Women & Kinship
Carla Gerona
Despite scant sources, this paper attempts to recover the worlds of Santos and the other women of Nacogdoches, Texas at the end of the eighteenth century. While Leal claimed that he did not know what his wife was up to, historians know even less about Santos and the other women of East Texas. By looking at Spanish government records and putting the accounts of the few women who appeared in them front and center, this article begins to shed light on women’s lives by mapping the ways kinship worked on a distant Spanish frontier with neighboring indigenous, French, and Anglo villages. Because the Spanish-American women of the borderlands lived in this world of intersecting cultures, there was a great deal of intermarriage and other forms of sexual interrelations, across race and ethnicity — some voluntary and others not so voluntary. Santos offers just one example in this essay about the women of borderlands Texas.
“Women and Kinship in Spanish East Texas at the end of the Eighteenth Century” in Women of the Iberian Atlantic
Citation and Praise
Women of the Iberian Atlantic was Awarded the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s 2012 Best Collaborative Project Award
This website was designed by Hayden Gregg and Carla Gerona
Carla Gerona
Email : cgerona@hsoc.gatech.edu
Telephone : 404-894-2601
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