Women and the Conquest of California, 1542-1840: Codes of Silence (review)

Virginia Bouvier, a former professor of Latin American literature, has produced an admirable book on the role and effects of female participation in the Spanish settlement of Upper California. Well written and deeply researched in several archives and libraries, Bouvier's book draws on a multiplicity of primary sources (including friars' letters and diaries, military journals, royal decrees, and government reports) and wide-ranging secondary historical and anthropological literature to tell the other part of the story of the conquest and settlement of the region.

Nevertheless, the title is a bit misleading. Bouvier is looking at much more than the conquest and a bit less than all women. The study, although it briefly discusses Hispanic and Hispanicized women, concentrates on the experience of Indian women. Of course, discussing the role of and reaction to women in the twenty-one missions created in Upper California between 1769 and 1823 is a complex task, because indigenous peoples involved in the missionizing effort included groups as diverse as the Chumash, TapÚ, and Luiseöo tribes. As Bouvier repeatedly emphasizes, the reactions of neophytes to the experience of the mission varied widely depending on their tribal culture.

The volume starts off with its weakest chapter, a literary discussion of "mythic beginnings" harkening back to the Greek tradition of Amazons and sixteenth-century chivalric writings (but the weakness is quite expected given the author's literature background). In this chapter, based entirely on secondary literature, Bouvier assumes a static model of gender relations that changed little from the early sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Luckily, when Bouvier turns to California itself, the book improves markedly. Beginning with the early Spanish explorations of the region, the author examines the creation of the missions and their evangelization of the natives, the attempt to create Spanish colonies alongside Indian missions, and the functioning of gender roles within the missions. Most interesting is her discussion of sexuality and marriage, for it was in these realms that indigenous traditions most directly collided with missionary values. Bouvier is convincing in her assertion that Indian women were important to the successes and failures of both conquest and settlement.

In spite of its overall success, the book has some glaring faults. The chapter conclusions are somewhat short and repetitive of the main points raised in the text instead of being used to explore new ideas and relationships. Spaniards are often assumed to be inventing, misrepresenting, or embellishing their reports and are repeatedly guilty of misinterpreting the California natives, a result of the priests' stupidity or guile. However, indigenous peoples' failure to grasp European culture is presented as an understandable mistake. Race is never considered or discussed, except to take the Spaniards to task for creating the racial category "Indian." Bouvier claims to have stressed how women's experience varied by ethnicity, religion, age, and civil status, although these various dimensions are often ignored. While showing how notions of gender shaped the conquest and missionizing of California, she fails to examine how women's roles in the conquest and settlement transformed the gender stereotypes that the Spanish brought with them.

The work is subtitled "Codes of Silence," but perhaps "Breaking the Codes of Silence" would have been more appropriate, for that is what Bouvier attempts to do. She is fully aware of the limitations of her historical sources: missionary friars who failed to discuss certain topics relating to gender, indigenous peoples who remained silent—perhaps to protect their culture—and earlier Anglo historians (including Herbert Bancroft and Hubert Bolton) who chose to ignore gender entirely. On the whole, Bouvier does a good job of "reading" silences, but mute sources tend to lead the author into the realm of the history of "might have" and "seems to sometimes have," with all its attendant risks. Particularly in the chapter on resistance, Bouvier...