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Archives of Dispossession

Recovering the Testimonios of Mexican American Herederas, 1848

Karen R. Roybal

Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 08/2017
Pages: 186
Subject: Social Science, Literary Criticism | University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9780000000000
eBook ISBN: 9781469633848

DESCRIPTION

One method of American territory expansion in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands was the denial of property rights to Mexican landowners, which led to dispossession. Many historical accounts overlook this colonial impact on Indigenous and Mexican peoples, and existing studies that do tackle this subject tend to privilege the male experience. Here, Karen R. Roybal recenters the focus of dispossession on women, arguing that gender, sometimes more than race, dictated legal concepts of property ownership and individual autonomy. Drawing on a diverse source base—legal land records, personal letters, and literature—Roybal locates voices of Mexican American women in the Southwest to show how they fought against the erasure of their rights, both as women and as landowners. Woven throughout Roybal's analysis are these women's testimonios—their stories focusing on inheritance, property rights, and shifts in power. Roybal positions these testimonios as an alternate archive that illustrates the myriad ways in which multiple layers of dispossession—and the changes of property ownership in Mexican law—affected the formation of Mexicana identity.