahontas, who willingly forfeits her own chances for love and happiness to a larger Anglo-European and AngloAmerican colonial effort—represented by their male love interests. 7. Through the ﬁgure of the wench, Lott believes minstrel shows “dramatized white men’s fear of female power with a suspiciously draconian punitiveness . . . usually in the grotesque transmutations of its female ﬁgures” (27). Lott links the minstrel shows’ preoccupation with a devouring, polymorphous Notes to Pages 74–75

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female body to the liberating yet dangerous potential transvestitism of the carnival. Following the excellent work of Natalie Davis and Mikhail Bahktin, the openness of the female body, particularly the mouth and vagina, become sites of masculine unease. The female body’s unruliness, its potential for chaos and change so expertly laid out in Bahktin’s Rabelais and His World, glossed the growing class tensions at midcentury. Lott links this particular mapping of the female body with social unrest to the minstrel shows’ popular Lucy Long, who swallows men and other objects whole (160–61, 166). 8. Harry Halyard’s The Mexican Spy and the Heroine of Tampico both contain trickster ﬁgures: Jedidiah Hutchins and Jedidiah Starkweather, respectively, who dish out homespun wisdom, jigs, and bad poetry. 9. In his analysis of Ann Eliza Bleecker’s The History of Maria Kittle (1793), “America’s ﬁrst captivity ﬁction,” Castiglia recognizes in the dynamics of female readership a form of sisterhood “that crosses class and national (although not racial) barriers” (127). The empathy displayed by other female characters in Bleecker’s novel models the readers’ emotional reception of the novel. Castiglia’s imagined community of female readers, however, draws heavily on Habermas’s notions of a democratic reading public, which, despite its idealism, reinforces class and gender distinctions since literacy was a luxury only afforded to a select few (namely, white men). By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the rise in literacy rates in the United States did blur class and gender distinctions, although racial lines were maintained. Indeed, Frederick Douglass and other former slaves identiﬁed literacy as a central component to their internal freedom. 10. Indeed, critics look at Mary Jemison’s extensive life among the Seneca and argue that she becomes a Seneca woman. See June Namias’s White Captives, especially chapter 5. 11. See Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s “Bodily Bonds,” Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood, Claudia Tate’s Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, Ellen Carol DuBois’s Feminism and Suffrage, Louise Michelle Newman’s White Women’s Rights, and Pamela Caughie’s “Let It Pass” as a representative but by no means exhaustive list of scholars and scholarship addressing this troublesome legacy of white feminism. 12. In the late nineteenth century, white women like Alice C. Fletcher, who acted as missionaries and agents of U.S. domesticity on reservations, gained social and political power at the expense of the tribes, particularly their male members. See chapter 3 of Laura Wexler’s Tender Violence and John M. González’s “The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona,” American Literary History 16.3 (Fall 2004): 437–65. 140

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13. See Barbara Welter’s “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–60” for more speciﬁcs on the parameters for this national female ﬁgure. 14. See Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher’s edited collection, No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader (Durham nc: Duke up, 2002). 15. For white masculinity’s dependence on the cultural practices of African Americans in its construction of itself and its other, see Eric Lott’s Love and Theft. See Hazel Carby and Karen Sánchez-Eppler for white femininity’s reliance on the overly sexualized African American female body. Just as much as white masculinity is indebted to its racial other in the black male, white femininity constructs itself on the images of the hypersexual black male and female. In this chapter, I am attempting to secure an argument for the racial

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construction of Mexican womanhood and white womanhood through an analysis of the female soldier. 16. Kaplan focuses on Capitola’s struggles against a bandit “signiﬁcantly named Black Donald” as the means by which Southworth’s heroine “reenacts the originating gesture of imperial appropriation to protect the borders of her *

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domestic empire and the inviolability of the female self” (601).

the beneﬁt of a mother’s advice makes her female alliances with Mexican women all the more powerful and necessary. Magofﬁn’s narrative takes a decidedly different tact in its depiction of Mexican domesticity once she’s befriended several of Santa Fe’s most respected female residents. For more on the portability of domesticity, see Janet Myers’s “ ‘Verily the Antipodes of

Home’: The Domestic Novel in the Australian Bush,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction (Fall 2002). 18. Indeed, the novel’s Irish barmaid, Mrs. Mullowney, is twice described as an Amazon when she upbraids her Irish cohort for lying under oath about Arthur Woodleigh’s national loyalty (62). 19. In Intimate Frontiers, Albert Hurtado’s table for sex ratios among California’s white population in 1850 were 12.2 males to every female. By 1860 the unevenness had subsided to a 2.4 to 1 ratio (76). 20. See David Weber’s The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846 and Antonia Castañeda’s “Anglo Images of Nineteenth-Century Californianas” and “Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish-Mexican Women in the Historiography of Frontier California.” 21. See Jean Stuntz, “Spanish Laws for Texas Women,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 104.4 (2001). Notes to Pages 77–92

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22. The subtitle reads: “Being a truthful and well-authenticated narrative of her parentage, birth, and early life—her love for one whom her parents disapproved—his departure for Mexico—her determination to follow him at all hazards—her ﬂight in man’s attire—enlistment—terriﬁc battles of Mexico—her wounds—voyage to California—the shipwreck and loss of her companions—her miraculous escape—return to her native land—meeting of the lovers—reconciliation of her parents—marriage, and happy termination of all her trials and sorrows.” 23. As discussed in chapter 2, in which I investigate the dynamics of interracial marriage following the U.S.-Mexican War, the custom of arranged marriage is associated exclusively with Spanish culture. Mexican heroines who marry for love rather than antiquated custom are politically afﬁliated with the tenets of republicanism and, by association, the United States. In Allen’s narrative, we witness the same formula—her patriotism is directly linked to her love for a suitor not chosen by her parents—and, in the midst of her military career, its reverse racialization. 24. Allen takes up the subject of her family’s prominence and her mother’s ﬂight from an arranged marriage in her second and ﬁnal text, The Nobleman’s Daughter. In this story of Allen’s parents’ romance, the custom of parents choosing their daughter’s husband is associated with England, and the United States becomes, in the tradition of the texts discussed in the ﬁrst chapter, the land of the romantically free. 25. The idea that Allen would be unknown to her mother is also worth comment because it places Allen entirely outside the domestic sphere, outside the familial relations so crucial to female identity in the nineteenth century. 26. For more on gambling and the sentimental, see Ann Fabian’s “Unseemly Sentiments: The Cultural Problem of Gambling,” in The Culture of Sentiment. Within the exchange paradigm of captivity, gambling confuses the exchange between the human and the monetary. 27. Together with the idea that she fancies herself the muse of temperance, men are slovenly in all respects because they fail to attend to their appearance and cannot live in moderation. 28. Priscilla Wald lists sobriety as one of the virtues embraced by True Women and transmitted by her to other members of her family (186). 5. Testifying Bodies 1. The Gadsden Purchase, ratiﬁed in December 1853 but not enacted until the following year, secured areas in southwestern New Mexico and southern Arizona from Mexico for the sum of $10 million. James Gadsden, U.S. Minis142

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ter of Mexico, desired the land to create a southern railroad that would make California dependent upon the South rather than the North. 2. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines 24. 3. In The American Woman’s Home (1869), Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister, Catherine Beecher, argue that the work of housewives constituted the “sacred duties of the family state.” Historian Ann Douglas Wood argues in “The War within the War: Women Nurses in the Union Army” that women expressed a “complicated urge to make the front truly a homefront, to replace the captain with the mother” (Civil War History 18 [1972]: 206). As early as 1778, John Adams asserted that the “foundation of national morality must be laid in private families” (Diary of John Adams 4). Also see Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions.

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4. In terms of the conventional captivity narrative, the racial purity of returned captives was a central condition for complete reabsorption into family/community/nation.

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rency of the family romance and, not surprisingly, employed the domestic as an indirect but socially recognized maneuver for political capital. 6. See Hazel Carby, “ ‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Em-

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pire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” in Race, Writing, and “Difference,” ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), for a critical and historical account of the logic of lynching laws and how the sanctity and preservation of the white female body became the very ideological grounds on which black males were killed. 7. Geographical proximity played such an inﬂuential role in the loyalty of Mexican citizens that a direct correlation existed between people living close to the capital ﬁghting for Mexico during the Mexican War and those residing in Alta and Baja California who welcomed U.S. annexation. In Telling Identities, Rosaura Sánchez notes that protonationalism in Alta California took the form of a nativist association with California in particular, not with Mexico. The closer subjects were to the capital in Mexico City, the stronger their ties with the nation. 8. Even when Mexico scaled back on its colonization plans, the Dublán and Lozano Act of 1844 “forbidding foreigners from engaging in retail trade . . . contained a clause which exempted those foreigners who were naturalized citizens, those who were married to Mexicans, and those who were residents of Mexico with their families” (qtd. in Rebecca McDowell Craver, “The Impact Notes to Pages 108–111

143

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of Intimacy: Mexican-American Intermarriage in New Mexico, 1821–1846,” Southwestern Studies 66 [1982]: 29). 9. Colorado’s state laws made exception expressly for “people living in that portion of [the state] acquired from Mexico [who] may marry according to the custom of that country” (Snyder 202). 10. “Going native” narratives investigated by Richard Slotkin, Leslie Fiedler, and Lora Romero defused the anxiety of miscegenation in red-white relations by prematurely declaring the death of all American Indians; in texts like The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper’s male Anglo characters gain access to Native customs and identities, which they put on and take off as easily as clothing, to shore up a masculinity threatened by the civilizing principles of women, the domestic, and the cult of sentimentality. More than the end of the American Indian way of life, these tales placate fears about the demise of a suspended adolescence for white men. What marks Harte’s plotline as distinctive is his casting of a white female into the role of “going native,” here going mestiza or putting on “brownface.” 11. The term californio describes a wealthy landowner born in California who boasts of pure Spanish ancestry. Mestizos, biracial people who have both Spanish and indigenous ancestors, make up the majority of Mexicans living in the United States and Mexico. Unlike the californios, who claimed and were granted access to citizenship and its rights and privileges on the basis of a shared European heritage with Anglo-Americans, mestizos comprised the middle to lower classes in Mexican society and provided the labor required to operate haciendas for nearly three hundred years. David Weber notes that most californios were mestizo but enhanced their claims to Spanish ancestry in the hopes of maintaining their social status after the war. 12. Article II, sec. 1 reads: “Every white male citizen of the United States, and every white male citizen of Mexico, who shall have elected to become a citizen of the United States, under the treaty of peace exchanged and ratiﬁed at Querétaro, on the 30th day of May, 1848 of the age of twenty-one years, who shall have been a resident of the State six months next preceding the election, and the county or district in which he claims his vote thirty days, shall be entitled to vote at all elections which are now or hereafter may be authorized by law: Provided, nothing herein contained, shall be construed to prevent the Legislature, by a two-thirds concurrent vote, from admitting to the right of suffrage, Indians or the descendants of Indians, in such special cases as such proportion of the legislative body may deem just and proper.” 13. Charles McClain Jr. quotes extensively from the Supreme Court decision on this point: “ ‘From [Columbus’s] time, down to a very recent period, the 144

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American Indians and the Mongolian, or Asiatic, were regarded as the same type of human species.’ Scientists, the court continued, had until quite recently believed that Indians and Asians came from the same ethnic stock” (549). 14. In Race and Manifest Destiny, Reginald Horsman notes that Germans were unquestioningly included in the racial Anglo-Saxonism dominating midcentury debates regarding the racial composition of U.S. citizenry. The Irish, who would be the target of the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, only appeared under the aegis of Anglo-Saxonism when the phrase included “Celtic.” 15. For additional information on married women’s property rights, see Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca ny: Syracuse up, 1982). 16. “If a woman lost her reputation, she also lost most of her rights, since [145], (23) the purpose of granting these rights under the Partidas was to entice respected women to move to the frontier” (Stuntz 545). 17. Harte resided in California from 1854 to 1871; even after his return Lines: 443 to to the East Coast, California, gold miners, and squatters were the primary ——— subject matter of his prose. Stories like “The Story of a Mine” (1878) satirized * 254.9480 lobbyists and federal bureaucrats involved in determining the legal status of a ——— quicksilver mine (Scharnhorst 63). See Leonard Pitt for exact ﬁgures on land Normal Page holdings in postwar California.

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Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Stratton, Royal B. Captivity of the Oatman Girls. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Stuntz, Jean. “Spanish Law for Texas Women.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 104.4 (2001): 542–59. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford up, 1992. Taylor, Edith S., and William J. Wallace. “Mohave Tattooing and Face-Painting.” Southwest Museum Leaﬂets 20 (1947): 1–13. Trebilcot, Joyce. Dyke Ideas: Process, Politics, and Daily Life. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Tremblay, Gail. “Reﬂecting on Pocahontas.” Frontiers 23.2 (2002): 121–23. Tuel, John E. The Prisoner of Perote: A Tale of American Valor and Mexican Love. Boston: F. Gleason, 1848. Tuttle, Jennifer. “The Symptoms of Conquest: Race, Class, and the Nervous Body in The Squatter and the Don,” in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Ed. Amelia de la Luz Montes and Anne E. Goldman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 56–72. Wald, Priscilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham nc: Duke up, 1995. Washburn, Wilcomb E. Foreword. Captivity of the Oatman Girls. By Royal B. Stratton. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983: v–xv. Weber, David J. The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Weis, Ann-Marie. “The Murderous Mother and the Solicitous Father: Violence, Jacksonian Family Values, and Hannah Duston’s Captivity.” American Studies International 36.1 (1998): 46–66. Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–60,” in Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline. Ed. Lucy Maddox. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1999. 43–70. Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Wheelwright, Julie. Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness. Boston: Pandora, 1989. White, Chris. Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook. New York: Routledge, 1999.

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Index

Allen, Eliza (Billings), xv–xvi, 91–105

gloss for Manifest Destiny, xi–xii, xvi,

Almaguer, Tomás, 23, 26, 62, 131n37 American Indians, as racial foil, xiii, xvi,

19–20, 22–23; as racial rescue, 26, 33–34; reversal of, 41, 93; and sexual

xx, 3, 8–10, 13–14, 16, 20, 23–25,

purity, 3, 7–8, 11, 14–16, 82–83, 88,

68 American Revolution, principles espoused in 1848, xiv–xv, 58, 71–72, 76–77, 89 arranged marriage, 21–22, 33–34, 142nn23–24 Arthur Woodleigh, 73–74, 82–85, 95 Austin, Stephen F., 21, 57–58

111, 116–19 Castiglia, Christopher, xiii, xvi, 16, 75– 76, 78 Chesnutt, Charles, xiv Chicano Movement, 36–37 class status, and Manifest Destiny, 93, 115 corporeality and legibility, 12, 25–26, 28, 51–52, 60–64, 85, 117. See also

Baym, Nina, 13, 16

blushing, practices of

black legend, xiii, 4–7, 61, 123n5, 137n43

cross-dressing, 71–73, 75, 88–89, 94– 99, 101–5 Cult of True Womanhood, xv, xxi,

blushing, practices of, 24–26, 84–85

4, 14, 41, 72, 77, 79, 80, 138n2,

Brooks, James, xvii, 6

142n28

brownface, xiv, 3, 11–12, 94–96, 109, 112–13, 115–19, 121 Buell, George P., 19

“Declaration of Sentiments,” 76, 91 dime novels, 19–22, 29–31, 41, 43–44,

Burke, Capt. Martin, 9

72–91, 130n36, 135n26, 138n1; The

Burnham, Michelle, 4

Heroine of Tampico, 94, 95; Inez,

Burton, Capt. Henry, 10

a Tale of the Alamo, 43; Inez the Beautiful, 30–33; The Mexican Spy,

Caballero (González and Raleigh), xx, 20, 23, 34–50 Caldwell, Charles, 24 captivity: and condoning interracial mar-

94; The Prisoner of Perote, 83 domestic science, 41–42, 53, 58–59, 79– 81, 141n17, 144n10 Dustan, Hannah, xii–xiii, 72

riages, 17, 21–22, 24; conventional notions of, 3–6, 16–17; as emotional rescue, 28–31, 33–34, 42, 64–67; as

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Carrillo de Fitch, Josefa, xi–xii

Bancroft, Hubert Howe, xi, 137n40 Billings, Eliza. See Allen, Eliza (Billings)

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Enlightenment (cont.) 134nn18–19. See also American Revolution

Johnson, Gov. J. Neely, 15 Kaplan, Amy, xxii, 73, 79

Faery, Rebecca Blevins, 5–6, 11 The Female Volunteer (Billings), xxi, 92–

Land Commission of California, 6, 108– 9, 120

105 femininity, constructions of, 78–80, 83,

land grants, 6

86–87 feminism, 139n5; Mexican-American, 32–33, 36–37, 91–92, 127n9; white, 32–33, 76, 89–92

Los Angeles Star, 7, 9, 10 Lott, Eric, xiii, xviii, 74–75, 94, 139n7 La Malinche, 20, 34, 37, 126n4 Manifest Destiny. See captivity

Flint, Timothy, 19–20, 22–30, 127– 28nn11–13 Foreign Miners’ Tax, 109

masculinity, constructions of, xx–xxi,

Fort Yuma, 1, 9 Francis Berrian (Flint), xx, 19–20, 22– 30

Menchaca, Martha, 113

Gabriel Conroy (Harte), xxii, 107–21, 144n10 Gadsden Purchase, 15, 109, 142n1

62–70, 81, 82, 84–86, 144n10 Mather, Increase, xii–xiii metaphors: annexation as marriage, xx– xxi, 21–23, 31, 53–56, 68–69, 81–82, 84–88, 92–93; body as nation, xvii, xx–xxi, 24–25; family as nation, xxi– xxii, 34–35, 78, 107–12, 115–21; woman as nation, xviii, 11, 13, 16, 34, 41–43, 65–67, 84

Garber, Marjorie, 71–72, 78, 88 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 20, 33–34, 139n4; representing 1776 in 1848, 71–73; and Men’s Rights Convention,

Mexicans: and black-white binary, xiv, 10, 12–13, 112–15; and racial ambiguity, xvi, xviii–xix, 11–12, 31–

90–91; reviews of U.S.-Mexican War material in, 73–74, 135n21, 139n4 gold-digging, xviii

32, 108, 112–15, 119–21; and white Mexicans, 4–5, 112–13, 121 minstrelsy, 74–75. See also brownface

Golden Era, 7–8

miscegenation, xx, 131n37; and antimiscegenation laws, 64

Haas, Lizbeth, 32, 92

Mohave Indians, 2, 9–10 Mormon Church, 5 Mott, Lucretia, 76 Myres, Sandra, xix

Harte, Bret, xxii, 145n17. See also Gabriel Conroy heterosexuality, and the national imaginary, 20–23, 47–48 Holley, Mary Austin, 58 homosociality, and the national imaginary, 43–47, 49–50, 132nn49–50 Jamul Ranch, 13 Jefferson, Thomas, 20–21, 25 Jemison, Mary, xiii, 75, 125n15, 140n10 156

Namias, June, xii–xiii, xvi, 3–4, 72 Oatman, Harrison, 124n12 Oatman, Harvey, 8–9 Oatman, Lorenzo, xvii, 2, 8–9, 15–16, 124n12 Oatman, Mary Ann, 2, 15 index

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Oatman, Olive, xix–xx, 1–11, 13–17, 123ch1n1, 124n3, 124n12, 125n14, 125n17

Storms Cazneau, Jane McManus, 134n12 Stratton, Royal B., 1, 4, 9, 126n21

“Old Dan Tucker,” 60–63, 135n27

tattooing, 3, 15, 124n3, 125n17

People v. Hall, xxii, 108–9, 113–14

Taylor, Zachary, 53, 66–67, 69 “They Wait for Us,” 64–65

Pico, Pío, 120

trafﬁcking, xvii

Pocahontas, 20–24, 28, 34, 126nn1–5, 128nn14–15, 139n6

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, xvii, 6,

Puritans, xii–xiii, 128n13 racialization, xix, 127n12, 142n23 resistance, xi Robinson, Cecil, xix Rolfe, John, 24, 126n5 The Rough and Ready Songster, 51–53, 59, 66–67, 69 Rowlandson, Mary, xii, 3 Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo, xix–xx, 1, 2, 6–7, 10–17 Samuels, Shirley, xx San Francisco Bulletin, 9 San Francisco Herald, 7 Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 51, 60– 62, 63–65, 67, 69 Santa Fe nm, xviii Seneca Falls Convention and 1848, 75, 91 slavocracy, 3, 123n3, 136n31 Slotkin, Richard, xii, 3 soldiers, female, xxi, 75, 77–78, 79, 81, Sommer, Doris, xx, 34–35, 72 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 74, 76, 89–90, 91 Stodola-Derounian, Katherine, xiii

Index

15–17, 52, 90, 108–9, 112, 115–16, 120–21, 134n17 “Uncle Sam and Mexico,” 59–64

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“Uncle Sam’s Song to Miss Texas,” 54– 57

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usable past, xiv–xv, xix, 76, 89. See also American Revolution, principles espoused in 1848

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Song to Miss Texas,” 54–57 Western Democratic Review, 19 Wheelwright, Julie, 77–78, 88 whiteness, 4–5, 11–13, 23, 38–39, 47– 48, 87, 112–13, 117–19. See also femininity, constructions of; masculinity, constructions of; miscegenation Who Would Have Thought It? xx, 1–5, 10–17 “Yankee Doodle,” 56–58 Yavapai Indians, 2, 124n2, 126n22

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