Read an Excerpt

Three Decades of Engendering History

Selected Works of Antonia I. Castañeda

University of North Texas Press

The Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century Stereotypes of Californianas

Recent scholarship in Chicano and women's history has challenged the limited, stereotypic images of Mexicanos and women prevalent in the contemporary and historical literature of nineteenth-century California and the American west. In studying North American imperial expansion, Chicano and other scholars have concluded that pejorative, racist stereotypes of Mexicanos, in particular, were an integral part of an ideology that helped justify the Mexican-American War as well as subsequent repression in the conquered territory. One scholar persuasively argues that the notion of Manifest Destiny, which a priori assumed the inferiority of Mexicanos, was "the product of a campaign of ideological manipulation."

In addition, studies in women's history, which tend to focus on the changing material reality and developing ideology of the United States, conclude that the constrictive, stereotypic molds into which women have been cast in the literature are sex- and class-based. The literature of the period was generally written by middle class, Anglo males who interpreted women's experiences from their own gender and class perspective of women's proper roles. In this way, these authors created sexist and unidimensional portrayals of women. Recent work has shown that even in the literature of the American West—where greater sexual equality allegedly existed—women are stereotyped into four sexually defined roles: gentle tamers, sun-bonneted helpmates, hell-raisers and bad women.

According to these studies, sexually defined stereotypes of women are rooted in the material changes which occurred in the nineteenth century when the United States was moving from an agricultural economy to mercantile capitalism. This transition from a pre-industrial economy physically removed the workplace from the household. In the process, many of women's traditional economic functions disappeared and the social relations of production were transformed. Women began to be defined primarily by their sexual function as reproducers of the species, and by the social roles ascribed to wife and mother. During the nineteenth century, the view that women's proper place was in the home formed a central part of the ideology of an industrializing America—an ideology which came to enshrine women in the cult of true womanhood.

However, these studies have not yet examined the portrayal of Mexican women and the relationship between stereotypes and ideology. Furthermore, these discussions have altogether ignored the intersection of sex, race and class in the development of America's ideology in the nineteenth century. Although Mexican women in California—Californianas—have never been the subject of any major historical work, they do appear in three kinds of North American literature which presents them in a contradictory, but nevertheless, stereotypic light. This literature—which spans both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—includes contemporary travel, journalistic, and biographical works; nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels; and general histories, both academic and popular, of California.

This paper examines contemporary North American literature on early California and the stereotypes it presents of Mexican women. The effort here is to examine the literature within the framework of mid-nineteenth century America's system of beliefs and ideas, and to suggest how the images of Mexicanas fit into that system. The discussion focuses on Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840), Thomas Jefferson Farnham's Travels in California and Scenes in the Pacific Ocean (1844) and Alfred Robinson's Life in California (1846). As an integral part of nineteenth-century American, but particularly Californian, literary culture, these works have served as primary sources for historical, novelistic, and popular accounts of provincial California. Dana and Robinson's works in particular have long influenced perceptions and interpretations of Mexicanos in California.

While the contemporary and historical literature purports to present accurate descriptions of Mexican women's experience and condition, it actually constructs stereotypic images which serve ideological purposes. The stereotypes manifest the polarities of "good" and "bad" women applied to women generally. This simplistic dichotomous portrayal is further complicated by stereotypical notions of gender, race, and class. While these prejudices are evident in most accounts of Mexicanas, and while all the descriptions purport to present transhistorical or timeless images, the descriptions do, in fact, vary considerably across time in terms of the particular aspects of these stereotypes which are emphasized. These variations correlate with the changing needs of the capitalist and imperialist system, its shifting relations to Mexicano culture and economy in California and the evolving ideology of the nature of women.

The earliest images of Mexican women in North American literature appeared in contemporary travel, journalistic, and biographical accounts written in the 1830s and 1840s. The authors were Anglo men—merchants, sailors and adventurers—engaged in the hide and tallow trade and/or America's westward expansion. Some arrived in the early 1820s when the newly-independent Mexico opened its borders to foreign trade. They brought their wares from Boston to Valpariso to California. In this remote province, recently freed from the grasp of Spain's stringent regulations and mercantilist economic policies, Yankee and English traders found a ready market for the Chinese, European, and American goods crammed into the holds of their ships. They soon established a brisk, lucrative trade, exchanging their cargo for hides and tallow, often at a 200 percent profit.

The next two decades—the 1830s and 1840s were years of escalating conflict between the young Mexican Republic and an expanding United States. The conflict, which culminated in the Mexican-American War, raged hot and cold in California prior to the actual outbreak of war in 1846.10 The three narratives discussed in this paper appeared during the height of this rising conflict.

Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast(published anonymously in 1840), presented the first major image of Mexican women in California. Dana, the scion of a cultivated patrician family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sailed to California on the Pilgrim, a ship belonging to Bryant, Sturgis, and Company, the major American firm engaged in the hide and tallow trade. In this work, Dana recorded his experiences as a sailor as well as his impressions of the country, the land, and the people he saw on his journey during his two years aboard ship.

Dana has little to say of a positive nature about Mexican people in general. His views of Mexican women, which center on virtue, are moralistic and judgmental. According to Dana, "The fondness for dress among the women is excessive, and is sometimes their ruin. A present of a fine mantel, or a necklace, or pair of earrings gains the favor of a greater part. Nothing is more common than to see a woman living in a house of only two rooms, with the ground for a floor, dressed in spangled satin shoes, silk gown, high comb, gilt if not gold, earrings and necklace. If their husbands do not dress them well enough, they will soon receive presents from others." Therefore, Dana points out, "the women have but little virtue," and "their morality is, of course, none of the best." Although the "instances of infidelity are much less frequent than one would at first suppose," Dana attributes this to "the extreme jealousy and deadly revenge of their husbands." To this Yankee patrician, Mexican women are profligate, without virtue and morals, whose excesses are only kept in check by a husband's vengeful wrath. In this narrative Mexican women are seen as purely sexual creatures.

Dana's work, which had immediate success in the United States and England, set the precedent for negative images of Mexican women in California. He created the image of Mexicanas as "bad" women. This condemnation of Mexican women's virtue appears again and again in subsequent works. The view of Mexicanas as women of easy virtue and latent infidelity easily led to the stereotype of the Mexicana as prostitute in the literature of the gold rush.

While Dana's writing attempted to convey the impression of an interested but rather detached objective observer of California's people and life, Thomas Jefferson Farnham's Travels in California and Scenes in the Pacific Ocean, published in 1844–45, was sensationalistic and vituperative. Farnham, a lawyer, came to California from Illinois by way of Oregon. He arrived in Monterey in 1841 and immediately took up the cause of Isaac Graham and his band of sixty foreigners. Governor Alvarado had shipped the group to jail in Mexico on charges of conspiracy to overthrow the government. Farnham described his travels on the Pacific Coast and detailed the Graham side of the political affair. Throughout his account Farnham consistently derided the Californianos. In his words, "the Californians are an imbecile, pusillanimous race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of that beautiful country." In clear, direct, and hostile terms, Farnham echoed the same sentiment that Dana and others had expressed with more subtlety, replacing passionate partisanship for the previous pretense of objectivity.

The Californiano's mixed racial background is a constant theme in Farnham's narrative. It is also the focus of his blunt comment on women, of whom he states "The ladies, dear creatures, I wish they were whiter, and that their cheekbones did not in their great condescension assimilate their manners and customs so remarkably to their Indian neighbors."Unlike Dana, who was, at times, ambivalent about the racial characteristics and beauty of the elite Californianas, Farnham was clear about their racial origins and his own racial views.

Like Dana, Farnham was also concerned with the Californiana's dress and appearance. While Dana focused on the extravagance of dress, Farnham centered on the looseness of the clothing and the women's "indelicate" form. "A pity it is," notes Farnham, "that they have not stay and corset makers' signs among them, for they allow their waists to grow as God designed they should, like Venus de Medici, that ill-bred statue that had no kind mother to lash its vitals into delicate form." Since Californian women do not lash their own or their daughter's "vitals into delicate form," they obviously are neither proper themselves nor are raising proper daughters for California. Farnham would have women's dress hide their form in the multiple layers of clothing that simultaneously hid the bodies of middle-class women in the United States and severely limited their physical mobility. Although Farnham made few additional direct statements about women, he did relate the woeful tale of a Southern lad's romance with a Californiana. The young man, who was ready to bequeath her all his worldly goods, was left bereft by the infidelity of his Californiana sweetheart. For Farnham, whose work justified the filibustering efforts of foreigners in California, Mexican women had no redeeming qualities.

Alfred Robinson, while no less concerned than Dana or Farnham with Californianas' virtue, morality, race and appearance, countered his countrymen's negative image by presenting the polar opposite view—albeit only of upper-class women—in his work, Life in California, published in 1846. Unlike Dana, who spent only a short time in California, or Farnham, who came in 1841, Robinson had been in California since 1829 and was on intimate terms with the Californianos. As resident agent for Bryant, Sturgis, and Company he had extensive business dealings with the province's largest landowners.

In 1837, at the age of thirty, Robinson converted to Catholicism and married fourteen-year-old Ana María de la Guerra of the elite de la Guerra y Noriega family of Santa Barbara. The de la Guerras were one of the very few families in California who could truthfully claim Spanish ancestry. Life in California was written from the viewpoint of an observer who "sought to refute the inaccuracies of itinerant travelers like Dana."

Robinson interspersed descriptions of women's physical appearance, dress, manners, conduct and spiritual qualities throughout his work. In this book, Californianas are universally chaste, modest, virtuous, beautiful, industrious, well- bred aristocratic Spanish ladies. "With vice so prevalent amongst the men," Robinson states in his most explicit passage, "the female portion of the community, it is worthy of remark, do not seem to have felt its influence, and perhaps there are few places in the world where, in proportion to the number of inhabitants, can be found more chastity, industrious habits, and correct deportment, than among the women of this place." Robinson defended the morals, virtue and racial purity of elite Californianas. By making racial and class distinctions among Californianas he transformed the image of immoral, bad and sexual women into the image of the sexually pure, good Californiana.

Dana and Farnham cast Mexican women into molds of the women of easy virtue, no morals and racial inferiority. Robinson cast elite Californianas into the stereotype of a genteel, well-bred Spanish aristocrat with virtue and morals intact. Her European ancestry and aristocratic background, to say nothing of her economic value, made her worthy of marriage. Dana and Farnham, in their concern with the Californiana's race, virtue and morals set the parameters of the stereotype. Robinson accepted the parameters and addressed the same issues.

Recently, these nineteenth-century narratives have attracted the attention of scholars and others working in Chicano, Women's, California and Southwestern history and culture. While Chicano historians and other scholars have noted the existence of contradictory stereotypes of women, few have examined the nature of these dual images. Generally, these scholars have attributed Mexicano stereotypes to historical Hispanophobia, anti-Catholicism, racial prejudice and to the economic and political issues involved in the Mexican-American War. More recently, David Langum and Janet LeCompte have specifically addressed the image of Californianas and Nuevo Mexicanas in nineteenth-century works written by Anglos.

Langum, who recognizes the existence of contradictory views and their focus on the issues of morality and virtue, argues that the negative image was the minority view. And this image, he further argues, was class-based. That is, it not only derived from upper-class Yankees like Dana, but more importantly, the subjects of the image were lower-class Mexican women, the only group of Californianas with whom Dana, as a sailor, had any contact. According to Langum, Dana had neither access to nor interaction with upper-class women. He could not, like Robinson, form an opposite view, and therefore generalized his observations of lower-class Californianas to all women. Ignoring the sexist bias in these works, Langum not only attributes the dichotomous images of Californianas to the class prejudice of the writers and the class origin of the subjects, he further assumes that the stereotypes were accurate for lower-class women.

While class was most certainly an issue in the development of dichotomous stereotypes of women, Langum's argument does not entirely hold up. Although Dana was not, like Robinson, on intimate terms with the Californiano elite, he did have the opportunity to observe them at close hand, and on occasion, he attended their social functions. In fact, he attended the festivities and dance celebrating Robinson's marriage to Ana María de la Guerra. As he develops it, Langum's class explanation is merely an extension of Cecil Robinson's earlier interpretation of pejorative Mexicano stereotypes in American travel literature immediately preceding the Mexican-American War. Robinson argued that Anglos formed a mistaken perception of all Mexicanos on the basis of contact with relatively few Mexicans in the border area. This interpretation has been challenged and refuted as the basis for the development of stereotypes of the Mexicanos.

LeCompte, whose main interest is the independence of Nuevo Mexicanas during Mexico's Republican period, also notes Anglo writers' comments about the dark skin of New Mexican women, their idleness, boldness of demeanor, revealing clothing and deplorably low standards of female chastity. She attributes Anglos' negative views of the Nuevo Mexicana's morality to the sexism inherent in Anglo norms for proper female behavior. And these norms, LeCompte continues, were conditioned by the more constrictive position of women in North American society and culture, and by the corollary view of womanhood as the upholder and symbol of American morality. Unfortunately, LeCompte does not develop the argument. The article is devoted to an exposition of the economic and social independence of New Mexican women. it generalizes about the nature of their independence without substantive research.

---

Excerpted from Three Decades of Engendering History by Linda Heidenreich, Antonia I. Castañeda. Copyright © 2014 Linda Heidenreich, Luz María Gordillo, and Antonia I. Castañeda. Excerpted by permission of University of North Texas Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---