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  • Engendering the Long Nineteenth Century and Mapping Gender onto Arizona History
  • Katherine Sarah Massoth (bio)

When I was initially asked to share my impressions on the state of women's and gender history of nineteenth-century Arizona, I had two conflicting thoughts—there is not much critical scholarship on nineteenth-century women in Arizona and there is a growing body of gendered scholarship on the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, especially after 1880. These overlapping observations of the gendered historiography of Arizona point to themes in recent scholarship. When viewed from an "Arizona women's history" lens, the scholarship seems sparse. However, when viewed from an interdisciplinary gendered lens, attending to Mexican history, Indigenous history, and borderlands history, the body of scholarship appears much more complex with many promising avenues for further research.

I approached my review of the literature by considering what is helpful in my teaching and research to offer a roadmap of the methods and key scholarship necessary to ground oneself in the gender history of nineteenth-century Arizona. As historical processes do not fit into neat periodization, I am focusing on scholarship covering Arizona's long nineteenth century, which began in 1775 when Spanish-speaking colonists "settled" Tucson and lasted until Arizona became a state in 1912. A long-nineteenth-century [End Page 429] approach recognizes Arizona as a space in which multiple gendered systems, social structures, and political powers sought to control the land instead of tackling the space from the lens of U.S. possession.

Three distinct, yet overlapping, eras shape how historians analyze nineteenth-century Arizona. First, there was the Hispanic era, consisting of the Spanish colonial and Mexican periods, which began in 1752 and ended with the Gadsden Purchase in 1854. The Hispanic era established colonial control over Indigenous peoples and fostered the frontera region of the Pimería Alta (stretching from Magdalena Valley, Sonora, to Tucson, Arizona). Second, a transitional period (∼1854–1880) occurred, in which Arizona moved from Mexican control to becoming part of the New Mexico Territory until the 1863 Organic Act established the Arizona Territory. The early territorial period saw a small Hispanic population and a sizeable Indigenous population negotiate U.S. settler-colonialism. When the United States took control in 1854, Indigenous peoples lived throughout the land; Mexicans were a majority population from Tucson southward while most Anglos settled in more northern communities like Flagstaff and Phoenix. Anglos did not dominate the Arizona Territory until the turn of the century. Two interrelated events fundamentally altered the dynamics of life in Arizona and Sonora—the arrival of the railroad by 1880 and the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Third, the late territorial period (∼1880–1912) began as Arizona grew rapidly when the railroad connected Tucson, Phoenix, and Flagstaff to the rest of the United States and Mexico and ended when statehood officially bound Arizona to the Union. These eras offer a framework for studying how women's experiences and gender systems mapped onto national concerns and colonial systems in the region.

The symbolic bookshelf holding the gender history of Arizona's long nineteenth century can be organized into three interrelated categories. First, there is interdisciplinary scholarship from the field of Mexican history that analyzes Hispanic-era gender roles in the Pimería Alta. This scholarship focuses on the role of gender in shaping regional power relations after Spanish colonization by historians of Mexico looking northward. Second, there is a body of critical gender and race scholarship on indigeneity, masculinity, maternalism, labor, Americanization, whiteness, violence, and [End Page 430] citizenship in postbellum and late-territorial Arizona. This second body of scholarship is larger because when extending the boundaries of "women's and gender history" to include interdisciplinary approaches more gendered work becomes obvious. Third, there is a small body of gendered scholarship that analyzes the transition from Hispanic to U.S. territorial control, what could be called early territorial Arizona. Besides a few notable exceptions discussed below, most scholars in the past twenty years have not focused on this transitional era. Those who touch on this early territorial period study Arizona as a space in which shifting gender and racial regimes influenced community relations, intimate bonds, and...

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