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University of California Press

On the Borders of Love and Power

Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American Southwest

by David Wallace Adams (Editor), Crista DeLuzio (Editor)
Price: $34.95 / £30.00
Publication Date: Jul 2012
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 366
ISBN: 9780520951341

Read an Excerpt

1

Breaking and Remaking Families

The Fostering and Adoption of Native American Children in Non-Native Families in the American West, 1880-1940

Margaret Jacobs

In the late nineteenth century, Mary Dissette, a single missionary and schoolteacher at Zuni Pueblo, adopted a Zuni girl named Daisy. After her tenure at Zuni, Dissette settled in Santa Fe, where she bought an adobe house and a large orchard with the intent of taking in "a dozen Indian girls from the different pueblos and teach[ing] them practical domestic industries, especially spinning, weaving, horticulture and poultry raising." D

About the Book

Embracing the crossroads that made the region distinctive this book reveals how American families have always been characterized by greater diversity than idealizations of the traditional family have allowed. The essays show how family life figured prominently in relations to larger struggles for conquest and control.

About the Author

David Wallace Adams is Professor of History at Cleveland State University and author of Education for Extinction. Crista DeLuzio is Associate Professor of History at Southern Methodist University and author of Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction
David Wallace Adams and Crista DeLuzio

PART ONE. DIVERSE FAMILIES AND RACIAL HIERARCHY
1. Breaking and Remaking Families: The Fostering and Adoption of Native American Children in Non-Native Families in the American West, 1880–1940
Margaret Jacobs

2. Becoming Comanches: Patterns of Captive Incorporation into Comanche Kinship Networks, 1820–1875
Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez

3. “Seeking the Incalculable Benefit of a Faithful, Patient Man and Wife”: Families in the Federal Indian Service, 1880–1925
Cathleen D. Cahill

4. Hard Choices: Mixed-Race Families and Strategies of Acculturation in the U.S. West after 1848
Anne F. Hyde

PART TWO. LAW, ORDER, AND THE REGULATION OF FAMILY LIFE
5. Family and Kinship in the Spanish and Mexican Borderlands: A Cultural Account
Ramón A. Gutiérrez

6. Love, Honor, and the Power of Law: Probating the Ávila Estate in Frontier California
Donna C. Schuele

7. “Who has a greater job than a mother?” Defining Mexican Motherhood on the U.S.-Mexico Border in the Early Twentieth Century
Monica Perales

8. Borderlands/La Familia: Mexicans, Homes, and Colonialism in the Early Twentieth-Century Southwest
Pablo Mitchell

PART THREE. BORDERLAND CULTURES AND FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
9. Intimate Ties: Marriage, Families, and Kinship in Eighteenth-Century Pueblo Communities
Tracy Brown

10. The Paradox of Kinship: Native-Catholic Communities in Alta California, 1769–1840s
Erika Pérez

11. Territorial Bonds: Indenture and Affection in Intercultural Arizona, 1864–1894
Katrina Jagodinsky

12. Writing Kit Carson in the Cold War: “The Family,” “The West,” and Their Chroniclers
Susan Lee Johnson

Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

Reviews

On the Borders of Love and Power explores the intimate intersections of race, gender, and empire among families in the American West. The editors have gathered provocative essays by the best-known historians of family and gender in the region. This volume captures the breadth and depth of contemporary research in the field and will influence scholars for years to come.”—Albert L. Hurtado, author of Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands

"This important book, full of fine scholarship, explores the history of the American West through intimate and richly rendered portraits of kinship and family relations. Emphasizing the centrality of cross-cultural encounters and the “micro-politics” of family formation within the broader context of colonial “macro-politics” and nation building, these compelling and accessible essays provide a deeply textured understanding of the history of the region. This volume will certainly inspire historians of the Western United States, as well as those of colonialism, empire, and national expansion in other regions, to focus more closely on these intimate realms in their own research."—James F. Brooks, president, School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, and author of Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands