For Tranquility and Order: Family and Community on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, 1800–1850 by Laura M. Shelton (review)

Laura Shelton explores the transition to republican rule in Sonora, examining social and economic tensions that played out against a changing political landscape. Maintaining social order in the midst of an increasingly violent and volatile world was vital to Sonoran notables, as colonial structures of dominance and control collapsed. Economic transformation increased the demand for labor, and demographic shifts challenged traditional hierarchies. Arguing that the transition was a “gendered process,” Shelton traces connections between gender hierarchies and order. In the face of threats from the “barbarous invaders” represented by the region’s indigenous peoples, Sonoran notables felt the need to uphold civilization and maintain the requisite order (p. 151).

Independence brought the disappearance of a modus vivendi that existed between the colonial state and local indigenous peoples. The collapse of the presidio system created a defense vacuum, and the weakened missions did not carry out the practices of gifting, exchange, and trade that had governed interactions between Hispanics and indigenous people. Independence also brought substantial economic changes as mining and commercial expansion increased in importance, creating greater need for reliable labor in an environment increasingly disrupted by indigenous raids and Mexican retaliation. In this mundo al revés Mexican responses were understandably firm; order had to be restored or civilization would be lost. Shelton examines how that order was re-established and sustained.

Marriage and family were essential to Sonora’s social order, the keys to establishing stability and maintaining community in increasingly tumultuous times. As Shelton notes, a “well-ordered, patriarchal family” was the “basis of civilization and good governance” (p. 45), and relationships that deviated from this model threatened the survival of the community. Hence the judiciary’s tendency to look askance at those in consensual unions, and even more at those involved in illicit relationships, and to look particularly harshly on adulterous women. Patriarchy governed relations among kin through obligations of deference and reciprocity, and relationships beyond the family as well, in the way patriarchal expectations structured relations between amos (employers) and servants.

Marriage also served an economic function, “creat[ing] ties of property and financial obligations between couples and their extended kin” (p. 56), and cementing regional economic alliances (p. 57). Women enjoyed property rights, guaranteed initially under Iberian law and affirmed in republican Sonora. And while elsewhere liberalism compromised such rights for women, in Sonora a combination of factors—among them high mortality rates and frequent migration among men—offered women greater opportunities to take advantage of the increasing commercialization and privatization of property (p. 62).

Lacking formal lending institutions, Sonora’s early republican credit system was “based largely on ties of family and friendship,” as well as ritual kinship (compadrazgo) (p. 97). This personalized system, drawing on notions of confianza, or trustworthiness, was inherently risky in a region experiencing high mortality; untimely death caught many in financially precarious positions, leaving widows and heirs to sort out accounts and, in many cases, obligated to repay debts not covered by the estate. Shelton locates widows at the nexus of two transitions in the 1830s and 1840s—the waning significance of family and confianza in local credit arrangements as merchants and loan guarantors came to occupy an increasing role in a commercializing economy, and the rising reliance on servitude to “compensate for unpaid debts” (p. 104).

Shelton’s last chapter treats the increasingly impersonalized employer/servant relationship in republican Sonora, noting the persistence of paternalistic rhetoric that masked increasingly coercive forms of labor relations. The region’s economic transformation necessitated a large and dependable labor force, feeding into the notables’ concern with issues of order and control as they worked to create a liberal republic. Unable legally to invoke racial or ethnic criteria to define citizenship, Sonoran officials turned to class, instituting laws barring servants, vagrants, and other socially “questionable” people from citizenship. Those categories were...