Domestic Violence and Empire: Legacies of Conquest in Mexican American Writing Leigh Johnson

University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository English Language and Literature ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 7-2-2011 Domestic Violence and Empire: Legacies of Conquest in Mexican American Writing Leigh Johnson Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds Recommended Citation Johnson, Leigh. "Domestic Violence and Empire: Legacies of Conquest in Mexican American Writing." (2011). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/13 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Language and Literature ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i ii DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND EMPIRE: LEGACIES OF CONQUEST IN MEXCIAN AMERICAN WRITING BY LEIGH JOHNSON B.A., International Affairs, Lewis & Clark College, 2001 M.A., English, Western Kentucky University, 2005 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy English The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico May 2011 iii DEDICATION To the memory of Dr. Hector Torres and Stefania Grey. To my boys. For all the women, men, and children who have been silenced by domestic violence. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have contributed to my finishing this project, and I would be remiss to not thank them for their investment in my scholarship and person. First, thank you to my advisor, mentor, and committee chair, Dr. Jesse Alemán. I really could not have completed the project without your encouragement, faith, and thoughtful comments. I owe you many growlers. Second, the other members of my committee have provided invaluable feedback and support. Thank you, Dr. Tey Diana Rebolledo, Dr. Barbara Reyes, and Dr. Sonia Saldívar-Hull. Third, my friends and colleagues in the English, Women‟s Studies, and American Studies departments at University of New Mexico and Western Kentucky University have read drafts of earlier work, made me laugh, and kept me honest. Jeremy and I have consumed more calories and ideas than were probably good for us; Christine saved me a seat the very first day; Erin and I have been mistaken for each other more times than we can count; and Myrriah and I have thought better on the bikes. Thanks to all of you! For financial support, I am grateful to the American Association of University Women for the American Dissertation Completion Fellowship, which has made this project come together in a timely and thoughtful manner. I also thank the University of New Mexico English department for providing a course release and the Feminist Research Institute for research funds. For nonacademic support, I thank my family—Patrick, Seamus, and Gilbert— who don‟t help me get the work done, but they‟re the ones I‟m doing it for. v DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND EMPIRE: LEGACIES OF CONQUEST IN MEXICAN AMERICAN WRITING BY LEIGH JOHNSON ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy English The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico May 2011 vi DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND EMPIRE: LEGACIES OF CONQUEST IN MEXICAN AMERICAN WRITING by LEIGH JOHNSON B.A. International Affairs, Lewis & Clark College, 2001 M.A. English, Western Kentucky University, 2005 Ph.D. English, University of New Mexico, 2011 ABSTRACT This dissertation posits that writers can symbolically represent domestic violence to critique unjust gender relations as well as iniquitous US policy toward Mexican Americans. I use the term domestic violence because it most closely describes the double voiced discourse women engage to critique communities that condone violence against women as well as a country that perpetrates violence against Mexican Americans within its borders. Put broadly, domestic violence refers to threats of sexual, emotional, or psychological abuse within the home. Furthermore, patriarchal control over women‟s agency, sexuality, and mobility in turn-of-the-century texts also indicates domestic violence through social and historical conditions. Violence is especially evident throughout this project as women‟s rights challenge patriarchal structures and civil rights challenge racist policies. Revealing the perilous gains of women and Mexican vii Americans, social backlash encourages explosions of domestic violence. For this reason, each chapter explores the historical and social contexts surrounding scenes of domestic violence. Mexican American women remain tenuously between the spaces of home and nation as they experience domestic violence from state and familial institutions. Because these women are not safe within their homes, they have to participate in a broader societal push to define, describe, and defend themselves against domestic violence. Their resistance comes with a price—women, especially women of color, who resist patriarchal violence may be seen as cultural traitors, exposing their men to criticism from dominant society. The first chapter shows how women‟s speech both uncovers and masks narratives of domestic violence through allegory using the testimonios taken for the Bancroft project on California history. The second chapter examines how the historical romance genre incorporates scenes of domestic violence against women‟s protected space in the home and nation. The third chapter reveals how representations of domestic violence within Mexico reflect colonial anxieties about conquest and domestic policy. American travel writers‟ encounters with domestic violence in Mexico reflect the anxieties surrounding American entitlement to Mexico and the bodies of the people living there. The fourth chapter observes limitations on women‟s ability to leave violent situations within the home or the nation. This chapter utilizes scenes by Mexican American men, as they write about (and blame women for) domestic violence. The fifth chapter celebrates women writers‟ activism through literary motherwork. Though these texts, with the exception of the last chapter, precede the Chicano Movement, they are politically engaged in a struggle to define and defend la raza through their intellectual agendas. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IN THE HOME AND NATION……1 CHAPTER ONE: TESTIMONIOS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE…………………14 CHAPTER TWO: HISTORICAL ROMANCE AND VIOLENCE IN THE LAND……………………………………………………………………………60 CHAPTER THREE: FOREIGN INCURSIONS: TOURIST VIOLENCE IN MEXICO………………………………………………………………………...94 CHAPTER FOUR: SHE’S CAUSING A SCENE (OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE)…………………………………………………………………...140 CHAPTER FIVE: MOTHER WORKS: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE GLOBALIZED………………………………………………………………...184 CONCLUSION: SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONDITIONS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE……………………………………………………………………………225 REFERENCES CITED……………………………………………………………….230 1 Introduction: Domestic Violence in the Home and Nation The 1956 film Salt of the Earth, which has been used in women‟s studies and Chicano studies classes to show emergent race and gender identification, contains a poignant scene of domestic violence. Based on the miners‟ strike in Grant County, New Mexico, the film features the personal story of Esperanza and Ramón Quintero. The 1950s were a volatile time for labor unions in New Mexico, because following World War II, women had to be convinced to return to the home and new social restrictions had to be placed on men who might have been in integrated units during the war. The Mexican American miners find themselves unable to endure the low wages and occupational hazards of life in the mines. The men strike, but when the injunction comes against them, and Ramón and the other men are arrested, their wives take up their places on the picket line. After Ramón loses his job, and the women, including his wife, take up the picket line, he threatens to slap her mouth. Esperanza rejects his violent overtones and says that she will no longer live by the “old way.” In the film, she does not turn her face away from him; instead, she keeps eye contact and challenges him to actually slap her. After a tense moment with both characters exuding stubbornness, Ramón backs down and turns his own face away from her in shame that he ever would have been violent toward her. Esperanza‟s stature grows in this scene. Her rejection of domestic violence as the “old way” symbolizes a movement away from silencing women by shutting their mouths and suggests that the “old way” of Mexican American workers being exploited for their labor and silenced by the union is also passé. By standing up for herself, Esperanza explicitly rejects the old ways—violence, intimidation, and submission—of 2 gender relationships within the home. Her experience with public violence, like that she sees on the picket line, convinces her that she need not be a victim in her home or in the world. Beyond domestic violence, the film reveals how women‟s work is also political, as shown in Lillian Robinson‟s comment, “Ramón‟s realization that the women‟s demand for running water was indeed a statement about working conditions, even about occupational health and safety, that it too was „real‟ politics” (180). She goes on to explain that the film makes an effort “to stress that the most oppressive aspects of sexist domination within the Chicano family are not intrinsic to the miners‟ ethnic culture but come from the power structure of society” (182). After all, it is not that the miners refuse to allow their wives to work; rather, the segregated occupational

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