Frank Norris's "Mexican" Women

McTeague (1899) opens with the title character taking his customary dinner on San Francisco's Polk Street, which then unfurls a story about ill-educated ethnic whites with one exception—Maria Macapa. The "Mexican woman who took care of the lodgers' rooms" (13) sprightly introduces herself, "Name is Maria—Miranda—Macapa. … Had a Flying Squirrel an' let him go" (16). With this signature utterance, Maria Macapa remains a crucial supporting character in the gritty late nineteenth-century novel of ethnic outsiders in northern California. On the surface, Norris's interest in the Mexican women that populated Northern California from the mid to late nineteenth century magnifies racialized forms of natural selection and intelligence. Indeed, Mexican female characters provide a less than flattering portrait of the nation's ethnic and racial diversity. It was shockingly diverse, and thus incorporation into the United States with statehood (1851) was fraught with chaos. The transition made everyone who was not Anglo American, from the California Mexican or Central American ruling classes to the poor, Indigenous peoples and uneducated ethnic whites, into a racialized laboring underclass (Monroy 277). In Norris's fiction, Mexican is intelligible because nineteenth-century Californians knew what a Mexican was. Instead of being white adjacent, Mexicans and Central Americans represent the economic and psychic losses that Indigenous, mestizo, Californio, and Ladino/Criollo peoples shared through overlapping imperial histories (Britain, Spain, and Portugal). When Norris wrote, "[i]n the west was the borderland where civilization disintegrated and merged into the untamed (Frontier 111)." he created a paradigm where unruly peoples from another era thwarted Anglo-American civilization in California.

In "Judy's Service of Gold Plate," McTeague, and "The Wife of Chino," Mexican women represent the border between chaos and civilization. Each narrator's shifting ethnic-racial terminology compresses Californio, Mexican, and Central American history to misrepresent California's immediate past. Their attitudes waiver between sympathy, confusion, and disdain.¹ These attitudes and narrative compression make us doubt if the characters Maria, Judy, and Felice are indeed Mexican, as do their names.² These speculative narratives combine a fascination with Central America, disdain for Mexicans, and extraordinary and observable disabled brown bodies.³ The palimpsest speculates on discovery, migration, conquest, and shifting borders, the very things that make it so important to revisit these characters. Judy, Maria, and Felice's speculative origins do not take historical responsibility for whom they were as gendered and racialized subjects—not knowing justifies their lack of place in California's future (Rodelo 13). As Jennifer Fleissner notes, a fundamental tenet of the naturalism genre prioritizes the "young woman, [who] is marked by neither the steep arch of decline nor that of triumph, but rather by an ongoing, nonlinear repetitive motion … that has the distinctive effect of seeming also like a stuckness in place" (9). Suppose Norris's Mexican women were members of once-powerful empires and yet untamed by Anglo standards. In that case, speculative Latinidad becomes increasingly specific, a marker of being stuck in place, the border between the untamed and civilized. White futures without Mexican women rely on compression and nonlinear repetitive motion.

Criticism of Frank Norris's major works focuses on his brutish, naturalist portrayals of immigrants and Anglo men.⁴ The appearance of Mexican women throughout the pages of his short stories and McTeague demonstrate the problems created by U.S. imperialism, both abroad and at home, especially regarding what Anglos did with the natives they encountered (Kaplan 263). While Maria, Judy, and Felice are three different characters from three separate stories, they express variations on the same themes: mania, disability, and racial degeneration.⁵ Each woman needs stories about lost wealth, trauma, and love interests that present as a sensory disorder (over-responsiveness to stimuli), trauma, or simple moral bereftness. Their emotional attachments to impossibilities—lost wealth, lost pets, lost lovers, and dead children—reflect Mexican women's nineteenth-century relationship to the material and affective worlds as one of dispossession. Therefore, Mexican women make up Northern California's "racial, sexual, and class disorder" that needs to fade away precisely because the space transitioned from Spanish-Mexican...