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13. “Have We Not a Mind Like They?” : Jovita González on Nation and Gender
- Southern Illinois University Press
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209 X 13 Why should they be our superiors? Have we not a mind like they? Do we not have a soul? Can we not think? Can we not love the same as they? Are they made of finer clay?—Jovita González, “Shades of the Tenth Muses” “Have We Not a Mind Like They?”: Jovita González on Nation and Gender Kathy Jurado The epigraph I begin with is taken from a short story by Tejana author and scholar Jovita González de Mireles1 in which González imagines a conversation between Mexican-born Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and the American poet Anne Bradstreet. Within the social landscape of González’s South Texas at the turn of the century, Sor Juana’s rhetorical question, “Have we not a mind like they?” echoes the sentiment of ethnic Mexicans along the U.S.-Mexico border experiencing racism through de facto Jim Crow segregation. It echoes as well the secondclass citizenship conferred upon women in general. González’s work as a writer and scholar in the 1930s challenged both these stereotypes by turning their unspoken assumptions on their heads. In a period when all Mexican subjects were rhetorically constructed as foreign, dirty, and ignorant, González’s revised history instead identifies Anglo-Americans as the more recent immigrants, with Mexicans and Mexican Americans as their friends and teachers. In essence, in all her writing, González flipped the conventional script of anti-immigrant, xenophobic discourse that operates upon the axis of “foreignness,” documenting instead a topsy-turvy world in which Mexican Americans belonged at the center. Kathy Jurado 210 González’s body of work, which ranges from fiction to folklore to history, has been the focus of a handful of Latina/o scholars, such as José Limón, María Cotera, and Leticia Garza-Falcón. My interest, however, resides in the rhetorical strategies deployed in two documents that have remained largely absent from academic conversations on González’s work: her master’s thesis, “Social Life in Cameron, Starr and Zapata Counties” (published in 2006 as Life along the Border), and the short story I began with, “Shades of the Tenth Muses” (published as part of the 2000 collection Woman Who Lost Her Soul), supplemented by her short memoir included in Dew on the Thorn.2 My examination of these texts demonstrates a rhetorical reconfiguration of ethnic Mexicans and women as knowledge producers that challenges the racist and sexist discourses at the time. In other words, these works reflect a rearticulation of nation and gender from the perspective of a Mexican American woman living in the borderlands. Background Born on 18 January 1904 in Roma, Texas, a border town in the southeast corner of the state, folklorist Jovita González experienced life among the rapidly changing social and cultural landscape of southern Texas. A drastically shifting economy, a result of the newly constructed railroad and de facto segregation for ethnic Mexicans, shaped the social world she lived in. As a woman of Mexican ancestry, she came of age during a time when ethnic Mexicans struggled for incorporation into the national imaginary, which tested their allegiance to the nation and which only grudgingly brought women (Anglo and non-Anglo alike) into academia. This historical moment witnessed the height of the so-called Mexican Problem (Gutiérrez 56). Ethnic Mexicans were deemed “dirty” and characterized as lawless bandidos, among other things, in newsprint media. Meanwhile, the status of women, despite their acquiring the vote in 1920, remained strained regardless of racial background. For women of color, such as González, life along the border must have been experienced from the margins, an element she sought to challenge and rectify in her work. Evident in her memoir in Dew on the Thorn as well as her thesis is the fact that González could trace her matrilineal ancestry to the original Spanish colonizers who established the first settlements in Nuevo Santander (in the general area that is the focus of her study) in the mid-1700s. This lineage of ancestral roots in Texas by ethnic Mexicans is a central theme in her thesis, evoked time and time again. [34.204.3.195] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:41 GMT) “Have We Not a Mind Like They?” 211 Such emphasis can be interpreted as an effort to refute the prevailing discourse of ethnic Mexicans as “foreigners” in Texas. González recounts her childhood fondly and remembers one aunt in...