Passions, Property, and Power: Mexican-Anglo Marriage in the Spanish Borderlands

Gender, Race, and the West 12 December 2014 Passions, Property, and Power: Mexican-Anglo Marriage in the Spanish Borderlands Interracial unions, as well as the legal and social prohibitions against such unions, reflect the ways in which societies consolidate power and regulate domestic arrangements. In the southwest, the study of intermarriage illuminates the intersection of race, gender, and culture on this colonial frontier. In focusing on Mexican-Anglo intermarriages in Texas, New Mexico, and California, this paper will demonstrate how historians reconceptualized the study of intermarriage based on their fields of study and how these studies were influenced by the dominant historical paradigms of the time. During the second half of the twentieth century, historians struggled to reconcile the studies of larger historical forces of assimilation, conquest, and colonialism with studies of individual agency and patterns of accommodation and resistance against oppressive circumstances. Sociologists, Marxists, cultural and social historians, feminists, Chicanas, borderlands historians, colonial and post-colonial historians have all analyzed Mexican-Anglo marriages. Their conclusions vary in explaining the motivations and consequences of interracial unions, as well as the amount of agency Mexican women may have expressed in choosing their marital partners. In theoretical terms, historians have dramatically reconceptualized the study of intermarriage over the second half of the twentieth century. Until recently, the majority of studies on intermarriage have been carried out by social scientists, who have focused their analysis on the laws of social behavior that account for the incidence of interracial marriage. In the immediate post-war period, American structural-functional theorists laid out an explicit theory of