Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820–1880 by María Raquél Casas (review)

W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 8 poem to untitled poem, carrying through each a memory and a song. Weber asks us to “remember back in / the old days” and question “whatever happen’d to us? / we used to be so young, and / innocent, vibrant / and / alive.” And he is right and good to remember and to write it all down. Locklin’s other collection reviewed here, New Orleans, Chicago, and Points Elsewhere, is a different kind of collection than open they effing ears (please). While still focused on jazz, “because jazz has become not an obsession but / at least a major locus of study and pleasure in / my life,” the collection is filled with references to other arts—including literature and Ernest Hemingway and a large section inspired by a visit to Chicago and the Art Institute. These travel poems, like those included in effing ears, are remembered visits to other lands: “ten years ago i gave up booze / and lost one hundred pounds / through exercise and diet,” of spending “my life under at least / the illusion that i’m teaching something,” that “the world changes, / but not much.” Locklin remembers it all: the women, the conferences, the gluttony, and the moderation. In his poem “The Working Class,” he recalls his parents, his childhood, his marriages, divorces, and the births of his children. He remembers his degrees and achievements, the years he bought his first new car and quit alcohol, and he pays homage to those who are “undefeated / among these street people, and i fear the / shame of the others, i hope i won’t run out / of money before i run out of breath.” I, a fan of Locklin’s, hope he doesn’t run out of breath and that his place among our poets is secured for a very long time. Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880. By Maria Raquel Casas. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007. 261 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by Maria O’Connell Texas Tech University, Lubbock In Married to a Daughter of the Land, Maria Raquel Casas explores the history of several interethnic marriages at the Spanish borderlands, how they challenged and perpetuated power structures as well as the roles women played. Casas states that “this study is a revisionist work, but not just revisionist in terms of historiography” (175). It offers “a new, gendered perspective on nineteenth' century California,” a way to “re-vision” the conflicts between ethnic groups at the Spanish borderlands (6). Casas sees these women as primary movers in the preservation of Spanish-Mexican values and identities, even as the EuroAmericans “exerted predominant political and economic control” (7). She is particularly interested in California from 1820 to 1880 when California first became part of an independent Mexico and later a part of the United States. She wants to illustrate how societies at the borders relate to each other and how the combination of cultures can become “intertwined, conflicted, trouble­ some, confusing—in a word, messy” (175). b o o k R e v ie w s Married to a Daughter of the Land begins by interrogating the prevailing historical viewpoint that powerless Spanish-Mexican women married powerful Euro-American men to gain mobility and power that they would not have had in a Latin society. Her first challenge to this viewpoint involves the difference between British-American common law, which severely restricted women’s rights to control property and which viewed a married woman as “a legal dependent ‘covered over’ by her husband” (14), and Spanish marriage laws, which “allowed women to maintain a separate legal identity when they mar­ ried” (15). This differing view of marriage made the role of women’s choices “broader and more dynamic than previously supposed” (15). After situating the two cultures and their views of marriage, Casas goes on to illustrate the complexity of relations between the cultures through personal stories of various women and their marriages. She looks at the role of class and status...