Mixed Race Studies

On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American

University of California Press
July 2012
366 pages
Illustrations: 19 b/w photographs, 1 map, 1 table
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520272385
Paperback ISBN: 9780520272392
eBook ISBN: 9780520951341

Edited by:

David Wallace Adams, Professor of History
Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio

Crista DeLuzio, Associate Professor and Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor of History
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

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.

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

History 328: American Mixed Blood

Oberlin College
Department of History
Fall 2009

Pablo Mitchell, Eric and Jane Nord Associate Professor of History and Comparative American Studies
Oberlin College

From the coyote and the half-breed to the “tragic” mulatto, people of mixed ethnic and racial heritage occupy a conflicted and controversial place in American history. This course will chart the histories of people of mixed heritage from the colonial period to the present, exploring the relationship between the historical experiences of mixed heritage and broader trends in American history including slavery, imperialism, legal transformation, and changing cultural patterns. We will also consider current social theories of hybridity and mestizaje.

Required Texts:

Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Ann Stoler, ed., selected essays
Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century
Earl Lewis, Heidi Ardizzone, Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White
Renee Christine Romano, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Post-War America
Jane M. Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era
Susan Koshy, Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation
Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States
Karen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans
Lauren Basson, White Enough to be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation

Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920

University of Chicago Press
2005
224 pages
10 halftones  6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780226532424
Paper ISBN: 9780226532431
E-book ISBN: 9780226532523

Pablo Mitchell, Eric and Jane Nord Associate Professor of History and Comparative American Studies
Oberlin College

With the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s came the emergence of a modern and profoundly multicultural New Mexico. Native Americans, working-class Mexicans, elite Hispanos, and black and white newcomers all commingled and interacted in the territory in ways that had not been previously possible. But what did it mean to be white in this multiethnic milieu? And how did ideas of sexuality and racial supremacy shape ideas of citizenry and determine who would govern the region?

Coyote Nation considers these questions as it explores how New Mexicans evaluated and categorized racial identities through bodily practices. Where ethnic groups were numerous and—in the wake of miscegenation—often difficult to discern, the ways one dressed, bathed, spoke, gestured, or even stood were largely instrumental in conveying one’s race. Even such practices as cutting one’s hair, shopping, drinking alcohol, or embalming a deceased loved one could inextricably link a person to a very specific racial identity.

A fascinating history of an extraordinarily plural and polyglot region, Coyote Nation will be of value to historians of race and ethnicity in American culture.

Table of Contents

Preface: A Note on Coyotes
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Bodies on Borders
2. Compromising Positions: Racializing Bodies at Pueblo Indian Schools
3. Carnal Knowledge: Racializing Hispano Bodies in the Courts
4. Transits of Venus: Ceremonies and Contested Public Space
5. Strange Bedfellows: Anglos and Hispanos in the Reproduction of Whiteness
6. “Promiscuous Expectoration”: Medicine and the Naturalization of Whiteness
7. “Just Gauzy Enough”: Consumer Culture and the Shared White Body of Anglos and Hispanos
8. Conclusion: Birth of a Coyote Nation
Notes
Bibliography
Index