How Northern Mexico Became South Texas (and Southern Too): The Reconstruction Saga of Caballero

We must not minimize the shattering importance of that initial insight—peoples being conscious of themselves as prisoners in their own land—for it returns again and again in the literature of the imperialized world. The history of empire … seems incoherent unless one recognizes that sense of beleaguered imprisonment infused with a passion for community that grounds anti-imperial resistance in cultural effort.

—Edward Said (214)

José E. Limón and María Cotera's discovery and 1996 publication of the lost novel Caballero, by Jovita González (1904-83) and Eve Raleigh (1903-78; her real name was Margaret Eimer), marked a watershed in Mexican American, Texas, and, as I argue here, Southern literature. This richly detailed and powerful narrative resurrects and revises the complicated history of the settlement of Texas, the US-Mexican War, and, most importantly, the accommodations the Mexican people in the newly annexed Texas lands had to make as the United States reorganized their complex society. Limón, Cotera, Vincent Pérez, and several other major scholars of Mexican American, feminist, and queer studies have given us engrossing readings of this fascinating tale, and it has subsequently been established as a classic of Mexican American and multi-ethnic literature.¹ Feminist scholars have rightly seen the book as a critique of patriarchy and as a surprisingly adamant reconstruction of the role of women in the conquered territory. We must also consider Caballero a key text for the transnational South, which has much in common with the "romances of reunion" that were written by US Southern writers during the late-nineteenth century. My exploration of this genre has been inspired by Pérez's observation that "Caballero … demonstrates theneed for rigorously historicized and comparatist studies of early Mexican-American literature texts. Caballero's intersection with plantation narrative presents a compelling model for carrying out this interpretive project" ("Remembering" 472).²

We can better understand the operations of this complex text by thinking about the situation that inspired it, which has been faced by numerous groups of people whose territories have been conquered and who have been forced to integrate into the culture of a new social and juridical order. Initially, therefore, I will consider Caballero alongside what is perhaps the key Reconstruction novel of the late-nineteenth century, Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction (1898), which traces the negotiations between the US North and South during Reconstruction as they sought to bind up the wounds of the Civil War. Some readers might suggest that I compare Caballero to a Reconstruction novel that we know González read (and perhaps Eimer as well), Laura Krey's lengthy And Tell of Time (1938). Krey's novel, like Caballero, sought to capitalize on the popularity of contemporary Reconstruction novels, such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936) and Stark Young's So Red the Rose (1934). However, neither Mitchell nor Krey are concerned with the romance of reunion; there are no concluding North/South marriages in either novel. There is no question, however, that González, Eimer, and Krey were all seeking to capitalize on the immense popularity of the plantation novel, a genre that began with John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn: Or, a Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832) and then took a new turn with the romance of reunion form after the Civil War, culminating in the triumph of Gone with the Wind. It is also clear that they were signaling the Southern nature of Texas, which has more often than not been left out of notions of the US South.

To be clear, there are certainly differences in the backgrounds of the authors under consideration here. González was a Mexican American woman whose fore-bears lived in the part of northern Mexico that became South Texas, and her aristocratic ancestors suffered many of the indignities traced in Caballero. By the 1930s, Mexican Americans were segregated and stereotyped much more than they had been immediately after the annexation of Texas, and González's generation had fallen in...