Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820-1880 (review)

Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820-1880. By Deena J. González. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xx, 186 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Paper, $17.95.

Deena J. González analyzes the impact of the United States annexation of New Mexico on the lives of Spanish-Mexican women. This book poses several questions. How did New Mexican women react to and participate in the new social order inaugurated by Euro-American colonizing structures? To what extent did their traditional roles and daily routines change? In other words, how did Spanish-Mexican women respond when their world was crosscut by the border?

González successfully challenges the traditional scholarship on New Mexican history that has overemphasized concepts of tradition, conservatism, and cultural homogeneity. Instead, González presents a vibrant society where accommodation, social change, re-adaptation, and contestation were the norm, not the exception. González also contests another conventional paradigm in Mexican American studies which proposes that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought only defeat, ruin and subjugation to all people in the borderlands. González dauntlessly tears down the vision of Mexican women as passive objects of racial prejudice, sexual violence and gringo justice. Positioned beyond the conventional narratives of victimization, her work demonstrates that women in Santa Fe vigorously challenged the new order and engaged in a dynamic struggle centered around economic survival and cultural reaffirmation.

González has taken an interdisciplinary approach by combining an intensive use of archival sources (mostly civil and criminal disputes) with travel literature and secondary sources. González convincingly argues that Santa Fe women actively defended their economic resources, legal rights, and traditional roles. At the crossroads between the fading institutions of Spanish-Mexican rule and the rise of Euro-American frontier society, local women survived and adapted to the new circumstances by various means.

Chapter 1 focuses on Spanish-Mexican women's participation in legal disputes of different sorts (marital, criminal, civil) between 1821 and 1846 and carefully identifies the fluid strategies women adopted to mediate and resolve antagonisms. Chapter 2 provides a meticulous reassessment of Gertrudis Barceló, a legendary Sonora-born tavern owner, better known as La Tules. González here provides a long-overdue gendered reevaluation of La Tules that deconstructs the misogynist and anti-Mexican images traditionally attributed to local women and validated by some scholars to this day. Instead, González argues that Barceló's life and times mark the beginning of a pragmatic and flexible accommodation process between Santa Fe women and Euro-American settlers. Barceló's saloon, in this perspective, is conceptualized as a border zone where cultural interaction between Spanish-Mexicans and Euro-Americans took place.

Chapter 3 analyzes the interconnections between gifts, favors, and women between 1846 and 1880. The book's final chapter provides a gendered critique and appraisal of the new paradigm of Western history. González concludes that economic decline, cultural survival, and gender subordination intermingled in unexpected ways and reshaped the social status of local women. In a bittersweet outcome, Spanish Mexican women successfully negotiated cultural survival but failed to maintain their economic status.

Refusing the Favor represents a major advance in our understanding of women's history in the preindustrial Spanish-Mexican eras, and the field of Chicana/o studies is deeply in debt to González for her brilliant work. Furthermore, this book is a welcome addition to the recent scholarship on Latin American women, especially the studies on women in colonial Mexico and Peru. González's study will definitely serve as a model for future research on similar processes affecting Spanish-Mexican women in California, Texas, and Northern Mexico. The volume is well written and effectively organized for classroom use. In sum, González's book is a major contribution to the history of the nineteenth...