Between Women: Alliances and Divisions in American Indian, Mexican American, and Anglo American Literatures of Protest to Colonialism

Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation

Authors Burford, Arianne

Publisher The University of Arizona.

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/195349 1

BETWEEN WOMEN: ALLIANCES AND DIVISIONS IN AMERICAN INDIAN, MEXICAN AMERICAN, AND ANGLO AMERICAN LITERATURES OF PROTEST TO COLONIALISM

by Arianne Burford ______Copyright © by Arianne Burford 2007

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2007 2

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Arianne Burford entitled Between Women: Alliances and Divisions in American Indian, Mexican American, and Anglo American Literatures of Protest to Colonialism and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

______Date: 5/7/07 Daniel Cooper Alarcón

______Date: 5/7/07 Judy Nolte Temple

______Date: 5/7/07 Luci Tapahonso

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.

______Date: 11/22/06 Dissertation Director: Daniel Cooper Alarcón

3

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder.

SIGNED: Arianne Burford 4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful for the encouragement and support that I have received from so many people along this journey toward realizing my dream of earning a Ph.d. I would like to thank my dissertation Chair, Dr. Daniel Cooper-Alarcón, for his respect for my work not only as a scholar, but also in terms of my commitment to social justice. His positive feedback on my writing and the time he puts in to helping graduate students get jobs is truly generous. All of my committee members believed that what I have to say is important, and their confidence in my work is something that I look forward to passing along to others. Dr. Judy Nolte Temple provided me valuable feedback on feminisms, asked me good questions along the way, and supported me toward my new position in Women’s Studies. Professor Luci Tapahonso taught me the importance of doing respectful scholarship on literature that inspires me. I treasure the stories we have shared about our dogs. I also want to thank Dr. Susan White for her tremendously brilliant sense of humor and for always having time to close the door and listen. Through these years Dr. Charles Scruggs has always conveyed an undoubting belief in my abilities and success as a teacher. Dr. White and Dr. Scruggs have taught me the pedagogical importance of humor in the classroom, something I will always keep with me. Numerous other people have provided support for me here at the University of Arizona and have been so gracious with their time. I appreciate Marcia Marma’s sense of humor and Chris Kiesel’s hard work—they are women whose work is the glue for the department. Both Dr. Susan Aiken and Dr. Meg Lota Brown provided amazing assistance and respect as graduate directors. Dr. Edgar Dryden has provided support and respect for my work as well. My family and friends have given me the kind of love and courage to have faith in my own voice, to write passionately, and to follow the paths in life that lead to empowerment and strength. Thanks, Mom, for always telling me to follow what inspires me, and that I am a capable woman. Thanks, Dad, for telling me when I was a child that if I wanted to I could become a doctor, and that my own voice is worth finding. My sister, Larissa, continues to respect and value my dreams. Thanks to my aunt and uncle Sharolyn and John for your love and recognition of that which nourishes the spirit. Greg Grewell loved me and shared with me the beauty in the wilderness. Our dog, Garbanzo, was a constant, happy friend and hiking companion. Spring Ulmer has known me and valued the passion and poetics of writing. Thanks too to Leigh Jones—you have shared so much strength on our hikes in the desert. Wendy Burke has offered her kindness. Thanks, Amy Hamilton and Randi Tanglen, for your encouragement on my writing. Debra White-Stanley has offered so much courage and been so generous with her time right up until the end. Thanks also to Rachel Scott for our friendship and long talks about alliances between women. Finally, I want to thank Laura Gronewold—friend, you are an inspiration to me. Thanks Laura and Chad for providing me with a room of one’s own, from which I am writing these very words. 5

DEDICATION

To those who have had the courage to voice social protest—past, present, and future.

To all women who have survived violence in its numerous forms.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………..11

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….12

CHAPTER ONE: SARAH WINNEMUCCA’S LIFE AMONG THE PIUTES:

TRAVERSING UNEVEN GROUND BETWEEN WOMEN’S RIGHTS, REFORM

MOVEMENTS, AND NATIVE PEOPLES’RIGHTS………………………………...... 28

Historical Contexts for the Production of Life Among the Piutes:

Winnemucca as Political Spokesperson……………………………………….34

Alliances between Winnemucca and Mary Mann and Elizabeth Peabody....39

Contexts for Reading Winnemucca’s Portrayal of Alliances Between

Women: Abolition, “The Indian Problem,” and “The Woman

Question”……………………………………………………………………..…41

The Women’s National Indian Association: Anglo Women as Mediators

and Missionaries………………………………………………………………..43

Winnemucca’s Critique of Reform Movements and Women’s Rights:

Protesting Racism and Imagining New Directions for Alliances Between

Women………………………………………………………………………...... 48

Alliances Between Women Against Sexual Assault in Life Among the

Piutes………………………………………………………………………….....63

Sexual Exploitation and the Exploitation of Labor: Anglo Women’s

Complicity in the Political Economy………………………………………...... 73 7

TABLE OF CONTENTS- Continued

The Debate about Winnemucca as Assimilationist: a Call for Further

Nuanced Readings…………………………………………………………...... 80

The Peabody Institute: An Alliance Between Women Against Assimilationist

Boarding Schools………………………………………………………………..85

Winnemucca’s Testimony and Recent American Indian Women Activists:

Parallels Between the Past and the Present…………………………………...88

Conclusions: or, a Call for Further Parallels Between the Past, Present,

and Future and the Decolonizing of Feminisms.……………………………...94

CHAPTER TWO: “I’M AN UMMERIKAN”: WOMEN’S RIGHTS, ALLIANCES

BETWEEN WOMEN, AND FISSURES TO COLONIAL DISCOURSES IN HELEN

HUNT JACKSON’S RAMONA...... …………………………………………………...... 98

Biographical Background on Jackson and the Production of the Text……106

Coming to Terms with Ramona’s Ideological Limitations………………….108

Nostalgia for the Mission System: The Women’s National Indian

Association as Context for Alliances Between Women in Ramona...………112

Moments of Opposition to the Mission System……………………………...117

Jackson’s Critique of Anglo Women’s Complicity: Alliance Building and

Women’s Rights…………………………………………………………….....121

Alliances Between Women: Political Power and the Nation-State………..129 8

TABLE OF CONTENTS- Continued

Alliances Between Women Against Colonialist Power and Violence Against

Women…………………………………………………………….…………...137

Between Three Women is a Man: Mexican American Women as Scapegoats

for Anglo Women………………………………………...... 143

Cultural Relevance of Ramona to the Twenty-First Century………………146

Conclusions: Decolonizing Feminisms in the Twenty-First Century…...…152

CHAPTER THREE: “ YOU AIN’T GOING TO SEND MY MOTHER TO

CONGRESS”: MARÍA AMPARO RUIZ DE BURTON NEGOTIATES WOMEN’S

RIGHTS AND ALLIANCES BETWEEN WOMEN AGAINST VIOLENT WHITE

MASCULINITY………………………………………………………………………..159

Mapping the Colonialist Terrain of Ruiz de Burton’s Writing in Chicana and

Chicano Literary Studies……………………………………………………..164

Historical Context for the Production of Ruiz de Burton’s Novels…..…….170

The Squatter and the Don and Who Would Have Thought It?: Drawing

Connections Between Colonialism and Women’s Rights…………………...171

Divisions Between Women: Anglo Women Profiting at the Expense of

Mexican American Women in Who Would Have Thought It?...... 177

Imagining Alliances Between Women Against White Colonial Male

Power…………………………………………………………………………...184 9

TABLE OF CONTENTS- Continued

Suffrage, Sexual Assault, and Political Representation: Ruiz de Burton’s

Interventions in Women’s Rights……………………………………………190

Conclusions: Looking at the Past to Envision the Future…………………212

CHAPTER FOUR: CARTOGRAPHIES OF A VIOLENT LANDSCAPE: HELENA

MARÍA VIRAMONTES’S AND CHERRÍE MORAGA’S MAPPING OF

EXPLOITATION AND FEMINISMS...……………………………………………….220

Biographical Background on Moraga and Viramontes…………………….228

Brief Overview of Concerns of the Chicano Movement and the Role of

Chicanas………………………………………………………………………..233

Brief Overview of Limitations of the Women’s Movement and New

Directions for Feminisms……………………………………………………..236

Re-mapping Feminisms: the Exploitation of Chicanas in Under the Feet of

Jesus and Heroes and Saints………………………………………………….240

History for Viramontes: Writing the “Decolonial Imaginary”……………252

Divisions Between Women: Political Economies of Violence………...... 253

The Absence of Anglo Women in Moraga’s Heroes and Saints and the

Portrayal of Chicano Masculinity……………………………………………260

Conclusions: Intervening in Feminist Theory and Praxis…………………265

EPILOGUE……………………………………………………………………………..271 10

TABLE OF CONTENTS- Continued

FOOTNOTES…………………………………………………………………………..280

WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………..295

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ABSTRACT

Between Women: Alliances and Divisions in American Indian, Mexican American, and Anglo American Literatures of Protest to Colonialism investigates nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers’ negotiation of women’s rights discourses. This project examines the split between nineteenth-century women’s rights groups and the Equal Rights Association to assess how American Indian, Mexican American, Anglo women, and, more recently, Chicana writers provide theoretical insights for new directions in feminisms. This study is grounded historically in order to learn from the past and continue efforts toward “decolonizing feminisms,” to borrow a phrase from Chandra Mohanty. To that end, current feminist theories about alliances and solidarity are linked to ways that writers intervene in feminisms to simultaneously imagine solidarity against white male colonialist violence and object to racism on the part of Anglo women. Like all the writers in this study, Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) challenges Anglo women to not be complicit with Anglo male colonialist violence. Winnemucca’s testimony illuminates the history of alliances between Anglo and Native women and current debates amongst various Native women activists regarding feminism. Between Women traces how Anglo American writer Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) protests effects of U.S. colonialism on Luiseño people and her negotiation of feminisms compared with Winnemucca’s writing and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), novels that protest the effects of U.S. colonialism on Mexican Americans, particularly women. It then compares Ruiz de Burton’s writing to Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1994), texts that acknowledge the difficulties of forming alliances between women in the context of exploitation, pesticide poisoning of Chicanas/os, and border policies. The epilogue points to Evelina Lucero’s Night Sky, Morning Star (2000), demonstrating how an understanding of the history that Winnemucca engages elucidates American Indian literature in the twenty-first century. By looking deeply at how nineteenth-century conflicts effect us in the present, scholars and activists might better assess tactics for feminisms in the twenty-first century that enact an anti-colonialist feminist praxis. 12

INTRODUCTION

The history of alliances between women in the United States has been fraught with realities of power and difference, including: a history of white supremacy as well as attempts by women to combat such ideologies; class differences and access to economic stability; constructed notions of subjectivity based on race and gender; the ramifications of colonialism; and access to power based on heterosexual connections to Anglo men.

Women’s rights activists first became allied in their anti-slavery work in the nineteenth century as they attempted to confront the horrendous oppression of Black women by

Anglos in the institution of slavery. In the abolition movement, important Anglo women activists such as Sarah and Angelina Grimkè (whose families owned slaves) made arguments in the 1830s about the savagery of the institution of slavery, particularly in terms of its effects on Black women.i Paralleling their critique of slavery was a call for

equal education for women, and a social protest against constructed gender roles for

Anglo women. Yet when Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton attended the

Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, they found that they were not allowed to

speak nor were they allowed seats in the main convention room—instead they sat in an

adjoining gallery (Banner 191). As Lois Banner explains, in 1839-40, “the national

abolition movement splintered over the issue of whether women could be full members

of the association, hold office, and speak in public” (190). Such gender discrimination

led many Anglo women such as Stanton and Anthony to form alliances with other Anglo

women such as Lucretia Mott, a Quaker who defiantly argued women’s ability and right 13

to participate equally in the abolition movement. Out of this meeting emerged the 1848

Seneca Falls Convention, the first official meeting of women’s rights activists in the

United States, which included some male allies as well such as Frederick Douglass.

Stanton read the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a document that called for equality for

Anglo women in a way that alluded to the “Declaration of Independence,” and the necessity to throw off the shackles of tyranny without representation.

As this study will discuss in more detail, women’s rights activists became allied with the Equal Rights Association, a group dedicated to rights for African Americans. As

Angela Davis documents in Women, Race, and Class, the issue of suffrage ended up dividing women’s rights activists such as Stanton from the Equal Rights Activists such as

Frederick Douglass. The national debate about suffrage became a debate about whether

Black men or Anglo women should be franchised.ii As Davis explains, Anthony and her followers became advocates for Anglo women’s suffrage and failed to take a public stand against the lynching of African Americans during Reconstruction. Even though she had been an ally with Ida B. Wells, an important African American activist, Anthony’s alliance disintegrated as a result of her failure to support her friend’s stance against lynchings.

I want to establish the relationship of the woman’s suffrage movement to other women’s rights issues in the nineteenth century because some of the nineteenth-century authors in this study, such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, directly engage discourses of suffrage while other authors, such as Sarah Winnemucca and Helen Hunt Jackson, engage more generally with the realities of an Anglo male-dominated political system. 14

All three writers address the exclusion of women in various institutions—the government particularly—the roles of women in marriage, women’s voices, and rights over their bodies, including but not limited to sexual assault. Suffrage is just one of the many discourses some of the authors engage—and I emphasize it because of its relationship to the other women’s rights struggles, especially since political power to create more equal conditions and laws for women could, in theory, potentially be achieved through suffrage. As Nancy F. Cott explains, in the nineteenth century “the underlying theme that women were variable human beings as men were, had the same human intellectual and spiritual endowment as men, and therefore deserved the same opportunities and rights to advance and develop themselves, persistently surfaced” (19). For example, Margaret

Fuller argues for equal education for women in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, pointing out that women’s intellectual inferiority is only a result of a lack of education.

In addition, some women’s rights activists focused on property rights for women, custody rights, political representation, and legal equality.iii Victoria Woodhull emphasized the right to refuse sex in marriage and other reproductive rights as well as the sexual double standard between men and women.iv Others such as Sarah Bagley focused her activism in the 1840s on the women textile mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts and labor rights for working-class women.

Thus not all women’s rights activists focused on suffrage, but that was a central political battle in the nineteenth century and it is where more explicit racism in the women’s movement can be historically located. My critique of Stanton’s failures is intended to look to the past and see what was happening in early women’s rights 15

movements and how women writers of the time were engaging such issues. To critique

Stanton’s racism, particularly her failure to support Ida B. Wells’ stance against lynching, is not to devalue the important battles that she waged against Anglo male power, and the difficulties that she and other Anglo women were confronted with as women. However, much can be learned about attempts at alliances in the present if we look to the past and locate a history of attempted, sometimes successful, and sometimes failed alliances between women of color and Anglo women. Further, it is important to consider that while Stanton has iconic status and is often referred to as the leader of women’s rights in the United States, not all Anglo women followed her stance on enfranchisement. As Jean

Humez explains in Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories, at the New England

Woman Suffrage meeting in 1868 Frederick Douglass called for a prioritizing of Black men’s vote because, as he argued, Anglo women were not threatened with lynching as were Black people and thus it was not as urgent of a matter (Humez 76). Soon after,

Stanton and Anthony changed their organizations’ name to the National Woman Suffrage

Association. As Humez and Davis explain, and as Chapter Three will discuss in more detail, Stanton’s and Anthony’s political strategy for Anglo women’s suffrage was based on appealing rhetorically to white power (Humez 76). Humez and Davis rightly point to the political alignment of Stanton and Anthony with Anglo men in attempting to get

Anglo women the right to vote. But in many ways Stanton and Anthony were placed in a position, by Anglo politicians and leaders, wherein it seemed that for any social change to occur they had to “choose” between supporting enfranchisement for Black men (the implicit meaning of the Fifteenth Amendment) and enfranchisement for Anglo women. 16

One of the reasons this history interests me is how it became a binary debate about either extending the vote to Black men or Anglo women.

Much can be learned from Stanton’s and Anthony’s “choice” not to support the

Fifteenth Amendment, and, rather than judge these women my goal is to recognize the politics behind their decision so as to address why their alliance with Black women such as Ida B. Wells failed and assess some of the historical roots of failures of solidarity between women. In addition, at the same time that I critique Stanton’s and Anthony’s lack of support for the Fifteenth Amendment, I want to recognize a political climate within which Anglo male colonialist supremacy benefited from the debate about suffrage becoming so binary and causing Anglo women to split from the Equal Rights Association while simultaneously excluding women of color from the central popular and historical discourses about enfranchisement. Stanton and Anthony were trying to negotiate power from subjugated positions. However, while Stanton and Anthony opposed the Fifteenth

Amendment, granting suffrage to all men, “dissenting feminist abolitionists” such as

Frances Harper “broke away and went on to create a rival organization under the leadership of Lucy Stone and Abby Foster Kelley, the American Woman Suffrage

Association” (76). This association supported the Fifteenth Amendment, whereas

Stanton and Anthony opposed it unless it was followed by an enfranchisement for women. Thus while Anglo men in power benefited from making suffrage a binary issue, some women such as Lucy Stone, an Anglo women, and Frances Harper, an African

American woman, managed to maintain solidarity. In contrast to Anthony and Stanton,

Stone was committed to the inclusion of women of color when it came to women’s rights. 17

And as I will demonstrate in Chapter Two, it was Stone who caused Helen Hunt Jackson to change her views on women’s rights and become interested in the issues. I thus contextualize my study of women’s rights movements in relation to women writers by locating one example of racism in women’s rights and recognizing that some Anglo women attempted to combat this racism in the women’s movement.

The American Indian, Mexican American, Chicana, and Anglo American women writers in this study engage women’s rights discourses to question the role of Anglo women in relation to white male colonialist power. I have chosen to use the terms “white masculinity” and “violent white masculinity” to emphasize the constructedness of masculinity as well as the constructedness of whiteness, both of which together are part of a constructed identity of power and manhood rooted in colonialist violence.

Therefore, I refer to this construction as such, and I refer to the actual people as Anglo men. The Anglo men who took on this identity both ideologically and in their actions thus embraced violent colonialist white masculinity. I use the term Mexican American to refer to people of Mexican descent, many of whom lived in Mexico before violent encroachment by the United States, war, and the eventual 1848 signing of the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo. I specifically use the terms Chicana and Chicano to refer to writers and activists during and after the Chicano Movement. Though I think the terms Chicana and Chicano can be applied to people who lived before the Chicano Movement, in the case of writer María Amparo Ruiz de Burton her identity and politics are complex, and

Chapter Three will address in more detail my choice in terminology to refer to her. I use the term Anglo rather than white women because I want to recognize that the appearance 18

of whiteness does not necessarily mean identification with whiteness or access to Anglo privilege. For example, one can be American Indian and/or Mexican American and have white skin. Finally, I use the terms American Indian and/or Native people to refer to

Indigenous people of what is now called the United States. I am influenced by Luci

Tapahonso, who has explained that the term Native and Indigenous recognizes identity in a way that does not emphasize citizenship or allegiance to the United States, or the renaming of the land as “American.” I use the term specific term American Indian as the preferred term of respect for most people in the field of American Indian Studies and literature.

This project looks specifically at the attempts at alliances, and the problematic assumptions inherent in the ideological premises of alliances imagined by reform groups such as the Women’s National Indian Association. Some Anglo women who had been working on reform in terms of abolition shifted their energies to what, in the nineteenth century, was called “the Indian Problem.” Such emerging reform groups, as this study examines, attempted to protest the need for certain civil rights for American Indians, but their premise was “civilizing the Indian.” As Chapters One, Two, and Three will demonstrate, writers such as Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute), Helen Hunt Jackson (Anglo), and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (Mexican American) imagine different alliances than those imagined by reform groups such as the Women’s National Indian Association and other Christian-based groups aimed at nterrogates g colonial subjects. These writers each demonstrate that the real threat to Mexican American and American Indian women is not the supposed racialized “savagery” of these groups, but rather the savagery of 19

colonialism, particularly the accompanying sexual assault upon Mexican American and

Native women and children. These three nineteenth-century women writers all imagine alliances between women of color and Anglo women against white male colonialist violence. They ask how Native and Mexican American women fit into discourses about women’s rights, and they call upon Anglo women to question their complicity with

Anglo male power.

One of the purposes of my study is to look at how the history of women’s rights illuminates literature and, conversely, how literature intervenes to imagine new directions for women’s rights. Although literature is often analyzed in terms of how it exemplifies a theoretical concept, I propose that the writers in this study engage discourses of women’s rights to articulate theories about alliances between women. By looking at the history of alliances between women, and the literature that points to reasons for divisions between women at the same time that it often ephemerally imagines alliances between women, we can further work to build alliances that attempt to avoid the power dynamics and racism of the past—though in order to do this it is necessary to confront racism. As Chicana feminist and writer Cherríe Moraga explains in Loving in the War Years,

[i]t is essential that feminists confront their fear of and resistance to each other, because without this, there will be no bread on the table. Simply, we will not survive. If we could make this connection in our heart of hearts, that if we are serious about a revolution . . . then we need one another . . . The real power, as you and I well know, is collective. I can’t afford to be afraid of you, nor you of me. If it takes head-on collisions, let’s do it. This polite timidity is killing us. (50)

At the same time, it is also crucial to recognize the necessity for various groups of women not to put efforts into alliance building, and even maintain a separatist stance on 20

alliances. For example, the Combahee River Collective emerged in the 1970s out of the reality that Black women’s voices and concerns were not being addressed in the Black

Civil Rights Movement or the Feminist Movement.v Additionally, as Native activist and scholar Devon Mihesuah (Choctaw) explains, in her book Indigenous American Women

(2003), the views of American Indian women activists are varied regarding the topic of feminism and alliance building. This project will look at her work in more detail, particularly in Chapter One and the relationship of Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the

Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) to present day tribal feminists and activists.

Mihesuah cites Lorelei DeCora, co-founder of WARN (Women of All Red Nations), as asserting

[w]e are American Indian women, in that order. We are oppressed, first and foremost, as American Indians, as peoples colonized by the United States of America, not as women . . . Decolonization is the agenda, the whole agenda, and until it is accomplished, it is the only agenda that counts for American Indians. (163).

Chapter One will look at varied Native women’s views on this subject, and how

Winnemucca protests colonialism and its particular effects on American Indian women while also articulating the possibility of alliances—and the reality of racism that prevents alliances—between Anglo and Native women.

In my examination of solidarity and alliances, I am inspired by the important critiques of theorists such as Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Norma

Alarcón, Emma Perez, Devon Mihesuah, Joy Harjo, Chela Sandoval, Chandra Mohanty,

Sonia Saldívar-Hull, and others who have pointed out some of the reasons for the failure of alliances between feminists of color and Anglo women, and between straight and 21

queer feminists. I am also inspired by the vision of This Bridge Called my Back:

Writings by Radical Women of Color, that Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga produced in 1981. Their call for Anglo women to address their racism and be more aware of the struggles of women of color is still relevant today, and I am glad to see that this text is often assigned in literature and women’s studies courses. I am also weary, as is Norma Alarcón, that the stories the anthology voices are appropriated by Anglo women, that these stories are too often used to merely give cursory attention to difference.vi Chela Sandoval reminds readers of Lorde’s critique of the Anglo women’s movement in the U.S. , when she asserted in 1980 that “today, there is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word SISTERHOOD in the white women’s movement. When white feminists call for ‘unity,’ they are misnaming a deeper and real need for homogeneity” (45). By examining alliances, I explicitly critique and avoid simplistic notions of unity and sameness that do not and should never exist. I also draw heavily on the more recent work of Mohanty, particularly her theories in Feminisms

Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003). She prefers the term “solidarity” to “sisterhood” because sisterhood suggests an erasure of difference and the realities of imperialism, whereas she defines solidarity as a respect for difference, “in terms of mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests as the basis for relationships among diverse communities. Rather than assuming an enforced commonality of oppression, the practice of solidarity foregrounds communities of people who have chosen to work and fight together” (7). In my analysis that follows, a discussion of alliances between women against white colonialist violence does not mean 22

to suggest a “commonality of oppression”—the women are oppressed differently based on their access to power and privilege. Instead of essentializing difference, I suggest a context from within which potential solidarities, across various lines of difference and access to power, are imagined in the novels. As Mohanty argues, it is not an essentialized notion of the experience of being “woman” that can bring about solidarity— as this notion of “woman” excludes (118). Rather, it is “the meanings attached to gender, race, class, and age at various historical moments that is of strategic significance” (118).

My discussion of alliances that follows is not predicated upon solidarity simply due to the experience of being “woman,” but solidarity that is resistant to racism, sexism, and colonialism.

I am also indebted to Emma Pérez’s theories in her book The Decolonial

Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Into History (1999). In it she articulates a space from within which marginalized voices intervene to rupture the colonial imaginary and imagine a decolonial reality. She explains, “the decolonial imaginary is that time lag between the colonial and postcolonial, that interstitial space where differential politics and social dilemmas are negotiated” (6). Although she focuses her theory and study on

Chicanas, it can be applied to American Indian women as well. This project looks at how

Chicana, Mexican American, American Indian, and Anglo women writers “intervene to do what I call sexing the colonial imaginary, historically tracking women’s agency on the colonial landscape” (7). This study will, in part, map out how agency to intervene and disrupt colonial power is imagined by these women writers, and what that agency is comprised of, in relation to a colonial landscape and other women. 23

To date, there has not been an extensive study done on literary representations of imagined and/or potential alliances and writers’ recognition of the realities of divisions between American Indian, Mexican American, and Anglo American women within historical and current contexts of colonialism, women’s rights, and more recent feminist theories. One of the purposes of this study is to elucidate the history of the women’s rights movement in the U.S. via literary studies and, conversely, use the history of women’s rights to illuminate literature. Additionally, the purpose of conducting such a study is to gain insights and continue work toward building feminist solidarity that does not erase difference, feminist solidarity that is focused on equality, justice, and democracy, a solidarity that is anti-racist, anti-colonialist, and anti-capitalist, one that is historically informed and continues to resist and survive via resistance to all forms of oppression.

In Chapter One, I locate Sarah Winnemucca as a precursor to late twentieth- century Native women activists and argue the importance of her memory of history as well as her intervention in women’s rights discourses. At a time when Matilda Joslyn

Gage, a contemporary of Stanton and Anthony, was interested in Iroquois culture only to appropriate it to argue for equal rights for Anglo women to Anglo men, Winnemucca emphasizes that the struggles for Paiute women for land rights and survival against genocide are decidedly different than Anglo women. She stresses that Paiute women are respected in Paiute culture, and points to the realities of racism that prevent Anglo women from being allied with Native women. Winnemucca, like María Amparo Ruiz de

Burton, points to the failure of alliances in order to encourage her Anglo women readers 24

to be different, not to be enemies to American Indian and Mexican American women

(respectively) and instead protest colonialist violence. I end this chapter by looking at

Winnemucca’s protest in relation to current tribal feminists, or woman-centered

American Indians such as Joy Harjo (Muscogee Creek) prefers to call herself, including

Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna), Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee), and others. Their protests of the history and continued reality of violence against Native people including exploitation, a racist justice system, lack of land rights, violence against Native women, unequal education and health care, and unjust incarceration parallels Winnemucca’s and merits further study.

In Chapter Two, I examine how Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona voices political protest to Anglo colonialist violence against Native people. Though limited ideologically by its support of the Catholic mission system, and its simplistic portrayals of American Indians and Mexican Americans, Ramona vehemently calls upon Anglo women not to be complicit with the nation-state and Anglo male violence against women.

(I use the term nation-state to designate the way that Anglo women challenge or protest

Anglo men’s institutional power in the government and in various institutions). Through her friendship with Ramona (a mixed blood Native woman), Aunt Ri (a working-class

Anglo woman) becomes educated about the realities of injustices in the U.S. and unlearns racism in a way that urges Anglo women readers to emulate. Like Ruiz de Burton,

Jackson suggests that the same violent Anglo male colonialists are the ones who are abusive toward Anglo women, that misogyny parallels colonialist violence. Like Ruiz de

Burton and Winnemucca, Jackson asks how rights for Anglo women, and the inequalities 25

confronting Anglo women, relate to the oppression facing American Indian and Mexican

American women. Jackson imagines social change, voicing her protest from the margins as a woman, albeit a privileged position as an Anglo woman. Though sentimentalism itself is not the focus of this project, Jackson does use the genre of sentimentalism to participate in what Jane Tompkins, in her book in Sensational Designs, calls the “cultural work of American fiction” in the nineteenth century.

Chapter Three investigates María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s intervention with women’s rights, and her “decolonial imaginary,” as I address the polemic issue of how to locate Ruiz de Burton in Chicana/o studies. Her novels Who Would Have Thought It?

(1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885) challenge the U.S. legal system and its unjust treatment of Mexican Americans in the nineteenth century following the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo—and call attention to the specific effects of colonialism on Mexican

American women, particularly in their lack of rights to land and lack of rights to their own bodies under the U.S. law. Further, her writing engages women’s rights to ask how political voice and representation for Anglo women relates to rights for Mexican

American people. Both Who Would Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don point out, in many ways, historical roots for some of the failings of such alliances between women that later writers such as Audre Lorde, Viramontes, and Moraga would critique. At the same time, Ruiz de Burton’s writing also suggests that there is not just a potential for, but also a necessity for, solidarity between women.

After analyzing the limitations of as well as the important interventions of

Winnemucca’s, Jackson’s, and Ruiz de Burton’s theoretical engagement with colonialist 26

violence and its relationship to women’s rights and Native and Mexican American women, I look at how Cherríe Moraga’s and Helena María Viramontes’s writing in the late twentieth century parallels such interventions. Viramontes and Moraga negotiate contemporary twentieth-century feminisms and a history of racism in the women’s movement that follows up on the writers from the nineteenth century. Viramontes and

Moraga comment on the reality of Chicanas’ subordinated role in the Chicano Movement and the exclusion of Chicanas from mainstream Anglo feminist movements. Both writers address the realities of continued colonialism as evident in the exploitation of farm workers and the effects of pesticide poisoning on people who do not have access to adequate medical treatment. Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) points to the reality of racism on the part of Anglo women who hold powerful, influential positions in the institutions of education and health care. Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1994) makes obvious the absence of Anglo women in the protests of farm workers. Both thus ask questions about Anglo women’s’ awareness and apathy about the daily working conditions of female farm workers. Regarding alliances, this chapter also looks at how

Viramontes’s and Moraga’s writings implicitly raise possibilities for transnational feminist solidarity between U.S. women of color and those across national borders.

In the Epilogue, I point to the necessity for further comparative studies of

Chicana, Anglo American, and American Indian women writers today, particularly in relationship to the nineteenth-century women writers in this study. I look briefly at how

Evelina Lucero (San Pueblo/Isleta) portrays an Anglo woman and imagines the possibility of alliances between Native and Anglo women. I will locate her portrayal of 27

alliances within the history of women’s rights, Native rights activists, and the literary visions of alliances that the following chapters examine.

One of my goals is to recognize limitations of the past in order to imagine possibilities for a future of solidarity, of bridges not built on somebody’s back or by the hands of working-class women, but bridges built to combat racism, continued violence enacted against colonized peoples, and exploitative power on a systemic level. I write with a hope that is paired with realism: I hope for solidarity but recognize the realities of difference, access to power, racism, and a history of violence and racism in the women’s movement that have often prevented alliances between women. I hope for continued changes in feminist theories and praxis, and strongly believe that by looking back into the past we can imagine a feminist future within which feminism is truly decolonized. 28

CHAPTER ONE

SARAH WINNEMUCCA’S LIFE AMONG THE PIUTES: TRAVERSING UNEVEN

GROUND BETWEEN WOMEN’S RIGHTS, REFORM MOVEMENTS, AND

NATIVE PEOPLES’ RIGHTS

In Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), Sarah Winnemucca charges the United States government with hypocrisy, calling attention to the construction of Native savagery as an attempt to justify genocide and colonialism:

Oh, for shame! You who are educated by a Christian government in the art of war; the practice of whose profession makes you natural enemies of the savages, so called by you. Yes, you, who call yourselves the great civilization; you who have knelt upon Plymouth Rock, covenanting with God to make this land the home of the free and the brave. Ah, then you rise from your bended knees and seizing the welcoming hands of those who are the owners of this land, which you are not, your carbines rise upon the bleak shore, and your so-called civilization swoops inland from the ocean wave; but, oh, my God! Leaving its pathway marked by crimson lines of blood, and strewed by the bones of two races, the inheritor and the invader; and I am crying out to you for justice—yes, pleading for the far-off plains of the West, for the dusky mourner, whose tears of love are pleading for her husband, or for their children, who are sent far away from them. Your Christian minister will hold my people against their will; not because he loves them—no, far from it;—but because it puts money in his pockets. (207)

Winnemucca challenges definitions of “savagery” and “civilization” as well as ideologies of Manifest Destiny and the accompanying attitudes of cultural superiority used by the

U.S. government to attempt to justify genocide. She notes the bloodshed on both sides, emphasizing Native people as those who have rights to the land. Marking so-called 29

civilization as a destructive tidal wave, leaving bones and blood in its path, she specifically speaks from the perspective of Native women who have lost their families to genocide.vii Winnemucca locates genocide within a political economy in which Christian

Anglos profit at Native peoples’ expense. In the above passage, and throughout Life

Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, Winnemucca testifies to the specific effects of various forms of colonial violence and demands justice. Winnemucca imagines the possibility for Anglo women to form an alliance with Native women against various forms of Anglo male violence including sexual assault. Yet she recognizes the uneven ground between women upon which such a bridge might be built. Simultaneously, Life

Among the Piutes addresses attitudes of cultural superiority and racism prevalent in both women’s rights discourses and reform movements aimed at “civilizing the Indian,” such as the Women’s National Indian Association, that would render such a bridge unstable and problematic.

Life Among the Piutes is considered to be the first autobiography written by an

American Indian woman, and it narrates events from Winnemucca’s experience and life, but her purpose is not individualistic as is the case with many autobiographies. She uses a European genre to testify to the injustices experienced by Paiute people and to the hypocrisies of the U.S. government. For example, much of Winnemucca’s critique is of the politics of war, and the economy that such violence against Native people helps bolster; she explains that “the only way the cattle-men and farmers get to make money is to start an Indian war, so that the troops may come and buy their beef, cattle, horses, and grain. The settlers get fat by it” (78). Therefore, I have chosen to use the terms 30

testimony or narrative to refer to Life Among the Piutes—the emphasis in Winnemucca’s writing is political, and she uses the personal to voice political protest.

Aiming for the survival of Paiute people who were dying from wars, disease, starvation, and freezing temperatures, Winnemucca protests injustices enacted by the

U.S. government. She especially critiques a violent political economy within which

“Indian agents”—Anglo men sent by the U.S. government to administer rations and maintain colonial order on reservations—profit from American Indian labor.

Winnemucca’s testimony condemns systemic violence on the part of the U.S. government against Paiute people, including the pervasive threat of rape for Native women and girls. Yet sexual assault is just one of the many brutalities in colonial history that Winnemucca documents in her testimony. Reform groups such as the Women’s

National Indian Association, the newspapers, and other discourses construct and reproduce an image of American Indian women as uncivilized, degraded by Native men, laborers of drudgery, and “squaws.” Winnemucca’s testimony challenges those discourses about Native women by reflecting on the important roles of women in Paiute culture and emphasizing that the real oppression for Paiute women comes from colonialism. Paiute women are not depicted as eroticized, sexualized women but rather as women who are constantly threatened by the truly uncivilized brutality of sexual assault committed by Anglo men. Throughout the text Winnemucca scathingly voices protest to Anglo encroachment on reservation land promised in treaties, physical violence against both Native men and women, the rape of Native women and girls by Anglo men, and the reservation system as an oppressive, exploitative prison system. 31

In this landscape of violence, her text serves as an articulation of the problematic ideologies being fostered by reform movements such as the Women’s National Indian

Association and the attitude of Anglo superiority that helped attempt to justify such movements aimed at assimilating and “civilizing the Indian.” It is within a landscape of violence, including genocide and the removal of Native people from their land, sexual assault of Native women, the economic exploitation of Native labor, and the criminalization of Native people (i.e. the construction of American Indians as “savage” and lawless so as to attempt to justify the control of their bodies and their servitude, their exploited labor) that I would like to examine how Winnemucca engages nineteenth- century women’s rights discourses. This landscape of violence is not simply the backdrop to Winnemucca’s depiction of Anglo women and her simultaneous imagining and questioning of the potential for alliances between Native and Anglo women: it is what foregrounds Winnemucca’s imagining of alliances and her engagement with women’s rights discourses. Winnemucca’s critique of various forms of violence in Life

Among the Piutes provides an example of an early attempt to intervene in women’s rights discourses by calling attention to the specific oppression of Native women, and thus suggest the limitations of the women’s movement. This chapter examines Winnemucca’s text within the contexts of discourses of reform in the late nineteenth century— specifically that of Matilda Joslyn Gage and the Women’s National Indian Association— in relation to alliances Winnemucca imagines, and in some cases outright rejects, between African American, Anglo American, and American Indian women. Life Among the Piutes articulates a theory about both the importance and possibility of alliances 32

between Native and Anglo American women as well as some of the problematic power

dynamics involved in such alliances. As part of this study, I assess Winnemucca’s

alliance with Mary Mann and Elizabeth Peabody, who helped make possible the

publication of Life Among the Piutes. Without dismissing the importance of these efforts to form alliances, the limitations of these alliances reveal historical roots of racialized power dynamics involved in such alliances between Anglo women and women of color.

Winnemucca’s narrative, and the context of its production, should be reexamined as a crucial commentary on historical attempts at alliances between women.

My methodological approach for reading Life Among the Piutes is grounded in

theories of recent American Indian women activists such as Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna),

Devon Mihesuah (Choctaw), Kate Shanley (Assiniboine), Joy Harjo (Muskogee),

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux), Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee), and others.viii

My methodological approach to history is also inspired by Emma Pérez’s The Decolonial

Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, in which she argues that Chicana “women’s voices and actions intervene to do what I call sexing the colonial imaginary, historically tracking women’s agency on the colonial landscape” (7). Though she is writing specifically about Chicanas, her theories about gendered subjectivity and resistance to colonialism are applicable to American Indian women, particularly in the way that dominant versions of history silence the experience and perspectives of women of color.

Pérez poses a theory about what she terms the “decolonial imaginary,” “an interstitial space where differential politics and social dilemmas are negotiated” (6). Winnemucca’s

Life Among the Piutes enacts a “decolonial imaginary” as it negotiates politics of reform 33

and women’s rights. By looking back at writers of the nineteenth century such as

Winnemucca, we can see how women of color have been intervening in the history of

Anglo women’s rights movements well before what would be called Third Wave feminism in the 1970s. Thus, via Winnemucca’s testimony, I call for a re-examination of feminist historiography that locates Third Wave feminism in the 1970s as initiating the need for inclusion of concerns of women of color. Life Among the Piutes raises questions that can and should be asked to continue efforts to decolonize feminism in the twenty- first century such as why the concerns of Native women are often absent at feminist organizations or why alliances between Anglo and Native women are still often difficult to build. The last part of this chapter argues for a reading of Winnemucca’s text as insightful to issues in the present, a reading that enables examination of the historical roots of tensions between mainstream (read Anglo) feminist movements in the twentieth and twenty-first century and Native women, particularly in relation to various Native women activists’ concerns today. Winnemucca’s engagement with discourses of Anglo reform offers a crucial memory of the historical roots of the appropriation of Native women in discourses about women’s rights, a memory that is especially insightful for the present considering the erasure of issues concerning Native women that all too often takes place. Winnemucca’s challenges are an early articulation of and resistance to similar issues that those who define themselves as tribal feminists today are concerned with, particularly in relation to exploitation of labor, injustices in the justice system, criminalization and imprisonment of Native people, land rights, and sexual assault and violence against Native women. As such, Life Among the Piutes should be recognized as 34

an important precursor to late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century activists and writers as well as an insightful memory of the effects of colonialism on Native women, a historical memory that challenges hegemonic tellings of history that render the effects on

Native women invisible. However, by calling her a precursor I do not mean to suggest a cause/effect or linear relationship to more current Native women activists. Rather, I think it is more helpful to think of Winnemucca as paralleling concerns of Native women today and look at the way the colonial past—and resistance to the “colonial imaginary,” the colonialist vision and imagination—still continues in the present.

Historical Contexts for the Production of Life Among the Piutes:

Winnemucca as Political Spokesperson

Worsening conditions for the Paiutes, due to Anglo encroachment, led

Winnemucca, her sister, and her father, Chief Winnemucca, to stage performances in

Virginia City, Nevada, where they were a spectacle for crowds of Anglos who came to gaze upon them. At the time of these performances in 1864, Paiute people were starving due to Anglo encroachment and displacement. These performances helped buy food and blankets for them (Canfield 42). After some performances in Nevada, they traveled to

San Francisco where an advertisement in a local newspaper described their show as a

“series of Tableaux Vivants Illustrative of Indian Life” and “romantic entertainment,” including a reenactment of Pocahontas saving John Smith’s life. The part of Pocahontas was played by Winnemucca who was then a teenager (Canfield 39).ix In her poem entitled “Pocahontas to her English Husband John Rolfe,” Paula Gunn Allen imagines

Pocahontas speaking: “I’m sure you wondered at my silence, saying I was a simple 35

wanton, a savage maid, a dusky daughter of heathen sires.” Allen writes back to the myth, and the way such a romanticized depiction continues stereotypes about Native women today. Rather than label Winnemucca, I allow for the possibility that these performances contained sarcasm, a feeding back or talking back to audiences’ expectations as Allen’s poem does. As Danielle Tisinger has pointed out, “by carefully crafting her appearance in public performances and her image in her written autobiography, Winnemucca creates a space in the contact zone in which to open and maintain dialogue between two disparate populations” (173). Winnemucca’s performance of the Pocahontas myth was likely done as a way to mediate and win over her Anglo audiences, using the well-known myth to suggest a kind of alliance as an alternative to the genocide that was taking place. During the performances, Winnemucca interpreted for her father who emphasized that he never entered into wars against Anglos

(nor intended to); then he passed around a hat for donations. Thus, the politics of these public spectacles was a politics of survival. This was only the beginning of her public performances to Anglo audiences. Later, her public lectures, a performance of sorts, would provide a much more complex character as she would, among other things, contest the stereotype of the sexualized “squaw.” In her writing and in her lectures she does not represent herself as a romanticized Pocahontas stereotype. Instead, she challenges her audiences to rethink not only common misperceptions about Native people, but also the oppressive actions of the U.S. government.

As Paiutes were starving, suffering from the cold, and dying of diseases

Winnemucca wrote letters, spoke with army officials, and eventually gave public lectures 36

as a political spokesperson for the Paiutes. Before the Paiute people were invaded by

Anglos they lived in the Great Basin region in what is now western Nevada, northeastern

California, and southern Oregon and were comprised of a number of bands. In 1860, the reservations at Pyramid and Muddy lakes were created by the U.S. government, and in

1865, due to reports that Paiutes had allegedly stolen some of the settlers’ cattle, U.S. soldiers attacked the Paiute people living at the Pyramid Lake reservation and killed all but one of them including men, women, children, and babies.x In 1872, the Malheur reservation was created in what is now southeastern Oregon and was a place of confinement for three bands of Paiutes who had not been at Pyramid lake. They were exploited for their labor by “Indian agents,” agents who also deprived Paiutes of government rations promised in treaties.xi During severe snowstorms in the winter of

1879, the Paiute people who had been ordered to live on the Malheur reservation by the

U.S. government were forced to walk over 350 miles to the Yakima reservation (in what is now central Washington). Winnemucca knew how to speak English, Spanish, and several Native languages and had been an interpreter between the Paiutes and the “Indian agents,” but she was banned from Yakima by the agent there, Father Wilbur, because she questioned his exploitation of Paiute people who were starving.xii

She decided to then become a teacher and interpreter among Bannock Indian prisoners and worked for the U.S. army as a translator. It is within the violence of the

“contact zone,” to borrow a term from Mary Louise Pratt, that Winnemucca became a translator for the “Indian agents,” as they were called, on the reservations, and later for the U.S. army.xiii Rather than label her as a traitor, as Native woman La Malinche has 37

been labeled for translating for Cortés, I would like to contextualize her work as translator.xiv La Malinche was taken as a slave by Cortés during his invasion of Mexico, and was forced to bear his offspring. While Winnemucca was not a literal prisoner by the

U.S. army, the Paiutes were confined to reservations, and they were starving. In Indian

Nation, Walker discusses how Winnemucca thought she could prevent problems by being an adept translator. Winnemucca had hoped to “limit the war” (145) in her work for the

U.S. army during the Bannock War. As translator for the agents, she condemns their injustices. For example, when some U.S. soldiers come to the reservation at Malhuer,

Winnemucca tells them “about our Christian agents’ doings” and writes a letter to

Washington D.C.: for this she is fired from her position (emphasis Winnemucca’s;

136).xv

After giving several public lectures in Virginia City, Nevada that protested injustices experienced by American Indians, she told one reporter from the San Francisco

Chronicle in 1879: “I might get the California Theatre, and perhaps I could make my expenses. I would be the first Indian woman who ever spoke before white people and they don’t know what the Indians have got to stand sometimes” (qtd. in Canfield 162).

Newspapers headlined her as “The Princess Sarah,” playing up the Pocahontas stereotype, but she was able to make use of this public notoriety to speak politically on the behalf of the Paiute people. During her lectures in San Francisco she wrote and circulated a petition asking that agent Reinhard, who exploited and abused Paiutes on the

Malheur reservation, be replaced and that the Paiutes at the Yakima reservation be allowed to return back to the Malheur reservation (Canfield 166). At her last lecture in 38

San Francisco 1879 she declared, “I call upon white people in their private houses. They

will not touch my fingers for fear of getting soiled. That’s the Christianity of white

people” (qtd. in Canfield 167). After these lectures, an agent from the Interior

Department, J.M. Haworth, was sent from Washington D.C. to investigate the “unrest” of

the Paiutes (Canfield 167). Winnemucca, her brother, Natchez, and her father made use

of this opportunity and requested to be sent to Washington D.C. to speak to the President

on behalf of the Paiutes (171).xvi Winnemucca met with Secretary of the Interior, Carl

Schurz, and asked that the Paiutes be allowed back to Malheur. He promised this, along with other promises that he never kept.xvii Additionally, when Sarah, Natchez, and their

father met with President Hayes he did not show any interest in the Paiutes’ suffering

(Canfield 175).

However, those failed political alliances did not prevent Winnemucca from

voicing scathing protests, and continuing her activism in hopes of making changes to

U.S. policies regarding Native people. After her marriage to an Anglo man, Lewis

Hopkins, (which she briefly refers to as an afterthought in Life Among the Piutes), and at the request of the Paiute people, Winnemucca traveled to Washington D.C. again, arriving in Boston in 1883.xviii Early on she met Elizabeth Peabody and her sister Mary

Mann, who had been abolitionists and worked for educational reforms and other

humanitarian causes and were supporters of woman’s suffrage.xix According to Canfield, it was Peabody who encouraged Winnemucca to continue lecturing (201). Between 1883 and 1884 she gave nearly 300 public lectures on the east coast from Boston and New 39

York to Baltimore and Washington (Georgi-Findlay 225), lecturing in front of large church meetings of various denominations and Indian Association groups (Canfield 201).

Alliances between Winnemucca and Mary Mann and Elizabeth Peabody:

After lecturing for some time Winnemucca knew that she could only address several main points in one lecture and decided she wanted to write a book about the injustices her people were suffering from (Canfield 201). Mann and Peabody helped garner funding and worked very hard to make possible the publication of Life Among the

Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883).xx The importance of Mann and Peabody’s efforts to support Winnemucca should not be undervalued; their alliance with

Winnemucca allowed for the publication of the first autobiography written by an

American Indian woman. As Ruoff puts it, “hostile government policies and public attitudes created a climate generally unfavorable to the development of Indian literature” in the nineteenth century (260). Still, the context within which Winnemucca wrote was one in which her editor and financers, though marginalized as women, held a position of power, both economically and as Anglo Americans in a white supremacist culture, that

Winnemucca did not.xxi

Regarding the role these Anglo women played in the production of the text, contemporary scholars generally agree that there is “little evidence of editorial

‘tampering,’” but “considerable influence” (Walker 149). Many scholars cite the letter

Mann wrote to a friend to emphasize that Mann merely edited the narrative: xxii

I wish you could see her manuscript as a matter of curiosity. I don’t think the English language ever got such a treatment before. I have to recur to her sometimes to know what a word is, as spelling is an unknown quantity to her, as you mathematicians would express it. She often takes syllables off of words and 40

adds them or rather prefixes them to other words, but the story is heart-breaking, and told with a simplicity and eloquence that cannot be described, for it is not high-faluting eloquence, tho’ sometimes it lapses into verse (and quite poetical verse too). I was always considered fanatical about Indians, but I have a wholly new conception of them now, and we civilized people may well stand abashed before their purity of life and their truthfulness. (Canfield 203)

Mann’s letter credits Winnemucca’s writing as literary even though it is not “high- faluting.” Additionally, Mann writes in the editor’s preface, “I am confident that no one would desire that her own original words should be altered” (ii). What interests me about the letter is not the question of editorial interference, as that has already been addressed by several critics, but Mann’s recognition that she has always been “fanatical about

Indians.” It is significant that Mann acknowledges that her “conception” has shifted, yet what it shifted to exactly is hard to surmise from this letter. Still, it does suggest that after reading Winnemucca’s text, Mann is more seriously willing to challenge U.S. policies and ideologies regarding Native people. That she is standing “abashed” before the “purity of life and their truthfulness,” though, suggests a kind of romanticization that places Native culture above that of “civilized” people. Still, considering the dominant ideologies of the time regarding Native people, the fact that she devotes so much of her time and energy to help promote Winnemucca’s testimony, a testimony that calls for changes in U.S. policy and attitudes about Native people, is significant. Regarding such alliances, Cherokee scholar Rayna Green asks an important question:

[w]hile most of the studies of Pocahontas and her sisters focus on the ways in which they helped non-Indians defeat their own people, where is the serious study of such women as cultural brokers, working to create, manage, and minimize the negative effects of change on their people—working for Native American people and with white men and women? (“Native American Women” 266)

41

Rather than celebrate Native women as heroines for helping Anglos (as do such romanticized versions of the Pocahontas myth), I note the alliance involving the production of the text in order to examine further how the text itself comments on the potential for and/or limitations of such alliances aimed at minimizing the destructive effects of colonialism.

Contexts for Reading Winnemucca’s Portrayal of Alliances Between Women:

Abolition, “The Indian Problem,” and “The Woman Question”

Winnemucca’s imagining of alliances between women takes place while “the

Woman Question,” as it was then called, was being debated in nineteenth-century

America (amongst other debates about reform such as abolition and reforms aimed at

“civilizing the Indian”). The central issues surrounding “the Woman Question” included rights to property regardless of marriage, the right to vote, and the right to break free from captivity within the “domestic sphere,” including the right to do work previously assigned only to Anglo American men (Heath 2212). These rights were called for by

Anglo women, and were primarily intended to be extended only to Anglo women, though this was usually implicit. Arguments made by Sarah Moore and Angelina Grimké in the

1830s called for equal education for Anglo women, asserting the gendered social construction of intellectual inferiority, but they also included protests against the sexual abuse of Black women slaves and the institution of slavery itself.xxiii The Grimké sisters gave public lectures in New England for the anti-slavery movement. When they were attacked by Catharine Beecher for entering into the public sphere, Angelina wrote a response that, according to Jean Fagan Yellin, argued that women can act “wherever men 42

can—both in public and in private” (1805). Further, as Yellin puts it, the Grimké sisters’ stance on abolition

came to define abolitionism to many Americans and their writings on women’s rights became the grounding of later works by Margaret Fuller, and the thinking of the women who established an American feminist movement at Seneca Falls in 1848. (Yellin 1806)

For the Grimké sisters and other women reformers, their work toward anti-slavery reform became a break from the domestic sphere. In The White Man’s Indian, Robert

Berkhofer briefly notes that, at the end of the Civil War, Anglo American reformers, many of whom were women, then became interested in “the Indian Problem” (166). As reform efforts shifted from slavery to “the Indian Problem,” many middle-and upper- class Anglo women continued to break out of the domestic sphere. At the moment when

Life Among the Piutes was published, some Anglo women had served as mediators for social injustices and Winnemucca’s narrative specifically intervenes in this history to comment on the potential and limitations for such cultural mediation.

The rhetoric of the two phrases, “the Woman Question” and “the Indian

Problem,” reflect indeed a problem in how discourses about rights functioned (and still often continue to function): questions regarding women mostly involved the rights of

Anglo American women while the “problem”—placed on the bodies of Native people— of discourses about Native people did not leave space for recognition of the ways colonialism specifically affected Native women. Winnemucca’s testimony puts this problem into question. Within a social and historical milieu in which “the Woman

Question” and “the Indian Problem” were being debated, Winnemucca articulates a notion of feminism that emphasizes survival, taking action for the purpose of defending 43

Paiute people from the invented notion of the “Indian,” i.e. definitions of indigenous

people created and perpetuated in dominant discourses to fit a colonial agenda.xxiv

The Women’s National Indian Association: Anglo Women as Mediators and

Missionaries

In 1879, the year that Winnemucca began lecturing publicly about the injustices experienced by Paiute people and just three years before Life Among the Piutes was

published, a group of middle-and upper-class Anglo American Christian women began

the Central Indian Committee of the Women’s Home Mission Society. The group was

created by Mary L. Bonneyxxv and Amelia S. Quinton, and in 1883 it became the

Women’s National Indian Association. As Francis Paul Prucha explains in American

Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865-1900, they sought to

“unite the Christian women of the nation” (134). They “had been aroused by injustices to

the Indians,” and “hoped to stir up the people of the United States to demand reform in

Indian affairs” (Prucha 134). Much of the work of this group focused on the circulation

of petitions by the thousands (Prucha 135). The 1883 Annual Meeting and Report of the

Women’s National Indian Association explains that between the years 1879 and 1883

they circulated three petitions and “a million pages of information and appeal on behalf

of justice to Indians” (8). The annual reports also provided extensive lists of individual

financial contributors, and thus evidence the popular support of numerous churches and

middle and upper class women.

The Women’s National Indian Association saw itself as guided by providence to

help American Indians. For example, the report states that 44

Providence has answered our prayers by bringing the gentlemen’s Indian Rights Association into existence to pursue as their chief work . . . leaving our own society free to devote, not by any means all but a portion of our work to uplifting Indian homes, to aiding the vastly needed work within Indian hearts, minds and souls, while not intermitting the effort to secure to the race civil rights. (10)

Its goals thus merged a concern with civil rights with a paternalistic attitude about what they could give to Native peoples’ souls. The first petition in 1880 had 13,000 signatures that denounced the encroachment of Anglos on Native peoples’ land (Prucha 135).xxvi In

1882, the group circulated a petition with 100,000 signatures that was given to Congress by Senator Dawes. The petition called for the U.S. government to do the following: to uphold all treaties, fund schools on reservations (including industrial schools), support allotment of land, and give “Indians full rights under the law,” including “full religious liberty” (as qtd. by Prucha 135). On some levels the group supported civil rights, and demanded that the government abide by its promises in treaties that had been made.

While the Women’s National Indian Association did purportedly support full rights for

Native people under U.S. law, its central concerns and “good intentions,” as Native feminist scholar and activist and theorist Devon Abbott Mihesuah (Choctaw) explains, were directed at educating in order to assimilate Native people (xii).

The annual report suggests that these Anglo American women were concerned with injustices, and that they found a special personal sense of agency in doing this work.

As Barbara Welter explains in her chapter “The Cult of True Womanhood,” in Dimity

Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century, “[o]ne reason religion was valued was that it did not take a woman away from her ‘proper sphere,’ her home.

Unlike participation in other societies or movements, church work would not make her 45

less domestic or submissive, less a True Woman” (22). The societal pressures on Anglo

American women of the time were such that all of their identity and work had to be centered on religion and the home. The Women’s National Indian Association allowed middle-and upper-class Anglo women to participate in the public sphere, to break from the confines of the separate spheres while still upholding the “cult of true womanhood.”

To a certain extent, the Women’s National Indian Association allowed middle- and upper-class women a space to work outside of the home, but maintained acceptability by centering it on religion. While Anglo women were then marginalized in American culture and regarded as inferior to men—ideologies that are still being battled today—this group was organized and run entirely by women and was concerned with American

Indian civil rights. As an organization run entirely by Anglo women (who were later excluded from the Indian Rights Association in 1882), it is unlikely that the Women’s

National Indian Association could have garnered financial support if it had not centered its efforts on religion.

Although these women took the initiative to involved themselves with civil rights, they had also internalized the colonialist ideologies of the times: as the documents from the reports of the Women’s National Indian Association evidence, they felt it was their duty to impose their notions of “civilization,” particularly in terms of gender roles, onto

Native women. As Mary Young discusses, the “cult of true womanhood” “implied an increasingly crucial role for women in transmitting ‘civilization’ to the rising generation”

(150). The women involved in the Women’s National Indian Association went beyond their role as mothers passing “civilization” onto their children by taking on a 46

maternalistic attitude toward Native women. In The Feminization of American Culture,

Ann Douglass references a minister’s writing in a popular Congregationalist magazine that reflects the dominant sentiment of the late nineteenth century. Douglass cites his warning to Anglo women that “Your importance to society . . . lies solely in your moral elevation” (44). These ideologies about Anglo women’s role in American culture were embraced by the Women’s National Indian Association, as it centered the importance of their “moral” work on bringing “civilization” to Native people, especially Native women.

Their celebration of their work is described by the association’s secretary, Amelia

Quinton, in her essay entitled “In Care of the Indian”:

By the success of this policy, developed with the aid of all officials, individuals, and organizations friendly to them, the quarter of a million Indians in our country are, by taking individual farms or adopting civilized avocations, at last really passing out of barbarism into civilization, and from the oppressions, disabilities, and helplessness of the reservation system into the freedom, protection, and development of United States citizenship. The women have undertaken to meet a particular crisis, to bridge a dangerous gap. (390)

The danger, in this statement, seems to be rooted in presumptions of Native “barbarism” and Anglo women as the saviors of a “dangerous” situation. Moreover, as V. S. Mathes points out, “the women of the Women’s National Indian Association often saw Indians as child-like, existing within a heathenistic culture that needed to be properly cleansed and replaced by the superior Anglo culture” (1).xxvii

Mathes makes some important critiques of the Women’s National Indian

Association, but she does not apply it to Winnemucca’s writing or any literature. In literary criticism, an occasional reference to the context of reform is made, but there has been no examination of such reform groups in relation to Winnemucca’s writing. For 47

example, Brigette Georgi-Findlay notes that “Indian reform” is, “at this historical moment, a domain which is of particular concern to women. The book [Life Among the

Piutes] is thus placed in a feminine discourse which assumes moral responsibility in the realm of political reform” (230).xxviii Georgi-Findlay notes that the book was promoted by women “active in or affiliated with various reform movements,” but is not more specific than that (230). Siobhan Senier has an entire chapter that provides an excellent analysis of women reformers and Helen Hunt Jackson, but she does not discuss

Winnemucca in relation to the Women’s National Indian Association beyond a brief reference to its existence.

By 1879, another reform group, the Friends of the Indian, had emerged as a missionary and philanthropic group. Such groups’ widespread popularity and their endorsement of the “civilizing mission” need to be recognized as part of the historical milieu within which Winnemucca wrote and published Life Among the Piutes: Their

Wrongs and Claims. Given the extent to which the Women’s National Indian

Association disseminated its views, Winnemucca would very likely have been familiar with its ideological premises. Additionally, the readers of Life Among the Piutes and the people in attendance at Winnemucca’s public lectures were likely the readers of the pamphlets produced by the Women’s National Indian Association (from which they learned their assumptions and “knowledge” about U.S. policy and Native people). The goal of my project is not to attempt to discern the authentic voice of Winnemucca from what is constructed to appeal to her audience, but rather to locate the position that Life

Among the Piutes takes up within several historical contexts (U.S. policies regarding 48

Native people, the Women’s National Indian Association, and the women’s rights movement) and analyze it as a discursive text.xxix By contextualizing Winnemucca’s writing historically in relation to Anglo women’s reform movements and efforts

(specifically the Women’s National Indian Association), it is clear that Winnemucca’s critique of definitions of “civilized” vs. “savage” directly contests such ideologies that were reproduced by and reflected in discourses of reform (such as their defining of

Native culture as inferior, and their presumption that Native women are in need of Anglo women’s civilization).xxx

Winnemucca’s Critique of Reform Movements and Women’s Rights: Protesting

Racism and Imagining New Directions for Alliances Between Women

Life Among the Piutes places much emphasis on Winnemucca’s grandfather’s attempt to make alliances with Anglos; thus, it serves as a significant starting point to delve into the question of how alliances are imagined between Anglo American and

American Indian women in the text. Life Among the Piutes opens with a memory of invasion by Anglos: she narrates how Anglos burn the Paiutes’ food and supplies and poison the river (18-19), and she describes her father’s dream that predicted genocide of

Native people (14). She also mentions that her grandfather went to California to help

Anglos fight Mexicans in the Mexican American war. Her grandfather, Truckee, likes

Anglos and refers to them as superior and “beautiful” (19). She remembers his talks of victories and having power over Mexicans, “about their killing so many of the Mexicans and taking their big city away from them, and how mighty they were” (18). At one point,

Winnemucca, her sister, mother, grandfather, and others, at the urging of Truckee, travel 49

to California where they come across some Mexican Americans; her grandfather says they would kill him if they knew who he was (28). Aside from this, which occurs in

Chapter One, and sporadic references throughout the text, there is very much an absence of Mexican Americans in the narrative. The few references to Mexican Americans portray them as en enemy from her grandfather’s point of view, highlighting that even though her grandfather risked his life to help Anglos, they did not keep their promises to

Paiute people.xxxi

Winnemucca’s emphasis on her grandfather’s failed alliance with Anglos (one of the first things she narrates in her testimony) is a violent irony if read as a literary text, and an ironic, violent reality when considering that her narrative is a literary rendering of history. It is with irony that she dwells so much on her grandfather’s hopes and faith in the alliances he formed, and Winnemucca carefully utilizes such irony as a rhetorical strategy to draw in her Anglo readers. The failure of her grandfather’s alliance with

Anglos is due to the devastating effects of colonialism, and it foregrounds Winnemucca’s imagining of alliances between herself and Anglo women, both in the persona she creates in her testimony and in “real life.”

Life Among the Piutes raises important questions about the possibilities of alliances between American Indian, African American, and Anglo American women.

Like the Mexican American presence in Winnemucca’s testimony, the African American presence is marginal; however, an African American woman appears in a crucial scene in the testimony that has more significance, given the historical context of tensions between the Equal Rights Association and the women’s movement. Scholars such as Angela 50

Davis have noted the limitations and problematic ways in which many Anglo American

women in the suffrage movement overlooked the material conditions of exploitation and

racism experienced by African American women. Davis explains that the attempt for

unity by the Equal Rights Association, (an alliance between people working for Black

liberation and people working for women’s liberation), during Reconstruction failed in

part because of the racism within the women’s movement.xxxii As Davis observes, many

Anglo American women suffragists opposed the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments

because they did not include suffrage for women (meaning Anglo women).xxxiii Elizabeth

Cady Stanton’s and Susan B. Anthony’s own sense of women’s rights had emerged, in part, due to being excluded from the male realm of public speaking in the abolition movement.xxxiv In this way, the organizing of the abolition movement and Anglo

women’s involvement in that area of reform had a causal relationship to the women’s

rights movement in the nineteenth century. Later, Stanton refused to take a public stance

against lynching, and used as a rhetorical strategy the notion that giving Anglo women

the vote would even out the “uneducated” votes of Black men and immigrants

(“Feminism and Feminisms” 191). Considering this context, it is more evident that

Winnemucca’s portrayal of alliances makes an important commentary on the historical

realities of racism in the women’s movement and racial violence, including lynchings, of

African Americans during this period.

Black people appear three times in the testimony. The first time occurs early on

in the narrative when Winnemucca mentions first seeing African Americans (8). Later,

when her grandfather takes Winnemucca, her mother, sister, and brothers to Carson City, 51

they travel with Anglos her grandfather had made friends with. Her grandfather gets into a fight with them because they are whipping the slaves who drive the wagons and refuse to stop when he protests (23-24). Her grandfather then stops traveling with them. While this point is not emphasized, it still articulates a shared experience of violence and injustice, recognizing too the presence of slaves in the American West. Later, during the

Bannock War, when Winnemucca arrives in Canyon City, an African American woman whom Winnemucca had known runs up to her and exclaims, “Oh, Sarah. I am afraid someone will do you harm. There is a woman living here who swears that the first Indian she sees she will shoot” because her husband had died in the war (198). She is the only

African American woman in the text, and this scene is the only time she appears. Though it is a short-lived alliance, it serves to protect her from the racial violence of an Anglo woman. Given the context of the racism in the women’s movement that caused a rupture between women’s suffragists and the Equal Rights Association, it is evident that

Winnemucca is commenting upon the historical reality of racism that prevented alliances.

In this case, the African American woman in the text is allied with a Native woman against the Anglo woman’s threats of racial violence.

Some of the images of Anglo women in Life Among the Piutes paint a dismal view of the realities of racism that would prevent alliances between Anglo women and women of color. Earlier in the Bannock War, Winnemucca and the U.S. military officers she is working with stop for something to eat. Winnemucca is working as a translator for these Anglo officers to try to save the Paiutes from violence directed at them from both the Bannock Indians and Anglo settlers. It is while Winnemucca is working as a 52

mediator that an Anglo American woman serving them suggests to the officers, “Why don’t you take her and tie one part of her to a horse, and the other part of her to another horse, and let them go? I would see the horses pull her to pieces with good grace” (168).

This Anglo woman had never even seen Winnemucca before. When the officer tries to explain who Winnemucca is, the Anglo woman replies, “I don’t care. Rope is too good to hang her with” (168). Winnemucca explains at that point that she could not eat anything. She reflects, “Dear reader, this is the kind of white women that are in the West.

They are always ready to condemn me” (168). Ruoff notes that the comment about the

Anglo woman “contrasts sharply with accounts of sisterly solidarity given by many white women writers who were her contemporaries” (“Early American Women Authors . . .”

89). Although Ruoff does not note which women writers she is referring to, her claim that Winnemucca treats the topic of alliances differently than her Anglo female counterparts deserves further consideration.

That just thirty pages later an African American woman warns Winnemucca in order to save her life from an Anglo woman who would kill her, and that another Anglo woman advocates lynching her with such vivid, violent details and imagery, suggests the potential for an alliance between African American women and Native women.

Although Winnemucca does not directly state it or pedantically connect the lynchings of

African Americans to genocide and violence directed at Native people, she would have been aware of this historical reality due to the time she spent on the east coast.

Winnemucca poses the Black woman as the one willing to save her from “the kind of white women that are in the West” (168). Winnemucca is urging women readers in the 53

Northeast not to be like those in the West (in a similar way that Harriet Jacobs urges

Anglo women in the North not to be like the Anglo women in the South), but the text also

raises a question: to what extent do the Anglo American women in the Northeast differ

from those sisters in the West?

Two other images of Anglo American women exist in the testimony; however,

these images are not without problems and limitations. The very first Anglo woman in

the text comes and gives healing medicine to Winnemucca, who as a child is sick with

poison oak. She recalls the woman’s “beautiful white hand” and refers to her as a

“beautiful angel” (32). While she did have fear of Anglo people prior to this experience,

it is because of this woman’s action that she states, “so I came to love the white people”

(32). Yet, she does not espouse to love all Anglo people in her testimony; in fact, she

scathingly critiques many Anglos and their actions. The depictions of Anglo women

sympathetic to Native people are always repeatedly referred to as either a “beautiful

angel” (as in the case of the woman who gave Winnemucca the medicine) or a “white

lily” (as in the case of Mrs. Parrish). These references to Anglo women’s beauty may

seem to idealize whiteness, a troubling notion given the many writings in the twentieth

century by women of color who describe the ways young girls of color often learn to

internalize racism and not see themselves as beautiful. Yet Winnemucca’s references are

different than the idealization of whiteness in Ruiz de Burton’s Squatter and the Don

(1885) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1872). Never does Winnemucca wish she is white, nor does she ever try to argue that Native people are white and should thus be accepted into the privileged class of Americans defined as white. 54

The only other Anglo woman who is more than a backdrop to her husband in the testimony is Mrs. Parrish. Mr. Parrish is the only agent on the reservations who seems to respect Paiute people, and he is the only one who does not steal from them and profit at their expense. Winnemucca highlights the fact that he is not a Christian. Mrs. Parrish, repeatedly referred to as the “white lily,” opens up a school on the Malhuer reservation with Winnemucca, and they work together there to teach Paiute children English.

However, the Parrishes are soon removed from their position, three weeks after the school opens, because they are not Christian (118). Although Winnemucca does dote on the “white lily” in a way that might make twenty-first century readers uncomfortable,

Mrs. Parrish and she are partners in the school in the sense that they receive equal pay

(116). The idealization of whiteness in Life Among the Piutes is only in relation to white women: white men are not glorified for their whiteness. Therefore, I would argue that the references to these Anglo women’s beauty are intended to make their actions seem worthy of imitation by Anglo women readers.

The alliance with this Anglo woman is decidedly not an alliance with a woman who would have been part of the Women’s National Indian Association or any kind of reform movement aimed at “Christianizing the Indian.” The depiction of Mr. and Mrs.

Parrish is the only instance in which Winnemucca describes the interactions between

“Indian agents” and Paiutes as positive, and she stresses that they are not Christian.

Indeed, Winnemucca’s critique of Christianity is what accounts for the fact that in her first lecture in Boston she “offended an influential Methodist woman” by condemning the actions of Father Wilber, an “Indian agent” (Canfield 201). According to Canfield, 55

Winnemucca did not “tone down her criticisms” and thus “opposition started against her, including [that of] the Women’s Association of the Methodist church” (Canfield 201).xxxv

In Life Among the Piutes, Winnemucca imagines another kind of alliance—one different than that embraced by popular reform movements that would place Anglo women as bringing “civilization” to Native women. Additionally, the representation of

Winnemucca’s various female alliances and enemies provides insightful commentary on the historical moment within which Life Among the Piutes was produced, and the racism that prevented alliances between women of color and Anglo women.

Not only does Winnemucca critique the alliances imagined by reform movements aimed at instilling Christianity and so-called civilization onto Native women, but she also questions the uneven ground upon which women’s rights discourses were built, and traverses discourses that were appropriating Native women for feminist purposes.

Winnemucca’s text engages the question of alliances between women at a point in history when Anglo women such as Matilda Joslyn Gage were using Native cultures to further their own battles against Anglo patriarchy. In her essay entitled “The ‘Other’ as Political

Symbol: Images of Indians in the Woman Suffrage Movement,” Gail Landsman surveys the shifting way that the American woman’s suffrage movement (1848-1920) portrayed

Native people and how various groups appropriated “symbols of the ‘other’ to enhance

[their] own goals” (252). Her historicizing of such appropriation does not cover

Winnemucca or an analysis of such appropriations in relation to literature. Landsman wonders “how the narrative that women suffragists told about American women affected 56

the story they told about Indians” (252). One of the women she examines is Gage, who is often overshadowed in histories of women’s movements by Anthony and Stanton.

In addition to coauthoring History of Woman’s Suffrage with Stanton and

Anthony, Gage was publisher and editor of a suffragist newspaper entitled National

Citizen and Ballot Box (1878-1881) and organized the Women’s National Liberal Union in 1889. She made an important argument in Woman, Church, and State for the separation of the church from the state, because of its oppressiveness for women, that

Mary Daly claims is “indispensable for an understanding of the women’s movement today” (qtd. in Wagner 21). In 1871, Gage wrote in a news article, entitled “The Mother of His Children,” that

The whitemen of New York are this very moment lower in the scale of humanitarian civilization than were the Iroquois, who had their seat here before Columbus discovered America; for . . . it was the unwritten law of the redman, that if for any cause the husband and wife separated, the child should go with her who had borne and nursed it. (qtd. in Landsman 260-61)xxxvi

In this example, Iroquois people are introduced and then symbolically appropriated in support of Anglo women’s custody rights. Yet the fact that Native people were here before Columbus is emphasized. In this way Gage advocated an acknowledgement of

Native rights to land, but only to assert that the “whitemen of New York” were inferior even to the civilization of the Iroquois.xxxvii During the time that Gage was president of the National Women’s Suffrage Association, in 1875, she wrote a series of articles in praise of the superior government system of the Iroquois in which “the power between the sexes was nearly equal” (qtd. in Wagner 9). Apparently, Gage spent time with the

Iroquois and was even given an honorary name by the Wolf clan in 1893 (Wagner 22). 57

In many ways Gage was far ahead of her time for trying to learn about an American

Indian culture by talking with and spending time with Iroquois people. For example, as

Wagner documents,

In an 1878 article entitled “Indian Citizenship,” Gage writes that “the black man had the right of suffrage conferred upon him without his asking for it, and now an attempt is made to force it upon the red man in direct opposition to his wishes, while women citizens, already members of the nation, to whom it rightfully belongs, are denied its exercise.” (qtd. in Wagner 11)

For Gage, if the U.S. government had been considering granting suffrage to men of color, it was hypocritical for it not to grant it to Anglo women. Still, Gage also may have been recognizing the sovereignty of Native people as citizens of their own nations, and thus as perhaps not wanting suffrage as U.S. citizens. As Landsman points out, while Gage lauded the superiority of Iroquois people in their attitudes about women, she contradictorily referred to the Iroquois in an editorial as having “heathen customs” and

“pagan worship,” and that it “is through the Indian women that the problem of their civilization must be answered” (268). Gage’s notion of women’s rights began by imaging freedom for Anglo women and advancing the cause of suffrage by using the image of Native women.xxxviii Ironically Gage assumed that Iroquois women needed to be saved from their own “uncivilized” ways, even though she deemed the equality of women in Iroquois culture superior to Anglo culture.xxxix

In “Native American Women,” Rayna Green (Cherokee) argues that even when

Winnemucca and other Native women “became well-known activists and lecturers, reformist women and men gave them a voice merely to further their own reforms—which had little relevance to Indian causes” (250). Green raises an important concern, though 58

she does not develop it further regarding Winnemucca or in relation to suffragists. One might ask how Peabody and Mann may have been using Winnemucca’s writing to further their causes as suffragists. My goal is not to speculate about Peabody and Mann’s intentions, but to assert that Winnemucca’s text itself engages in these complex intersections between reform and suffragism as they relate to Native rights.

Winnemucca’s text challenges the premises of the Women’s National Indian

Association and its definition of Native people as savage and thus in need of a supposedly superior Anglo civilization. Her testimony stresses that the Paiutes were generous and peaceful toward the first Anglo settlers. She writes, “[y]ou call my people bloodseeking. My people did not seek to kill them, nor did they steal their horses—no, no far from it. During the winter my people helped them” (11). Right from the beginning, Winnemucca contests definitions of “savagery” and “civilized.” She recounts stories from other Native people that “the people whom they called their white brothers were killing everybody that came in their way” and “eating them” (11). (She is likely referring to the Donner Party, a group of Anglo settlers who tried to make a pass over the

Sierras from what is now Reno to Tahoe and, suffering from starvation and extreme cold, reverted to eating some of the members of the party). Winnemucca’s fear of cannibalism reverses the dominant discourses of Native people as cannibals so prevalent of the time and popularized by captivity narratives.xl Framing the testimony in this way indirectly questions the premise of reform movements such as the Women’s National Indian

Association and instead implicates Anglos as in need of civilization. Many scholars have noted how Winnemucca disrupts the common stereotype of the time of Native people as 59

savage, violent, brutal, and inferior, but the context of the “civilizing missions” of reform groups such as the Women’s National Indian Association makes Winnemucca’s critique of “savagery” much more complex, particularly in terms of gender.

The Women’s National Indian Association embraced nineteenth-century notions of “True Womanhood,” what Welters calls “a fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility, the nineteenth-century American woman had—to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand” (21). Anglo women were considered the harbingers of civilization and, as evidenced by the discourses produced by the Women’s National Indian

Association, they saw it as their moral obligation to impose the “temple” of civilization onto Native people. Emphasizing that Christianity is the “practical remedy for savagery and sin” (11), the Women’s National Indian Association 1883 Annual Report reflects a special importance placed on Anglo American women reformers’ work, especially the importance of the “education of Indian women and girls in the habits of a higher civilization” (24), and “teaching the women how to cook the food of civilization and how to care for their children, and most surely, teaching all within reach in the simplest way, redeeming Christian truths” (12). Winnemucca’s text challenges such discourses, showing that Paiute women are not in need of Anglo civilization, since women are respected in Paiute culture. She tells of customs such as courtship, mourning, and other ceremonies to emphasize Paiute culture and women’s roles that exist already within that civilization and tradition.

In a memorial letter written in 1882, the secretary of the Women’s National

Indian Association, Amelia S. Quinton, wrote that it was up to them to pass legal 60

authorization to help the “suffering, undefended, ever-endangered Indian women and

children,” and that “the plea of the Indian women for the sacred shield of law is the pleas

of the sisters, wives, and mothers of this nation for them, the plea of all womanhood,

indeed, on their behalf to you as legislators and as men” (qtd. in Mathes 5).xli Thus, the

Women’s National Indian Association was articulating a kind of concern on the part

Anglo American women on behalf of Native women specifically. Since part of its

solution included “civilizing” Native people, the direct implication of the above statement

is that Native women are endangered by “barbarism.” Life Among the Piutes contests the premise of the Women’s National Indian Association, pointing out the importance of women within Paiute culture. Winnemucca explains that women may share in council talks, and that “[t]he women know as much as the men do, and their advice is often asked. We have a republic as well as you. The council-tent is our Congress, and anybody can speak who has anything to say, women and all” (53).xlii At the same time that this

passage demonstrates an egalitarian, tribal government already in place, and thus not in

need of Anglo “civilization,” it also demonstrates that the concerns of most Anglo

American women struggling for equality were not the same as those of Native women.xliii

While Anglo American women were struggling for an equal voice in politics, rights to an

equal education, suffrage, and property rights (to name a few), Winnemucca makes clear

in Life Among the Piutes that Paiute women were struggling to survive the effects of

colonialism.

Native scholar Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna) writes that there is an “obsession” to

prove “that Indians mistreat their women brutally, at every level and in every way—the 61

implication being that civilized people revere women, and savages, who don’t revere them, deserve extermination” (5). For Allen, this attempt to justify genocide is the root of any “attempt to paint Native American cultures as patriarchal when they are not” (5).

Winnemucca makes a point of stating that women participated in races and sports (13), and that the choice to marry was completely up to the woman: “She is never forced by her parents to marry against her wishes. When she knows her own mind . . .” she marries, suggesting that women’s minds apart from men are valued in Paiute culture (49).

Winnemucca’s testimony makes clear that Paiute women do not struggle with the same issues of gender equality as do women in Anglo culture.

Additionally, Winnemucca takes up the notion of gender equality to articulate a solution to the so-called “Indian Problem”: she addresses the issue of equal representation as the suffrage movement did, but rather than use Native people to further the cause of Anglo women, as did Winnemucca’s contemporary Gage, Winnemucca poses participation of women in Congress directly in relation to Native peoples’ rights.

She declares that “if women could go into your Congress I think justice would be done to the Indians” (53). Regardless of whether we read Winnemucca’s claim about women in

Congress as meaning only Anglo women or both Anglo and Native women, she still imagines an alliance between women and protests Anglo patriarchy. Perhaps when

Winnemucca said “women” she meant only Anglo American women: yet as a public speaker, who is rhetorically savvy, it is also possible that she is arguing here for participation of Native women in Congress. Later in the narrative, when the Paiutes ask

Winnemucca to speak on their behalf in Washington D.C., she replies to them, “but I am 62

powerless, being a woman, and yet you come to me for help” (139). Since she uses the general term “woman” to refer to herself, it seems then that when she refers to women going to Congress it could also include Native women. In any case, if women had some say in the matter, then injustices against Native people would not continue to be endorsed by the government. By imagining women in Congress as a solution, and showing that

Paiute women have equal say in their government, Winnemucca reverses the notion that

Native people are barbaric and Native women are in need of help, placing the barbarism in the U.S. Congress. Life Among the Piutes roots the problem in Anglo patriarchy, and places colonialism within a gendered context.

Winnemucca’s testimony serves as an historical document that expresses some of the tensions surrounding alliances on both the part of the Women’s National Indian

Association and the women’s movement. If the Anglo women imagining these alliances were like the typical women of the West Winnemucca refers to above, then an alliance would not help bring justice to Native people. Further, if the Anglo women are maternalistic, speaking on behalf of Native people as do groups such as the Women’s

National Indian Association, then that kind of liberalism is problematic. At a time when suffragists and other women activists were doing important work in challenging a patriarchal society, including its denial of women’s legal rights as individuals, their own voice and independence, Winnemucca’s challenge to a male-dominated Congress would have appealed to contemporary women’s rights activists. Many current feminists have pointed out, as do Gwendolyn Mink and Barbara Smith, that “where Anglo-American women’s rights advocates spoke for themselves, maternalists spoke about and to other 63

women. Rights advocates often alienated or excluded women whose social status and

political needs were different from their own” (194). The Women’s National Indian

Association is an example of the type of maternalism that seemed to advocate rights for

Native people while making presumptions about what would be best for them. If we read

Life Among the Piutes as advocating both Native and Anglo women’s participation in

Congress, then she is not supporting political changes that would mean Anglo women

speak on behalf of Native women. In Life Among the Piutes, an alliance is possible, but it

is not set up as a guarantee, for it would require a major shift in thinking for the Anglo

women like the one ready to quarter her. Thus, Life Among the Piutes can be read as a

theoretical articulation about the limitations of women’s rights and reform movements as

it also imagines possibilities for alliances that resist white male colonialist violence.

Alliances Between Women Against Sexual Assault in Life Among the Piutes:

Winnemucca contrasts an image of an Anglo woman who is deplorable and racist

with several positive images of Anglo women worthy of imitation by her female Anglo

audience; these, combined with her representation of sexual assault, suggest that an

alliance is necessary to battle Anglo male aggression and violence. Within a landscape of

violence, including sexual assault against Native women, Winnemucca attempts to forge

an alliance with her Anglo women readers. Further, Winnemucca makes clear that Paiute

women are not oppressed by the image of the male “savage Indian” so popular in

captivity narratives from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century: the real “savagery”

in the West comes from Anglo frontiersmen.xliv Additionally, by stressing her fear and the terrifying experiences of sexual assault of other Native women, Winnemucca 64

overturns the myth that Native women were waiting with open arms for Anglo men; it also overturns discourses that sexualize and eroticize Native women as libidinous and licentious: instead Native women’s bodies are invaded and brutalized in Winnemucca’s intervention to the “colonial imaginary.”

Rape and the threat of rape pervade Life Among the Piutes; it is always at the forefront of the narrative. Cari Carpenter notes that the threat of rape “aligns white and

Paiute women against the depraved, dangerous white man” (5).xlv I would add that Anglo women too were (and still are) subject to inequity under patriarchal law, and their bodies were/are victims of sexual violence as well. In the editor’s preface to Winnemucca’s contemporary audience, Mann explains that “[a]t this moment, when the United States seem waking up to their duty to the original possessors of our immense territory, it is of the first importance to hear what only an Indian and an Indian woman can tell” (ii). Here,

Mann is valuing Winnemucca’s experience, pledging an allegiance to her perspective as a

Native woman. I would like to further Carpenter’s argument about appealing to an audience against a “dangerous white man” by taking a close look at a particular scene.

Winnemucca tells the story of a blind Native woman who, during the Bannock

War, witnessed the screams of her husband while Anglos scalped him. She thought she would be raped, but instead she is brutally beaten and left to die. She is saved by an

Anglo woman, however. Thus, there is an Anglo woman ready to lynch Winnemucca, but there is also another portrayal of a kind of woman who has sympathy for a Native woman who has been beaten, a victim of violent male colonialist dominance and power.

The blind Native woman tells Winnemucca that she had assumed it was Winnemucca 65

who was saving her, but she eventually figured out it was an Anglo woman who came to her rescue. Through this representation of this incident, Winnemucca symbolically imagines a kind of potential rupture on the part of Anglo women who decide not to condone the violence enacted against Native women by Anglo men.

One of Winnemucca’s earliest memories, an account of what Pratt calls the

“contact zone”—“where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (4)—is one predicated on her fear of sexual violence as a child. In fact, one of the few memories she records about her mother is her mother burying her and her cousin alive to protect them from being raped by invading Anglo men, leaving them in the sun all day (11). Yet this is just one experience of many in a landscape of violence. Later, after the Anglos take the

Paiutes’ food supply and poison the water, Winnemucca’s grandfather leaves the rest of the Paiutes to take Winnemucca with her brothers, Mattie, and her mother to an Anglo ranch in California to become servants for Anglo people. Her brothers work handling cows, and the girls learn to cook and work in the house (36). Upon their arrival at the ranch, Winnemucca remembers that “[m]y poor mother felt that her daughter was unsafe, for she was young and very good looking” (34). Her mother’s premonition is correct, and the men there “would come into our camp and ask my mother to give our sister to them. They would come in at night, and we would all scream and cry; but that would not stop them” (34). Even though her uncles and brothers knew about it, she explains, “My uncles and brothers would not dare say a word, for fear they would be shot down” (34).

Many critics have noted Winnemucca’s emphasis on rape, but I would like to emphasize 66

one additional point: the violence of sexual assault occurs within the context of the

Paiutes’s economic servitude, having been displaced due to Anglo encroachment and the concurrent destruction of Paiute resources.xlvi Canfield explains that, “in California,

Indian women were commonly seized and forced to serve as servants and concubines”

(8). Life Among the Piutes points to the systemic problem of sexual assault of Native women and their lack of rights under the U.S. law. Winnemucca’s mother declares, “I would rather see her die than see her heart full of fear every night” (37). She adds,

“[t]hey are not people; they have no thought, no mind, no love. They are beasts . . . ”

(38). Winnemucca writes further, “the mothers are afraid to have more children, for fear they shall have daughters, who are not even safe in their mother’s presence” (48), emphasizing that it is not just Native women at risk, but particularly girls, a tactic that clearly would have appealed to her Anglo women readers, especially mothers.

That Winnemucca’s lectures were popular attests to the growing interest, or curiosity, about what, as Mann says in the preface, “only an Indian woman can tell”; yet the tour that Winnemucca takes her audience on is no pleasant, comfortable, touristic look at Indian country. For any voyeurs interested in the spectacle of gazing into an exotic life experience of the “other,” Winnemucca demands that they re-focus their gaze to see the violence of such sexualization of American Indian women as well as children.

The tour that Winnemucca takes readers on emphasizes the systemic problem of the rape of Native women on the frontier, something that the Women’s National Indian

Association did not address; in so doing Winnemucca’s testimony questions the association’s desire to bring “civilization” to Native women. As Winnemucca depicts it, 67

the forced submission, the brutal act of dominance enacted against both the land and the women inhabiting that land is the savagery of the frontier, one of the many savageries of colonialism. In her essay “Tireases Speaks: Sarah Winnemucca’s Hybrid Selves and

Genres,” Cari Carpenter discusses Winnemucca’s use of the term “outrage,” arguing that

Winnemucca “reverses the stereotype of the debased woman of color who deserves or even enjoys a sexual assault” (5). A constant fear of rape pervades the testimony, reversing the trope of the popularized captivity narratives by Anglo women in which the fear of rape lies in the imagined savagery of Native men.

Christine Jespersen argues that Winnemucca uses “conventions of frontier adventure narratives in order to combat imperial take over of her lands and culture and entice Euro American women to take up adventurous subjectivities and to work on behalf of the Numa” (185). Such a reading misses the point. The plot itself may fit a format of the adventure genre, but Winnemucca’s travels are in the context of real, genocidal violence and sexual assault: this is not a novel of sentimental fiction. At one point

Winnemucca does travel 223 miles in two days on horseback to help with translating and to try to save her people from further conflict and war, and it is within this travel that some of the rape threats occur (“Three Nineteenth Century American Indian

Autobiographies” 263). Yet Winnemucca’s movement is in response to Anglo encroachment; her “adventurous” flight on her horse away from the three men trying to rape her may be “exciting” for readers, but readers are also reminded that this

“adventure” is real, lived experience. At one point Winnemucca and Mattie depart from the U.S. soldiers during the Bannock War. She writes, “we had not been there but awhile 68

when three men rode up. One of them said, ‘Come, boys, here are the girls, and the lieutenant is not with them.’ At this I said to sister, ‘Quick, get on your horse,’ and off we went without stopping” (182). A chase ensues until they finally, breathlessly, reach the group of U.S. soldiers. Life Among the Piutes’ portrayal of such a scene contests nineteenth-century representations of the West as a space for adventure and freedom.

Further, via her representation of sexual assault Winnemucca attempts to ally her Anglo female audience against such dominant discourses celebrating a landscape of freedom: instead her Anglo readers are asked to see at whose expense this “freedom” exists.

Interestingly, the threat of rape never comes from U.S. soldiers—they are the ones she and Mattie find refuge with from outside threats of rape by frontiersmen and cowboys. Winnemucca avoids the historical reality of U.S. soldiers raping Native women, which is an obvious absence considering the prevalence of rape threats on the frontier from Anglo men. In this scene, proximity to soldiers is depicted as a safe haven from sexual assault; thus, the tour Winnemucca takes readers on is clearly selective. But it is the government that makes the policies and the wars rather than the soldiers fighting them that Winnemucca targets. Thus, her portrayal of rape is strategically selective and serves to emphasize the systemic oppression as a result of government policies. It also strategically allows for more of her Anglo audience to listen.

Winnemucca places the cause of the Bannock War as retaliation for rape of a

Native woman by some Anglo men. Winnemucca’s involvement in the Bannock War begins in the winter of 1878. While she is there, the Paiutes ask her to go to Washington

D.C. to speak for them on their behalf about the starvation they are suffering while 69

trapped on the Malheur reservation as the agent, Reinhard, steals the government rations and sells them (138). The Paiutes tell Winnemucca how many of them have fled from the reservation and are fishing for salmon at a river twenty-five miles away where the

Bannocks are. The Bannocks had told them how two Bannock women were digging, when some Anglo men caught one of them and “used her shamefully” (139). The

Bannocks retaliate against Anglos for the sexual assault of a Bannock woman and for the encroachment on their land. They also kill and take as captives some Paiutes who had fought and sided with Anglos, and even those who refused to fight at all (147).xlvii

Winnemucca then takes it upon herself to free the Paiutes from their captivity. By rooting the cause of the war in the gang rape of a Native woman by Anglo men,

Winnemucca emphasizes to her Anglo female audience that the retaliation by the

Bannocks is not one of “savagery,” as the nineteenth-century discourses would have them believe, but rather in reaction to the invasion of a Native woman’s body, and in defense of their land. In this way, Winnemucca forges an alliance against Anglo male colonialists via the depiction of sexual violence.

In the telling of this war, its causes, and the rescue of her people, Winnemucca does not depict herself as a Pocahontas stereotype, defying her own people and father to rescue an Anglo man: instead, she locates the root of the war as the sexual assault of a

Native woman, and Anglo American encroachment upon their land. She writes, “I went for the government when the officers could not get an Indian man or a white man to go for love or money. I, only an Indian woman, went and saved my Father and his people”

(164). In the above passage from Life Among the Piutes and throughout the testimony, it 70

is not an Anglo man she is saving, but rather her own people. In examining the image of

the Pocahontas stereotype of Native women, Green writes that usually “the Indian

woman saves white men” (704). Green examines American oral traditions and myth,

explaining that this heroine is “[a]lways called a Princess (or Cheiftain’s Daughter), [and

that] she, like Pocahontas, has to violate the wishes and customs of her own ‘barbarous’

people to make good the rescue, saving the man out of love and often out of ‘Christian

sympathy’” (704). Indeed, Winnemucca was the Chief’s daughter, and she emphasized

this in both her narrative and her public lectures.xlviii Yet the passage above expresses a distinct effort on Winnemucca’s part to not represent herself as a Pocahontas stereotype.

And while the Pocahontas myth in the twenty-first century functions to promote a sexualized stereotype of Native women, Winnemucca’s narrative overturns such eroticization by pointing to the brutality and violence of the rape of Native women by

Anglo men.xlix

Another myth popularized by captivity narratives that Winnemucca overturns is

that of the Native male rapist. Winnemucca writes, “I am so proud to say that my people

have never outraged your women, or have even insulted them by looks or words. Can

you say the same of the negroes or the whites?” (244). Because Winnemucca would have

been familiar with the issues surrounding abolition during her stay on the east coast

before publishing this book, and since her editors as well were abolitionists, it is

unfortunate that she does not instead make a connection between the sexual exploitation

of Black women, that Harriet Jacobs detailed so well in her 1863 narrative, and that of

Native women.l Captivity narratives created and perpetuated a myth that Native men 71

were an imminent and threatening danger to Anglo women, the beacon of “civilization,”

a myth that, as Annette Kolodny has pointed out, was employed to attempt to justify

genocide.li The above passage serves as a historical challenge to this myth. Further, by asking that Anglo women think about their own sexual assault, Winnemucca implies the potential for an alliance between women.

In depicting sexual assault, Winnemucca does not portray herself as a helpless

victim, which is perhaps one reason why critics often refer to her as a “woman warrior.”lii

Perhaps too her text empowers contemporary Anglo women to defend themselves

against sexual assault. Winnemucca defiantly declares,

If such an outrageous thing is to happen to me, it will not be done by one man or two while there are two women with knives, for I know what an Indian woman can do. She can never be outraged by one man; but she may be by two. It is something an Indian woman dare not say til she has been overcome by one man, for there is no man living that can do anything to a woman if she does not wish him to. (228)

This may seem at first to suggest that a Native woman cannot be raped by one man, but

really the word “til” signifies that this attitude is one she must have for survival and

defense. Directly after Winnemucca remembers having that thought, she and another

woman flee from three male pursuers. As part of her travels and negotiating, she had

stayed the night with her sister at a house that had “some Spanish boarders, who were

living near the house, and they saw us there” (229). They pursue the two women “like

wild men” and, as she reflects, “we saw it was war then” (229). These are the only men

who threaten to rape who are not Anglo American, but their identity as

European/colonizer, as Spanish, is selected rather than the term Mexican that she uses

earlier. Winnemucca narrates a plan of action to take if the men overtake them, which 72

includes being prepared to kill in self defense. After a long pursuit only one overtakes them, and they spar verbally for a bit before he departs. One night soon after,

Winnemucca hits a man quite forcefully when he wakes her in her sleep (232). In a biography on Winnemucca, Canfield explains that she was put in jail for cutting an Anglo man with a knife. He had “touched her without her permission” and yet she was charged with “assault with intent to do bodily harm” (92). In the “justice” system of the time she was charged with assault, instead of the perpetrator of aggression against her. According to Canfield, the case was apparently dismissed because the knife was so small (92), although Zanjani emphasizes that her defense lawyer had rallied a number of “prominent church members and physicians” who were willing to testify on her behalf (127).

Apparently, when she was released, she “talked at length to those who were assembled about white justice and the merits of the court system” (Canfield 92). As Canfield notes,

American Indians did not have the “right to use the courts in a criminal case nor to testify against whites” (Canfield 92-3), thus the legal rights denied Native women as women were also rights denied Native men.liii Yet, her testimony shows why a woman might kill a man in self defense. For Winnemucca there are multiple battles in the war zone of the frontier, and her activism to protest these injustices included writing as well as delivering public speeches. Her testimony makes clear that sovereignty for Paiute people also means sovereignty for Paiute women over their bodies. Aligning Anglo women via the depiction of sexual assault, Winnemucca also asks that her readers question the racist inequities in the U.S. legal system, a system which did not recognize the rights of Anglo women either. 73

As Winnemucca articulates, there are multiple wars, and rape is one of them.

Winnemucca is on the front line. Life Among the Piutes’ emphasis on sexual assault shows one battle that Anglo and Native women share (though in different ways), and it surely would have appealed to both the “morality” of reformers in the Women’s National

Indian Association and the politics/ethics of contemporary women’s rights reformers.

Yet Winnemucca’s testimony also makes clear that there are many battles confronting

Paiute women that neither the women’s movement nor the Women’s National Indian

Association had in its scope. Her testimony serves as an important historical memory of some of the ways that feminism of her time (though not labeled as such) did not adequately serve the needs of Native women, but her testimony also suggests that there are ways that Anglo and Native women could be aligned, if Anglo women are willing to see that the men oppressing them are also oppressing Native women and all Native people in their invasion and genocidal wars against them.

Sexual Exploitation and the Exploitation of Labor: Anglo Women’s Complicity in the Political Economy

It is within a landscape of violence—including exploitation of American

Indians—that Winnemucca imagines that an alliance between women could be forged.

Economic exploitation is not simply the background for the alliances she imagines: it foregrounds the necessity to voice her testimony. Winnemucca emphasizes, throughout

Life Among the Piutes, that Native people were being exploited for their labor and removed from their land and confined on reservations. While some attention has rightly been given to the exploitation of African Americans in building this nation, little 74

reference is made to the exploitation of Native people’s physical labor.liv The state of

California, for example, enacted “The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians in 1850, amended in 1860 . . . [that] allowed white people to simply take Native children, those orphaned or supposedly with parental consent, as indentured slaves” (Ross 15).

Additionally, in 1871, the U.S. government assumed what it considered its “responsibility for Native education” (Berkhofer 171); day schools on reservations were created, but so too were off-reservation manual labor boarding schools. The most famous of these was

Captain Richard Pratt’s “Indian Industrial School” in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, founded in

1879. With its “prisonlike supervision of the students” and its “outing system,” in which students spent summer months or a year “living in the home of a good Christian family” basically as a servant, Pratt “hoped to destroy the ‘Indian’ in the ‘race’ in favor of the

‘man,’ as he was fond of saying” (Berkhofer 171). According to this way of thinking,

Native people could be assimilated in order to be servants for Anglo people. In Nevada at this time,

Indians found work in menial support services, such as timbering, cattle-tending, loading and unloading wagons. . . . Indian women found work even more easily than their men in these woman-short frontier towns, where they washed clothes, cleaned houses, and served as prostitutes. (Knack and Stewart 47)

Many Native people in Nevada became “herdsmen and laborers” on Anglo farms, working as servants on the land they had been displaced from (Knack and Stewart 62).

Additionally, Native people were hired “en masse” along with Chinese immigrants to labor on the railroad (Canfield 59). The discovery of gold in California in 1848 brought thousands of Anglos to the West, and the discovery of silver near Virginia City resulted in a flood of Anglo immigrants to Nevada by the thousands (Omer and Stewart 42-5). 75

This invasion depleted resources for Paiutes (and for other tribes) dramatically, especially

water. Also, miners stripped down pine nut trees for mining and building, and pine nuts

had been a major source of sustenance for the Paiutes (Omer and Stewart 46).

Chapter Five of Life Among the Piutes begins by noting that the reservation of the

Pyramid and Muddy lakes was established in 1860, and that “since the railroad ran

through in 1867 the white people have taken all the best part of the reservation from us,

and one of the lakes also” (76). In contrast, in the February 7, 1883 Reno Evening

Gazette (the same year Life Among the Piutes is published), the editor wrote

[i]t is very unfair that Indians should control these two great lakes [Pyramid and Walker] and enjoy privileges [sic] that are denied to white men; but it is safe to say that when the hills adjacent to Walker Lake are peopled with miners and prospectors—as they will be in a few years—its waters will be levied upon to supply the wants of the neighborhood, in spite of hoggish Indians and jealous agents. (qtd. in Stewart and Omer 50 emphasis mine)

Winnemucca notes that the first work her people did was build a ditch and put up a saw- mill and a grist-mill (76); she explains that she read a report that twenty-five thousand dollars was “appropriated to build them,” and asks, “where did it go?” (76). Moreover, the report stated that Paiutes were to be given lumber from these mills for building, but

Winnemucca attests that no lumber was ever seen, that the lumber trees were gone, and that Anglo Americans use the ditch for irrigation (77). Central to Winnemucca’s text are issues related to the land, including the removal of people to reservations, the diminishing size of reservations, the encroachment upon the land and its resources by Anglos, and the

U.S. government’s failure to uphold its promises.

Many women’s rights reformers contemporary to Winnemucca were concerned with suffrage and sovereignty rights as individuals, such as the right to private property 76

regardless of marriage. Winnemucca’s text serves to highlight, without blatantly stating so, that while many women’s rights advocates of the time were concerned with their rights as individuals, Native people were concerned with their survival: Native people were being denied rights to land they had lived on for thousands of years, and Anglo women were striving for property rights as individuals to that very land at the same time that they were denied equality within Anglo patriarchal culture and regarded as inferior beings. Furthermore, Anglo women who were the wives, mothers, and sisters of Anglo men who invaded Native land and flourished due to stealing Native resources profited from colonialism. However, because Winnemucca depicts several kinds of Anglo women (racist ones as well as those sympathetic to injustices), and because Winnemucca attempts to forge an alliance via her depiction of sexual assault, it seems evident that

Winnemucca is asking her Anglo women readers whether or not they will be complicit with the actions of their Anglo male counterparts. Will they continue to benefit from the exploitation of Native land and resources or will they join Winnemucca in questioning injustices and oppression? If women go to Congress will justice be done to American

Indians as Winnemucca urges?

Winnemucca testifies to the ways that “Indian agents” exploited Native labor, and the political economy of such exploitation that was systematically condoned by the U.S. government. She writes, “dear readers, this is the way all the Indian agents get rich. The first thing they do is start a store; the next thing is to take in cattle men, and cattle men pay the agent one dollar a head” to graze their cattle on the reservation (86). Bateman is one of many who do this and who “called himself a Christian, too” (87). Additionally, 77

Winnemucca makes it clear that it is not just one agent, but the system itself that allows for such profit at Native peoples’ expense. Another agent makes Paiutes give him every third sack of wheat after they labor to harvest it. On top of this, Winnemucca explains that the news reports euphemize the situation, erasing the exploitation (97).lv For example, an agent named Parker at Pyramid lake reported that the Native people “were never so happy or so well provided for” (Canfield 59). The reports’ highly paternalistic rhetoric starkly contrasts the reality that Winnemucca insists be heard. It is an ironic violence too, that while Native people were laboring for the profit of Anglo agents such rhetoric of paternalism would be used. The reality, in contrast to the newspapers, is that agents profit off Paiutes’ labor while they starve. Winnemucca’s brother Egan explains that, on the Malhuer reservation, “My children are dying with hunger. I want what my people have worked for; that is, we want the wheat” (133). Winnemucca’s concerns are focused on the group and on the various forms of violence that they are suffering within a gendered, capitalist political economy. Sexual assault is just one of many of the kinds of violence: economic exploitation and hunger, with children dying as a result, foregrounds

Winnemucca’s attempt to form a bridge between Anglo women and not just Native women but Native women, men, and children as well.

Within a setting of violent exploitation, agent Reinhard physically abuses Native people at his will. Winnemucca shows potential Anglo women allies and readers that

Native men are victims of physical abuse as well, their bodies the site of colonial power and control:

He beat an Indian man almost to death for no cause whatsoever. He asked him to help him carry a sick woman. The Indian was little too long getting on his 78

moccasins. The agent knocked him down with a great stick, and beat him so shamefully I ran to him and caught hold of him saying, “Do not beat him so.” (135)

The agent takes out a pistol to shoot the man, but a couple of unnamed Anglo men who happen to be present stop him. Historians Knack and Stewart write that “[a]gents had nearly total dictatorial authority within their reservation domains” (97). Winnemucca makes the point that the Anglo agents can and do abuse and punish with death at their will, explaining that this is a systemic problem. In her testimony, Reinhard is not merely one individual, but rather a part of the institutionalized violence against Native people, and it is not just Native women whose bodies are the site of colonial violence.

Within this landscape of violence, Winnemucca places importance on the voices of Native women concerned about their children who “will surely die of hunger” (126).

While this might be read as a sentimental appeal to her Anglo audiences, it does not fit that kind of rhetoric. It may fit the outcome in terms of the emotional appeal, but the rhetoric is not dramatized or melodramatic: it is reality. Winnemucca describes how

Reinhard abuses a Native boy, throwing him on the ground and kicking him, after which he proclaims, “I will beat the very life out of him. I won’t have any of the Indians laughing at me” (128). Winnemucca tries to talk to the agent to calm him down and make peace. Then the mother of the child runs in “crying as if her heart would break.

‘Oh, my poor child,’ she was saying, ‘he will die,—the only child I have left out of four”

(129).lvi When Winnemucca tells of the removal of her people from the Malheur reservation in Nevada to the Yakima reservation in what is now Washington, a distance of over 350 miles, she emphasizes the experiences of women but not exclusively. People 79

begin freezing in the snow and are left in the road (208). She testifies to the reality of women dying after childbirth and babies dying after being born. Of a mother, she writes,

“that night she too was gone, and left on the roadside, her poor body not even covered with the snow” (209). During this forced removal north during midwinter,

Winnemucca’s sister Mattie “was dying little by little” (209). When they arrive, Mattie dies along with many others. Winnemucca critiques a government that would call for such a thing: “I have never seen a president in my life and I want to know whether he is made of wood or rock, for I cannot once think that he can be a human being” (205). She emphasizes the stories and experiences of Native women, realities that must have appealed to Anglo women of the time, especially given the cultural importance placed on motherhood.

Winnemucca’s narrative links sexual exploitation to physical exploitation of

Native people—two forms of colonial control at the expense of Native peoples’ bodies.

After such a violent removal in 1879, the Paiutes are put to work at the Yakima reservation where “both men and women went to work, and boys too,” (211). Father

Wilbur, the agent there, makes the Paiutes purchase the government rations of food and clothing with money they earn working the fields, but the little money they earn is not sufficient to cover the price he charges for food. Winnemucca explains, “Father Wilbur hired six civilized Indians to plough it for them; these Indians got three dollars a day for their work, because they were civilized and Christian” (211). Obviously, Winnemucca is not endorsing the “civilizing” missions of the reformers of the time. On top of that,

Wilbur sells them flour that has gone bad and it “made us all sick. My people died off 80

very fast” (213). She states that some day Father Wilbur will have to account for his

deeds, “that is, if that book you civilized people call the Holy Bible is true” (214). She

presents a damning case for the hypocrisy of Christians involved in or condoning

“civilizing missions.” Winnemucca is not supporting a kind of uneven alliance

advocated by the Women’s National Indian Association. Instead, she imagines a political

alliance between sympathetic Anglo women readers, urging them to question the

hypocrisy of Christians, including the ways Christianity is used to justify exploitation,

sexual violence against Native women, and the profiting of Anglos from Native people’s

labor under such violent, oppressive conditions.

The Debate about Winnemucca as Assimilationist: A Call for Further Nuanced

Readings

Although Kathleen Mullen Sands and Gretchen Bataille see Winnemucca’s

writing as “heavily biased by her acculturated and Christianized viewpoint” (21),

Winnemucca clearly provides a scathing critique of Christianity, as evidenced in the

opening passage to this chapter and throughout her narrative. Given her concern with

Anglo encroachment on Paiute land, Winnemucca’s political decision to support the

Allotment Act is somewhat difficult for many people today to reconcile.lvii According to

LaVonne Ruoff, Winnemucca “staunchly supported the General Allotment Act” (262).

Andrew McClure writes that “part of the discomfort contemporary readers may have with

Winnemucca (see Bataille and Sands, Fowler, Ruoff) is her support for the Dawes, or

General Allotment Act of 1887, which sought to end the reservation system” (4). He argues that “before it was put into law it appeared to be a solution to the abuses her 81

people underwent, and Winnemucca found Senator Henry L. Dawes, the main sponsor of the bill, to be fair and straightforward with her, unlike most of the other politicians she dealt with” (McClure 209). McClure’s defense of Winnemucca emphasizes that the

Dawes Act seemed to offer a better system than that of the current reservation system.

This seems plausible, given the dire conditions the Paiutes were suffering in that system.

Additionally, at the time the bill passed, “the Indian land base amounted to 138,000,000 acres. Between 1887 and 1934 about 60 percent of this land passed out of Indians hands”

(qtd. in McClure 4).lviii Many people are skeptical of Winnemucca’s motivations for supporting such a bill, and rightly so, although Siobhan Senier provides a convincing case—using letters and historical accounts—that Winnemucca was actually against the bill. Referencing several letters by Peabody, Siobhan Senier even argues that “there is buried evidence that Winnemucca may actually have spoken out against allotment and assimilation” (80). Given her critique in Life Among the Piutes, any attempt to support such a bill as a solution might have been to solve the problem of corrupt agents, as it would eliminate them altogether. Her alleged support of the allotment act could not have been one that would foresee the loss of American Indian land that occurred after her death. Rather, her support was an attempt to negotiate with U.S. politicians in an attempt to secure some land for Native people since even the reservations were being encroached on by Anglos, and Paiute people were starving, and exploited for their labor within the reservation system.lix

McClure defends the attacks against her as assimilationist, arguing that, given the context “some degree of assimilation is essential to cultural and physical survival” (29). 82

He contends that the labeling of Winnemucca and others as either assimilationist or

posing complete opposition is simplistic and

fails to allow for an ethnocritical reading that would look at Winnemucca’s position as one that negotiates what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “contact zone,” which she defines as ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of dominations and subordination.’ (par. 2)lx

To add to this, I would emphasize the context of extreme “Indian hating” of the time that

Knack and Stewart cite in their history of Paiute people. For example, an editorial that

appeared in the Humboldt Register on 5 August, 1865 stated,

the Indian nature, as developed on the frontiers, is devoid of gratitude, and of all susceptibility to humanizing influences. Be kind to them and they think you fear them. . . . Shoot them down, scourge them with saber and brand, ‘til they cringe and beg for their lives. (qtd. in Knack and Stewart 59).

The pervading “Indian hating,” as Knack and Stewart call it, or “anti-indianism” as Crow

Creek Sioux theorist Elizabeth Cook-Lynn terms it, should be taken in account when examining Winnemucca’s writing. Winnemucca explains,

Since the war of 1860 there have been one hundred and three of my people murdered, and our reservations taken from us; and yet we, who are called bloodseeking savages, are keeping our promises to the government. Oh, my good Christian people, how long are you going to stand by and see us suffer at your hands? Oh, dear friends, you are wrong when you say it will take two to three generations to civilize my people. No! I say it will not take that long if you will only take an interest in teaching us. (89)

Her text at once disrupts definitions of “civilization,” rejecting such colonialist discourse, at the same time that she pleads to Christians to be true Christians. Her emphasis on teaching Native people what they need to learn—according to Anglo Americans—to survive is posed as an alternative to genocide. This passage should then be understood as 83

a negotiation with the rhetoric, discourse, and ideologies of missionaries in an attempt to save her people from genocide.

The purpose of my study is not an attempt to defend Winnemucca as non- assimilationist nor to attack the problematic positions that her text, at times, takes regarding assimilation. At times it seems she is engaging with, and at times even positioning herself as accepting the notions of reform: the above passage makes a point of seeming acceptance within the context of genocide. Yet it is important to recognize that the discursive context of the production of this text is one of “asymmetrical relations of dominations and subordination,” to use Pratt’s definition of the “contact zone.” Her alliances with Anglo women in the production of the text and in the spaces of her narrative are forged on uneven ground in the “contact zone.” She makes comments such as “my heart used to ache for the poor soldiers” (185), and yet early in the narrative she describes how soldiers went to Muddy Lake in what is now Nevada, where many Paiutes were hunting and fishing, and just “fired into it, and killed almost all the people that were there . . . old men, women, and children,” including her younger baby brother (77). The soldiers took babies and “threw them into the fire to see them burn alive” (78).

Winnemucca confronts readers with a very disturbing, graphic image of colonialist war against Native people. Her later references to pitying the soldiers requires recognition of the way that she is appealing to the ideologies of her mostly Anglo audience in order to garner support for her arguments regarding the reservation system and the brutal living conditions her people are suffering from. The occasional comments made by

Winnemucca such as her “heart aching for the poor soldiers” may seem to suggest 84

contradictions in her position; however, such comments attest to the complexity of her position as a mediator in the “contact zone.” She confronts the destructive effects of an imperialist government, “a Christian government practiced in the art of war,” that causes even its own citizens, the soldiers, to suffer. Again, her text cannot fit easily into a category of complete resistance to colonizing powers nor acquiescence, but she does chisel a violent image onto readers’ minds and memories, writing with the hope that something can be done for the survival of the Paiutes.

In their history of the Northern Paiutes, the authors of As Long as the River Shall

Run point out that “Paiutes hoped merely to survive on the reservations with as little interference in their lives as possible” (116). One Paiute claimed, “Anything the

Government says, we will do—if we can keep our homes” (116). Several years after the

Dawes Act was passed, Paiutes resisted even talking with the Government about a

“reduction of the reservation until they had a full commitment from the government to enforce trespassing laws against all these squatters on their remaining land” (195). As

Knack and Stewart demonstrate in their history, Paiute history is a long story of Anglo encroachment, broken treaties by the U.S. government, and continued resistance on the part of Paiute people to retain rights to their remaining land. They continue to fight back

“with vigor in the courts against water expropriations and against Bureau of Indian

Affairs mismanagement. They have taken steps to restore Pyramid Lake into a self- sustaining fishery…” (xii). 85

The Peabody Institute: An Alliance Between Women Against Assimilationist

Boarding Schools

Beyond writing Life Among the Piutes, Winnemucca protested the government schools of the time by opening up her own school for Paiute children. After she stopped lecturing publicly, and with the proceedings of selling Life Among the Piutes, along with the funding raised by Mann and Peabody, Winnemucca was able to open up the Peabody

Institute in Lovelock, Nevada. Her school, created through the alliance between

Winnemucca and two Anglo women, provided an alternative to the reform schools run by

Anglo Americans. Government funded off-reservation schools separated children from their parents by hundreds of miles, but Winnemucca’s school was a day school and thus allowed children to remain with their families.lxi Schools such as Hampton in Virginia and Carlisle in Pennsylvania were completely run by Anglos, and Native students were not allowed to use their Native languages while there, but Winnemucca taught a bilingual school (a fact that problematizes labeling her as assimilatist).

One of Winnemucca’s central goals was to teach Native children skills so they would not have to rely on Anglos. In a letter written to Dr. Lyman Abbot, of the

“Christian Union,” entitled “Sarah Winnemucca’s Practical Solution to the Indian

Problem,” Peabody quoted from a letter that Winnemucca wrote to Paiute parents, explaining that they should send their children to her school “so that they can attend to their own affairs instead of having to call in a white man. . . . You have brains same as the white, [and] your children have brains . . .” (6). Here, Winnemucca poses education 86

as a tool of resistance, a tool that could allow for some independence. Zanjani explains that Paiute parents were eager to send their children to Winnemucca’s school because it was a much preferable alternative to sending their children far away, often never to be seen again (266). Often American Indian children were kidnapped from their families and imprisoned in boarding schools; mothers were forced to give one child to a boarding school or else lose government rations promised in treaties; fathers were imprisoned for resisting the kidnapping of their children (Zanjani 266). As Zanjani explains, at

Winnemucca’s school they would not be ripped from their families, nor would they be whipped as punishment for speaking their Native language (267). Winnemucca’s creation of an alternative school is one additional act of resistance on her part to institutional racism enacted on the part of the government.

Asking for government financing of the school, Peabody testifies to the good character of Winnemucca, her success as a teacher and in the program she had begun.

The government refused to provide any funding for Winnemucca’s school, though it did suggest that it might if she agreed not to be the director of the school and if Natchez gave up the ownership of his land that it was built on (Canfield 239).lxii A newspaper report of a lecture Winnemucca gave in Reno, Nevada, just before starting her school evidences her scathing critique of missionaries. The report states that

she said these zealous societies had only one idea in view—that of administering to the spiritual wants, which they proposed to cater to through missionaries, tracts, books, etc., which were of no avail, for the reason that her people could not read, and that religious teaching would not go far on an empty stomach. What was wanting was food, clothing, farming implements, practical teaching, their rights to be recognized in courts, and hold the title to lands. (qtd. in Zanjani 258)lxiii 87

Winnemucca publicly rejected missionaries, pointing out that people were starving and they were denied equal rights in the justice system; thus, she publicly rejected the goals as outlined by groups such as the Women’s National Indian Association.lxiv

Despite all this, Mann and Peabody supported Winnemucca’s cause and the letter cited above shows Peabody’s efforts to provide very good documentation of

Winnemucca’s reliability, capabilities, and trust, including a number of letters from

Anglo Americans written on Winnemucca’s behalf. Peabody notes that before the

Paiutes were heard of in the East, “all the funds to be raised by the women’s associations were pledged to their own missionary work,” but Peabody wanted to “solve the Indian problem practically (at least among the Piutes)” by creating a bilingual school run entirely by a Native woman (16). Peabody formed a political alliance by making friends with President Cleveland’s wife, Rose Elizabeth, and personally delivered a letter from

Winnemucca along with other documents to persuade the government to fund the school, but this women-centered effort to make political changes in a patriarchal government did not succeed (Zanjani 268). Peabody herself visited the President and commissioner of

Indian Affairs, John D.C. Atkins, and thought that they had a positive interview because he promised funding for the school, but he did not follow through with his promises

(Zanjani 268). The alliance between Winnemucca and two Anglo American women allowed such a school to operate, but the school did not have enough funding to continue for more than two years (1885-1887). It was a racist, patriarchal government that preferred to fund schools embracing the complete assimilation of American Indians, and the destruction of their cultures and languages, that caused it to fail. Winnemucca left the 88

ranch Natchez had bought to take on work as a house servant, and her brother became a ranch hand, unable to profit from farming due to underpayment for his crops and the town’s refusal to give him access to irrigation that other farmers had (Zanjani 271-76).

Winnemucca died at the early age of forty-seven in 1891.

Winnemucca’s Testimony and Recent American Indian Women Activists: Parallels

Between the Past and the Present

In this chapter I have asked that we look at the history of the women’s suffrage movement and the Women’s National Indian Association, both entirely run by Anglo

American women, and the ways these organizations engaged with issues regarding

American Indians in the nineteenth century. Winnemucca’s traversing of such a history has important implications for the present. By examining the historical moment within which Winnemucca formed an alliance with two Anglo American women, and how

Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes comments upon activists concerned with solving the “Woman Question,” a further understanding of some of the roots of tensions between activists involved in various women’s organizations and Native rights organizations can perhaps take place. Likewise, the current tensions as well as connections between various activist groups concerned with oppression of women and Native people can serve as a lens through which to see what is happening in Winnemucca’s text (especially considering the historical context within which it is written, during the beginning of various reform movements aimed at “civilizing the Indian” vís-a-vìs Christianity and the beginning of the woman’s suffrage movement). 89

Yet, to examine Winnemucca’s text in this way is not to hold up her testimony as

a paradigm representing all Native women’s voices past or present. It is one text, one

documentation that negotiates as it reflects and creates a space for commentary on the

intersections between women’s rights and Native peoples’ rights.lxv In examining the

question of alliances I do not mean to argue that all women or all Native women would

have a natural alliance, as this would assume commonality based on essentialist notions

of identity. Further, no one definition can encapsulate the concerns of Native women as

it relates to feminism, nor can one definition of feminism be agreed on by many who

would call themselves feminists.

Still, I would like to provide several perspectives from contemporary Native

women regarding what feminism means to them so as to examine Life Among the Piutes

as a case study and to interrogate how ideologies prevalent at the time of Life Among the

Piutes continue into the twenty-first century. The hesitancy of many Native women to

call themselves feminists is rooted, in part, in the racism within the women’s movement.

Mihesuah explains, “While some scholars do define themselves as ‘feminists,’ most

Native women I know are strong, confident, and active in their quests to assist their tribes

but do not always use the term ‘feminist’ as a self-descriptor” (161). She refers to

activist and scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux) who states that “most

people think I must be a feminist. I’m not. I’m tribal” (161). Cook-Lynn does not want

to define herself first and foremost as a feminist.lxvi As a Native woman activist working toward tribal sovereignty she is concerned with the oppression of Native women, but does not want to align herself with a history of feminism. Central to the work of Joy 90

Harjo (Muskogee) is, as she explains, “the hatred against the female, and notice, too, that all the wars are basically race wars, white people against the darker skinned ones. . . .

My work is woman identified” (59). In their historical piece on feminism, Wilma

Mankiller, Marysa Navarro, and Gloria Steinem close with the words of Laguna writer

Paula Gunn Allen: “the root of oppression is the loss of memory” (192). For these writers, feminism is history, suggesting memory as a form of resistance. Winnemucca’s act of writing her testimony, and the narrative itself, resist the loss of memory that Allen,

Mankiller, Navarro, and Steinem locate as central to oppression. Winnemucca’s testimony functions to remember a number of injustices enacted against Paiute people, and while she focuses on sexual assault of Native women, she is also concerned with the survival and well-being of the group. In an historical explanation entitled “American

Indian Feminism,” Susan M. Williams and Joy Harjo use the term “feminist,” but specify what it means for them to be concerned both about Native rights and issues relating to women:

tribal feminism is a multisphered concept with the family at the center, surrounded by clan identification, then tribe and tribal relationships, which can mean relationships with state and federal governments and those with other tribal and international governments. Crucial to this tribal context are land and history as well as the belief that nothing is possible without the female and the power of the female to harbor and sustain creation. . . . In recognition of the importance of women is sustaining tribal cultures, community takes precedence over individual women’s rights yet conversely there are no human rights until femaleness is respected and venerated. (198)

Central to Winnemucca’s testimony are land and history, and respect for Native women is emphasized in her depiction of Paiute culture. The significance she places on the interactions between her tribe and the U.S. government is significant as well. 91

I make these connections not to hold Winnemucca as a paradigm of what

Williams and Harjo have defined as “tribal feminism,” but to recognize that her writing engages in these issues, and merits further study as such. While many literary scholars have read her testimony through the lens of gender, they have not done so through the lens of “tribal feminism” as it relates to current issues today—as a result, all too often the gendered readings of the text situate Winnemucca as empowered as an individual accomplishing heroic feats or as an important insight into history.lxvii Mihesuah writes further that,

[d]espite rhetoric about white feminism having no meaning for Native women, not all Native women reject every aspect of white feminism, and they are no less ‘Indian’ for their beliefs. When they identify themselves as ‘feminists,’ they often mean they are ‘Native Activists,’ concerned with more than just female marginalization. Indeed, they fight for fishing, land, water, and treaty rights, and at the same time, they have no desire to be called inferior by anyone because they are women. (163)

Winnemucca was, to borrow Mihesuah’s phrasing, “concerned with more than just female marginalization”: she was concerned about Paiute women’s physical and mental well-being and health as she was also concerned about encroachment of Anglo

Americans on land and lakes promised in treaties and the accompanying violence and exploitation of American Indians.

Contemporary feminist organizations in the twentieth and twenty-first century, their writings, conferences, and overall politics and agendas have often been accused of excluding the concerns of women of color, of tokenism, and of other forms of racism.

For example, in This Bridge Called My Back, Chrystos (Menominee) explains, in a 1980 essay entitled “I don’t understand those who have turned away from me,” 92

I no longer believe that feminism is a tool which can eliminate racism—or even promote better understanding between different races and kinds of women . . . I left the women’s movement utterly drained. I have no interest in returning. My dreams of crossing barriers to true understanding were false. (69)lxviii

Similarly, in an interview with Laura Coteilli in 1990, Harjo explains that she does not feel comfortable at women’s organizations because the participants are mostly Anglo

American and she has felt voiceless at these functions. This exclusion has roots in nineteenth-century women’s rights movements and reform groups such as the Women’s

Indian Association. Inés Hernandez-Avila, who identifies herself as Nez Perce and

Chicana, writes, “Still, at many women’s conferences, in written works, in the media,

Native people, Native women, are erased” (538). Many scholars refer to the imagery of the “vanishing Indian” in film and literature; the erasure of American Indian women, literally, and the issues facing American Indian women—especially at conferences and other kinds of academic contexts dedicated to feminist issues—is disturbing.

Winnemucca’s testimony speaks to a history of this erasure. She demands that the violence enacted against Native women is not simply erased in the depths of a national

American consciousness that would prefer to not remember. Furthermore, within a context in which the “Woman Question” and the “Indian Problem” were being debated and discussed in the U.S., Winnemucca’s testimony asks, where do Native women fit into these questions and debates?

Winnemucca’s questions about the past can be examined in a dialogue with issues in the present in order to address productive connections between a history of colonialism and its ramifications in the present. As Allen writes, 93

[c]urrently our struggles are on two fronts: physical survival and cultural survival. For women this means fighting alcoholism and drug abuse (our own and that of our husbands, lovers, parents, children); poverty; affluence—a destroyer of people who are not traditionally socialized to deal with large sums of money; rape; incest, battering by Indian men; assaults on fertility and other health matters by the Indian Health Service and the Public Health Service; high infant mortality due to substandardized medical care, nutrition, and health information; poor educational opportunities or education that takes us away from out traditions, language, communities; suicide, homicide, or similar expressions of self-hatred; lack of economic opportunities; substandard housing; sometimes violent and always virulent racist attitudes and behaviors directed against us by an entertainment and educational system that wants only one thing from Indians: our silence, our invisibility, and our collective death. (191)

Allen articulates nicely some of the battles of many Native women in the twenty-first century and intersections between race, gender, class, and a history of continued colonialist violence in the present. Similarly, Kate Shanley (Assiniboine) writes that that “survival as a people” and sovereignty are issues that “do not concern mainstream women” (214).lxix She acknowledges that most non-Native women are not concerned with Native rights. Many people have not taken the time to learn about the histories and literature of Native people, or the concerns of Native women today. At the same time, feminist concerns are often dismissed; women challenging male dominance and issues of power and gender in any way are labeled as complainers. As Shanley explains, “The women’s movement and the Indian movement for sovereignty suffer similar trivialization” (215). Additionally, Shanley writes that

The word ‘feminism’ has special meanings to Indian women, including the idea of promoting the continuity of tradition, and consequently, pursuing the recognition of tribal sovereignty. Even so, Indian feminists are united with mainstream feminists in outrage against women and child battering, sexist employment and educational practices, and in many other social concerns. Just as sovereignty cannot be granted but must be recognized as an inherent right to self- determination, so Indian feminism must also be recognized as powerful in its own terms, in its own right. (215) 94

As Shanley explains, there are issues that unite “mainstream feminists” with “Indian

feminists”; she also rightly calls for recognition of “Indian feminism” “in its own terms,”

not as a subset or marginal footnote to mainstream feminist movements and

organizations.lxx

Conclusions: Or, a Call for Further Parallels Between the Past, Present, and Future and the Decolonizing of Feminisms

With its Anglo American women who cared in some ways about civil rights for

Native people, the Women’s National Indian Association assumed it knew what was best for Native people, particularly Native women; liberalism of well meaning people of the nineteenth century is limited by the paternalistic, racist ideologies of the times regarding

American Indian people as inferior, “savage,” and in need of Anglo culture and

“civilization.” Yet, at the same time, the social protests by Anglo American women against both slavery and genocide of American Indian people, including even the

Women’s National Indian Association, was vital in raising the national consciousness in the U.S. The activism on the part of Peabody and Mann, and other Anglo American women, was from a marginalized position in their culture: their concerns and rights were trivialized by those making and enacting the laws. Mann, in one of her last letters, wrote that Peabody was “quite happy about her pet Indian who is doing wonders” (qtd. in

Zanjani 280), reflecting a kind of ownership and dehumanization of Winnemucca. Anglo

American women’s work, such as that of Peabody and of Mann, though limited by the ideologies of the time, carved a space for questioning injustices in U.S. policy and attitudes toward Native people. The appropriation of Native culture for the cause of 95

Anglo American women’s suffrage—which was then contradicted by Gage calling

American Indian people “savage” and in need of civilization—provides a context that helps elucidate a reading of Life Among the Piutes. The testimony itself might appeal to those interested in using Paiute culture to argue for Anglo American women’s equality in government; however, it ultimately portrays Paiute women’s roles to demonstrate that

Paiutes are not in need of the Anglo American culture and civilization that reform groups, such as the Women’s National Indian Association, were promoting. Life Among the

Piutes foregrounds its imagining of alliances between women by showing that the violence of colonialism threatens American Indian people, not Native “savagery.” At the same time that Life Among the Piutes depicts a dismal view toward the kind of women in the West ready to lynch her, Winnemucca also provides moments in which Anglo women are imagined participating in Congress to do something about the injustices experienced by Native people including sexual assault, abuse by agents, unjust incarceration, genocide, exploitation of labor and resources, and many other injustices. Given the context of U.S. law of the time, Life Among the Piutes speaks to the fact that the U.S. denies Native people justice and sovereignty rights, and that many Native women lost sovereignty over their own bodies. Within the context of numerous forms of colonial violence Winnemucca imagines the possibility for alliances between Native and Anglo women as she simultaneously questions that very possibility. For this reason, any discussion of alliances in Winnemucca’s text must be foregrounded in an analysis of economic exploitation, sexual assault, and invasion of Native land because these are the material conditions, the historical reality within which Winnemucca engages the 96

possibility of an alliance. For Winnemucca, the ground that she traverses among discourses for women’s rights, Native rights, and reform groups such as the Women’s

National Indian Association is indeed uneven, but it is more than a metaphor: that ground and the people inhabiting it are being invaded, assaulted by colonialist violence.

Winnemucca’s intervention in women’s rights discourses should be studied further in dialogue with recent Native women activists regarding issues of feminism: by paralleling the past with the present we may be able to continue efforts to decolonize feminisms and forge alliances between women that recognize the effects of privilege and power, but do not parallel the power dynamics between women in the past.

For other writers writing in the same decade as Winnemucca, such as Helen Hunt

Jackson and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, alliances are both imagined and in some cases not even conceived of between American Indian, Mexican American, and Anglo

American women. Ruiz de Burton and Jackson also negotiate and engage, though differently than Winnemucca, the discourses of women’s rights, suffrage, and “civilizing missions” of the late nineteenth century. They imagine freedom from colonialism and in doing so, paint portraits of an “othered” woman whose body is both a site for colonialist violence as well as a symbol of primitiveness. Chapters Two and Three will examine how an “othered” woman is portrayed in Jackson’s and Ruiz de Burton’s novels of social protest against U.S. policies and law regarding American Indians and Mexican

Americans, and how alliances between American Indian, Mexican American, and Anglo

American women are imagined in relation to their protest to colonialism. I will also examine the ways Jackson and Ruiz de Burton challenge, or to what extent they 97

challenge and/or avoid critiques of the institutions of religion, U.S. government, and the

U.S. legal / justice system, and how these compare with Winnemucca’s protests. 98

CHAPTER TWO

“I’M AN UMMERIKAN”: WOMEN’S RIGHTS, ALLIANCES BETWEEN WOMEN, AND FISSURES TO COLONIAL DISCOURSES IN HELEN HUNT JACKSON’S RAMONA

--There is but one hope of righting this wrong . . . It lies in appeal to the heart and the conscience of the American people. What the people command, Congress will do.

(Helen Hunt Jackson, Century of Dishonor 30).

--I jest wish the hull world could see what I’ve seen! Thet’s all!

(Aunt Ri, Ramona 348)

A year after Winnemucca publishes Life Among the Piutes, Anglo American writer Helen Hunt Jackson publishes Ramona (1884), a novel that protests similar issues such as the removal of Native people from their land, genocide, and the condoning of such violence by the United States legal system. Mary Mann’s footnote in Life Among the Piutes about Jackson’s 1881 book, Century of Dishonor, attests to the influence

Jackson had on Winnemucca’s editor. Mann highlights Jackson’s critique of Anglos’ attitudes of superiority regarding American Indians: “we know from H.H.’s ‘Century of

Dishonor’ that from the beginning the Christian bigots who peopled America looked upon the Indians as heathen” (52). In A Century of Dishonor, Jackson provided a researched documentation of a century of injustices and violence imposed on American

Indians by the United States government. Using her own money, Jackson sent copies of this indictment to every member of Congress. The copies were printed with jackets the 99

color of blood, and the cover had Benjamin Franklin’s words inscribed on it: “Look at

your hands! They are stained with the blood of your relations” (qtd. in Olsen 256). That

Mann was aware of Jackson’s protest makes it plausible that Winnemucca was aware of

these actions as well, and perhaps Winnemucca had Jackson in mind when she wrote that

if Congress allowed women as members, then justice would be done to American

Indians.

After writing A Century of Dishonor, Jackson was disappointed that so few

Americans read it and decided to write a fictionalized account of history in an attempt to bring awareness to Anglo Americans of the injustices committed against American

Indian people.lxxi In a letter to her husband, Jackson explains, “Every hour my feelings

grow intenser on this subject--& I feel more & more impelled to work for the cause”

(3).lxxii Just after writing her novel, Jackson exclaimed in another letter, “My life-blood

went into it—all I had thought, felt, and suffered for five years on the Indian Question”

(Mathes 216). Additionally, her letters suggest that she was not using the oppression of

American Indians to gain esteem in the literary world: “I care more for making one soul

burn with indignation and protest against our wrongs to the Indians than I do even for

having you praise the quality of my work” (Mathes 217).

Like Winnemucca, Jackson suggests an alliance between Anglo and American

Indian women against violent white masculinity. I use this term to emphasize the

gendered construction of male whiteness in relation to a colonialized “other,” and an

attitude of superiority, power, and violence that accompanies colonialist ideologies and

actions. Both authors condemn sexual violence by Anglo men against American Indian 100

women, and both authors articulate a critique of the male nation state in terms of the way

the government excluded voices of women.lxxiii Both point to the absence of women in

Anglo government, and suggest that if Anglo women could participate they should, and potentially could, advocate on the part of American Indians. Very little attention has been given to the way that nineteenth-century women writers negotiate women’s rights movements in a way to intervene, to offer a theory about new directions for women’s rights activists that would include women of color. One such direction is offered by

Winnemucca and Jackson, who suggest an alliance between American Indian women and

Anglo women that would unite them against white male colonialist violence.

As Ramona begins, we learn that a Mexican American woman named Ramona

Ortegna had been engaged to a Scottish man, Angus Phail, the owner of a wealthy shipping company. He had set sail for eight months and returned to find her wedded to another man. After that he became a “‘dead drunk’ who was commonly seen reeling about, tipsy, coarse, loud, profane, dangerous” (26). News spread that he went to the San

Gabriel Mission and, as Jackson phrases it, was “living with the Indians. Some years later came the still more surprising news that he had married a squaw—a squaw with several Indian children—had been legally married by the priest in the San Gabriel

Mission Church” (26). Angus visits his previous lover, Ramona, and says he has “sinned and the Lord has punished me. He has given me a child” (27). The implication here is that he has sinned by marrying a Native woman. Jackson never explains what happened to this nameless Native woman: she simply disappears, inhabiting the space of the

“vanishing Indian” motif in the American imagination. As Yolanda Venegas asserts, she 101

“remains a nameless, silenced ‘squaw,’” one of the problematic aspects of the novel (77).

Angus gives his baby daughter to Ramona, and she is named after her. He also leaves

Ramona Ortegna with an extensive amount of jewels for his daughter’s well being,

implying he and his Native wife cannot raise her adequately. However, Ramona Ortegna

dies young and she wills the guardianship of her adopted daughter, Ramona, to her sister

Señora Moreno. Señora Moreno keeps Ramona’s mixedblood identity a secret, and the

jewels given to Ramona by her father are also secretly stashed away. Ramona passes as

an elite Mexican American and is raised as such. Señora Moreno resents adopting

Ramona; however, Felipe Moreno, Señora Moreno’s beloved son, is kind to her (and later

falls in love with her).

Ramona also tells a story of the losses experienced by Señora Moreno, including

the post-1848 diminishing of her land. As the novel begins, Jackson informs us that the

elder Felipe Moreno, “one of the most distinguished Mexican generals,” had died in the

defense of the land against Anglo invasion (19). Jackson’s letters do not reveal any

documented attempt on her part to voice dissent to the United States’ denial of Mexican

Americans’ claims to land following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; however, Ramona

does contain statements about the injustices experienced by elite Mexican Americans

who had lost land due to Anglo American theft.lxxiv The novel does not consider the reality that Spanish/Mexicans had previously taken land from and displaced American

Indians. As a novel of protest, Ramona focuses mostly on the removal and genocide of

American Indians in California, specifically the Luiseño Indians in the Temecula valley.lxxv There is no critique in the novel of the way that American Indians are servants 102

as a result of Spanish/Mexican colonialism previous to Anglo colonialism. The Moreno estate (near Monterey) is still quite large, and Señora Moreno employs a number of servants and laborers. One of the laborers is a Luiseño man named Alessandro Assis, whose Father, Chief Pablo, was leader of the choir at the San Luis Rey Mission.

Alessandro and Ramona fall in love and the Señora does not approve. She yells at

Ramona, “You marry an Indian? Never! Are you mad? I will never permit it” and to prevent their marriage Señora Moreno locks Ramona up (129). At this point, Alessandro goes back to his community in Temecula to find the tragedy of forced removal. He travels back to Ramona, who manages to escape her captivity to briefly talk with him.

He tells her, “I have no home. My father is dead; my people are driven out of their village

. . . we have been starving . . . it was decided in the court that they owned all our land”

(176). Ramona replies, “that’s the way the Americans took so much of the Señora’s land away from her” (176). Alessandro tells how those who escaped were forced to move to

Pechanga, how his friend José and his father both became ill and died, and how José’s wife mourned her husband’s death, sneaking into the graveyard at night to sleep by his grave.

Alessandro and Ramona then flee from the Moreno estate and marry. Their first child dies, and another is born.lxxvi The novel tells of their struggle to survive as

Alessandro farms the land and as Anglos keep encroaching and pushing them off harvestable land. During a snow storm after a forced removal, their second child becomes ill and an Anglo family, the Hyers from Tennessee, take them into their home

(described as a “hut”) for a brief period. Ri Hyer, an Anglo woman, begins to question 103

the stereotypes she has learned about American Indians. She eventually forms an alliance with Ramona and asks Ramona to call her Aunt Ri, suggesting a kind of familial kinship alliance. By the novel’s end, Ri voices dissent to the colonial male-run government of the United States. Through her friendship with Ramona, Aunt Ri learns to critically examine her own racism against American Indians and the discourses she learned it from.

Through Aunt Ri, Jackson hopes to inspire her Anglo women readers to rethink their own internalized racism and speak out against injustices against American Indians. Near the end of the novel, Alessandro becomes depressed and mentally ill after so much tragedy, and mistakes an Anglo man’s horse for his own. The Anglo man feels justified murdering Alessandro and is not punished for the crime. Felipe then finds Ramona, and they move to Mexico where they marry and have children.

As in Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes, the social protest in Jackson’s

Ramona questions the political roles Anglo women have in relation to institutional male colonial power and to American Indian women, particularly when Native women’s bodies are the sites of various forms of exploitative violence such as sexual assault.

Jackson accomplishes this by transforming Ri’s consciousness—she learns to rethink racism against American Indians and as a result she begins voice opposition to racist injustices. In a social milieu in which women’s rights are being debated and colonial violence is questioned by some, many women writers of social protest in the United

States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries articulate a politics of gender, power, and difference in an attempt to locate Mexican American, Native, and Anglo women in relation to each other and within real spaces of colonial violence.lxxvii Ramona engages 104

nineteenth-century ideologies and discourses about women’s rights, American Indian rights, and the loss of rights of Mexican Americans following the Treaty of Guadalupe

Hidalgo in 1848. In Ramona Jackson appeals to the American people, calling on them to act in opposition to an unethical government. In the quotation from A Century of

Dishonor that opens this chapter, Jackson expresses a hope for social change and an optimism about expressing dissent. Throughout Ramona, Jackson defines patriotism as enacting resistance to a corrupt, violent government. Within the context of such violence, her representation of alliances between women articulates Jackson’s politics regarding

Anglo women’s empowerment, suggesting, like Winnemucca, that not to resist colonialism is to be complicit with the Anglo male-led violence against American

Indians.

That Jackson chose to make Ri a working-class woman from Tennessee who, along with her husband and son, are struggling to survive, is crucial. Jackson suggests an alliance, then, between a mixed blood Native woman and an Anglo woman who share in a class struggle. The alliance between Ramona and Aunt Ri is idealistic in its vision of allying these women against violent colonialist white masculinity, and borders on romanticizing sisterhood at times. However, even though the novel is sympathetic to the injustices suffered by Mexican American people following the Treaty of Guadalupe

Hidalgo, the alliance between Mexican American women and the central Native woman character, Ramona, is fraught with strife. As a result, it allies Anglo women readers with

Ramona against the violent “Anti-Indianism” of the Señora Moreno and the cruel 105

jealousy of Margarita.lxxviii As such, Señora Moreno’s racism functions to highlight the transformation Ri goes through to unlearn her racism.

As various kinds of alliances between women are imagined in Ramona, Jackson portrays an Anglo woman, Aunt Ri, whose protest challenges the actions of a male- controlled Congress, Anglo male colonial power, and the various injustices enacted by these powers at the expense of Native people. In the process, Ri’s opposition reflects cultural anxieties of the late nineteenth century regarding women’s rights, including the increasing empowerment of Anglo women, some of whom were claiming their own independent voices. As Modoc writer Michael Dorris noted in his introduction to

Ramona, Jackson “had no sympathy with the suffrage movement” (ix). Despite the anti- suffragist statements Jackson made both in her private letters and in public editorials, she suggests political changes be made to various patriarchal, colonialist institutions.

Through Aunt Ri, Jackson negotiates women’s rights for Anglo women as they relate to

Native peoples’ rights. Ramona emphasizes how colonialism affects Native and Mexican

American women, and the strong voice of an Anglo woman, Aunt Ri, protests male-led colonialist violence. This serves as Jackson’s definition of women’s rights and empowerment that insists that Anglo women take a position against colonialism. Jackson puts into question what Anglo women will do with their empowerment and whether they will continue to benefit from colonialism or whether they will question their own complicity, even if subordinated, with colonial power. Through her representation of

Aunt Ri, Jackson also addresses the dismissal of Anglo women’s voices by a patriarchal, colonialist American culture. Throughout Jackson’s social protest, however, the mission 106

system is portrayed as beneficial for American Indians—except for important fissures

made to this system via the perspective of Alessandro. Although Aunt Ri does not

advocate missionary work, the novel expresses nostalgia for the mission system, and after

Jackson’s death the novel inspired missionary work amongst Anglo women’s reform

groups such as the Women’s National Indian Association.

Biographical Background on Jackson and the Production of the Text:

Helen Maria Fiske was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts.lxxix Her father was an orthodox Calvinist minister and her mother was also an orthodox Calvinist. She grew up in a home that emphasized education, and her parents were both writers—her mother wrote children’s stories and her father wrote and worked as editor on several large volumes. Helen experienced a tremendous amount of grief as a child due to the death of loved ones, and this continued into her adult life. As a very young child her brother as well as her best friend both died, and her mother suffered from tuberculosis and eventually died when Jackson was thirteen. Just three years later, at the age of sixteen, her father died, which left her struggling with depression and isolation. Helen’s grandfather arranged for Helen and her sister to be adopted by a successful lawyer, and they were well provided for financially by her grandfather. These provisions included the continuation of Helen’s boarding school education. At the age of twenty-one, Helen married Edward Hunt, a lieutenant in the Army Corps, and had a son who died before he was one year old. Edward was away much of the time for his job, and after they had been married nearly eleven years he was killed in an accident while testing out a weapon

(ironically of his own design). Just two years after that, in 1865, Helen’s only remaining 107

son, Rennie, died at the age of nine, leaving her a childless widow who suffered from

“severe depression” (Phillips 17).

At this point she ardently devoted herself to her writing career, and began

publishing poems, essays, and travel sketches (all under pseudonyms).lxxx She had

privileged starts in the sense that she had connections to the literary world, including her

friend Emily Dickinson, right from the beginning.lxxxi Her persistency and strength in the face of so much grief and loss is noteworthy: she writes, “there have been a great many things in this world I have not liked, but of which I have made the best” (Phillips 18). In the mid-1870s she suffered from numerous health conditions, including depression and sore throats and colds, and she moved to Colorado Springs where she met William

Sharpless Jackson and married him in 1875. Her personal experience with loss and grief are reflected in her novel Ramona when Ramona’s child and husband both die, and I would argue, helped her as writer to relate to the experience of trauma and grief that her characters suffer from.

Jackson first became concerned about American Indians after attending a speech by Standing Bear in Boston in 1879. His speech was about the removal of the Poncas, and was, as Valerie Mathes writes in The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson

1879-1885, “the catalyst that threw Jackson into the arena of Indian reform” (6). In a letter written to the New York Daily Tribune, not long after the speech by Standing Bear,

Jackson asks, “Has the Indian any rights which the white man is bound to respect?” (qtd.

in Mathes 5). Later, in an 1883 letter to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Jackson writes, “If I

could write a story that would do for the Indian a thousandth part what Uncle Tom’s 108

Cabin did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life” (qtd. in Mathes 203).

After writing Ramona, Jackson explains in a letter to the president of the Women’s

National Indian Association, Amelia Quinton, “I do not dare to think I have written a

second Uncle Tom’s Cabin—but I do think I have written a story which will be a good

stroke for the Indian cause” (qtd. in Mathes 218). Jackson saw herself as an advocate for

Native rights, writing with the hope to create social change.

Before writing Ramona, Jackson did extensive research on injustices against

American Indians at New York’s Astor Library and published extensively in New York and Boston newspapers and magazines.lxxxii Because of her research for A Century of

Dishonor, she was selected to write a report on the Diegueño, Gabrieleno, and Luiseño

tribes (often referred to as the “Mission Indians”), and conducted her research via

numerous trips to Southern California where she spent a lot of time both in the Bancroft

library and talking with American Indian people. lxxxiii She visited a number of times the

Luiseño people of Pala, Temecula, Pauma, Rincon, Pechanga, Potrero, Saboboa, and La

Jolla; the Cahuilla people; the Cupeno people of Agua Caliente; the Ipai people of Mesa

Grande and Santa Ysabel; and the Serano people.lxxxiv In the process, she learned that an

Anglo man was acquitted for the murder of a Cahuilla man, Juan Diego.lxxxv His murder

is what, according to Mathes and others, Jackson used as the basis for the ending of

Ramona, in which an Anglo man murders Alessandro. In fact, as Mathes explains in

detail, many of the incidents from Jackson’s research in California appear in Ramona.

Coming to Terms with Ramona’s Ideological Limitations: 109

While Jackson provides an example of an Anglo woman willing to challenge

Anglo male colonial power, Ramona has limitations in terms of the problematic stereotypes that it promotes and perpetuates about both Mexican American and Native people. For example, Martin Padget points out that while Ramona is “innocent, joyous, generous, and industrious, she is also childlike, and without intellectual depth. Likewise

Alessandro is a two-dimensional character, a ‘simple minded-unlearned man’” (94).

Alessandro does dote on Ramona with romantic ideas in his “poetic Indian fashion”

(Ramona 111), and he is characterized by “noble Indian” stereotypes, such as having

“infinite patience of his Indian blood” (Ramona 123).lxxxvi Regarding the “noble savage” stereotypes, Dorris notes that though the novel “cashed in on every positive stereotype in the cultural repertoire, Ramona neutralized some historic aspects of American hostility toward Indians” (xvii). As characters, Alessandro and Ramona are often portrayed as simplistic, falling into a history of literature that either romanticizes (as in this case) or demonizes American Indians, and results in defining American Indian identity in binary colonialist terms. Additionally, the opening description of Señora Moreno depicts her as looking “simply like a sad, spiritual-minded old lady, amiable and indolent, like her race”

(2), thus othering Mexican Americans as simple and lazy and reproducing what Daniel

Cooper Alarcón has examined as a “construction of Mexicanness as a series of interdependent erasures and superimpositions” in terms of subjectivity (3).

In his book Manifest Manners, Ojibwe writer and theorist Gerald Vizenor examines a history of literature which he terms “manifest manners,” a literature that

“simulates” the real, replacing it with fake constructions of American Indians which are, 110

thus, part of a colonial mission of “dominance.” Clearly, the colonialist lens through

which Jackson saw the American Indians she visited in Southern California affected how

she later depicted their struggles. This raises the question, then, of who should speak on

behalf of whom, or who should represent the struggles of particular groups. David Luis-

Brown argues that the novel itself “attempts to achieve sentimental reform by countering

racial ideologies that portray Indians as inherently criminal” (825). But at the same time,

in Ramona, as Luis-Brown points out, Native people are “lower-class laborers and

‘human ruins’ to be pitied with imperialist nostalgia” (825). Anne Goldman contends that the mixed race marriage in Jackson’s Ramona and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s

The Squatter and the Don “provide the means by which a distinctly political agenda is carried out,” protesting the land grab and encroachment from Anglo settlers (67). She argues, however, that Jackson’s novel ends up “foreclosing on any recommendations for change,” while Ruiz de Burton’s novel The Squatter and the Don ends with a “call to action that provides for the possibility of a kind of textual and political behavior that is more than simply elegiac” (68). Margaret Jacobs also criticizes Ramona, asserting that

“more is at work in Ramona than a simple desire to arouse sympathy for the Mission

Indians” (216). Like Jesse Alemán, she argues that “the book also explores and ultimately affirms Yankee racial categories” (216). Additionally, in “The Erotics of

Racialization,” Venegas argues that Jackson “participated in the creation of the Spanish- heritage myth” and that this “concealed the state’s violent origins, [and] legitimized

Manifest Destiny by asserting white supremacy . . .” (69). Venegas continues, asserting that Jackson participated in “erotics of racialization that redeployed age-old images of 111

exotic Native maidens (‘squaws’), Californias of ‘pure Spanish’ blood, and lowly

Mexicanas within the emergent rhetoric of romance and nostalgia” (69). She makes excellent points about the hierarchies in place in the novel; however, the novel simultaneously exposes the “state’s violent origins” by protesting institutionalized violence against American Indian people.

Alternatively, Luis-Brown focuses on sentimentalism and whiteness; he concludes that both Ramona and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Squatter and the Don

“deserve to be read and reread because of their complex allegorical engagement with

U.S. race relations and imperialism” (829). Though Luis-Brown does not expand directly on Ramona as an allegory for race relations in the U.S., much could be done with this notion of allegory and the novel. Ramona, as a mixed blood American Indian who is raised on an elite Mexican American hacienda embodies many histories in the United

States. Her body and the violence she experiences, could be read as a text, or as an allegory of a violent History—with a capitol H—in the United States.lxxxvii As Martin

Padget argues, critics have been “unduly hasty in dismissing Jackson’s passionate stand against the dispossession of California Indians” (82). Padget acknowledges that “while

Jackson clearly subscribed to racialist assumptions,” she “nonetheless challenged her own culture’s more conservative propositions about the character of the American nation and its people” (“Travel Writing . . .” par. 21). Jackson’s writing deserves to be critiqued for the ways her writing participates in a literature of “manifest manners,” and at the same time more nuanced readings need to be done of her writing so as to also recognize how her writing provides fissures to a “literature of dominance.”lxxxviii Jackson creates 112

fissures to colonialist discourses, and in the process discourses of women’s rights slip into these spaces and she calls upon Anglo women to continue to create ruptures to colonial discourses. At a time when women’s rights were being debated and contested and political power and rights accompanying U.S. citizenship only pertained to Anglo males, Jackson’s Ramona suggests as necessary a relationship between women’s rights and Anglo women and resistance to colonialism.

Jackson’s writing defied dominant views in the United States toward Native people at a time when, as a woman, she had to battle to be heard in American culture.

Jackson’s writing provides an insightful lens into a history of protest of “Anti-Indianism” that late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century Native writers would later take up and more vehemently protest. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a member of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe, theorizes about what she calls “Anti-Indianism” in literature and art. She writes about the pervasive racism toward American Indians and the celebration of U.S. expansionism, pointing to “Anti-Indianism” as deeply ingrained in the American imagination and reflected in the production of literature and art. In her study, she refers to Jackson as one of the “thoughtful Americans” in history who voiced dissent against the

U.S. policies toward American Indians as “dishonorable” (22).

Nostalgia for the Mission System: The Women’s National Indian Association as

Context for Alliances Between Women in Ramona

Much of the literary criticism of Ramona focuses on its nostalgia for the history of the California missions and the servitude of American Indians within that system. Padget notes that Ramona has been criticized for its “politically conservative portrayal of 113

California society in the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexican War” (79). He points out that

Jackson mythologized the mission system through which “thousands of California

Indians had been pulled into the work regimes of twenty-one Franciscan missions set along the coast between San Diego and Sonoma” (79). Literary critic Bryan Wagner argues that to expose the underbelly of U.S. imperialism Jackson rewrites the frontier using techniques of “local color writing,” specifically of the “regional culture of the U.S. south” (2). In doing this, she “remembers the Missions not as a system of economic exploitation but as a paternalistic institution designed to promote American Indian assimilation” (2). He argues that most readers fail to see this paradox in the narrative.

Overall, the novel “abandons the liberal fiction of equal rights in favor of a local color narrative that claims to speak for American Indians even as it places them at the bottom of the nation’s racial hierarchy” (4). Jackson’s novel does portray the missions in a nostalgic way as it simultaneously, through the voice of Alessandro, provides momentary fissures within such a glorification. Anglo women missionaries were becoming much more prevalent and, as discussed in Chapter One, had a kind of maternalistic attitude toward Native women built upon an attitude of cultural and religious superiority.

Relations such as these were emerging at the time Ramona was written and were very much a part of reform circles in Anglo culture. Thus, in a text written by an Anglo woman who was 1) trying to create social change by critiquing the encroachment by

Anglos on Native land, and the unjust seizure of that land and consequent forced removal of American Indians from their homelands and; 2) establishing an idea about Anglo women forging an alliance with Native women against white male-led colonialism, the 114

portrayal of the mission system in a nostalgic way may seem to obviate the progressive anti-colonialist views that the novel otherwise expresses. Yet the character of Aunt Ri does not embody the Anglo woman missionary of reform movements such as the

Women’s National Indian Association.

As Mathes explains, the novel had the effect of inspiring “humanitarian Indian reformers” to advocate for Native people’s rights to land and establish reservations

(which protected some land as opposed to nothing) in the Southern California region. It also inspired reform groups, such as the Women’s National Indian Association, to improve “the condition of Indian women and children;” however, their main efforts were aimed at assimilation through “education and evangelism” (119). Mathes’s excellent book, Helen Hunt Jackson and her Indian Reform Legacy, provides a detailed history of

Jackson’s efforts at reform and the effects of Ramona on reform groups such as the

Women’s National Indian Association and the Indian Rights Association. As Mathes explains, Jackson’s report on the “Mission Indians” as she called them, focused on protecting treaty rights and eliminating the encroachment of Anglos on Native land. The

Women’s National Indian Association worked, as they explain in their annual report, to

“promote the reforming activities” of writers such as Jackson, who, for a short time, was a member of the association (Fourth Annual Report for the WNIA, 1884, 7). Jackson’s poetry and writings were read and lauded at the Women’s National Indian Association meetings. One might ask why there is no record of the Women’s National Indian

Association reading the testimony of Winnemucca at their meetings. It is likely, though, that Winnemucca’s scathing critiques of Christians accounts for the fact that while the 115

Women’s National Indian Association embraced the social protest of Jackson’s writings, it did not adopt Winnemucca’s text to support their petitions, nor did it provide records of the associations’ women encouraging other reformers to go hear Winnemucca speak.

After Jackson’s death, the Women’s National Indian Association was inspired by

Jackson’s novel to erect buildings for missionaries and homes for Native people in

Southern California for the purpose of converting them to Christianity (Mathes 120).

Mathes asserts that Jackson’s death “spurred members of WNIA and IRA and Lake

Mohonk Conference participants ‘to continue and complete the work inspired by her pen, and [what she] labored for to the end of her life’” (qtd. in Mathes, from the conference itself 219). However, as Mathes explains, “while Jackson had been more interested in protecting their lands, Quinton [the President of the Women’s National Indian

Association] was interested in leading these Indian women into the sphere of nineteenth- century domesticity,” teaching Native women “proper” Victorian style gender roles

(129)—the very thing that Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes contests.

As a novel advocating social reform, Ramona unfortunately contains plenty of nostalgia for the mission system, a system that inspired further encroachment by Anglos on Native land to nterrogates American Indians. For example, when it is time for sheep shearing on the Moreno estate it will not happen until Father Salvierderra comes. Juan

Canito says to himself, “it is a good thing for those poor Indian devils to get a bit of religion now and then,” adding, “I doubt not it warms the Señora’s heart to see them all there, as if they belonged to the house, as they used to” (5). In this statement, clearly the

American Indian people who are servants for the Moreno estate are not portrayed as 116

having any religion of their own.lxxxix Jackson’s writing thus differs markedly from

Winnemucca’s autobiography—which decidedly rejects the hypocrisy of Christians and their actions against American Indians—and by contrast could not have been appropriated by such missionary groups as the Women’s National Indian Association.

In glorifying the nterrogates g of American Indians, Ramona justifies the exploitation of American Indians that took place within the missions. For example,

Señora Moreno defines Native people as inferior, uncivilized, and in need of the “help” of elite Mexican colonizers, thereby justifying a hierarchy between her and the laborers on her estate. Señora Moreno’s nostrils “dilate[] in scorn” as she asks:

Of what is it that these noble lords of villages are so proud? Their ancestors,— naked savages less than a hundred years ago? Naked savages they themselves too, today, if we had not come here to teach and civilize them. The race was never meant for anything but servants. That was all the Fathers ever expected to make out of them—good faithful Catholics, and contented laborers in the fields (88).

Jackson’s statement in the context of a novel that celebrates the missions reproduces a hierarchy between the landed Mexican elite and Native people (erasing the fact that their land ownership often displaced and dispossessed Native people from their land).

Jackson does not to set up Señora’s diatribe as a parody or as ironic, as does Ruiz de

Burton with Mrs. Cackle in Who Would Have Thought It? Whereas Winnemucca makes visible the exploitation of Paiutes’ labor on reservations and challenges the use of rhetoric of manifest destiny, Jackson describes the labor of American Indians in Ramona as part of a pastoral setting. For example, she writes that

the delicious, languid, semi-tropic summer came hovering over the valley. The apricots turned golden, the peaches glowed, the grapes filled and hardened, like opaque emeralds hung thick under the canopied vines. . . . there were lilies, and 117

orange-blossoms, and poppies, and carnations, and geraniums in the pots . . . It was like an enchanter’s spell . . . . (107)

The setting for servitude for many American Indians in California during this time is depicted as romantic and pastoral, as a kind of tropical paradise.xc Such romanticization of farm work is later vehemently contested by writers such as Cherríe Moraga and Helena

María Viramontes, both of whom deal with the possibility of forming alliances between women in the context of labor exploitation. The servitude of American Indians on the

Moreno estate is celebrated with nostalgia as is the servitude within the mission system.

For example, Jackson narrates, “while the estate was at its best, and hundreds of Indians living within its borders, there was many a Sunday when the scene to be witnessed there was like the scenes at the Missions” (18).

Moments of Opposition to the Mission System:

Yet such a romanticized image of the setting for labor in Ramona is coupled with a response from Alessandro who points to the realities of such exploitation. He explains to Ramona that at his home in Temecula there are

Nearly two hundred [people], when they are all there; but many of them are away most of the time. They must go where they can get work; they are hired by the farmers, or to do work on the great ditches, or to go as shepherds; and some of them take their wives and children with them. I do not believe the Señorita has ever seen any very poor people. (121)

The displacement of the Luiseño people due to Anglo encroachment is such that they are then hired out by Anglos as laborers to earn very low wages. Jackson makes this clear in the end of the novel, when Ramona suggests they move to Los Angeles to get jobs.

Alessandro refuses on the grounds that he does not want to work for half the wages of an 118

Anglo man. Thus, in the midst of Jackson’s pastoral romanticization of the servitude of

American Indians there are also fissures to such colonialist imaginings of the West.

Another such moment is when Alessandro locates American Indians as having

“always lived on” the land and asserts a right to the land. When Alessandro is talking to

Father Salvidierra about his own father, he states:

They say the Americans, when they buy the Mexicans’ lands, drive the Indians away as if they were dogs, they say we have no right to our lands. Do you think that can be so, Father, when we have always lived on them, and the owners promised them to us forever? (66)

Yet, in Jackson’s construction of history it seems as though the “owners,” and Native people came to an agreement that allowed Native people rights to their homelands. The target of Jackson’s protest is the U.S. government rather than what happened previously, but by avoiding a critique of the previous Spanish colonialism she seems to erase the violence of that history. Because Ramona is based on real incidents, and in many cases it informs readers of history, the question must be raised about how responsibly it portrays history and to what effect. Ramona was well-reviewed and quite popular, attesting to the potential this novel had to influence Jackson’s readers.xci An article in an 1886 North

American Review described Ramona as “unquestionably the best novel yet produced by an American woman” (Introduction v). Ten months before Jackson’s death in 1885 it sold 15,000 copies (7,000 of which were sold in the first three months).xcii Given the popularity of Ramona and its many reprints and theatrical reproductions—and thus the fact that so many people have been influenced by this text—it is especially important that work is done to carefully consider what version of history she tells and the ideological implications of such a rendering.xciii 119

Throughout much of Ramona, Jackson’s depiction of the California missions seems to align her ideologically with a colonial agenda and nearly erase a history of resistance on the part of indigenous people. For example, Jackson writes of the disintegration of the mission system with nostalgia: “As year by year she saw the ruin of the Missions steadily going on, their vast properties melting away, like dew before the sun . . .” (22). Ramona wishes for the past with the mission system, when “there would be work for all” at missions that were “like palaces, and that there were thousands of

Indians in every one of them; thousands and thousands, all working so happy and peaceful” (229).xciv This portrait is like a pastoral painting of American Indians content with their servitude within these missions. As Wagner contends, the Moreno ranch is like the “mythical southern plantation” (6). He makes an excellent point in that there is nostalgia for the “golden age,” when American Indian servants labored extensively on the

Moreno estate.xcv Via a close reading of the opening sheep shearing scene, Wagner argues that for Jackson, labor is something to be watched, viewed, a picturesque spectacle. Further, he asserts that Jackson “represents the qausi-feudal relationship between Mexican ranchers and American Indian laborers as natural, right, and beautiful”

(10). Here, I think of Vizenor’s repeated phrase, “This portrait is not an Indian” (43).

Instead, it is a “simulation,” to borrow Vizenor’s term, that validates Anglo and/or

Spanish superiority and dominance. Padget explains that the reality of the mission system was such that

Indians were coerced into laboring at missions and that large numbers of them became fugitives rather than suffer Spanish colonial discipline, noting also that many Indians who remained attached to the missions resisted acculturation by 120

refusing to learn Spanish, only nominally following Christian practices, and holding onto their own customs (“Travel Writing . . .” par. 13).

In other words, contrary to the way Ramona sees the missions, there was quite a lot of resistance on the part of American Indians.xcvi

Still, there is a moment when Alessandro teaches Ramona, and thus the reader, that such a nostalgic memory of the missions is not accurate: “The Señora does not know all that happened at the missions, Alessandro replied. ‘My father says that some of them were dreadful things, when bad men had power. Never any such things at San Luis Rey’”

(229). In this way, there is space for a critique of missions, but then, like in Uncle Tom’s

Cabin, it seems as though there is such a thing as a “good master”: the mission at San

Luis Rey. In contrast, the tribal website for the Pechanga band of Luiseño Indians refers to the building of the San Luis Rey Mission in 1798 as “forever altering Luiseño tribal life and pressing the Luiseño people into servitude, slavery or imprisonment.”xcvii

Jackson’s rendering of the history of the San Luis Rey mission erases what the official website for the Pechanga Indians refers to as slavery. Such a rendering of history is disturbing since so many people continue to read Ramona as an account of history. Later in the novel, Alessandro refers to an older Gabrieleno woman who had come to Temecula to live. She had said that

The Indians did not all want to come to the Missions; some of them preferred to stay in the woods, and live as they had always lived; and I think they had a right to do that if they preferred, Majella. It was stupid of them to stay and be like beasts, and not know anything; but do you not think they had the right? (231).

Statements such as these contain ruptures to colonial discourses that would proclaim that

Native people would be better off at the missions, yet in this passage the fissure is 121

minimal since Alessandro concludes that Native people would be “stupid” to prefer their

traditional ways of life and live free from the power of the church.xcviii Whereas

Winnemucca explains that Paiutes are better off without Christians around, and attests to

the hypocrisy of Christians who promote and support violence against American Indians,

Jackson embraces the missions as a preferable way of life for American Indians. Thus, it

is understandable that groups such as the Women’s National Indian Association were

inspired by her writing.

Jackson’s Critique of Anglo Women’s Complicity: Alliance Building and Women’s

Rights

While Jackson fails to critique the negative effects of the Franciscan missions on

American Indians, Ramona addresses the larger role that middle-and upper-class Anglo

women were beginning to play publicly. In “The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and

Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona,” John Gonzales contends that Ramona

“illustrates domesticity’s centrality to late-nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism and

suggests how white women’s engagement with the colonial project advanced their own

quest for national agency” (437). As a result of the colonial project, Gonzales explains,

“white women negotiated a larger role in public life” by becoming teachers on

reservations, in boarding schools, and as administrators in the Office of Indian Affairs

(441). Yet Jackson specifically creates a working-class character who does not have the

same power and privilege of access to the public sphere that her middle- and upper-class

counterparts did. Aunt Ri is not a part of any “reform” effort or missionary project, and she does not struggle to advance her own self individually via the colonial enterprise. 122

Instead, she struggles to survive economically and voices resistance against the colonial enterprise. Mathes and Siobhan Senier argue that while Jackson had some connections to the Women’s National Indian Association, this group went “far beyond the author’s own goals” in terms of reform policies.xcix Though Ramona ended up inspiring groups such as the Women’s National Indian Association, the novel itself does not advocate Anglo women becoming missionaries or teaching Native women “proper” gender roles.

Instead, through the character of Aunt Ri, it advocates that Anglo women protest injustices enacted by the U.S. government-sponsored “Indian agencies.”

In the alliance between Aunt Ri and Ramona, Aunt Ri does not teach Ramona how to assimilate into Anglo culture: instead Aunt Ri begins to unlearn her racism. The context within which Aunt Ri and Ramona first form an alliance is when Ramona,

Alessandro, and their baby are displaced by Anglo encroachers and are forced to move during a snow storm. Just at the point when they fear for their lives during the storm, they come across the Hyer “hut,” as Jackson describes it. Aunt Ri scolds her husband for not wanting to take them in, stating with her heavy Tennessean drawl as she takes their baby in her arms, “Naow Jeff, yer know yer wouldn’t let enny-thin’ in shape ev a human creetur go perishin’ past aour fire sech weather’s this” (282). When Aunt Ri’s son translates Ramona’s Spanish into English for his parents, Aunt Ri exclaims,

Lord save us, Jos! Hev we reelly took in Injuns: What on airth—Well, well, she’s fond uv her baby’s enny white woman! I kin see thet; an Injun or no Injun they’ve got to stay naow. Yer couldn’t turn a dog our n’ sech weather ‘s this. (283)

Aunt Ri seems to first glimpse Ramona as a human because she recognizes her compassion as a mother, a trope of sentimentalist novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 123

Still, Aunt Ri thought they were Mexican Americans, but when she learns they are

American Indians she likens them to dogs. However, after a short time (three pages to be exact), “a feeling of friendliness, surprising under the circumstances, grew up between them” (286). Aunt Ri’s transformation is similar to a shift that Jackson makes in her travel writing from the early 1870s, in a piece called “From Chicago to Ogden.” At first

Jackson describes a Native woman as “the most abject, loathly living thing I ever saw,” but when she sees the woman is a mother it is “then, and not til then, I saw a human look in the India-rubber face” (qtd. in Phillips 167). Jackson’s own personal shift in consciousness probably allows her the optimism she has that other Anglo women, like

Aunt Ri, can also learn to unlearn the colonial construction that American Indians are not human.

One of the first ways Aunt Ri learns to humanize Ramona and Alessandro is through her observations about the way Alessandro treats Ramona. Aunt Ri does a little comparative cultural analysis of gender:

I’ve got a lesson ‘n the subjeck uv Injuns. I’ve always hed a reel mean feelin’ about ‘em; I didn’t want ter come nigh’ em, not ter hev ‘em come nigh me. This woman, ehre, she’s ez sweet a creetur’s ever I see; ‘n’ ex bound up ‘n thet baby’s yer could ask enny woman to be; ‘n’ ‘s fur thet man, can’t yer see, Jeff, he jest worships the ground she walks on? That’s a fact, Jeff. I dunno’s ever I see a white man think so much uv a woman; come naow, Jeff, d’yer think yer ever did yerself? (286).

Jackson thus paints Native men as more respectful to Native women than Anglo men are to Anglo women. Though it is a kind of chivalrous respect that places woman on a pedestal, it is still portrayed as superior to Anglo “civilization.” This moment in the text provides a mirroring of the kind of rhetoric that Matilda Joslyn Gage uses to argue for 124

women’s rights—that Native people are more respectful, and thus are superior to Anglo civilization when it comes to the treatment of women. In fact, Aunt Ri uses this moment to ask her husband what his own attitude toward women is. He does not take her up on her challenge to his treatment of women, but Jackson still uses this representation of a

Native couple to raise questions about how Anglo men treat Anglo women, particularly in a marriage. However, Jackson is not appropriating the history and story of Ramona and Alessandro in order to further an agenda about women’s rights (as did her contemporary Gage). Instead, in Jackson’s text about Native peoples’ rights some of the contemporary discourses about women’s rights seep in.

In addition to learning lessons about gender and culture, Aunt Ri learns that her ideas about what an “Indian” is have been gathered from discourses of “Anti-Indianism.”

As Wardrop points out, “Jackson meant for her to be the character with whom her typical reader might most readily identify” (32). As such, Aunt Ri serves as the model for Anglo women readers to follow. For example, the narrator reflects that

Aunt Ri was excited. The experience was, to her, almost incredible. Her ideas of Indians had been drawn from newspapers, and from a book or two of narratives of massacres, and from an occasional sight of vagabound bands of families they had encountered in their journey across the plains. Here she found herself sitting side by side in friendly intercourse with an Indian man and Indian woman . . ..(286)

Jackson’s text thus makes a point about American Indians being what Vizenor would later call the “simulations” of “manifest manners,” the constructions of colonial discourses. While Jackson reproduces the kind of “simulations” that Vizenor critiques, she also challenges the “simulations” of popular discourses such as newspapers and books. The narratives of massacres she refers to are likely the popularized “Indian 125

captivity narratives” that demonized American Indians as “savages” lurking in the wilderness waiting to rape Anglo women. Through the voice of her Anglo female character, Jackson urges her Anglo readers to question where they have gathered their

“information” about American Indians. On the one hand, Aunt Ri’s dialect may cause some readers to take her less seriously. Yet as a stereotype of a Southern, uneducated, working-class woman Aunt Ri can also have the effect of suggesting to Jackson’s middle-and upper-class Anglo women readers in the North that if even Aunt Ri can unlearn her racism so can a more educated, “enlightened” reader in the North.

As Luis-Brown and others have noted, “Aunt Ri’s change of heart suggests how the reader can similarly empathize with Indians” (824). Though literary critics have written about Aunt Ri’s change of heart, none have examined her alliance with Ramona in relation to women’s rights. The alliances that are imagined between women in this text—as well as the failed alliances—are particularly insightful, especially when considered within the historical context of racism within the women’s movement (as discussed in Chapter One). Daneen Wardrop asserts that Jackson “appeals to a kind of women’s justice” and writes of Ri’s “sense of justice as feminine and incontrovertible;” however, such essentialist notions of the feminine and of “women’s justice” are problematic (36). Ri’s gender is crucial, but it does not spring out of her innate womanness; instead her sense of justice is in resistance to the values and beliefs of Anglo men in power and the Anglo women complicit with such power.

As Aunt Ri becomes enlightened, Jackson urges her own Anglo women readers to become educated about the reality of violence against American Indians. Ramona’s 126

relationship to Aunt Ri is one of teacher to student. After Ramona and Alessandro move out of the Hyers’ and reside in the community Native people in San Pasquale Alessandro farms the land, harvests wheat crops, and builds a house. They are soon informed that a new law (the Homestead Act) allows Anglo homesteaders to take up any land they wish.

An Anglo man approaches Alessandro one day and tells him that his family has to leave

(and leave the house and the unharvested wheat crop for the Anglo man). Alessandro resists by saying that he will burn everything unless the man at least pays him (256). In this way, Alessandro is able to get a bit of money for his labor (but the land is still nearly stolen from him). Alessandro and Ramona then move to live with the Saboba Indians, a band of the Luiseño people at the foot of the San Jacinto mountains in Southern

California. The Hyers live nearby for six months and Ri’s husband Jeff and Alessandro become hunting partners. Near the end of six months, just before the Hyers move closer to San Bernardino in search of work, Aunt Ri says to Ramona: “They’re drefful

nterroga lot, these yere Mexicans; ‘n’ the Injuns is wuss. Naow when I say Injuns, I don’t never mean yeow, yer know thet. Yer aint’ ever seemed to me one mite like an

Injun” (291). That is, Ramona does not seem like the American Indians in narratives and newspapers written by Anglo people where Aunt Ri had gleaned her “information” about

Native people. On the one hand, Aunt Ri’s attempt at a compliment has the effect of making Ramona and Alessandro exceptions to their race, as literary critic Venegas contends (73). At the same time, the story of Ramona and Alessandro is told in a way that emphasizes that their individual tragedies are representative of a larger problem of violence and injustices against American Indian people. Ramona’s response to Aunt Ri’s 127

statement above is crucial, pointing to systemic violence and oppression: “Most of our people haven’t had any chance” and “[y]ou wouldn’t believe if I were to tell you what things have been done to them; how they are robbed, and cheated, and turned out of their homes” (291).

Aunt Ri wants to learn, so Ramona tells the story of Temecula, and San Pasquale

(all via Ri’s son who translates from Spanish). Ramona too is newly educated in that she has just learned from Alessandro. She has not personally experienced Alessandro’s losses, and she is a kind of mediator between American Indians (Alessandro) and Anglos

(Ri). Upon hearing of the injustices, Aunt Ri “was aghast; she found no words to express her indignation . . . Somebody ought ter be sent ter tell ‘em ‘t Washington what’s goin’ on hyar” (291). “I think it’s the people in Washington that have done it,’ said Ramona sadly. ‘Is it not in Washington all the laws are made?” (291). Through this alliance between women, Jackson sets up Aunt Ri, and the readers of the novel, to be educated.

Ramona further explains to Aunt Ri that “It’s all done by the American law” and “if anybody goes against the law he has to be killed or put in prison” (291). At this point,

“Aunt Ri shook her head. She was not convinced” (291). She declares she wants to find out the root of the problem, for “there’s cheatin’ somewhere” (291). As this conversation continues, Jackson dismantles the mythic notion of American justice and innocence when it comes to the frontier and the violence against American Indians condoned by the U.S. government. Ramona explains, “[t]he Americans think it is no shame to cheat for money”—it is part of a political system of profit that drives these injustices (291). 128

Jackson goes beyond simply arguing that Americans need to be informed: she portrays dissent not only as a patriotic endeavor but as a necessity. In response to

Ramona’s statement about cheating Americans, Aunt Ri cries out,

“I’m an Ummeriken!” and “Jeff Hyer, and Jos! We’re Ummerikens! ‘n’ we wouldn’t cheat nobody, not ef we knowed it, not our er a doller. We’re pore, an’ I allus expect to be, but we’re above cheatin’: an’ I tell you, naow, the Ummeriken people don’t want any o’ this cheatin’ done, naow! I’m going to ask Jeff hoaw’t is. Why it’s a burnin’ shame to any country! So’t is! I think something oughter be done about it! I wouldn’t mind goin’ myself, ef thar wasn’t anybody else!” (292).

Aunt Ri admonishes the nation for the oppression of American Indians and makes a call to action. Jackson imagines an alliance between a Native woman and an Anglo woman who, due to her class positioning, does not reap the benefits of colonialism as do other

Anglo Americans. Aunt Ri says that her family is poor, and that they do not cheat. They live in a “shanty on the outskirts of San Bernardino” (292), and as Aunt Ri explains,

“[w]e ain’t rich folks, yer know, not by a long ways, we ain’t . . . Jeff an me’s got to begin airnin’ suthin’” (290). By emphasizing her identity as a working-class American,

Jackson suggests that Aunt Ri is more able to see the oppression suffered by Native people who are also struggling to survive. While Aunt Ri’s family’s very existence in

California contributes to the displacement of American Indians, she protests violence and dishonesty toward American Indians and thus serves as a role model for contemporary

Anglo American female readers not to be complicit in the colonial project of genocide and removal. A seed of awareness is planted in Aunt Ri, and it is a seed that leads to action:

A seed had been sown in Aunt Ri’s mind which was not destined to die for want of soil. She was hot with shame and anger, and full of impulse to do something. ‘I ain’t nobody,’ she said; ‘I know thet well enough,--I ain’t nobody or nuthin’; 129

but I allow I’ve got suthin’ to say abaot the country I live in, ‘n’ the way things had oughter be . . . (292).

As an American, Aunt Ri feels a responsibility to question the principles of the country she lives in, even though she realizes that she does not have access to social rank or power: as she repeatedly states, “I ain’t nobody or nuthin’” (292).

Aunt Ri’s voice is not the only one urging readers to question violence. After

Ramona asks Alessandro if he does not think there are at least some good Americans, he challenges: “If there are Americans who are good, who will not cheat and kill, why do they not send after these robbers and punish them?” (239) In this way, to not do something in opposition to such violence is to be complicit. Through these questions

Jackson also asks her readers what it means to be an American, aiming her protest at the

U.S. government and the Americans who condone it. In a context when Anglo women were valued as harbingers or emblems of civilization in late nineteenth-century Anglo

America, Jackson creates an Anglo woman character who learns to question the

“civilization” she is upholding.

Alliances Between Women: Political Power and the Nation-State

Aunt Ri’s protest is how Jackson takes up the issue of women’s rights as they relate to Native people (and, more specifically, Anglo women’s rights to dispute the U.S. government). As Nancy F. Cott’s Grounding of Modern Feminism explains, some women’s rights activists in the nineteenth century focused on suffrage, while others emphasized “rights equivalent to those that men enjoyed on legal, political, economic, and civil grounds” as well as equality in terms of education and property rights (16-20).

Though Jackson does not directly engage the language of suffrage in her novel, she 130

addresses the issue of women’s lack of political power and encourages women to voices protest to the male-dominated nation-state. At the time that Ramona is published, suffrage and political representation for women had been part of a nation-wide discourse.

In 1872, Victoria Woodhull was a Presidential candidate nominated by the Equal Rights

Party, and Frederick Douglass was nominated as the Vice President. In the year Ramona is published, 1884, Belva Lockwood was nominated as President. Additionally, while various territories grant women suffrage by the time Ramona is published (for example,

Utah in 1870, Wyoming in 1869, and Washington in 1883), the U.S. Supreme Court would later rescind women’s suffrage in 1887.c American Indians would not be granted

Citizenship until 1924; however, many states would prevent them from voting. As women’s rights, including but not limited to suffrage, are being contested and debated,

Jackson portrays an Anglo woman who has the strength to protest Anglo male violence against Native people. Yet this reading of Jackson goes against the way her biographers construct Jackson’s life. For example, as most recent biographer Kate Phillips emphasizes, Jackson “did not support the women’s rights movement of her day” (141).ci

In a private letter, Jackson writes, “Nobody sees the flimsy injustice of half the arguments against Women’s Suffrage &c, more clearly than I do, who hate and oppose it with all my soul.”cii Later, Jackson went to hear Lucy Stone speak at a women’s suffrage convention, and though she had agreed to write a satire of it, she changed her mind and later even

“hospitably entertained” Stone at her house in Colorado.ciii My reading of Jackson suggests a shift in consciousness from her statements and writings in the 1870s against suffrage. Jackson’s text raises issues about what women’s rights in the nineteenth 131

century—including political power and voice—for Anglo women mean in relation to the violence and injustices enacted against American Indians.

Though Aunt Ri is not an advocate for women’s rights directly, as the contemporary discourses defined them, she argues on behalf of Native people. While she does not go to Washington to protest, she challenges several Anglo men who are representatives of various institutions. As a strong female character, Aunt Ri represents

Jackson’s imagining of a woman willing to question Anglo men and their treatment of

Native people; in this way she serves as Jackson’s negotiation of both Native rights and women’s rights discourses. Aunt Ri’s advocating for Native peoples’ rights allows for a notion of feminism—though not labeled as such at the time—that includes battles affecting Native women (and men too). Such alliances had taken place between Anglo women and Black women. Some of these alliances failed due to racism; for example,

Susan B. Anthony had been allied with Ida B Wells, but when Anthony refused to take a public position against lynching their alliance crumbled.civ However, other alliances between Anglo women and Black women were positive, such as Lucy Stone’s alliance with Harriet Tubman.cv Given Jackson’s friendship with Stone, perhaps she was influenced by Stone to imagine alliances with women of color. In Ramona, after

Alessandro has been murdered by an Anglo man who goes unpunished for his crime,

Aunt Ri challenges Sam Merrill, “I know yeow folks hyar don’t seem ter think killin’ an

Injun’s enny murder, but I say ‘t is; an’ yoew’ll all git it brung home ter yer afore her die”

(346). Jackson explains that the young Merrill “listened with unwonted gravity to Aunt 132

Ri’s earnest words,” suggesting that he is not as set ideologically as his father. Regarding

Merrill’s son, Jackson writes,

The character of the western frontiersman is often a singular accumulation of such strata,--the training and beliefs of his earliest days overlain by successions of unrelated and violent experiences, like geological deposits. Underneath the exterior crust of the most hardened and ruffianly nature often remains—its forms not yet quite fossilized . . . (346).

The imagery Jackson uses conveys a sense of the social construction of the frontiersman of the west: early training upon which violent layers, deposits, harden him. Because

Sam Merrill listens ‘with unwonted gravity,” Jackson suggests that younger Anglo men, who are “not yet quite fossilized,” are potentially willing to listen to Aunt Ri, to take her seriously.

Yet another of the Anglo men Jackson confronts, the “Indian agent,” does not regard her protest seriously. After Alessandro is murdered and their first child has died because the doctor who is supposed to care for displaced American Indians refuses to come attend to their baby. Following up on one of Winnemucca’s scathing critiques, the corruptness of “Indian agents,” Jackson, through the voice of Aunti Ri, asks the agent what purpose he serves: “jest what ‘t’ is yeow air here ter dew fur these Injuns. I’ve got my feeling’s considerable stirred up, bein’ among ‘em, ‘n’ knowing this hyar one, thet’s ben murdered. . . . hev yer got enny power to giv’ ‘em anything,--food, or sech? They air powerful pore, most on’ em” (352). Again, her alliance with Ramona and voice of protest on behalf of Native people is built on both a connection to Ramona as a woman, as a mother, but also as a result of understanding what it means to be poor. In a long conversation in which Aunt Ri persistently questions why the doctor who is supposed to 133

help Native people fails to do so, she asks if there is anything the Indian agent can do since that is what he is getting paid for. After he asserts that he cannot do anything she insists, “I want so bad ter git at what ‘t is the Guvernmunt means ter hev yeow dew fur

‘em . . . ef yer can’t put folks inter jail fur robbin’ n’ cheatin’ ‘em, not ter say killin’ em”

(352). In this conversation the agents are ineffectual, and do not work for any kind of justice. Her opposition emphasizes the hypocrisy of a government that says they are helping American Indians when, in reality, the agents they are paying do not help battle against injustices. As she leaves, she is “not a whit clearer in her mind as to the real nature and function of the Indian Agency than she was in the beginning” (352). After her protests the Agent “laughed” “complacently,” while pointing to a pile of paperwork and explaining that he must do his job.

Aunt Ri is an admirable character, and Jackson makes clear that her power as a woman is limited, particularly when state power is male controlled. The agent says to her, “I have no real power over my Indians as I ought to have” to which she replies

“What makes yer call ‘em yeour Injuns?” (351). She challenges the notion that the agent owns the Native people he is supposed to be there to help. In that conversation she continues to question the inefficiency and lack of concern the doctor had for Ramona’s dying baby. While Jackson does not make a definitive statement about why, Aunt Ri is not taken seriously due to her gender and her class positioning. Yet if she were one of the women in Congress that Winnemucca proposes as a solution to the “Indian Problem,” then perhaps her voice would have a scope beyond individual dissent. Jackson’s text thus calls upon Anglo women to take action while recognizing the delimited power of 134

working-class women within a male controlled and dominated culture that makes the laws and sets up such things as the “Indian agency.” While the novel does not ever use the word “suffrage,” as do Ruiz de Burton’s novels, Jackson takes up the issues of political power, voice, and agency for Anglo women and thus engages nineteenth-century women’s rights discourses while also suggesting what women should do with political power should they attain it.

As narrator, Jackson furthers her critique of the nation-state by voicing her opposition to the U.S. justice system (or rather the lack thereof) and the dismissal of

Native women’s voices as valid testimonies in a crime.cvi Near the end of the novel,

Alessandro becomes ill mentally and physically and accidentally trades his horse for another. The owner of the horse, Jim Farrar, feels justified in brutally killing Alessandro in front of Ramona, who bears witness to this settler’s lack of humanity, to his savagery.

Farrar is not punished for the murder of Alessandro, an event that Jackson based on a real incident in history. The narrator comments that “there would never have been found a

San Diego County jury that would convict a white man of murder for killing an Indian, if there were no witnesses to the occurrence except the Indian’s wife” (321). Jackson continues, stating, “The word ‘justice’ had lost its meaning, if indeed it ever had any”

(321). Hence, Jackson critiques not only the American justice system, but also the invalidation of Native women’s voices. The reader is intended to sympathize with

Ramona’s suffering as she grieves her husband’s death. As the Indian agent explains to

Aunt Ri, “I was going to have the man arrested, but they said it would be folly to bring the case to trial. The woman’s testimony would not be believed” (350). In case readers 135

did not listen to Jackson’s critique thirty pages earlier, she repeats the point that the

Native woman could not testify in court. At this point, Aunt Ri asks if anything can be

done for them since the court system has failed, asking if they can get some food at least.

Thus, it is both Aunt Ri and Jackson as narrator who question these injustices. Because

of the context of Aunt Ri’s alliance with Ramona, the words of the narrator above suggest

an alliance between Anglo women and Native women against a male-dominated justice

system that does not allow any women a voice. In this way, Jackson imagines her Anglo

women readers forming an alliance against violent white masculinity—represented by

both the murderer of Alessandro and the “justice” system. Such a questioning of the

justice system is evident in Winnemucca’s writing, and an understanding of the historical

social protests in writings by both Anglo American women (such as Jackson) and

American Indian women (such as Winnemucca) parallels the ways in which late

twentieth- and twenty-first century American Indian women writers such as Leslie

Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, and Evelina Lucero critique the U.S.

justice system and the historical roots of the criminalization of American Indian

people.cvii

Ri Hyer’s character provides a different image of an Anglo woman in the West

than the one ready to lynch Winnemucca. Instead, Aunt Ri is more like the Anglo

woman Mrs. Parrish in Life Among the Piutes, or the portrayal by Winnemucca of the

Anglo woman who saves the Native woman who has been beaten and raped by an Anglo man.cviii Jackson takes the woman of the West that Winnemucca describes as so typical,

and teaches her a lesson that is intended for her readers to follow. By depicting such an 136

alliance, Jackson attempts to inspire other Anglo women to protest violence against

American Indians, thus suggesting that there should be more of an intersection between the issues of women’s rights and Native peoples’ rights than what contemporary discourses reflect. The alliance that Jackson imagines also empowers an Anglo woman to question and challenge her husband, an Anglo “Indian agent,” and the U.S. government, suggesting for Anglo women readers a role model who is not complicit with colonial male power.

Jackson’s choice to create Ramona as a mixed blood character with an “olive complexion” and blue eyes may have been a way, on her part, to rely on white supremacist notions of allegiance for her Anglo readers, helping them relate to and form an alliance with Ramona. As Luis-Brown argues, “Ramona’s blue eyes suggest that she is also a site of identification for whites” (827). Perhaps, too, readers enmeshed in white supremacy might see all of Ramona’s goodness as a mother and virtuousness as a result of her Scottish blood. Yet the lightness of her skin is not described in relation to her virtuousness, as is the case with characters in Ruiz de Burton’s novels. One might ask why Ramona had to have an Scottish father, and how this appeals to an Anglo audience.

Yet her Scottish ancestry also alludes to a history of British colonialism in relation to

Scottish and Irish peoples. Further, by making Ramona European and American Indian

Jackson points to the reality of mixed blood identity, and the text even potentially puts into question binary and culturally constructed notions of race. Luis-Brown argues that

“by soliciting the identification of readers with racially ambiguous subjects, the covert plot undermines racial discourses of absolute difference” (827). After all, Ramona 137

speaks Spanish, learns English, understands Luiseño, has blue eyes, is Catholic, passes as

Mexican American, sees herself as a Native woman for most of the novel, and makes alliances with both an Anglo and Native women. As such, she defies rigid racial and cultural categories and her very existence puts into question the constructedness of such categories.

Alliances Between Women Against Colonialist Power and Violence Against Women:

Given that one of the issues in discourses about women’s rights was the right for a woman to refuse sex—the right over her own body—the portrayal of Ramona’s lack of rights would have caused readers concerned about women’s rights to think about the ways that discourses about women’s rights should be extended to include Native women.

Because Jackson’s portrayal suggests an alliance between Anglo and Native women against violent white masculinity, her strategy is similar, then, not only to Winnemucca’s and Ruiz de Burton’s, but also to Harriet Jacobs’ strategy in her 1863 narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: all four nineteenth-century women writers imagine a female

Anglo readership who would be horrified at realities of sexual assault against women of color and all four writers hope to forge an alliance between women against violent white masculinity, sexual predators, and colonialist oppression.cix

In Ramona, the only other Anglo woman in the text is a wife of the western frontiersman who has taken over Alessandro’s house in Temecula; her portrayal directly links violence against American Indian people to Anglo men’s violence against Anglo women. When Alessandro and Ramona first arrive at his village, which has been taken over by Anglos, Alessandro tells her to wait for him at the graveyard in the darkness. 138

There, she comforts José’s wife who is there mourning over her husband’s grave.

Alessandro sneaks over to his old house and peers into the window. He sees a woman whose “face was a sensitive one, and her voice kindly; but the man had the countenance of a brute—of a human brute” (215). She exclaims to her husband, “[i]t seems as if I should never get rights in this world!” (216). As they argue he says to her that she sure

“can grumble” . . . and “that’s about all you women are good for, anyhow” (216). At such verbal abuse, “the woman looked at him reproachfully, but did not speak for a moment. Then her cheeks flushed, and seeming unable to repress the speech, she exclaimed, ‘Well, I’m thankful he did let the poor things take their furniture’” . . . “It’s bad enough to take their houses this way” (216). He yells back to her, “Oh, you shut up your head for a blamed fool, will you!” (216). The narrator explains, “he was half drunk, his worst and most dangerous state” (216). The conversation that passes begins with the woman asserting her voice about her lack of rights. However, the conversation shifts as she asserts her perspective on injustices committed against American Indians and, thus, establishes a connection Jackson makes between verbally protesting injustices against women and American Indians. Her husband is verbally violent with her, and then states that “we’ll have to shoot two of three of ‘em yet, before we’re rid of ‘em,” referring to the American Indians, and suggesting a connection between violence against women and violence against American Indians. Though this man does not physically assault the woman in this scene, Jackson suggests quite blatantly that he has a violent temper and that, even if he does not hit his wife physically, he is verbally violent with her. One of their children actually sees Alessandro at the window, and points to him. The woman 139

carefully replies, “‘I don’t believe is was anybody, after all, father,’ persisted the woman.

‘Bud’s always seein’ things’” (217). Her husband contents himself with just firing his

gun into the night, and Alessandro escapes. Though hesitant to stand up to her violent,

drunk husband, the woman asserts her views and suggests to readers an alliance between

women against white male colonialist violence.

Jackson furthers an alliance between her Anglo female readers and Native women

by addressing the issue of the rape of Native women by Anglo men.cx While she does not emphasize rape nearly as much as Winnemucca, Jackson still addresses the reality of the rape of Native women which would have had the effect of appealing to her female readership. Before Alessandro is murdered, some Anglo men come to their house to steal meat, claiming Ramona and Alessandro stole it. At this point Ramona is alone. Jackson writes,

‘if you touch it, I will kill you!’ cried Ramona, beside herself with rage; and she sprang between the men, her uplifted knife gleaming. ‘Hoity-toity! Cried Jake, stepping back; ‘that’s a handsome squaw when she’s mad! Say boys, let’s leave her some of the meat . . . (306).

Ramona defends herself and their food, and as she does so their position of power over her is clear: for one they outnumber her, but Jake also objectifies her, ridiculing her with racist epithets. At this point Alessandro returns and confronts the men who then leave, but Jackson makes clear that Ramona’s safety as a woman is in danger. Like

Winnemucca, Jackson points to the necessity for Native women to arm themselves in self-defense against Anglo male predators. In the above passage, Jake’s derision of her displays his power, and the threat of rape by these men is also an act of power that reflects not only a gendered hierarchy but an attitude of racial superiority as well. After 140

this, Ramona suggests going to the high mountains right away, “bursting into violent weeping as she recalled the insolent leer with which the man Jake had looked at her. ‘Oh

I cannot stay here’” (307). Jackson expresses the oppression that Ramona feels as the object of a gaze by a man who threatens to dominate and assault her, an oppression that would have been understood by many of her Anglo female readers. Yet through this narration, the Anglo readers can see how Ramona is doubly oppressed: as a woman and as a Native person.

Venegas addresses the way that Ramona “highlights the heroine’s mixed blood heritage and makes it the focal point of her exotic beauty,” to contend that the novel follows a “long tradition of appealing to an American libido hungry for exotic Native maidens to justify violence and racial domination” (74). Venegas makes an excellent point about the way Ramona’s beauty is emphasized; after all Jackson describes her as having “just enough of the olive tint in her complexion to underlie and enrich her skin without making it swarthy. Her hair was like her Indian mother’s, heavy and black, but her eyes were like her father’s, steel-blue” (qtd. in Venegas 74). The effect of such exoticization is not to justify violence, as Venegas contends, because Jackson vehemently contests violence against American Indians and specifically calls attention to the problem of sexual assault of Native women. Additionally, as the following demonstrates, Jackson conveys the fear that Ramona has to live with after Jake threatens her.

In Antonia I. Castañeda’s essay, “History and Politics of Violence Against

Women,” she cites the first written documentation of rape in the Americas—by a man who came with Columbus on his second journey—and quotes from his letter to a friend 141

in which he brags about raping a Native woman. Castañeda locates rape within a history of colonial violence and the continued violence against women of color in the United

States in the end of the twentieth century. She writes that “it is imperative that we understand that in the United States, in the Americas, rape and sexual violence are inextricably tied to a pervasive racism” (312). Jackson’s novel allows readers to make these connections between colonialism, rape, and racism. Though Jackson’s biographers and her own letters denounce suffragists, her novel points to her concern for women’s rights in general, particularly regarding the violation of women’s bodies by men. In the context within which Ramona is written, some women’s rights activists in the 1870s supported such things as “free love,” which included the “right to refuse sexual intercourse,” including to one’s husband.cxi For Jackson’s readers familiar with such arguments, she points out the sexual servitude of Native women to Anglo men in a time when no laws protected Native women. As a text, then, Ramona, like Life Among the

Piutes, asks its Anglo women readers to consider the then-prevalent contemporary discourses about women’s rights regarding issues such as rights over their bodies and how such issues pertain to Native women.cxii

Jackson’s portrayal of Jake as predator of Ramona also testifies to the historical reality that Anglo men had the power to force Native women into sexual servitude.cxiii

Even though California became a “free state” in 1850—and slavery was thus illegal—the state also passed a law that allowed indenture of Native males under eighteen and Native females under fifteen years old.cxiv As Castañeda explains, “the abduction and sale of

Indians—especially young women and children—were carried on as a regular business 142

enterprise in California” (316). Given this reality, Ramona’s fear that Jake is going to take her into slavery is not the drama of a sentimental novel: it is a fear based on historical reality. As Jackson explains,

new terror had entered into Ramona’s life; she dared not tell it to Alessandro; she hardly put into words in her thoughts. But she was haunted by the face of the man Jake, as by a vision of evil, and on one pretext and another she contrived to secure the presence of some one of the Indian women in her house whenever Alessandro was away. Every day she saw the man riding past . . . Ramona’s instinct was right. Jake was merely biding his time. . . . he wished to have an Indian woman come to live with him and keep his house. . . . think[ing] he was doing a good thing for the squaw. (308)

Jake wishes to have Ramona as a servant, and given his earlier references to her looks, his desire to have her “keep his house” is a euphemism for a kind of relationship wherein the man has absolute power over the woman and can demand sex at any time. It also completely dismisses the fact that Alessandro is the legal husband to Ramona. Jake approaches her one day, and asks her to come join him. She yells “beast” and flees “to the nearest house where she sank on the floor and burst into tears” (309). Jake tells this story to his friend, Sam Merrill’s father, who replies, that “there’s plenty you can get, though, if you want ‘em. They’re first rate about a house, and jest’s faithful’s dogs”

(309). Merrill’s words refer to a history of sexual assault in which Native women were

“things” (as Merrill describes them) that an Anglo man could “get” and keep in servitude.

Jackson thus locates the sexual servitude of Native women within the history of genocide and removal, making a similar protest as Winnemucca does in her testimony about the savagery of Anglo male predators of Native women. In a context in which the popular discourses of “Indian captivity narratives”—widely disseminated between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries—depicted Native men as “savage beasts” who 143

attacked and captured Anglo women and raped them, Jackson’s text reverses that colonialist image and, as does Winnemucca’s text, places the savagery of the frontier on

Anglo men.

Between Three Women is a Man: Mexican American Women as Scapegoats for

Anglo Women

Within an economy of colonial desire and violence against Native women and men, Jackson’s imagined alliance between Anglo and Native women is rhetorically strategic; however, Jackson’s imagining of alliances does not extend to Mexican

American women. On the one hand, Jackson’s portrayal of Señora Moreno’s plight is sympathetic, and shows the injustices she has experienced. For example, in reference to

Anglo Americans stealing the land of Mexican Americans Jackson writes, “Once a thief, always a thief. Nobody need feel himself safe under American rule. There was no knowing what might happen any day; and year by year the lines of sadness, resentment, anxiety, and antagonism deepened on the Señora’s fast aging face” (13). However, the

Señora’s “Anti-Indianism” becomes more and more violent until, to prevent Ramona from marrying Alessandro because he is a Native man, she finally imprisons Ramona within the house and becomes an abusive parent.cxv Anglo women readers are then allied with Ramona not only against violent colonial white masculinity, but against a violent

Mexican American woman.

In a twist on the “Indian captivity narrative,” Ramona becomes captive to Señora

Moreno, and is imprisoned within the hacienda. The violence enacted by Señora Moreno starkly contrasts the kindness and acceptance that Aunt Ri extends to Ramona later in the 144

novel. Señora Moreno threatens to lock Ramona up in a convent, and instead locks her

up in the house. When the Señora finds out that Ramona loves Alessandro, “the Señora

did a shameful deed: she struck the girl on the mouth, a cruel blow” (113). Moments

later, “the Señora looked as if she might kill her” (114).cxvi The narrator asks readers to

imagine, “What was not that terrible Señora capable of doing?” (116). Further, the

narrator locates Señora Moreno’s rage in her racism: “Since she knew that the Señorita

herself was half Indian, why should she think it so dreadful a thing for her to marry an

Indian man?” (116).cxvii Immediately she asks where her mother is and if she is alive, and

Señora Moreno replies that she was “some low, vicious creature, that your father married

when he was out of his senses, as you are now, when you are talking of marrying

Alessandro” (133). Señora Moreno sees Ramona as superior to Alessandro because she

has been raised on an elite Mexican American estate, and probably because she is also

part European. Jackson’s text calls attention to the reality of racism that was prevalent

amongst elite Mexican Americans who saw themselves as superior to Native people.

While Aunt Ri is allowed the chance to unlearn her “Anti-Indianism,” Señora Moreno is

ultimately vilified in her violence against Ramona. And while Señora Moreno is shown

to be a victim of American colonialism, the alliance between Anglo and Native women

that Jackson imagines for her readers is optimistic while an alliance between Mexican

American women and Native women is not fathomed. Señora Moreno embodies the

figure of the “evil stepmother” archetype, and because of this characterization there is no

hope—in the imaginative space of Ramona—for an alliance between Mexican American women and Native women against Anglo male colonial power.cxviii On the one hand, 145

Ramona raises questions about the realities of racism by Mexican Americans against

Native people; however, in the process Señora Moreno is vilified while a critical consciousness is reserved only for two Anglo women in the text.

The relationships between the two Mexican American women and Ramona are fraught with antagonism. While Señora Moreno holds a position of power over Ramona,

Margarita is Ramona’s servant but, in the language of the novel, they were “more like friends than like mistress and maid” (41). The power dynamic involved in a relationship between servant and the served is made to seem irrelevant. At the same time that Jackson portrays their relationship as magically transcending class divisions, the relationship is quickly overturned by rivalry for a man. Whereas Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men analyzes the homoerotic triangulation of desire between two men over one woman, the triangulation of desire between Margarita, Ramona, and Alessandro is not homoerotic but rather a heterosexist rivalry between two women over one man that causes the women to lose their friendship. Between them grew a “bitter seed,” as Margarita’s jealousy for

Alessandro’s affection grew, “and when it blossomed, Ramona would have an enemy”

(76). In this case, a man comes between these two women. At one point, Margarita declares that Señora Moreno “shan’t starve her to death” (that Margarita would interfere), but her “jealousy again got the better of her sympathy” (114). Margarita’s jealousy is that which “only a woman repulsed in the presence of another woman can see and feel;” she is “sulky, abject in her gait, but with a raging whirlwind in her heart” (83). Jackson continues, explaining that “Margarita clenched her hands. The seed had blossomed.

Ramona had an enemy” (85). While this female rivalry seems more a dramatic part of a 146

plot device than an attempt on Jackson’s part to comment on the heterosexist competition

for male attention between two women, its depiction reflects a problem of a heterosexist

culture in which women learn to compete against each other for male attention.

The vilification of Margarita and Señora Moreno starkly contrasts the alliance

between Ramona and Aunt Ri, emphasizing the celebration of the Anglo woman and her

ability to re-think racism against American Indians. The othering of Señora Moreno, and

her wicked racism, serves to highlight what Aunt Ri is not. Perhaps Señora Moreno

serves to remind contemporary Anglo readers of what they, according to Jackson, should

not be like. The sisterhood that Jackson imagines between Aunt Ri and Ramona seems too easy—from the shift in consciousness that Aunt Ri has, to the last comments made by the narrator about Aunt Ri, “The last vestige of her prejudice against Indians had melted and gone, in the presence of their simple-hearted friendliness” (347). The work of unlearning “Anti-Indianism” or any kind of racism is of course a much longer, difficult process. And still, in the end, in the narrator’s words American Indian identity is still defined as “simple-hearted,” thus making the shift in Aunt Ri’s consciousness a bit too

“simple-hearted.”

Cultural Relevance of Ramona to the Twenty–First Century:

Aside from the influence that Jackson’s widely sold novel, Ramona, has had on

Americans, her story continues to impact people’s understanding of the history of

California. Jackson “considered her novel a failure” when she died of cancer in 1885, only a year after writing it (Delyser x). However, the impact it continues to have on

American culture, and California culture especially, is worthy of discussion. Several film 147

versions of the book were made, the first of which was done by D.W. Griffith in 1910.cxix

Numerous streets are named “Ramona” in Southern and even Northern California; a town is named Ramona; and one can even stay in a Best Western called the “Ramona Inn” in

Carmel.cxx But the effects are greater than simply the naming of hotels and streets. In

Dydia Delyser’s Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California, she discusses the effects that the novel has had on tourism and provides an important analysis of what she calls the “Ramona myth,” i.e. how “Jackson’s work of fiction changed how people remember southern California’s past, how a new past was inscribed on the landscape and marked on tourists’ itineraries as thousands flocked to the sites the novel described” (ix). Tourists can still visit Ramona’s “marriage place,” the hacienda that she lived on, her grave, her birthplace, and other attractions.cxxi

Additionally, a “Ramona Pageant” takes places in Hemet, California, where a play based on the novel has been performed annually since 1923.cxxii The Ramona

Pageant is the longest surviving outdoor drama in the history of the United States. It runs for six weeks on Saturdays and Sundays every year and draws in a mostly Anglo audience who drive from the San Diego, Orange Country, San Bernardino Country, and

Los Angeles areas to see the play. While it sold approximately 40,000 tickets annually in the 1970s, it still sold 11,000 tickets in 2005. The production of this play attests to the impact that Jackson’s original novel Ramona continues to have in the Southern California region, causing audience members to become more aware of the injustices and violence that comprise the history of the United States. Although much of the audience may simply come to see a love story, the play does important cultural work. As Navajo and 148

Sioux actor Vincent Whipple, who plays the lead part of Alessandro, explains, “It’s important for me as a native person to bring myself, my experience . . . to the story”

(Susannah Rosenblatt). The cast of 386 actors has changed from its early twentieth- century Anglo actors in brown face to portray Mexican Americans and American Indians in leading roles.cxxiii Additionally, American Indians have influenced the pageant’s production by adding traditional songs in Cahuilla that celebrate such events as births and weddings. After the performance, the actors and actresses were walking around and I asked an American Indian man, who was a minor actor in the play, what he thought of the songs being incorporated. He said that “the songs are good because we want to teach the [mostly Anglo] audience something about Cahuilla culture.” The pageant necessitates further historical and literary analysis beyond the scope of this project: it makes the studying of Jackson’s novel Ramona more relevant to the present not only as a literary venture but also as a cultural study.cxxiv

Jackson’s Ramona continues to affect Southern California culture, and has a long history of doing so. It has even been appropriated for a number of advertisements featuring a Native woman. Delyser includes several of these in her book, but does not discuss how these images appear and what ideologies they produce (170-1). One is a

1925 “Ramona Wine Tonic,” featuring a Native woman with long braids holding a blanket and standing by several pieces of pottery. Another is a 1937 ad for “Ramona

Perfume,” in which a much younger Native woman, dressed only in a short wrap, exposes her legs and upper chest and wears a feather out of her braids. To borrow a phrase from Gerald Vizenor’s Manifest Manners, “This portrait is not an Indian.” 149

Whereas the Ramona in Jackson’s novel exposes the problem of male Anglo predation on

Native women, the appropriation of Jackson’s Ramona exoticizes her body, corporatizing it and erasing the social protest that Ramona represents in Jackson’s novel. Such images erase the violence and oppression that Jackson’s novel protests, and instead reproduce a colonialist image of Ramona ready-made for consumption.

Yet, one might ask, what happened to the “real Ramona” of Jackson’s novel?

How was her story appropriated to then sell a novel, even if it was intended to rally people against actions done by the U.S. government?cxxv The publication had an effect on the “real Ramona,” or, rather, the “real Ramonas.” After the publication of Jackson’s novel, several women claimed to be the “real Ramona.”cxxvi One of these Ramonas,

Ramona Lubo, posed by the grave of her husband, Juan Diego (the man whose murder is what Jackson based the end of her novel on), and charged fees for tourists to take her picture. Additionally, in an 1899 article in the Riverside Morning Enterprise, the writer makes horribly racist comparisons between the fictional Ramona and the “real Ramona.”

He reports,

the other day I saw Ramona—the real Ramona— . . . of the story. She still lives at Cahuilla. . . . Her home is a poor, wretched, wooden shanty, looking more like a large-sized dilapidated dry goods box than a human habitation. . . . While it may shock many of the preconceived notions of those who expect this Ramona to fully comport with the ideal Ramona of ‘H.H.’s’ novel, it is only truth to say that neither in person, face, mentality or morals is Ramona Lugo [sic] the being we have learned to love. That such ideal characters are found among the Indians, twenty years of close study and observation of many Indian tribes compels me to believe. They are just as common as are the ideal characters of novelists among the white race. . . . No, alas! The real Ramona of this portion of the tale, the wife of Juan Diego, has the squat, plump, shapeless body of a wellfed, but coarse and vulgar animal. Her face expresses neither fine feelings, refinement, culture (not even a rude Indian culture) nor morality (Delyser 129).

150

Such a report testifies to the ideologies Jackson was trying to work against and question.

Unfortunately, the reporter could see only with the racist, “Anti-Indian,” colonialist lens that he learned from American culture. Objectifying and evaluating Ramona’s body, the reporter dehumanizes her, much in the same way that Jake dehumanizes the Ramona in

Jackson’s novel.cxxvii

The ending of Ramona has been critiqued for the way Alessandro is murdered and thus vanishes, while Ramona flees with Felipe to Mexico.cxxviii In the space of Ramona, it seems that due to Anglo encroachment there is no room for Mexican Americans or

American Indian people in California. Alemán argues that Ramona “consolidates whiteness,” affirming “’natural’ categories of racial identity that predestine Native

Americans to extinction, mestizos to removal, and whites to cultural dominance” (63).

Because Alessandro dies in the end and Ramona flees with Felipe to Mexico, the novel does participate in the “vanishing Indian” theme so prevalent in American culture. In the end, Felipe wants to go to Mexico because the “fast incoming Americans were odious to him . . . he was beginning to yearn for Mexico—for Mexico, which he had never seen, yet yearned for like an exile. There he might yet live among men of his own race and degree, and of congenial beliefs” (359). In this way, the novel seems to be adopting segregation as a solution. Yet, at the same time, their fleeing suggests that the spaces of the United States, where there is supposed to be liberty and justice for all, are not safe spaces for Mexican American and American Indian people. Luis-Brown reads the end of the novel and the characters’ move to Mexico as an expression of “their disgust with the

U.S.” (829). He also rightly points out that Jackson “even hints of an anti-imperialist 151

uprising against the U.S. Alessandro says that the Indians would join the Mexicans if they were to ‘rise against’ the U.S.,” suggesting yet another potential alliance in the novel

(829).

For this reason, readings of Jackson’s novel need to be paired with current theorists such as Louis Owens, who, in Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family,

Place, examines the constructed identity of Native people as a product of the film industry and a long historical process of erasure, of a reinscription colonialist definitions of Native identity.cxxix Owens writes that as part of this colonial storytelling, “the Indian is supposed to vanish, to die culturally and literally” and that in such renderings, Native people are not portrayed as living people who continue to suffer from oppression due to continued racism and injustices (70).cxxx Because of this history of portrayals, writers such as Jackson need also to be read and studied alongside contemporary American

Indian writers. In the words of Wilma Mankiller, former Chief of the Cherokee Nation,

At different times throughout our history, we have been described as ‘vanishing Americans’ or have been considered relics of an ancient past. Despite all that, we not only survived—not intact, certainly—but we kept enough culture and tradition to sustain us through all the battles of the past and those yet to come. (44)

This emphasis on survival is threaded throughout Mankiller’s autobiography. Like

Winnemucca, Mankiller’s autobiography focuses in part on her individual experience, but it is also a testimony to injustices the Cherokee people have suffered. The emphasis on survival is something that many current American Indians focus on in their writing and when representing themselves.cxxxi 152

Conclusions: Decolonizing Feminisms in the Twenty-First Century

Through her portrayal of Aunt Ri, who claims, “I’m an Umerikan,” Jackson calls upon Anglo women not to be complicit in the colonial project and urges them to protest as Americans, thus enlisting Anglo women’s voices to express dissent in patriotic terms.

Aunt Ri exclaims in the end of the novel, “I jest wish the hull world could see what I’ve seen! Thet’s all!” (348), suggesting that Jackson, through writing the novel, hopes the whole world can see the injustices that Aunt Ri has seen. Through Ri, Jackson provides readers with a paradigm of an Anglo woman contesting various institutions: the justice system (that will not accept the testimony of Ramona regarding Alessandro’s murder), marriage (questioning the treatment of women their husbands in Anglo culture), the U.S. government (the Congress that makes the laws), and the “Indian agent” system (the doctor who refuses to help Alessandro and the agent who cares only about paperwork).

Rather than separate women’s rights from Native rights, Jackson suggests a merging, an alliance between women against oppressive American institutions. Like Winnemucca’s text, Jackson’s text raises questions about the exclusion of American Indian women from discourses about women’s rights. For example, the woman settler who stands up for herself by saying that she does not have rights as an individual also speaks out against her violently tempered husband regarding the fact that they have stolen Alessandro’s house.

Also, for women concerned with rights over their bodies and the right to refuse sex even in marriage, Jackson points out that American Indian women suffer from sexual assault and servitude to Anglo men. Through the two Anglo women characters who do not 153

repress their criticisms of violent, unjust Anglo men, Jackson suggests that Anglo women ought to voice resistance against injustice for themselves as individuals as well as injustices enacted by Anglo men against American Indians. While Ramona conveys optimism about Anglo women unlearning “anti-Indianism,” it unfortunately uses the

Mexican American woman’s “Anti-Indianism” to make the Anglo woman in her text seem all the more enlightened. Jackson’s notion of unlearning racism was progressive for her time, even if the task in Ramona is represented as easy, as too simple. However, the process of unlearning racism is a task that still needs to be genuinely dealt with by

Americans in the twenty-first century. Jackson simultaneously empowers and appropriates Ri Hyer as an uneducated, working-class woman from the South in order to empower her middle-and upper-class Anglo women readers in the North to protest the injustices enacted against American Indians. Yet her class positioning suggests that she is more understanding of the struggle of American Indians displaced from their land and struggling to survive. As a working-class woman, Aunt Ri does not embody the ideologies that her middle-and upper-class Anglo sisters did who were part of reform movements such as the Women’s National Indian Association. Aunt Ri does not try to change Ramona to teach her “proper” gender roles: on the contrary, Aunt Ri learns from

Ramona. Further, her lack of power and privilege as a working-class woman allows her to have a better understanding of Ramona’s and Alessandro’s struggles. Like

Winnemucca, Jackson critiques violent white masculinity, and the racist ideologies rooted in the systemic raping of Native women, suggesting an alliance between Anglo and Native women against such violence. 154

Jackson maps a violent landscape of the West at the same time that she

simultaneously romanticizes the mission system, and describes exploitation of American

Indians in pastoral, romantic ways. The colonialist structures of the missions still stand at

the end of Jackson’s novel, but there are also fissures to structures of colonial male

power—such as the government that condones and is responsible for violence against

American Indians. Jackson should not be glorified as an advocate for social justice

without examining the problematic views in her writing; nor should she be dismissed

because of the troublesome racial stereotypes and glorification of the mission system that

her writing reproduces. Even in a novel aimed at social protest, Jackson cannot escape

her “Western eyes,” to borrow a term from Chandra Mohanty. In Feminism Without

Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Mohanty writes about the “urgent

need to examine the political implications of our analytic strategies and principles” (175).

As such, Jackson’s writing too should continue to be studied and examined for its

“political implications” and for the “strategies and principles” that are the basis for her writing.

For Jackson, once an avowed anti-suffragist, feminism matters: even though the term did not yet exist as such, it matters in the representation that Jackson envisions of Ri

Hyer, and the way her voice as a working-class woman is dismissed by the “Indian agent.” It matters in her construction of a strong Anglo woman able to challenge Anglo male authority and systems of power. For Jackson, feminist matters do not simply include Anglo women: feminist matters include a call to action against injustices enacted by Anglo male colonialists against American Indians. The alliances that Jackson 155

attempts to envision, to imagine, are other than the so-called alliances between Anglo and

Native women claimed by groups such as the Women’s National Indian Association and

other reform groups aimed at nterrogates g American Indians in order to assimilate them into American culture. Given the context of women’s rights movements that at the time did not forge alliances between Native women and Anglo women, Ramona imagines

a new direction for women’s rights that attempts to make a bridge between Native rights

and women’s rights. Still, Jackson’s imagination is under the influence of her “western

eyes,” to borrow a term from Mohanty. She did not develop the alliance between

Ramona and Ri into something lasting (since Ramona moves to Mexico), but Jackson

does plants seeds, ideas regarding the potential for alliances between women. Studying

the representation and imagination of alliances—and the failure of alliances—between

Anglo, Native, and Mexican American women in literature is crucial and needs to be

done more extensively because, as Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, and others have said,

alliances between women are crucial for the survival of feminist movements. In writing

about sisterhood, Lorde explains in “The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the

Master’s House,” “I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of

knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives

there” (101). Aunt Ri’s willingness to address her own loathing, her own fears of

difference, is a lesson that is still, unfortunately, relevant today. A genuine willingness to

reevaluate her own internalized racism is what Moraga urges women to do in “La

Güera.” As she explains, “it is essential that radical feminists confront their fear of and

resistance to each other, because without this, there will be no bread on the table. 156

Simply, we will not survive . . . We women need each other” (34). Studying literary representations of alliances between women in the U.S. is an excellent way to gain insight into the history of feminist ideologies in the United States, and conversely, studying the history of women’s rights movements also provides an insightful lens into the workings of literature. In discussions of what comprises feminist theory, literature is sometimes not considered as articulating a “theory” of feminism. Rather, people use theory to elucidate literature or doing a theoretical feminist approach to literature.

However, texts such as Jackson’s and Winnemucca’s articulate a theory about the women’s rights movement and political power/agency for Anglo women. Ramona envisions connections between Anglo women and Native women in a way that theorizes the necessity for Anglo women to recognize the struggles of Native women and voice resistance to male-led colonialist violence. Ramona can also be read as a theory about the necessity for alliances between women. Acknowledging the limitations of how these alliances are imagined by writers such as Jackson can help as we envision alliances between women today. On whose terms are alliances forged? What assumptions are made? What work at eliminating racism amongst Anglo women must be done in order for interracial alliances to be bridged? What is excluded from “feminist issues” in both theory and practice? Why do many Native women activists hesitate to call themselves feminists? As Chapter One discusses, some Native women use the term feminist to describe themselves at times while others redefine what it means and still others refuse to identity using that label. Talalip activist and writer Janet McCloud confronts important and difficult issues regarding alliances and feminism: 157

Some of us can’t help but think maybe a lot of these ‘better ideas’ offered by non- Indians claiming to be our ‘allies’ are intended to accomplish exactly these sorts of diversion and disunity within our movement. So, let me toss out a different sort of ‘progression’ to all you Marxists and socialists and feminists out there. You join us in liberating our land and lives. Lose the privilege you acquire at our expense by occupying our land (qtd. in “American Indian Women: At the Center . . .” 318).

These questions continue to be raised by various feminists in the twenty-first century and attest to the necessity for further work both from a theoretical and literary perspective and in terms of praxis. Jackson was, in her own way, working out some of these difficult issues that McCloud raises about privilege, Anglo encroachment on Native peoples’ land, the role of Anglo women in colonialism, and women’s rights. A century later, in the

1980s, feminists such as Paula Gunn Allen, Moraga, Anzaldúa, Lorde, and others who contributed to The Bridge Called My Back addressed these difficult questions (and more) to critique the racism within the second-wave feminist movement. Feminists continue to address these issues in such anthologies as The Bridge We Call Home (2002), and there is still a lot of work to be done. Jackson’s novel provides an excellent lens into some of the history of these issues.

Such an examination of Jackson’s voice of dissent against injustices enacted upon

American Indians by the U.S. government and a reading of her text as articulating a theory about feminism helps understand how that late twentieth and early twenty-first century American Indian writers critique such things as “civilizing missions,”

Christianity, and the relationship of these to Anglo women. Further, an understanding of the literary history of Jackson’s novel as well as the contextual history of such groups as the Women’s National Indian Association and women’s rights groups helps understand 158

the historical roots of ideologies about Native people that have effected political alliances between Anglo and Native women throughout the last century. Knowledge of the ways

Winnemucca and Jackson deal with these issues helps illuminate the ways more recent

American Indian women writers critique a history of violence against Native women.

Representations of Anglo women in more recent American Indian women’s novels is elucidated by awareness of the following: the historical roots of racism within women’s rights movements; the exclusion of American Indian women’s struggles from such movements; the appropriation of Iroquois culture by Sarah Joselyn Gage and others; the ideological attitudes held by Anglo women missionaries and espoused by groups such as the Women’s National Indian Association; and the ways nineteenth-century writers such as Winnemucca and Jackson engage these issues. As the following chapter will examine, knowing such histories also helps to understand the social protests by María Amparo

Ruiz de Burton and the ways she locates Mexican American women in relation to Native and Anglo American women; how she portrays the struggles of Mexican Americans to retain rights to their land following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; her critique of

Anglo male predation of Mexican American women and girls; and the relationship she demonstrates between Mexican American women and issues being addressed in women’s rights movements in the nineteenth century. 159

CHAPTER THREE

“YOU AIN’T GOING TO SEND MY MOTHER TO CONGRESS”: MARÍA

AMPARO RUIZ DE BURTON

NEGOTIATES WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND ALLIANCES BETWEEN WOMEN

AGAINST VIOLENT WHITE MASCULINITYcxxxii

Acuérdese que soy mujer . . . y mexicana . . . con el alma encerrada en una jaula de fierro, pues así nos encierra ‘la socidedad’ luego que nacemos, como los chino los pies de sus mujeres.

Ruiz de Burton, from Conflicts of Interest 290

[Remember that I am a woman . . . and Mexican . . . with my soul enclosed in a cage of irons, thus does ‘society’ confine us as soon as we are born, just as the Chinese do the feet of their women.] translation minecxxxiii

In Who Would Have Thought It?(1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885),

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton confronts a colonialist agenda within which both Anglo

American and Mexican American women are oppressed—though decidedly not in the same ways. Her characters’ experiences range from not being taken seriously to threats of sexual assault and emotional and verbal violence by Anglo men. This chapter examines how, within the contexts of colonial violence and discourses about women’s rights, Ruiz de Burton intervenes to question Anglo women’s complicity with Anglo men 160

in power. Within these contexts, Ruiz de Burton imagines alliances between Anglo and

Mexican American women and simultaneously points to the reality of racism that divides

women. In this way, she calls for a new definition of feminism—though not labeled as

such at the time—that is similar to the interventions made by Sarah Winnemucca and

Helen Hunt Jackson. As Chapter Four will further demonstrate, such a study helps to

analyze not only the history and politics of feminist alliances between women in the

United States, but also twentieth-century literary renderings of solidarity between

women. This chapter provides historical contexts that will enable a comparison of Ruiz

de Burton’s social protest to twentieth-century Chicana writers such as Cherríe Moraga

and Helena María Viramontes, particularly in the way they mediate and offer new

directions for feminisms.cxxxiv

Though there is no record of Helen Hunt Jackson having read Ruiz de Burton’s

1872 Who Would Have Thought It?, the plots of Ruiz de Burton’s first novel and

Jackson’s 1884 Ramona are strangely similar—both have adoptions of non-Anglo girls

who come with wealth and are held captive by their wicked adoptive mothers.

Additionally, both novels protest the U.S. government and end with the main characters’

decision to flee to Mexico. Who Would Have Thought It? and Ramona imagine, though with different lenses, the potential for solidarity between women. Ruiz de Burton’s novels offer an important insight into a history of division between women. The potential for alliances between Anglo women—such as Mary Darrell and Lavinia

Sprig—and Mexican American women parallels these Anglo women’s emerging feminist consciousness and their growing consciousness about injustices to Mexican Americans. 161

Such a parallel suggests, on Ruiz de Burton’s part, a ground from which alliances between Mexican American and Anglo women against male colonialist violence could be built. Like Jackson, Ruiz de Burton demonstrates further that the dismantling of violent white masculinity would benefit both Anglo women and colonial subjects, since the construction of white masculinity, as she portrays it, is enmeshed in attitudes of superiority toward Anglo women and Mexican Americans.

Ruiz de Burton’s novels The Squatter and the Don (1885) and Who Would Have

Thought It? (1872) critique the exclusion of women in the male-dominated social and legal systems in the United States, a protest that parallels her critique of injustices experienced by Mexican Americans whose land claims were not recognized by the

United States government after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.cxxxv Her personal letters make these parallel forms of oppression clear. In a letter dated February

15, 1869, Ruiz de Burton asserts to her friend Mariano Vallejo, a Mexican American who lost most of his land to Anglo encroachment, that “progress” is not benefiting Mexican

Americans or women: “No. Es necessario que yo no me entusiasme por el progreso del continente. ¿Para qué? Ni mi raza ni mi sexo van a sacar mejora alguna . . .” (qtd. in

Conflicts of Interest 280).cxxxvi [“No. It is necessary that I am not enthusiastic for the progress of the continent. For what? Neither my race nor my sex are going to come out as the better one …] (translation mine). Later that same year, after the death of her husband, she writes again to Vallejo regarding her land title dispute and her lack of rights as a Mexican American woman. She writes, “¡Con su entusiasmo, al hablar del progreso de California! . . . Pero después recaigo en mi desaliento y digo, “¡Ah! Si yo fuera 162

hombre! ¡Qué miserable cosa es una mujer!” (Conflicts of Interest xi). [“With your

enthusiasm, talking of the progress of California . . . but after gathering myself in my

discouragement, I say, ‘Oh, if I were a man!’ What a miserable thing a woman is!”]

(translation mine). She points out that progress in California is reserved for men, aware

of the multiple layers of oppression that confront her: “Como si ser mujer no fuera

suficiente calamidad sin añadir otras.” “As if being a woman were not enough of a

calamity without having to bear others as well” (translation by Sanchéz and Pita Conflicts

of Interest xii). Further, in a letter written on February 15, 1869 to M.G. Vallejo she

laments: “¡Decididamente la Providencia debe recompensarme de alguna manera por

haberme hecho mujer!” [“Decidedly, Providence should recompensate me in some way

for having made me a woman!”] (Conflicts of Interest 128 translation mine). In the introduction to the only collection of Ruiz de Burton’s letters, Conflicts of Interest,

Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita explain that Ruiz de Burton was “up to date on political events and banking, investments, and stocks” and that “gender location all too often determined access to opportunity and to the marketplace” (xi). According to

Sánchez and Pita, that is why she saw being born a woman a “major obstacle” (xi), yet as the above quotations demonstrate, Ruiz de Burton’s awareness of her own subjectivity in relation to race and gender oppression complicate that.

In their introduction to The Squatter and the Don, Sánchez and Pita briefly state

that women’s rights—i.e. the struggle for social, political, and economic equality for

women—was “an issue not foreign to Ruiz de Burton,” (16). They contextualize the

novel by mentioning the Seneca Falls convention and the struggle for women’s suffrage. 163

Additionally, in their introduction to Who Would Have Thought It?, they include women’s suffrage in a list of issues that are “foregrounded” in the novel, but they do not develop ideas on Ruiz de Burton’s engagement with suffrage discourses. As Julie Ruiz has observed, “the majority of criticism on María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s texts subordinates gender issues to those of class and emphasizes middle-class resistance to

U.S. colonialism as the most important factor in determining her ‘recovery status’” (116).

I argue that Ruiz de Burton envisions a kind of feminism—as it would later be called— that calls for women’s rights as well as rights for Mexican Americans who are oppressed by the so-called democracy of the United States. Both of her novels suggest a need for alliances between women against violent colonialist white masculinity, suggesting what I call more than just a trend or coincidence in the three nineteenth-century women writers studied in this project. Rather, these writers reflect a crucial time in history as they negotiate solutions and imagine solidarity within their writing and with their readers in ways that suggest that in the nineteenth century Anglo, American Indian, and Mexican

American women were actively imagining directions for women’s rights and its relationship to colonialism. Though many would locate such negotiations and criticisms of Anglo women’s complicity with Anglo men in power as the agenda of the third wave feminists of the 1980s, I argue the importance of recognizing such critiques made by women writers in the nineteenth century. Because such resistance has been going on for more than a century, there is less reason to argue that more progress has not been made to decolonize feminisms. 164

Mapping the Colonialist Terrain of Ruiz de Burton’s Writing in Chicana and

Chicano Literary Studies:

A brief discussion of biographical information helps locate Ruiz de Burton’s complex subject positioning as both colonizer and colonized. As José Aranda has pointed out, she identified herself as part of a white Mexican elite, but the injustices she experienced regarding her land rights would be the inspiration for her protests of the systemic dispossession of Mexican Americans’ land in The Squatter and the Don.cxxxvii

María Amparo Ruiz was born in 1832 in Loreto, Baja California to an elite military family that owned an extensive amount of land. She met Captain Henry S. Burton, an

Anglo American who was working for the U.S. military to “quell an armed uprising,” as

Aranda notes, during the Mexican American war (556). In 1849, Ruiz left Baja

California with her family and moved to Monterrey California. Shortly after, at the age of seventeen, she married Captain Henry Burton, and lived with him in San Diego on land they purchased from Pio Pico’s Jamul land grant.cxxxviii Later, her husband fought in the Civil War, which brought Ruiz de Burton out East. There, her husband was promoted to General, but in 1869 he died of malaria.cxxxix After his death, their land in San Diego

was denied validity by the Land Commission (as many Mexican Americans experienced

during that time). A widow at thirty-nine with two children, Ruiz de Burton spent much

of her energy fighting legal battles related to land claims until she died.cxl Such litigation

and involvement with the injustices of the U.S. courts greatly influenced her protests of

the law in The Squatter and the Don. 165

Both Jackson and Ruiz de Burton experienced loss and tragedy in their lives, and

both authors managed to have enough literary connections and privilege to continue to

write and get published. Like Jackson, Ruiz de Burton met literary and other influential

people who helped to publish her writing.cxli Ruiz de Burton referred to herself as “very good friends” with Mary Todd Lincoln, President Lincoln’s wife, and “went to many receptions of the President,” as she explained in one of her many letters to Vallejo

(Crawford 204). As a Mexicana elite from a landed family and, due to her marriage to an

Anglo general, Ruiz de Burton was privileged in terms of class. Yet she was also marginalized as a woman, as a racially constructed other, and as a Mexican who lost rights to her land due to American empire expansion.

A significant amount of the literary criticism of Ruiz de Burton’s writing has emphasized her as a colonized subject who simultaneously identifies with the colonizer and reproduces racist, elitist colonialist ideologies. For example, Peter Chvany asserts that although Ruiz de Burton performs an “admirable refutation of racist stereotypes,” she “leaves upper-class Mexican privilege intact and is silent about the oppression of

Mexican mestizos and other people of color” (106). Her writing reflects her own class biases as well as notions of American Indian inferiority and stereotypes. For example,

Native people are often referred to as “those stupid Indians” (The Squatter and the Don

240) or “the lazy Indian” (The Squatter and the Don 258). Such representations have been addressed by a number of literary scholars, including Amelia María de la Luz

Montes who notes that, in The Squatter and the Don, American Indians are “placed on the ranch next to the animals” in a list (215). Chvany also notes that, whereas the French 166

servants are identified by name, the Native women servants are referred to as “squaws”

(112). Clearly, Ruiz de Burton’s representation of American Indians reinforces racist colonialist attitudes about Native people. While Jackson dehumanizes American Indians by romanticizing them as “noble savages,” Ruiz de Burton’s dehumanization contributes to colonialist constructions of American Indian identity as indolent.

Vincent Pérez’s scholarship emphasizes how Ruiz de Burton’s writing about the hacienda aligns her with southern narratives about plantations. In his article,

“Remembering the Hacienda: Land and Community in California Narratives,” he points out that there were 10,000 Mexicans in California when it became a U.S. state but only

3% owned large ranches, “illustrating the hierarchical division between high/landed and low/poor Mexicans” of the time (44). In The Squatter and the Don, Pérez continues, the

“hacienda as icon and myth” functions much in the same way as the “pastoral icon develops in Southern writing,” a “symbol of land ownership and power” (51). Pérez addresses the class based ideologies in Ruiz de Burton’s writing and the pathos it evokes between the landed Spanish elite and the landed Southerners of the time.cxlii In another article, “South by Southwest,” he further points out that “to be a member of the gente de razón (the term invented by the California upper class to distinguish landed ranchers from

Indian and mestizo peons), meant to be not like Indians or dark-skinned mestizos” (119).

Ruiz de Burton’s novels, as Pérez notes, function to emphasize the gente de razón as superior to the Native laborers. In a similar vein, in “Returning California to the People,”

Aranda writes that in The Squatter and the Don is a “desire to return California to a previous golden age of ranchos, fruit orchards, and vineyards, all of which grew out of 167

the repressive and coercive mission system that colonized native lands and native people into feudal labor” (21). Like Jackson, Ruiz de Burton romanticizes the hacienda, erasing the exploitation of American Indians via the normalization of such hierarchies.

John Gonzales similarly critiques the hierarchies in the novel. In his excellent article, “Romancing Hegemony: Constructing Racialized Citizenship in María Amparo

Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don,” he argues that The Squatter and the Don’s

“immediate cultural work is to make visible the Californios as ‘white’ and to obscure the indigenous labor that made possible this translation” (27).cxliii Ruiz de Burton emphasizes in both of her novels that some people of Mexican descent are white, and thus by implication should not be excluded from the rights enjoyed by Anglo Americans.

In another article, Gonzales notes that, in The Squatter and the Don, there are “Indian and mestizo ranch laborers whose presence is taken for granted” (“The Whiteness of the

Blush” 163). Gonzales points out that “[t]he narrative reveals no possibility that in coming to share the same structural and symbolic positions within the corporate U.S. imaginary, Californios and indios might also share a similar historical consciousness of their racialized class positions” (165). Unfortunately, Ruiz de Burton’s excellent critique of injustices enacted against land-owning Mexican Americans fails to see the position of elite Mexican Americans as colonizers of American Indians, as displacing them of their land. Her writing reproduces colonialist ideologies regarding American Indians and fails to make connections between the injustices experienced by both American Indians and

Mexican Americans due to the Anglo colonialist agenda.

In his article “Contradictory Impulses: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Resistance 168

Theory, and the Politics of Chicano/a Studies,” Aranda provides an excellent discussion of the implications and problematic ideologies present in Ruiz de Burton’s writing. As

Aranda explains, the contradictions in Ruiz de Burton’s writing do “have much to say about a Mexican American past, [but] they are equally important for the future of

Chicano/a literary and historical studies” (553). Additionally, María Carla Sánchez argues that Ruiz de Burton “raises the necessity for Chicano studies scholars, and all others who recover, recuperate, or rehabilitate their pasts, to self-critically examine how we reclaim the dead” (68). Because of class differences and other ideological differences, Sánchez warns, pre-1960s writers cannot be called Chicano, even though they are studied in Chicano studies. Sánchez refers to Aranda’s article, and argues that it is not just the usefulness of resistance theory that is at stake, but rather “the notion of a genealogy of Mexican American literature as a whole” (78). As she explains, “[e]arly writings are simply not resistant in the same ways as post-1960s writings; they’re not

Chicano” (78). Such a caution regarding Ruiz de Burton’s elitism is worthwhile, particularly since her elitist attitude is not aligned with the fundamental claims of the

Chicano Movement; however, I would still warn against claims of inclusion and exclusion regarding the term Chicano, especially when considering such works as

Michele Serros’s How to Be a Chicana Role Model, in which she dismantles rigid definitions of what it means to be Chicana. Montes’s essay, “María Amparo Ruiz de

Burton Negotiates American Literary Politics and Culture,” engages in this dialogue by first noting that Rosaura Sánchez, one of the editors of Ruiz de Burton’s recuperated novels, “understands the need to recover and investigate nineteenth-century Mexican 169

American writing” (215). Montes further explains that “Ruiz de Burton, who reveals the

inequities of women in American society in her novels and letters, becomes, for Chicana

writers today, a prophetic voice from the nineteenth century” (215). Montes writes that

she makes this statement “with caution because of her failure to recognize the Indígena,

the brown skin, as her own,” but she still calls for a “consideration of Ruiz de Burton as

precursor to Chicana writing” (215). This kind of recognition should be made, so long as

it is done with an understanding of Ruiz de Burton’s class elitism and attitude of

superiority toward Native people. Throughout Women Signing in the Snow, Tey Diana

Rebolledo refers to Ruiz de Burton as a Chicana writer, and as part of a “Chicana literary

tradition” (24), but without the caution that Montes and others provide. Ruiz de Burton’s

ideologies do not coincide with those expressed by recent Chicana feminist writers such

as Cherríe Moraga, Helena María Viramontes, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, and

Mary Pat Brady, to name a few. However, comparing Ruiz de Burton’s writing with

more recent Chicana feminist writing is still a useful task, a task that will add to the

complexity of Chicana literary studies.

Furthermore, Aranda states that the classification of Ruiz de Burton as “subaltern”

(as do the editors of her novels) is premature because “Chicano/a Studies has yet to

conceptualize adequately the inclusion of writers and texts that uphold racial and

colonialist discourses that contradict the ethos of the Chicano Movement” (554).cxliv He calls for “nuanced studies” in the field that will look at nineteenth-century Mexican

American “participation in hegemonic discourses,” insisting on looking at a literary history of Mexican Americans as not “always marginalized” (554). As he points out, 170

people were basically grasping onto pre-1848 status while being “deprived of civil rights, property, and upper-class status” (554). Aranda explains that Ruiz de Burton’s “life reveals an individual willing to wage a rhetorical war on her conquerors but also anxious to reassume the privileges of a colonialist” (554).cxlv The aim of this chapter is to provide what Aranda calls for: a “nuanced” reading of Ruiz de Burton’s writing. Colonial attitudes about Native people are reflected in her novels that simultaneously protest colonial injustices. As Anne Goldman contends, a careful reading of Ruiz de Burton does “not mean that we should either discard it because of its sustained classism nor romanticize it as the Movimiento’s originary text” (73). Similarly, as Montes points out,

Rebolledo writes that it is important not to dismiss early Mexican American voices: due to “economic privilege, [they] had the means to speak and create for themselves a literary space in a primarily male Mexican and American literary landscape” (217). One of my goals is to recognize the contradictions in Ruiz de Burton’s novels—as both colonizer and colonized—to then examine how, within a landscape of colonialist violence, her writing engages discourses about women’s rights as she both imagines alliances between

Anglo and Mexican American women and condemns Anglo women’s complicity with male colonial power.

Historical Context for the Production of Ruiz de Burton’s Novels:

While Jackson’s novel sold well just before her death in 1885, and has, since then, been through over 300 English language editions, Ruiz de Burton faced difficulties as a

Mexican American woman writer.cxlvi Ruiz de Burton “died in poverty” “like countless other Californios,” as Sánchez and Pita explain in their introduction (The Squatter and 171

the Don 15). Amelia María de la Luz Montes writes that “Mexicans, like novelist María

Amparo Ruiz de Burton, who became American after 1848 were recreated into

stereotypes or dismissed as writers” (202). In addition, while numerous streets in

California are named after Jackson’s novel, Ruiz de Burton’s novels went out of print and

were only recently recuperated by the Arté Publico Press. Who Would Have Thought It?

was republished in 1995 and The Squatter and the Don in 1992. Ruiz de Burton was

publishing during a time when Mexican Americans were being lynched regularly by

Anglos. In 1851, heavy taxes on land were imposed by the U.S. government on Mexican

Americans in California, forcing many of them to leave or become dispossessed of their

land. In 1855, The Greaser Act was passed in California, defining people of Mexican

descent as “vagrants” and allowing deportation, forced labor, arrest, lynching, and the

confiscation of property all of which were defined as legal measures. Additionally, with

the passing of the Homestead Act of 1862, the U.S. government made it legal for Anglo squatters to take over Mexican American land. These are just some of the contexts for the publication of Ruiz de Burton’s novels, novels that protest the U.S. government’s sanctioning of such colonial violence and injustice.

The Squatter and the Don and Who Would Have Thought It?: Drawing Connections

Between Colonialism and Women’s Rights

Ruiz de Burton’s 1872 Who Would Have Thought It? begins three years before the start of the Civil War and after Dr. Norval, an Anglo Yankee, has taken an expedition to the Southwest and has returned home to New England with a girl, María Dolores

Medina (who is referred to as Lola throughout the novel). She and her Mexicana mother, 172

Doña Theresa Medina, were captured in 1846 in Sonora, Mexico by Apaches and sold to

Mohaves with whom they resided for about ten years near the Colorado River. When Dr.

Norval stops to help the Mohaves with some of their wounds from a war with some

“government troops,” Doña Theresa urgently begs him to rescue Lola and offers to give him as much gold as he wants if only, as he explains to his wife later, he “would take her child away from among savages and bring her up as a Christian, and educate her myself in case I should not be able to find her father” (35). She had found the gold and other precious stones while in captivity and had collected them with the help of the Mohave people. The narrator explains that Lola’s mother soon dies as a result of her horrible experiences with the “savage Indians”: “In a miserable Indian hut lay the dying lady.

The surroundings were cheerless enough to kill any civilized woman” (36). Dr. Norval’s wife, Jemima Norval, is horrified at the thought of adopting Lola into her household and permits it only because her whole family will become rich from investing Lola’s gold.

While Lola and her mother were in captivity, the Mohave Indians had put a temporary skin dye on their bodies so that they would not be recognized as captives. As Ruiz de

Burton emphasizes throughout the novel, Lola and her mother are Mexicanas who have white skin. As the skin dye begins to fade, Lola’s white skin surfaces.

Even though Lola has white skin, she is still clearly a victim of several kinds of injustices and corruption, and she represents the lack of rights for Mexican Americans in the United States legal system. The Norvals have already profited tremendously from adopting Lola, and are able to buy such things as “costly silks (all bought with Lola’s gold),” but Mrs. Norval wants to take all of Lola’s wealth (167). Mrs. Norval plots to 173

steal Lola’s money, using two Presbyterian ministers, Mr. Hammerhard, and his friend

Mr. Hackwell, also a lawyer, to attempt to legally appropriate Lola’s wealth. Mr.

Hammerhard’s name satirizes his role as minister and his own hypocrisy and Mr.

Hackwell can certainly hack well with the law. Hackwell threatens Lola as he attempts to legally prove they are married so he can have her gold and possess her legally as her husband: “[h]e had cherished the thrilling, intoxicating hope, though with savage spells of rage and wild longings of despair, that she would be his” (252). Hackwell convinces

Lola that she needs to say she is his wife in order to get information about her father

(from whom she was separated when she was captured by the Mohave Indians). He arranges a meeting wherein she is coerced to pretend she is his wife: “‘Yes, sir, he is my husband,’ the poor child replied hurriedly, afraid that if she did not say that, she would not hear from her father” (228). Lola is thus a captive to the U.S. legal system and Anglo male sexual predation. Additionally, Mrs. Norval assists in Hackwell’s schemes. When

Hackwell notices that Mrs. Norval “already imagined Lola’s father in New York asking for Lola’s money and that she was ready to do anything to avert such a catastrophe, he told her that if she would advise Lola to be guided by him he thought he could yet fix matters so as to avoid giving up Lola’s money” (218). In Who Would Have Thought It?,

Jemima Norval’s racism and greed cause her to be an enemy to Lola, all while an important alliance forms between Lavinia (Lavvy) and Lola against Jemima.

Meanwhile, much of the plot focuses on how Mrs. Norval’s son, Julian, falls in love with Lola despite Mrs. Norval’s protest. However, he is gone most of the time fighting for the North in the Civil war, and thus cannot help defend Lola from his mother 174

and Hackwell. While Lola remains in captivity in the Norval home, the concurring plot

development and characterization of Lavvy Sprig, Mrs. Norval’s sister, is how Ruiz de

Burton further emphasizes Anglo men’s mistreatment of women. Lavvy volunteers to do

patriotic services as a nurse during the war and attempts to speak with a government

official to try to get her brother, Isaac, out of the confederate prison. She tries to protest

the unjust treatment of prisoners, but she is merely laughed at by men in power (in a similar way that Aunt Ri is in Ramona). Through Lavvy’s character, Ruiz de Burton demonstrates the lack of power that Anglo women have within the institution of an Anglo male-led government. In the end, Lola’s Mexican father, Don Luis Medina, finally finds out the cause of his wife’s disappearance and death and is reunited with his daughter after eighteen years of separation. Julian and Lola take refuge in Mexico, joining Lola’s father there in the end.

In the opening lines of Ruiz de Burton’s second novel, The Squatter and the Don

(1885), Anglo American woman, Mary Darrell, and her Anglo American husband,

William Darrell, are having a conversation about squatting on Mexican American land.

While she “darned his stocking and sewed buttons on his shirts,” he acknowledges that

“had I been guided by your advice—your wisdom—we would be much better off today.

You have a right to reproach me” (55). He then promises, “I understand, little wife,” and

“I’ll try to do better” (56). Mary replies by defining the terms of their next move very specifically:

I trust that before you locate any homestead claim in Southern California, you will first inform yourself, very carefully, whether anyone has a previous claim. And more specifically, I beg of you. Do not go on a Mexican grant unless you buy the land from the owner. This I beg of you specially, and must insist upon it. (57) 175

She continues by stating, “if you go into a Mexican grant, William, I shall not follow you there willingly. Do not expect it of me; I shall go only if you compel me” (57). He replies, “Compel you!’ he exclaimed, laughing. ‘Compel you, when you know I have obeyed you all my life’” (57). In this opening scene, Ruiz de Burton puts the words of protest in the voice of an Anglo woman who says she will not follow her husband as a squatter unless he pays for the land or unless he physically forces her, thus playing upon the nineteenth-century assumption that women were morally superior to men. Thus, Ruiz de Burton portrays an Anglo woman who is able and willing to challenge male colonial power vis-á-vis the specific institution of marriage. Ultimately, Darrell ends up not listening to his wife’s demands—which points to the limits of rhetoric as empowering for women of the time—but he realizes his mistake in the end of the novel.

The Squatter and the Don also tells the story of Don Mariano’s family who had lived in the San Diego area—long before it was claimed as the United States—as a way of protesting the systemic injustices involved in the denial of Mexican American’s claims to their lands, the U.S. government’s condoning of Anglo squatters and their vigilante justice, and the unjust land taxes Mexican Americans were forced to pay for land that was not even recognized as legally theirs. A number of Anglo squatters encroach on Don

Mariano Alamares’s land and continue to shoot Don Mariano’s cattle because they keep eating the squatters’ crops. Yet the squatters refuse to put up a fence, and they even refuse a very generous offer Don Mariano proposes that would enable them to all live in peace together. The U.S. legal system fails to recognize Don Mariano’s title to his land, as it did to most landed Mexican Americans after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 176

1848.cxlvii

In The Squatter and the Don, Ruiz de Burton imagines an Anglo woman as a much stronger ally than Lavvy, an ally who voices protest against systemic Anglo male- led violence sanctioned by the U.S. government. Beth Fisher argues that in The Squatter and the Don Ruiz de Burton “leaves behind her critical perspective on domesticity’s place within the politics of expansionism to portray the middle class woman as an important ally in her own reformist project of restraining the acquisitive desires of

Yankee men” (66). Fisher speculates that this shift is due to the fact that “she may well have alienated” her female readers in Who Would Have Thought It?, presumably through the portrayal of Jemima and Mrs. Cackle (66). While this may be the case, both novels’ representations of Anglo women question Anglo women’s complicity in colonialism and, thus, result in urging Anglo women to protest Anglo male colonial power. Further, Ruiz de Burton’s portrayal of Mary Darrell as an ally does not weaken her “critical perspective on domesticity”—instead it imagines possibilities for social change. Perhaps Ruiz de

Burton’s shift in her portrayal of Anglo women resulted from an ideological shift that caused her to see the usefulness of Anglo women as potential allies.

Like Ramona and Who Would Have Thought It?, Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don tells a love story and like these two novels it raises questions about the participation of Anglo women in colonialist projects. As in Ramona, The Squatter and the Don and Who Would Have Thought It? provide an image of Anglo womanhood—

Mary Darrell and Lavvy Sprig respectively—that does not blindly follow the dominant views of the time, an Anglo woman whose own power is limited in American culture, but 177

who nonetheless continues to voice protest. The issues addressed in Ruiz de Burton’s novels, such as the denial of Mexican Americans of their land, unjust laws enacted by the

U.S. government, and Anglo male violence toward both Mexican American and Anglo women, serve as the foreground from which discourses of women’s rights prevalent of the time—particularly regarding marriage, suffrage, and political power—are engaged.

In this way, Ruiz de Burton asks how these issues relate to one another and where

Mexican American women fit into these nineteenth-century discourses about equality and women’s rights. Through her portraits of Anglo women, Ruiz de Burton suggests the possibility of feminist alliances between Mexican American women and Anglo women, but as Ruiz de Burton demonstrates, such an alliance would require Anglo women not to be complicit in the colonialist project. As such, Ruiz de Burton calls for a redefinition of feminism, a revisioning that would necessarily make it anti-racist and anti- colonialist.cxlviii

Divisions Between Women: Anglo Women Profiting at the Expense of Mexican

American Women in Who Would Have Thought It?

In Ruiz de Burton’s first novel, Who Would Have Thought It?, the image of Anglo womanhood, embodied by Jemima Norval, is that of a hypocritical, profit seeking racist

Christian abolitionist. Like the Anglo woman in Winnemucca’s testimony who is ready to lynch her, Jemima is an enemy to Lola from the start. The othering of Lola occurs early on in the novel, revealing Ruiz de Burton’s critique of the racism of Anglo women who take part in objectifying Lola as they discuss her physical features. Dr. Norval has brought Lola to his home after one of his expeditions out West. When Jemima and her 178

daughters first see Lola, Ruth remarks that “[t]he next specimen will be a baboon . . . for

Papa’s specimens don’t improve” (16). Ruiz de Burton critiques not only the contemporary scientific discourses that labeled and defined races and their

“characteristic” traits, but also the Anglo women and girls who adopted such beliefs about race. In addition to the scientific objectification, the girls participate in an eroticized objectification begun by none other than the former reverend of the

Presbyterian church who exclaims, “I have been looking at this one, and I think it is rather pretty, only very black,’ the Rev. Hackwell observed” (16). Coupled with such eroticized othering are comments such as, “How black she is!’ uttered Mrs. Norval with a slight shiver of disgust” (17). Mrs. Norval calls herself a Christian and an abolitionist, but, as one of the neighbor ladies, Miss Cackle, emphasizes, “Mrs. Norval is a good abolitionist in talk . . . but she ain’t so in practice” (47). As Pita and Sánchez point out in the introduction, “working against the grain of the dominant fiction of the day, Ruiz de

Burton’s novel focuses not on woman’s ‘moral and religious influence’ [Douglass, 60] but on her hypocrisy and even moral corruption” (XXX). It is Mrs. Norval’s hypocrisy and moral corruption, but significant too are her racist, imperialist ideologies that make her an enemy to Lola. Even though Mrs. Norval’s husband has “rescued” Lola from the

“horrid savages” to bring her up Catholic, Mrs. Norval does not fit the image of the idealized Anglo missionary woman. Even though such groups as the Women’s National

Indian Association did not begin until 1879, Who Would Have Thought It? provides, through satire, a telling critique of the mythologizing of Anglo women’s superior morality. 179

The relationship between Lola and Jemima marks not just a failure to form an alliance, but a specifically antagonistic relationship that represents the historical realities that have kept and often continue to prevent alliances between Anglo women and women of color. When Jemima learns of Lola’s wealth she finally agrees to adopt her, stating, “I shall do my duty as a Christian woman. But she can’t grow up in idleness and be a burden to us” (italics Ruiz de Burton’s 24). This statement, along with Mrs. Norval’s racism, condemns hypocritical Anglo Christian women. Like Winnemucca, Ruiz de

Burton is skeptical of Christian women who must do their “duty” for non-Anglo women.

Another Anglo Christian woman, Mrs. Cackle, expresses not only Ruiz de Burton’s satire of Manifest Destiny, but also the patriotism of Anglo Christian women who supported the laws and wars waged by Anglo men against American Indians and Mexican Americans.

Ruiz de Burton thus exposes the hypocrisy of nationalistic and Christian discourses. Mrs.

Cackle cackles,

To me they are all alike—Indians, Mexicans, or Californians—they are all horrid. But my son Beau says that our just laws and smart lawyers will soon ‘freeze them out.’ That as soon as we take their lands from them they will never be heard of anymore, and then the Americans, with God’s help, will have all the land that was so righteously acquired through a just war and a most liberal payment in money.’ ‘Ain’t that patriotism and Christian faith for you?’ added Mr. Hackwell” (11).

To emphasize this, Ruiz de Burton adds that Mrs. Cackle “was a good American woman, she believed firmly in ‘MANIFEST DESTINY’”(159). Thus, Ruiz de Burton, like

Jackson, questions what it means to be an Anglo American woman, though unlike

Jackson she accomplishes this through directly satirizing Anglo Christian women. In another example, Jemima bursts out on her way to church, “How I do hate foreigners!’ exclaimed Mrs. Norval vehemently” (63). At this, Doctor Norval laughs and 180

sarcastically remarks, “I am glad that hating foreigners agrees with your constitution so well. It is well to have something to stimulate the liver. Hatred is your stimulant” (63).

Mrs. Norval may be an abolitionist, but she is far from an ally to Lola because of her racism: in this way Ruiz de Burton satirizes “good” middle-to upper-class Anglo

Christian woman reformers whose racism makes them enemies to women of color.

Lola’s ethnicity is put into question due to the fading skin dye: she is referred to at different times as “nig,” “Indian,” and from Mexico with “pure Spanish blood.” Thus, the treatment by Mrs. Norval is representative of the prevalent racism of Anglo women against Black, American Indian, and Mexican American women. Considering the many references throughout the novel that she makes to women’s rights and suffrage, I argue that Lola’s ambiguous racial identity comments on the racism that divided women and the lack of inclusion of women of color in the women’s rights movement in the nineteenth century.

Early Anglo women’s rights activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.

Anthony, and Lucretia Mott were active in the abolition movement, and when they attended the 1840 London Anti-Slavery Convention they found that they were not allowed to speak publicly.cxlix Inspired by Mott, who believed women should have equal participation in the movement, Stanton became more aware of her own lack of rights as an Anglo woman. Though these leaders had begun working in reform for Black rights, nation-wide debates arose over whether Anglo women or Black men should be given the right to vote (as if it had to be one or the other), and this led to overt racism in the women’s movement in the nineteenth century. According to Angela Davis, Elizabeth 181

Cady Stanton and her followers viewed the Republicans’ move to get the vote of Black males as a move to “extend to Black men the full privileges of male supremacy” (75). As

Davis points out, James Brooks, a congressman who supported woman’s suffrage, was

“enthusiastically lauded by Susan Anthony and her colleagues,” despite the fact that he was a “self-avowed white supremacist” (80). Conversely, Davis cites Henry Blackwell, who argued that if women are granted suffrage, then “the political supremacy of your white race will remain unchanged” (114). A motivation for granting Anglo woman’s suffrage could have been hope that their vote would maintain the interests of white supremacy. Further, Davis points out the fact that Ida B. Wells, an African American friend of Anthony, had friends who had been victims of lynching and that Wells had compiled research on the numbers of documented victims, yet Anthony took a

“noncommittal stand on racism,” implying that lynchings” were “not a concern” of hers

(119). cl Thus, while the women’s movement grew out of protest to slavery, the issue of suffrage caused Anglo women such as Anthony to form alliances based on whiteness rather than gender. The issue of suffrage in the nineteenth century—whether for Black men or Anglo women—excluded women of color, and Ruiz de Burton’s novels intervene in this moment in the women’s rights movement to suggest new alliances between women be built.

Additionally, the relationship between Jemima, Lola’s adopted mother, and Lola is one of appropriation, pointing to a history of Anglo women profiting at the expense of women of color. Jemima tolerates Lola only to create an elaborate plan to steal the gold

Lola’s mother gave Dr. Norval for Lola’s care and education. Ruiz de Burton explains 182

that, “with childlike simplicity [Jemima] began to take pieces of gold and examine them attentively and toss them up playfully. . . [the] serious lady of forty was a playful, laughing child again” (25). Further, “she was so subdued, so humbled before the yellow god” (26). Later, when Lola is fifteen years old and “was growing prettier every day,”

the hatred of the Christian matron increased in proportion. She had always hated and despised the black creature ever since she had appeared before her eyes encircled so tenderly by her husband’s arm. But Lola was rich, and for her money’s sake the matron had concealed the throbbings of aversion of her mercenary heart. (92)

Due to Lola’s gold, Mrs. Norval’s daughters all are able to afford nice clothes and jewelry (167). Mrs. Norval and her whole family profit, due to legal manipulation, at the expense of her adopted Mexican American daughter. Dr. Norval is often away on expeditions in Africa, so Lola is usually left at the mercy of her adoptive mother. Mrs.

Norval’s appropriation of Lola’s wealth represents the way that Anglo women profit from colonialist enterprises, or to be more specific, from the lack of rights of Mexican

American women in the U.S. legal system within the context of colonialism. Mrs. Norval is not content to simply enjoy part of Lola’s wealth: she plans, along with Hackwell, an elaborate scheme to try to take all of Lola’s jewels. As Hackwell develops his plot, “[h]e smiled, and Mrs. Norval, who was watching him, felt happy. She smiled too” (253). The portrait of Mrs. Norval suggests, on Ruiz de Burton’s part, that racism and imperialism prevents Anglo women from being allies with Mexican American women.

Because of the way that the novel directly addresses issues related to women’s rights discourses of the time, the novel raises questions, through the character of Jemima, about the empowerment of Anglo women who work in collusion with Anglo men at the 183

expense of Mexican Americans. Pita and Sánchez state that Hackwell, “exploit[s] the flaws of a patriarchal system” and Jemima “shows women’s complicity within it”

(xxxiv). Yet, because Hackwell is a former preacher turned lawyer, he represents not just a patriarchal system, but also the specific institutions of the Protestant church and the

U.S. legal system. In an article on Who Would Have Thought It?, Fisher points out that

Jemima goes against her husband’s wishes, and thus the novel combines “domesticity’s anti-patriarchal aims with the doctrine of ‘manifest destiny’” (60-1). Fisher argues that

Ruiz de Burton asks which ways “women are also implicated” in “male expansionism,” as she “draws attention to the terms through which the discourse of domesticity can translate expansionist desires into a language of womanly moral authority” (61). Yet

Mrs. Norval is hardly anti-patriarchal: she is completely reliant on Hackwell and his male power, authority, schemes, and whims. Still, Fisher points to an important concept about Mrs. Norval’s complicity that I would like to develop further, particularly in relation to Ruiz de Burton’s engagement with women’s rights discourses. Ruiz de Burton makes many references to women’s rights in the novel to question what Anglo women will do with their empowerment. Because of this, the schemes that Mrs. Norval participates in demonstrate not just the complicity of Anglo women with Anglo male enterprising power, but also Anglo women’s potential access to power due to constructions of white supremacy.

Despite Mrs. Norval’s power over Lola, she is still subject to Hackwell’s deception—he pretends to be interested in Mrs. Norval sexually, but only to lure her into his schemes to attain Lola as his wife. Jemima’s notion of empowerment to defy her 184

husband is one of individualism: her goal is to identify with Anglo male authority and law in order to exploit a Mexican American woman. In her well-known feminist essay,

“the Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Audre Lorde asserts that relying on the master’s tools will never bring about “genuine change” (99). Lorde cautions against women who will use the tools of privilege and power to gain access to the power of Anglo men. For those women who “still define the master’s house as their only means of support,” Lorde suggests, not relying on the master’s tools of power is

“threatening” (99). Mrs. Norval defies her husband by going against him in his absence, but she uses the tools of white privilege and male power—represented by her alliance with Hackwell and his tools of imperialism and racism within the legal system—to profit at Lola’s expense.

Imagining Alliances Between Women Against White Colonial Male Power:

In contrast to Jemima Norval, though, Ruiz de Burton offers a depiction of an

Anglo woman, Lavvy, who becomes conscious of her oppression as a woman and then forms an alliance with the Mexican American heroine against Anglo male control and the

Anglo woman who supports it. As such, she offers an alternative kind of feminism that allies a Mexican American woman with an Anglo woman, suggesting the importance of such solidarity. Because such an alliance is coupled with so many references to discourses about women’s rights, Who Would Have Thought It negotiates the reality of racism within the women’s movement and suggests change. An example of the sprinkled discourses of women’s rights occurs when a minor character in the novel, Mina, is described as follows: she “[d]id not want matrimony; she scorned such slavery. She was 185

the prettiest advocate of free love, and he [Sophy] her most devout proselyte” (277). At

the time of the novel’s publication, Victoria Woodhull and her followers advocated

against the institution of marriage and instead proposed the notion of “free love” for

women.cli Ruiz de Burton references women’s rights throughout the novel and develops a sustained engagement with feminist issues through Jemima’s sister Lavvy, a single woman who is an “old maid” at thirty-two (106). Early on in the novel, Lavvy reflects on the institution of marriage and male hypocrisy concerning sexual morality. She had been engaged to Hammerhead and Hackwell who had both proposed to her and then married other women. The text suggests that they did so in order to take advantage of her sexually. She reflects,

How very wrong girls are in permitting any liberties to men to whom they are engaged . . . For I believe that men would rather lie to a woman than speak the truth. . . . Oh, the rascals, the hypocrites, preaching morality every Sunday! Faugh! What nasty beasts men are!’ And here Miss Lavinia, as if the word men filled her mouth with some of the ashes in the grate, spat in disgust, and poked the fire vigorously in continued thrusts. (39)

The image of Lavvy thrusting the poker into the fire and spitting at the thought of men

allows a space for expressing anger at her mistreatment. Significantly, she points to a

cultural problem of men lying to women and then hypocritically embracing “morality.”

Hackwell and Hammerhard also become Lola’s enemies, coercing her and plotting to

legally steal her wealth and force her marriage to Hackwell. As such, Ruiz de Burton

suggests that the men who form and manipulate laws to exploit Mexican Americans also

manipulate and coerce Anglo women. This would appeal to her Anglo women readers,

and it suggests the necessity for solidarity—even though Lavvy and Lola are oppressed in

different ways, the oppression of both women is premised upon an ideological foundation 186

of racist, sexist, Anglo male entitlement to women’s bodies.

Lavvy’s emerging awareness as a woman in a male-dominated culture parallels her alliance with Lola, suggesting that a feminist consciousness should be inclusive rather than simply focused on Anglo women. Lavvy’s growing consciousness about gender, power, and privilege begins after she volunteers as a nurse for the North during the Civil

War. She works extremely hard day and night, and, as the narrator comments, “Lavvy was no advocate of ‘women’s rights.’ She did not understand the subject even, but she smiled sadly, thinking how little woman was appreciated, how unjustly underrated”

(129). This statement is not dissimilar to those in the twenty-first century who will say they are not feminists, but that they believe women should be treated with respect and equality. Even though Lavvy was not an “advocate of ‘women’s rights,’” as the narrator describes her, her character raises many issues related to women’s rights and serves as

Ruiz de Burton’s engagement with these issues. Yet, Pita and Sánchez argue that

“Lavina is not, however, constructed as a feminist, although historically women involved in the war effort would also figure prominently in the struggle for gender-specific interests, especially suffrage” (xxxvii). They acknowledge that although Lavvy is described as “‘no advocate of women’s rights,’” she “does begin to attain a certain critical perspective to see her situation in terms of gender and its relation to power”

(xxxviii). They do not take this issue any further. Indeed, Lavvy begins to grow more and more conscious of the inequities facing women in a male-dominated culture.

Lavvy sacrifices a lot to do her duty to her country, and Ruiz de Burton demonstrates that even though Lavvy is working for a country that espouses democracy, 187

Anglo women do not enjoy the privileges of a democratic society. Before she leaves to be a nurse, Lavvy feels she has to choose between her country and her birds. She chooses her country because she had been “trained to do her duty no matter how painful,” and she kills her birds (88). She loves the birds, but she kills them because she will not be there to look after them. Such violence is the premise for serving her country. Montes refers to “the caged bird motif in Ruiz de Burton’s epistolary writing,” but she does not discuss the birds in Who Would Have Thought It? (212). In the opening epigraph to this chapter, Ruiz de Burton likens herself as a woman and a Mexican American to being trapped in a cage: “con el alma encerrada en una jaula de fierro” [with my soul enclosed in an iron cage] she is ensnared by social constructions of gender and race. Given this powerful image in Ruiz de Burton’s letters, the captivity of the birds in Who Would Have

Thought It? can be read as symbolic of women at the time, especially women such as

Lola who, like the birds, is confined in the Anglo house and is doubly constrained due to race and gender constructions. Or, if the birds symbolize Lavvy’s imprisonment as a woman, then perhaps her killing the birds is killing or emancipating that idea of woman.

To read it another way, Lavvy is symbolically killing herself to serve a country that will only place her in a cage. Whatever way it is interpreted, the ambiguous, multi-layered possibilities of reading the cage further contribute to the themes of captivity and enclosure due to gendered, racialized hierarchies of power. The theme of birds in a cage as a metaphor for women is a trope of nineteenth-and twentieth-century century women writers to express the ways that women are imprisoned by social constructions of gender.

For example, in Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers,” the woman who is trapped 188

within the home and in an abusive marriage is symbolized by her bird, who is murdered by her husband. Maya Angelou follows up on this theme in I Know Why the Caged Bird

Sings (1970), her autobiography that addresses racism and rape. The bird trope for

Angelou, Glaspell, and Ruiz de Burton is used to symbolically represent a woman who is trapped, and whose voice is silenced in a male-dominated culture. Angelou and Ruiz de

Burton emphasize that it is a racist, patriarchal culture within which women’s voices are squelched.

Through Lavvy, Ruiz de Burton exposes the hypocrisy of American political democracy: Anglo women do not share the fruits of a country of “glorious equality.”

Later in the novel, Lavvy tries to speak with high-ranking government officials in an attempt to get Isaac, her brother, rescued from a confederate jail. She realizes that her power as a woman is limited and reflects

that no matter how much a woman, in her unostentatious sphere, may do, and help to do, and no matter how her heart may feel for her beloved, worshipped country, after all she is but an insignificant creature, whom a very young man may snub, simply because he wears very shiny brass buttons and his uncle is in Congress. “What a miserable, powerless thing woman is, even in this our country of glorious equality! Here I have been sitting up at night, toiling, and tending disgusting sickness, and dressing loathsome wounds, all for the love of our dear country, and now, the first time I come to ask a favor—a favor, do I say? No. I come to demand a right—see how I am received!” Poor Lavvy! She had no experience about asking favors of great men. She had believed all she had read in printed political speeches delivered just before election times. (106)

Goldman reads this section as Lavvy’s mourning of “female powerlessness in order to correct it, transforming plea into command” (70). To build on this, her efforts to serve her country are undervalued in the midst of “great men” who lead the country.

Additionally, as Goldman points out, Lavvy’s dealings with these men expose the 189

“federal government’s corruption” in a way that “simultaneously burlesques Anglo

American despotism and gender tyranny” (68). The political reasons for keeping Isaac a prisoner are so corrupt that they do not make any sense. The rationale is to keep him a starving prisoner on the edge of death so that he uses up the resources of the confederates. When Lavvy explains the lack of logic of this to Mr. Blower, a political leader, he says “you, of course, reason as a lady” (114). Ruiz de Burton thus overturns the concept of masculine logic and female lack of reason. Similarly, Mr. Cackle’s response to Lavvy is to utter “condescendingly, ‘I see you don’t grasp the idea. Of course, ladies can’t well grasp great ideas, or understand the reasons that impel men in power to act at times in a manner apparently contrary to humanity, to mercy, to justice”

(114). Lavvy is validated by Ruiz de Burton’s narrator, but remains an unimportant

“lady” without reason for these political leaders such as Mr. Blower who are really just blowers blowing off steam. Aranda asserts that in this novel Ruiz de Burton “lashes out equally at constitutionally sanctioned notions of inequality that bar women from elected office and at the social norms that infantilize and deny women’s potential” (564). In her interactions with so-called important men, it is clear that Lavvy is infantilized by them.

Within such a country both Mexican American women and Anglo American women suffer from inequalities, though in different ways, as Ruiz de Burton emphasizes. Even though Fisher reads Ruiz de Burton’s second novel, The Squatter and the Don, as the novel that imagines alliances, Ruiz de Burton’s first novel suggests that Anglo women such as Lavvy could be further allied with Mexican American women who are also not 190

privy to equality. As such, Who Would Have Thought It? is a social commentary on the

lack of solidarity between women at this historical moment in the women’s movement.

Suffrage, Sexual Assault, and Political Representation: Ruiz de Burton’s

Interventions in Women’s Rights

At a time when women’s rights activists addressed issues such varied issues as

suffrage, property rights, marriage, reproductive rights, and political equality (to name a

few), Ruiz de Burton calls upon her readers to acknowledge the injustices experienced by

Mexican American women. In this way, Ruiz de Burton negotiates women’s rights

discourses of the time, and revises them to include Mexican American women and

imagine solidarity. Ruiz de Burton engages specifically with issues related to women’s

suffrage, and makes many references to this issue in both her novels. Before discussing

this further, however, it is necessary to contextualize her protest within the context of

suffrage for Mexican Americans. In the 1850s in California, Mexican men had recently

become Mexican Americans with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo vote in

elections, but their presence at the polls declined steadily after that.clii By the 1880s,

lynchings of Mexican Americans in California and Texas were a common occurrence,

and accounts for the decline of Mexican American voters in California as a result of such

terrorism.cliii In Texas, Mexican American men were “granted suffrage, but only in principle” (Takaki 179). As Ronald Takaki explains in A Different Mirror, his counter-

hegemonic history of the United States, Mexican Americans were disenfranchised,

denied the rights to citizenship promised in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. An

editorial in an 1863 Fort Brown Flag newspaper proclaimed, “We are opposed to 191

allowing an ignorant crowd of Mexicans to determine the political questions in this country, where a man is supposed to vote knowingly and thoughtfully” (Takaki 179). A timeline of U.S. history shows that the discrepancy between what was granted in theory in terms of voting rights and the fifteenth amendment and what actually happened, and thus reveals why disenfranchisement was something so necessary to address in Civil

Rights Movements (and still continues to be an issue in the twenty-first century).

Since so many references are made in the novel to Lola as a Mexican American whose “skin was white and smooth” (140) once the skin dye wore off, it is likely that

Ruiz de Burton’s references to suffrage are an attempt to include white Mexican

American women in the struggle for Anglo women’s suffrage. As noted earlier,

Gonzales argues that Ruiz de Burton places much emphasis on her Mexican American characters’ whiteness so that elite, white Mexican Americans may gain access to the privileges of whiteness afforded to Anglo Americans. If this argument is applied to her engagement with women’s suffrage, perhaps Lola’s whiteness is emphasized by Ruiz de

Burton in order to gain access to the struggles made by Anglo women for equality with

Anglo men. After all, as discussed earlier, suffrage in the women’s movement became solely focused on suffrage for Anglo women. Regardless of Ruiz de Burton’s intention regarding whiteness and access to privilege, the references to suffrage suggest an attempt on Ruiz de Burton’s part to appeal to an Anglo female readership. Though Ruiz de

Burton’s voice is not included in histories of women’s suffrage, her satire of Anglo male power combined with her references to women’s suffrage make her an important voice in the nineteenth century, particularly as suffrage relates to Mexican American women. By 192

engaging in the discourses of suffrage and women’s access to the public sphere, Ruiz de

Burton asks how the issues addressed by the women’s rights movement could seriously engage the issues facing Mexican American women. After all, as Ruiz de Burton makes clear, issues of sexism face Mexican American women, yet this is inseparable from the racist injustices that confront women such as Lola.

As Goldman has astutely pointed out, Ruiz de Burton “satirizes gender tyranny”

(68), and I add that she does this to align Anglo women with Mexican American women against Anglo male control. When Lavvy goes to Mr. Cackle—whose sons, as Goldman explains, “have profited enough from the war business to insert themselves into the

Washington political elite” (64)—to get Isaac out of the confederate prison, he offers to send a word to a man of influence. Lavvy insists on sending it herself. He responds by

“muttering to himself, ‘Women are so foolish! They never know how to make a good use of their capital, either in money or influence. Bah! And they want to vote!

Ridiculous!’” (110). Because Lavvy wants to get something done herself, independently of a man, she is referred to by Mr. Cackle as “ridiculous.” Mr. Cackle takes this moment to cackle disparaging words about women who want suffrage. After such statements by

Mr. Cackle, Lavvy thinks about a colonialist government that tries to rule the world but cannot manage its own affairs without violence and bloodshed. Lavvy “never could see how it was that after men had been trying for so many years to govern the world, they had not yet been wise enough to settle their difficulties without killing and mutilating each other” (115). Her murdering of her birds parallels this violence, particularly since she kills them in order to serve her country. Even Hackwell himself, after being accused 193

of embezzlement of government funds, has a moment of clarity: “bitterly he laughed at the wisdom of man,” reflecting,

I think the sooner we give over to women the management of public business, the better it will be. If we did not have such brute arrogance and unblushing conceit, we would long ago have seen the justice and propriety of hiding our diminished heads. But no. Because we have the physical force to beat women at the polls with our fists we maintain that they have no right there as thinking beings. (271)

The leadership of Anglo men is exposed as corrupt, dishonest, and inept. The most dishonest Anglo male in the novel voices his own awareness of this fact, acknowledging the myth of male superiority that excludes women from the public sphere. Because this plot parallels the story of Lola’s struggles, Ruiz de Burton raises the question of how

Mexican American women fit into discourses about women’s rights, particularly in terms of sexual assault and colonialist violence against Mexican American women.

As a Mexican American woman coming of age, Lola is excluded from the public sphere, and this lack of rights parallels her lack of rights over her own body: ordered by

Mrs. Norval to attend to Hackwell who is supposedly ill, Lola becomes captive to the

Anglo woman’s home, and prey to the Anglo man’s sexual fantasies and coercion.cliv

Hackwell admits that, “if those superb eyes of Lola were not here maddening me,’ . . . ‘if

I did not think of that girl night and day’” then the “old woman,” Mrs. Norval, would succeed in “kindling me with her conflagration” (177). As such, Ruiz de Burton stresses the barbarism with which Lola is treated in the Anglo home as even more “savage” than the Mohave people’s treatment of her while in captivity. Thus, Native people are used to more vehemently critique Anglo culture and its claims to “civilization.” Lola is merely transported from one captivity to another. Further, Ruiz de Burton demonstrates 194

Jemima’s profit-seeking schemes with Hackwell as an act of collusion with Anglo male power to sexually assault and control a young Mexican American woman. Jemima leaves the house to attend to her son Julian, who has been discharged from the war and is sick. Hackwell is ill as well, and Lola is appointed by Jemima to be his nurse, during which time, “the closer Lola sat by him, the wild beasts got more ferocious and unmanageable” (254). Hackwell’s lust for power over Lola is described as “savage.”

Even though he sexually desires Lola, it is important that his motivation is also coupled with lust for power and wealth, a desire to own and possess her. His is an attitude of conquest, and his character is symbolic of an Anglo male attitude of conquest of Mexican and Native women that Castañeda historicizes (as discussed in Chapter Two). Because he has power over the law, and over the Protestant church, his character represents the violent collaboration of these institutions in the conquest of Mexican and Mexican

American women’s bodies and resources—symbolized by Lola’s body and her gold.

Hackwell manipulates Lola into believing that she must legally prove that she is his wife, telling her that she can find out information about her father so long as she pretends to be his wife—though he is old enough to be her father. He explains, “All I care for is to secure you, no matter if you say you hate me” (258). Hackwell coerces Lola to believe that she must follow his legal procedures and that if her father tries to rescue her and take her back to Mexico he would be punished (224). Left alone in the legal meeting room, he accuses her, that “you hated to pass for my wife” and mournfully confesses, “I know it is madness, but I can’t help it. You are my destiny; you are the only woman I ever did or ever shall love” (228). To this, “Lola looked at the door, alarmed” 195

(228). She is at his mercy for information about her father, and feels bad that she “could not be more grateful to him than she was” (229). As they go out on the street, she “was afraid to ride with him. She told him that she would take an omnibus, as she wished to do some shopping” (229). He tells her she can ride in the coupe alone, but she is still in a situation of legal powerlessness, subject to a corrupt legal system that would allow for

Hackwell to hack well with the law. Ruiz de Burton protests the ways the legal system is manipulated and used at the expense of Mexican American women. Lola is a victim of his sexual threats, and is coerced into passing as his wife: “Her own anxiety to obtain information about her father, and her dread that those horrible advertisements describing her mother’s capture and life among the Indians might come out if she did not go in person to stop them” (220). The implication in this statement is that her mother’s

“honor” was ruined while she lived with the Mohave people, and thus to protect her mother, and be reunited with her father, Lola agrees to pretend she is Hackwell’s wife.

Beyond that scheme, though, he plans to kidnap her, though she is an adult of eighteen.

He plots to traffic a Mexican American woman against her will to Cuba, “and there force her to marry him” (249), so that he can possess her body and her wealth. He intends not to use “fair means,” but rather “unfair means” to “win Lola”: “[h]e cared not, provided he succeeded, and she was his” (249). Part of his plan is to take Mrs. Norval along so it looks “quite proper and most decorous,” and he “laughed to think that Mrs. Norval would help him carry off Lola” (249). Thus, Mrs. Norval’s desire to profit at Lola’s expense also makes her complicit with the harassment and threats Lola receives from Hackwell.

Using a similar strategy as Winnemucca and Jackson, Ruiz de Burton allies her Anglo 196

women readers with a woman of color who is prey to, but a resistant survivor of the savagery of violent white masculinity. But Ruiz de Burton also specifically allies her mostly Anglo women readers with Lola against Mrs. Norval, and thus she imagines an alternative to such complicity. Such an imagining is crucial in Ruiz de Burton’s defining of women’s rights, as the alliance between readers and Lola is based on an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-imperialist sense of justice.

Ruiz de Burton specifically allies Lavvy with Lola against Mrs. Norval, suggesting that Anglo women such as Lavvy with an emerging feminist consciousness can have solidarity with Mexican American women. In the beginning of the novel,

Lavvy thinks Lola is “a mixture of Indian and negro,” commenting that “Indians are as proud and surely as they are treacherous” (20). Lavvy thus expresses racism toward

Lola, a racism toward both American Indians and African Americans that Ruiz de Burton is complicit in reproducing throughout the novel. Lavvy does not undergo a transformation in which she unlearns her racism as does Aunt Ri in Ramona; however, later in the novel Lavvy exclaims, “poor child! I pity her!” (78), referring to Lola’s situation and the treatment she receives from the Norvals. Yet on just the next page the narrator informs readers that the “unfortunate spots had almost entirely disappeared;

Lola’s skin was white and smooth” (79). The spots, as a result of the skin dye from the

Mohave Indians, are almost entirely gone and Lola is now racially defined as white by the narrator. Lola’s attainment of whiteness occurs just as Lavvy begins to feel sympathetic to Lola, suggesting that Anglo women can form alliances with Mexican

American women who are also white. Lavvy then becomes an ally against Jemima, 197

arguing on behalf of Lola. She makes a case so that Lola can help nurse Julian, since she and Mattie, one of Mrs. Norval’s daughters, “quite favor their attachment” (153).

Additionally, Lavvy comments to Lola that “you are right, Jenny [Jemima] is a tyrant”

(138). From this point on both Mattie and Lavvy work to help Lola escape with Julian to

Mexico.

Perhaps the emphasis given to Lola’s whiteness suggests a defense, on the part of

Ruiz de Burton, of Mexican American women as white. As Jesse Alemán has pointed out, “Ruiz de Burton challenges the definition of whiteness in the United States to include Mexicans” rather than dismantle racial hierarchies (“Thank God Lola is Away from Those Horrid Savages” 100). Mattie defends Lola by stating: “Talk of Spanish women being dark! Can anything be whiter than Lola’s neck and shoulders?” (232).

That Lola’s whiteness—and Mercedes’ whiteness and blue eyes in The Squatter and the

Don—are emphasized to such an extent suggests that the alliances between Anglo and

Mexican American women are predicated on a shared status of whiteness. In The

Squatter and the Don, many descriptions are given of Mercedes’ whiteness and blonde hair. For example, “those golden curls over blue eyes floated in hazy mist and music in tantalizing recurrence until dawn,” keeping both Mr. Seldon and Mr. Gunther awake

(148). Or, while Clarence is trying to read, “that white arm would come across the page and that white hand would cover the letters” (219). Thus, it is difficult to make a case for

Ruiz de Burton as a radical visionary of interracial alliances between women—especially since she does not imagine an alliance between an Anglo woman and a dark or non-

European identified Mexican American woman. She takes great pains to suggest that 198

elite Mexican American women who are white are not like the dark “savage” Mohave

Indians that captured Lola and her mother.

Yet, at the same time, Lola is still racialized as other, and does not have access to the rights enjoyed by her Anglo “sisters.” Ruiz de Burton’s vision of alliances between women is also premised on imagining alliances based on resistance to violent Anglo male predatory sexual and colonial power. After all, Hackwell has not only been a predator to

Lola: earlier in the novel he kisses Lavvy while she is unconscious (she passed out after killing her birds). Lola witnesses it. As such, Ruiz de Burton addresses the ways

Mexican American women and Anglo women are survivors of Anglo male sexual aggression and power. The law is in the hands of Hackwell and Hammerhard, and their collaborators Mr. Hooker and Mr. Skinner, thus emphasizing Lola’s lack of legal recourse as both a woman and as a Mexican American in the United States.

Whereas in Who Would Have Thought It? Lavvy mostly questions Anglo men’s authority inwardly, to herself, and never directly critiques systemic injustices against

Mexican Americans, in Ruiz de Burton’s second novel, The Squatter and the Don, Mary

Darrell explicitly protests the encroachment by Anglos on Mexican Americans’ land.

Mary is introduced as a woman who is independent and, though her name is Mary, does not want to enter into the institution of marriage. Naming is never a coincidence in Ruiz de Burton’s novels. With such characters as Hammerhard and Hackwell in Who Would

Have Thought It?, naming is often done with satire and irony. When Mary and William first meet she mentions that she will soon be leaving her aunt’s house in New England to get back to her job teaching. William replies, “No but there is no need of your working” 199

to which she replies, “[i]t is a need to me to feel independent. I don’t want to be supported by my aunts, while I know how to earn my own living” (58). He replies by proposing to her. She responds, “I thank you for the compliment you pay me with your honorable offer, but I have no wish to get married” (59).

She leaves for Washington, with her “colored servant (called Tisha) who was devotedly attached to her” (59). The fact that this independent, empowered Anglo woman has a Black woman as a servant is not questioned. Novels of this period in

American literature often have people of color as minor characters, and though the novel does not question this, it provides an excellent way of discussing issues raised by third wave feminists such as Audre Lorde who asks, “what do you do with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend to your children while you are away at feminist conferences are, for the most part, poor and third world women?” (100). If Mary Darrell is an image of an empowered woman, it might also be asked how she still participates in a class-based racialized hierarchical system and does not have the burden of labor that her working-class sisters, such as Aunt Ri and her servant Tisha, have.

Mary’s aunt tells William that Mary is afraid of him and that “you gave her the impression that you have a high temper, and she told me, ‘If I loved Mr. Darrell better than my life, I wouldn’t marry him, for I could never be happy with a man of a violent temper’” (59). He then goes to her house in Washington, and says “you shall never have occasion to be made unhappy or displeased by my quick anger, because you will only have to remind me of this pledge, and I shall curb my temper, if it kills me” (61). He continues by claiming he will kill himself if she denies him, and she felt “as if being 200

carried away in spite of herself, by the torrent of his impetuosity. She was afraid of him, but she liked him and liked to be loved in that passionate, rebellious way of his . . . “ (61).

Mary thus marries, despite her inclination to avoid the institution, and despite her awareness that William Darrell has a violent temper. Ruiz de Burton makes clear in the novel that his violent temper affects his wife as well as the Mexican Americans whose land he invades. In this way, similar to Jackson’s violent male settler who takes over

Alessandro’s house, Ruiz de Burton theorizes a connection between Anglo male violence directed at Anglo women in the home and Anglo male violence against Mexican

Americans, thus suggesting the necessity for solidarity between women. Within a landscape of violence, Ruiz de Burton imagines a direction for feminism that would be anti-racist and anti-imperialist in its struggle.

As discussed in the beginning of this chapter, Mary tells her husband that she will not move again with him as a squatter and he promises that he will be different. In

Darrell’s first conversation with the Don, he “thought of his wife, and her earnest injunctions. He wished to keep his promise to her” (76). He promises to pay the Don if the courts say it belongs to him rightfully. However, this serves as a delay tactic and

Darrell becomes influenced by his male squatter friends. In an act of defiance and protest, Mary secretly has her son, Clarence, pay Don Mariano for the land they are residing on, using the money he had inherited from his aunt. In “Romancing

Hegemony,” Gonzales states that Mary orders her son to buy the land “in order to avoid strife,” but it is much more complex than that (28). Her resistance serves as a representation, a possibility of the kind of resistance that Anglo women could enact. It 201

also reveals her limited power as a woman who is economically dependent on her husband and, as a result, must enlist her son to act ethically. Sánchez and Pita state that

faced with major economic obstacles, the women in the novel do not, for the most part, challenge patriarchy in any way—except, perhaps to a degree in the case of Mary Moreneau Darrell. They do, however, take stands; they are not frivolous and flighty, but ‘women of substance,’ that is, morally strong, highly intelligent and both loving and lovable. (43)

Mary does take a stand, but I would also caution against underestimating the importance of the concrete ways she challenges patriarchy. Despite the fact that her husband has a violent temper, she undermines him by paying Don Mariano for his land and by attempting to establish a peaceful relationship with his family as neighbor. Due to

Mary’s influence on her son, Clarence explains,

I think those Spanish people ought to be allowed to keep the land that their government gave them. We ought not to have made any laws that would place their titles in a bad light and be questioned. We should have accepted the legality they had before their own Mexican government, without making some other legality requisite to please ourselves. (75)

Mary adds, “with our combined efforts, we might dissuade him [Mr. Darrell] from his present way of thinking” (75). Mary’s influence as a mother is significant here, and suggests on Ruiz de Burton’s part that Anglo women who are mothers teach their sons not to be like their unjust, unethical fathers. Mary’s growing feminist consciousness to question her husband is inseparable from her increased efforts to protest injustices enacted by Anglo men against Mexican Americans. In this way, Ruiz de Burton imagines revisioning the women’s rights movement so that its focus could be inclusive and not just focused on the concerns of Anglo women.

Mary’s failure to persuade Darrell otherwise emphasizes her limited power as a 202

woman, as wife. The other Anglo squatters influence Darrell, and they refuse a generous offer the Don makes that would allow them all to live harmoniously and avoid violence.

Darrell still remembers the promise he made to his wife, but he is conflicted: “in his heart he felt the weight which his wife’s sad eyes invariably put there when the talk was of litigating against a Mexican land title” (62). The squatters’ violence toward Don

Mariano gets worse and worse. They are portrayed as a white supremacist gang, demythologizing the “homesteaders” who went out and displaced people from their land.

One of the squatters, Matthews, encourages other squatters that “those greasers ain’t half crushed yet. We have to tame them like they do their mustangs, or shoot them, as we shoot their cattle” (71). Darrell does nothing to discourage this violence. As they shoot his cattle, Don Mariano also continues to get taxed unjustly for land that the squatters have taken over and reside on. These taxes were imposed by the United States government on Mexican Americans, with land grants from the Mexican government, so as to “legally” dispossess them of their land. Faced with taxes too high to continue to profit, many were forced to sell their land or move away.

After Clarence makes a secret deal with Don Mariano to purchase the land they reside on, he promptly falls in love with Don Mariano’s daughter, Mercedes. Much of the plot of the novel is focused on this romance. Eventually, Darrell finds out about this purchase as well as Clarence’s engagement with Mercedes. Darrell acts violently toward

Don Mariano and, “shaking at him the fist in which he held the whip” accuses the Don of selling his daughter, “like a pretty filly for sale” with the land (229). In his violent rage, he tries to whip the Don, which is an allusion to the historical lynchings of Mexican 203

American men. However, the Don is much too great a horseman and easily maneuvers out of the way. Gabriel, the Don’s son, lassoes Darrell who then asks his son, Webster, to go get his guns at home. Webster acts as if he will obey only to let Darrell cool off.

Both Webster’s and Clarence’s choice not to act in collusion with their father is crucial, and suggests possibilities for social change. Darrell, whose wife marries him even though she is afraid of him, embodies the violent Anglo male colonialist that Ruiz de

Burton critiques. He has a reputation as “that terrible and most dangerous squatter,

William Darrell” (63). Yet, despite his raging temper, Mary still speaks out publicly against the squatters’ violence. In this way, Ruiz de Burton combines notions from the women’s rights movement of the nineteenth century—such as women having an independent voice of their own and the importance of speaking in the public sphere— with a concern for injustices enacted against Mexican Americans. Thus, Ruiz de Burton

(re)defines what it could mean for Anglo women to be empowered: it is not simply to profit and work in collusion with Anglo men, as does Jemima Norval.

Mary attempts to influence these squatters, waging a war of rhetoric and calling upon a sense of patriotism as an American woman. Earlier in the novel, Mary was silent as the influence “wielded by Mrs. Darrell” would not at present “be as effective” (215).

The narrator explains that, “being a wise little woman, [she] not always made direct assaults upon the strong citadel—oftener she made flank movements and laid sieges”

(216). Mary wages a war against Anglo male colonial power, and “[t]his time, however, all tactics had thus far failed, and she withdrew her forces” (216). In the battle that Mary is waging, Ruiz de Burton recognizes that her power as a woman is limited, but she still 204

struggles to wage war on the conqueror. Later, the squatters have gathered at the

Darrell’s house and Mary gives a speech to her husband and the other squatters. She explains that the “laws are wrong and good, just, moral citizens should not be guided by them” (235). The following words sound extremely similar to the protest of Aunt Ri in

Ramona a year earlier: “I love my country, as every true-hearted American woman should, but, with shame and sorrow, I acknowledge that we have treated the conquered

Spaniards most cruelly . . . [who] have been sadly despoiled and reduced to poverty”

(236). Like Jackson, Ruiz de Burton provides an image of an Anglo woman who is patriotic, but who protests injustices enacted by Anglo Americans. Mary explains to the squatters why she had Clarence purchase the land. Romeo Hancock, a squatter, exclaims,

“ain’t she superb! I see now where Clarence gets his good sense and correct ideas”

(236). The narrator explains that “all were impressed with Mrs. Darrell’s words” (236), yet her husband is ashamed because she “purchased” the land without his knowledge.

Still, as a woman she had to have her son buy the land, and her lack of power to do so is apparent. As the narrator explains, “if Darrell had obeyed the impulse of his heart when he went upstairs to his bedchamber, he would have taken his wife in his arms, and, with a kiss, made peace with her” (236). Yet he does not. Instead he responds with rage.

The husband’s lack of respect suggests that colonialist attitudes about conquering people and land are often coupled with degrading attitudes about women. Mary apologizes for not telling him about the purchase: “It was a mistake; I regret it” (236).

She asks, “Can you forgive me?” (236). She is not radical in the sense that she submits to her husband by asking his forgiveness, but she does not apologize for her beliefs or for 205

imploring Clarence to purchase the land. She only apologizes for not telling him about it.

He replies, “Yes, wise women generally put their foot in it,’ said he, turning his back on her” (236). He turns his back on her literally, and this leads to more trouble and injustice in the novel. Mary then reflects, “What fools men are. Such small vanity guides them,” and he sleeps in another room that night “smothered with rage” (238). Darrell’s comment about “women” conveys his condescending attitude about women, and he is still too overcome with rage to sleep in the same bed with his wife. Ruiz de Burton portrays this as foolishness on his part, and on the part of Anglo men who do not see the wisdom of their Anglo wives who protest injustices. Pita and Sánchez refer to Mary’s

“independent spirit,” but note that “the desire to protect the male ego seems to be paramount in her dialogue” (43). Yet, they argue, “she does in fact place her moral convictions and self-righteousness above her husband’s wishes” (43). They further add that Mary “take[s] control of the situation and invert[s] the positions of power in the

Darrell patriarchy” (43). First, Mary does not have control over the situation and second, her position is not simply an inversion of male power. Her apology demonstrates the difficulties Mary has as she tries to negotiate the violent temper of her husband, her own sense of ethics, the squatters, her family, and the Alamares family. Darrell still wields power over the family, and Mary’s apology emphasizes that. Through his response to her, Ruiz de Burton appeals to Anglo women who are not taken seriously by men, and suggests that, despite the difficulty of the task, Anglo women readers should emulate such protest to the unjust treatment of Mexican Americans.

Through the portrayal of Anglo male squatters’ relationships with women, Ruiz 206

de Burton makes clear a connection between Anglo male colonial violence and misogyny. William Darrell goes to ask Matthews, a squatter, if he has been shooting cattle that the Don has sold to Clarence. Matthews enters the house and immediately pours a whiskey. His sister pleas, “Oh William! For pity’s sake! Don’t drink more” “it will make you crazy, I am sure” (271). At this Matthews calls her an “old hag” (271).

When Darrell asks about the rifle, he “became so enraged, hearing this, and so violent and abusive in his language, that Darrell had to interfere to silence him” (272). Darrell, who up until now has not demonstrated concerns for women’s well being or worth, replies, “if you talk like that to your sister, I would advise her not to stay alone in this house with you” (272). Matthews then retorts, “I wish the devil would take the old hag . .

. I hate her” (272). Darrell proceeds to ask if he can borrow his gun, in a ploy to disarm

Matthews since he is so angry about the land dispute. While Matthews’ sister and Darrell are still talking, Matthews shoots George—an Anglo man who attempted to use a legal connection he had to help the Alamares family in their land disputes. Then Matthews starts violently cursing and “smashing furniture” (272). Miss Matthews was “shocked to see her brother crazy, but she had been expecting it. She quietly consented to have him taken to an insane asylum” (273). In this scene, Ruiz de Burton portrays an Anglo woman who is victim to an abusive brother who suffers from alcoholism. Although there is not evidence of him physically hitting her, he insults her verbally and, as a result of his violent actions, she is subject to a violent living situation. Matthews is one of the more vehemently racist of the squatters, suggesting a correlation between colonialist violence and misogyny in a similar way that Helen Hunt Jackson does in Ramona when the Anglo 207

woman’s husband is verbally abusive to her. Ruiz de Burton’s portrayal of Matthews as

“crazy” may, by pathologizing him, make his actions seem an exception. Still, the institutionalization of Matthews as mentally ill suggests that violent, racist, misogynist masculinity is a disease that readers should be uneasy with.

Even though Darrell’s masculinity prevents him from crediting his wife with her good sense, Ruiz de Burton removes the “tough guise”—to borrow a term from Jackson

Katz, an Anglo male theorist on white masculinity and violence—from Darrell. Darrell’s rage causes his son Clarence to flee from the house and his other children not to respect him. As Ruiz de Burton portrays it, the injustices and difficulties the Don has gone through lead to his early death. In the end, Darrell admits he is wrong, and “completely lost his self-control and wept like a child” (331). Without the facade of the “tough guise,” Darrell is able to admit his errors both in not recognizing his wife’s and son’s wisdom and in his treatment of the Alamares family. As such, Ruiz de Burton suggests that the undoing of Anglo American masculinity would benefit Anglo women as well as the people who have been treated with injustice by the same Anglo men whose notion of masculinity is enmeshed in violence and conquest.

The image of an Anglo woman who is empowered to challenge her husband and injustices against Mexican Americans is accompanied by a number of references to women’s suffrage, suggesting, on the part of Ruiz de Burton, the importance of women like Mary who will not use her empowerment to further profit from colonialism. For example, on a business trip, George, who is engaged to Mercedes’ sister Elvira, explains that he prefers not to smoke on a boat where women are present. Clarence replies, “I 208

think so too. We have too many rights, and more than our share of privileges” (141).

“Wait until we have woman suffrage. We will make things uncomfortable for inebriates and tobacco smokers,’ Elvira said laughing” (141). Clarence and George are the Anglo men who are allied with the Alamares family against injustices. George attempts, through his connections, to help the Don get the rights to his land back. Sánchez and Pita note that “intelligent and enlightened men, like Clarence” for their part, are said to recognize an inequality in rights” (46). Thus, Clarence, the hero of the novel, recognizes not only inequality but Anglo male privilege. Moreover, his portrayal serves to contrast the image of his father and Matthews who are disrespectful toward women. Elvira jokingly references the power that might come with women’s suffrage if the temperance movement also gains power. Elvira Alamares, as a Mexican American, refers to the women who would get suffrage as “we,” suggesting on the part of Ruiz de Burton that suffrage for women should include Mexican American women. While this may seem like a minor reference in the novel, such references as these are sprinkled throughout and suggest a concern, on Ruiz de Burton’s part, about political voice and representation and rights for Anglo women and how this relates to rights for Mexican Americans. Through

Elvira’s comment, Ruiz de Burton asks, will the attainment of suffrage be spent to merely further the cause of temperance or will equal rights such as suffrage for women address the injustices and inequities that oppress the Mexican American women and men in her novels?

For example, numerous references are made to the exclusion of women from the public sphere, and this exclusion is linked sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly 209

with the denial of justice to Mexican Americans. When Don Mariano Alamares calls a meeting for the squatters: “The heads of families all came—the male heads, be it understood—as the squatters did not make any pretense to regard female opinion with any more respect than other men” (84). This passage emphasizes that Anglo women did not have a voice in the decision to reject Don Mariano’s offer. Ruiz de Burton’s plot is structured around the loss of the Alamares families’ land, but she also emphasizes that

Anglo women’s voices are not valued by those taking the land. Additionally, the narrator reflects that

love is a woman’s special province—she has, or has had, or will have, power there. Man might take, and absolutely appropriate, monopolize, and exclude her from money-making, from politics and from many other pursuits, made difficult to her by man’s tyranny, man’s hindrances, man’s objections—but in the realms of love he is not the absolute dictator, not the master. He must sue, he must wait, he must be patient. (169)

Ruiz de Burton references the choice a woman has to fall in love, whereas in all other affairs such as politics and “many other pursuits” man has prevented her in his tyranny.

Although the claim that love is a “special province” for women is essentialistic and limiting, another implication of this passage is that women have abilities to protest that they could utilize. Such statements as the one above, and the support she offers for suffrage, suggest an alliance on Ruiz de Burton’s part with the women’s movement, but it is an alliance that demands a protest to the injustices that these dictators have inflicted on

Mexican Americans as well. In the exchange between Don Mariano and Clarence, for example, when Clarence asks to purchase some of the land, Ruiz de Burton critiques

Congress, a Congress that is specifically run by Anglo men. Clarence explains, “my father is a blind worshipper of Congress . . .” (97). Calling on Americans to protest the 210

laws the government makes, he asserts, “it is our duty and privilege to criticize our laws, and criticize severely” (97). Calling the treaty “disgraceful to the American name,”

Clarence states that since he “cannot repeal” he will at least “evade such unjust laws” by paying “for our land whatever price you think just” (97). Later, Don Mariano explains his position: “the law has deluded and misled them . . . so they should bear only half the blame for being squatters—Congress must bear the other half” (161). Ruiz de Burton specifically points not just to the individuals who are stealing the Don’s land, but the government that makes it legal to do so. Clarence insists that if Americans knew about such injustices, “they would denounce it,” to which the Don replies, “I used to think as you do, that the American people had a very direct influence upon the legislation of the country,” but really it is Congress, “led by a few persistent men who with determination do all things” (164). This exchange is strikingly similar to Aunt Ri’s discussion with

Ramona about Congress and the American people. Though there is no record of Ruiz de

Burton reading Jackson’s novel, Ramona was widely circulated and well-received and it is likely that Ruiz de Burton had read it and was influenced by it. If this is the case, then she adds to Jackson’s protest the injustices that a specifically male-run Congress enacted against Mexican Americans.

Like Winnemucca, Ruiz de Burton references the possibility of women in

Congress in such a way that points to the unjust decisions being made by Anglo men.

For example, a man name Gasbang, who has robbed American Indians of their belongings to become wealthy, decides to hide his “predatory gambling” and “seem respectable” (307). He becomes a “pillar in the church” and gets himself nominated to 211

run for Congress (306). During his speeches he makes jokes, at his mother’s expense, about her cooking. Finally, a “loud voice” contends, “we don’t want to be represented in

Washington by a fellow who exults in degradation and has no respect for the memory of his mother” (308). He replies, “you ain’t going to send my mother to Congress” (308), suggesting, on Ruiz de Burton’s part, an attempt to make alliances with women’s rights advocates in the nineteenth century. The references to women’s rights such as the exclusion of women from male decisions and politics, the degradation of women by

Anglo men, and refusal to grant suffrage are all part of Ruiz de Burton’s protest, making her an important voice to study for an understanding of feminist history as well as the history of protest of Mexican Americans to the injustices acted out by the U.S. government.

Most of the novel focuses on Mary as a potential ally in the battle against violent white masculinity directed toward both women and Mexican Americans, yet Mary never becomes friends or even exchanges words with Doña Josefa, the wife of Don Mariano

Alamares. In this way, the novel is limited—Mary never directly becomes an ally with

Doña Josefa, and Mary is the one who is empowered in the novel to voice protest.

Sánchez and Pita assert that “on the whole, women protagonists in the novel do not appear to be overly conscious of their subordination nor their dependent status, except, perhaps, to a degree, Mary Darrell” (46). However, Mary is clearly more than just a little aware of her subordination, as conveyed in the passages above. Doña Josefa too is aware of her subordinate status, though she only gets one important moment when she voices her protest. When she is at a party hosted by wealthy Anglos near the end of the novel, 212

she answers people’s questions about the cause of her husband’s death. Don Mariano became ill during a long series of injustices including the squatters’ encroachment on his land, including their killing of hundreds of his cattle all while the U.S. government refused to validate his land claim. A series of battles shortened his life. An “old friend” warns Doña Josefa not to speak about it, “for you will give great offense” (336). Doña

Josefa replies, “Why should I give offense? It is the truth” (336). Her so-called friend says, “That may be but you cannot speak against such rich people; San Francisco society will turn against you” (336). She replies,

Then it is a crime to speak of the wrongs we have suffered, but it is not a crime to commit those wrongs . . . Oh, very well, let it be so. Let the guilty rejoice and go unpunished and the innocent suffer ruin and desolation. I slander no one, but shall speak the truth. (336)

While Lola never gets a moment to voice her protest, Doña Josefa emphasizes the importance of not silencing injustice. Via her speech, Ruiz de Burton stresses the importance of recording these injustices in history, and thus the importance of her historical fiction. Even if these narratives confront the wealthy and “give great offense,” they must be spoken. Even though Mary Darrell and Doña Josefa are not direct allies and have not organized coalitions with other women, they are allied in their commitment to speak the truth.

Conclusions: Looking at the Past to Envision the Future

At a crucial time for the development of what would later be called feminism,

Ruiz de Burton, Jackson, and Winnemucca point out the impediments that prevent alliances between women and suggest the importance, albeit the difficulties, of such alliances. Jackson minimizes the difficulties such as racism in the forging of alliances 213

between Anglo and Native women, however, Ruiz de Burton and Winnemucca point to the racism on the part of Anglo women that all too often makes them allies with Anglo male power. Ruiz de Burton specifically cautions against the kind of complicity that a profit seeking Anglo woman might have with Anglo men in power, which serves as an insightful lens into the kind of liberal feminism of today wherein some women’s sense of empowerment means equal access to corporate competition and wealth at the expense of those they exploit. All three writers engage discourses about women’s rights, and ask how these struggles for equality relate to the struggles of either American Indian or

Mexican American people. In addition, all three writers suggest a necessary alliance between women against Anglo male sexual predation of Native and/or Mexican

American women. Winnemucca, Jackson, and Ruiz de Burton link sexual violence and other forms of violence against women to the violence of colonialism, and thus theorize an anti-colonialist politics against sexual assault. This is particularly evident in the connections they make between Anglo male entitlement to women’s bodies, colonial power, and political control. Additionally, the breakdown of Matthews in The Squatter and the Don, suggests that violent white masculinity is a mental illness. In both Ruiz de

Burton’s novels, colonial male power necessitates resistance, and is the target against which Mexican American and Anglo women can become allies. Further, Darrell’s

“tough guise” is broken down, due to the persistent “sieges” that Mary wages, suggesting a potential for change.

In Who Would Have Thought It? Ruiz de Burton critiques the institutions of the

Anglo Protestant church, the figure of the Anglo wife as complicit with Anglo male 214

power—Hackwell and Hammerhard, representatives of the church and the United States

legal system—and these function to assault the Mexican American heroine, Lola Medina,

in various ways. Unfortunately, Ruiz de Burton emphasizes the savagery of Hackwell in

a way that makes Anglo men even more “savage” than the Mohave Indians who had

captured Lola and her mother. Ruiz de Burton thus reproduces popular notions of Native

American “savagery” to then satirize Anglo savagery as more savage. In addition, Ruiz

de Burton emphasizes the corruption of Anglo women who are complicit in colonialist

enterprises, but she also reveals that Jemima is still ultimately subject to Anglo male

authority. Hackwell controls and manipulates her into thinking he is interested in her

sexually, and he makes all the decisions. Lavvy’s character further demonstrates that

Anglo women do not share in the so-called democracy of the United States, a move I

argue is an attempt on Ruiz de Burton’s part to ally Anglo women with her social protest.

Lola and Lavvy are both survivors of Hackwell’s sexual predation, and share this struggle

as women—yet Ruiz de Burton emphasizes the additional struggles that Lola has as a

Mexican American woman who, as a racialized other, is especially without access to just

legal recourse. While Lavvy confronts Anglo male power, Jemima works in collusion

with it in order to profit economically. Further, Ruiz de Burton’s numerous references to

suffrage and the exclusion of women from government and business—combined with the

satire in Who Would Have Thought It? of inadequate, dishonest, corrupt Anglo men in power—explicitly critiques white masculinity and the oppression that such Anglo men in power inflict on both Anglo women and Mexican Americans. Ruiz de Burton appropriates the racist ideologies in American culture of American Indians as “savages” 215

to stress her vehement critique of Anglo men’s savagery as worse than the supposed

“savages.” Ruiz de Burton’s numerous references to Mexican Americans as white, combined with her numerous references to suffrage for women, could very well be an attempt to argue for the access of rights for white Mexican Americans to the same rights sought by Anglo women. Regardless of whether or not access to white privilege is Ruiz de Burton’s intention, the references to suffrage and the devaluation of women’s voices parallel her protest to injustices experienced by Mexican Americans; as a result, her novels question how the inequities facing Anglo women relate to the inequities faced by

Mexican American women. Like Jackson and Winnemucca, Ruiz de Burton asks what

Anglo women will do with their empowerment. Through the characters of Aunt Ri,

Lavinia Sprig, and Mary Darrell and their emerging feminist consciousness, Jackson and

Ruiz de Burton provide possibilities regarding what Anglo women will or can do with their empowerment—yet both authors reflect upon the limitations of Anglo women’s protests due to their oppression as women.

Winnemucca, Jackson, and Ruiz de Burton acknowledge, in some way, that

Anglo women are kept out of Congress, not allowed to participate in the decisions of the government, and are not granted the supposed democracy upon which the United States was founded. The sexist incumbent running for office in The Squatter and the Don announces, “you ain’t gonna put my mother in Congress” (308). Winnemucca states that if women were in Congress, then perhaps justice would be done to American Indians.

Jackson’s Aunt Ri learns about and becomes indignant regarding the unjust laws that

Congress makes, while in A Century of Dishonor Jackson suggests an optimism about 216

“what the people command, Congress will do.” Over a century later, the United States has had 11, 699 people serve in Congress. Of those, 2% have been women. A total of twenty-two African American women and seven “Hispanic” women have served positions in Congress—no statistics are provided for American Indian women on the official Congress website. Currently, in the 109th Congress, Anglos hold 84% of the seats in the House and 97% in the Senate. But “progress” does not simply mean equal representation in terms of gender and race anyway. At such a time when our government is still controlled by a privileged few, and the voices of women and people of color are all too often marginalized and/or a mouth pieces for wealthy Anglo men in power, the voices of these nineteenth-century writers are, unfortunately, not outdated.

After more than a century of dishonor later, the feminist matters that these nineteenth-century writers engage are still quite relevant. Writing of internalized racism, homophobia, sexism and classism, Cherríe Moraga explains in 1979 that “each of us has in some way been both the oppressed and the oppressor. We are afraid to see how we have taken the values of our oppressor into our hearts and used them against ourselves and one another” (“La Güera” 32). As a Chicana, she describes how she had internalized the idea that she should aim to pass as white, that “white was right. Period. I could pass.

If I got educated enough, there would never be any telling” (31). Moraga’s working-class parents taught her this as a method of survival, with the hope of having access to more opportunity. Moraga’s writing works through the difficulties of being both the oppressor and the oppressed, and thus makes for an excellent comparative analysis with Ruiz de

Burton’s writing. In Chapter Four I will examine how in Heroes and Saints Moraga 217

takes up similar issues that Ruiz de Burton did, such as the relationship of rights for

Mexican Americans to feminist issues. In contrast to Ruiz de Burton and Jackson, who romanticize the servitude of American Indians on the haciendas, Viramontes and Moraga write to protest the exploitation of Chicanas and Chicanos who are farm workers, and

Moraga specifically emphasizes Chicanas’ indigenous identity (as opposed to Ruiz de

Burton’s identification with Spanish identity and whiteness).

Understanding Ruiz de Burton as a problematic, albeit important, voice of social protest that precedes the Chicano movement helps better understand literary history as well as the history of social protest. Additionally, comparing the ways that Viramontes and Moraga imagine alliances between Anglo and Chicana women is elucidated by understanding the history of racism in the women’s movement in the nineteenth century and the way that writers such as Ruiz de Burton, Jackson, and Winnemucca negotiate such problems and offer tactical strategies for resistance against violent Anglo colonialist masculinity. The reading and studying of writers such as Ruiz de Burton and Jackson enables recognition of the limitations of their ideologies as well as the important protests they voice. By doing this we may continue to work toward decolonizing feminism in the twenty-first century. Examining the writers in this study can allow us to ask important questions regarding the difficulties of alliances between women both individually and within feminist organizations inside and outside of academia. It can ask us to interrogate imbalances of power and problematic maternalistic roles some well meaning Anglo women may have in building alliances with women of color. It can also allow us to ask questions about the kind of individualist liberal feminism of the Mrs. Norvals in the 218

twenty-first century who ally themselves with corrupt Anglo men and profit at the expense of women of color. Ruiz de Burton thus offers a caution to this brand of feminism, a kind of individualist feminism that would be criticized by third wave feminists such as Lorde, Norma Alarcón, and bell hooks in the later part of the twentieth century.clv

Let us proceed beyond the literary criticism that places upon writers such as

Jackson, Winnemucca, and Ruiz de Burton the status of either glorified heroine of social protest or assimilationist, racist, and elitist. Rather than condemn and discard Ruiz de

Burton for the ideological limitations that make her writing disturbing—especially her portrayal of American Indian people—we must ask each of ourselves how we see these limitations in our own writing and thinking and in the world around us: in what ways do we as academics and teachers reproduce classist, racist, or heterosexist ideologies and assumptions? Ruiz de Burton does call for solidarity between Anglo women and

Mexican American women, but the solidarity that she calls for is not anti-capitalist in its struggle. As Sánchez and Pita have pointed out, Clarence, the hero of The Squatter and the Don, owns mines in Arizona, and becomes quite wealthy due to stocks and business investments. The laborers he employs are never mentioned, and the American Indian laborers on the hacienda in that novel are portrayed as inferior. This provides a contrast with Moraga’s and Viramontes’s writings as they imagine a resistant feminist solidarity that is anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-homophobic. Studying literature in this way allows for a lens through which to ask difficult questions about feminism(s) and the problems of racism amongst feminists; about struggles against white male power, 219

violence, and privilege; about the racialized exploitation of workers; and about the various gendered kinds of injustices that Chicanas and Native women continue to experience and the position of Anglo women in relation to such injustice. 220

CHAPTER FOUR

CARTOGRAPHIES OF A VIOLENT LANDSCAPE: HELENA MARÍA

VIRAMONTES’S AND CHERRÍE MORAGA’S MAPPING OF EXPLOITATION

AND FEMINISMS

“I cannot continue to use my body to be walked over to make a connection.”

--Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back, xv

There is “[n]o sense talking tough unless you do it.”

--Estrella, Under the Feet of Jesus, 45

In her 1980 preface to This Bridge Called my Back, Cherríe Moraga explains that

despite the exclusion of women of color and the prevalent homophobia in the feminist

movement, she dreams of a bridge between women. Regarding the exclusiveness of the

feminist movement, she asserts: “I call my white sisters on this” (xiv). She calls for changes from Anglo feminists, and writes of her “faith” and “visions” of alliances between women, acknowledging the toll such attempts at alliances have taken on her body. Throughout Moraga’s poetry, especially her poems in Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983), plays, autobiographical writing, and essays, her body as a Chicana and the Chicanas she writes about carry the physicality of a history of colonialism, a physicality that particularly connects them to an exploited land, to a 221

landscape of continued violence against Chicanas.clvi Moraga’s play Heroes and Saints

(1994) and Helena María Viramontes’s novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) map the continued violence against Chicana farm workers, particularly the effects of pesticide poisoning on female farm workers and the collusion of agribusiness and the United States government. Such a mapping foregrounds their intervention in feminisms, as their writing asks questions about the relationship between Anglo women and the exploitation of Chicana farm workers, about the invisibility of the material conditions of women farm workers’ lives, and the relationship of such realities to feminisms. Such questioning is crucial for efforts to continue to decolonize feminisms in the twenty-first century, particularly in relationship to the work that more feminists are making to define feminist struggle as a recognition of particular effects of constructions of gender in the struggle for human rights.

Whereas Ruiz de Burton negotiates women’s rights in the nineteenth century— particularly suffrage and legal rights for Anglo women in relationship to land rights for

Mexican Americans—Moraga and Viramontes emphasize the daily realities of working- class Chicanas who do not own land but who are exploited on the very land that, as

Gloria Anzaldúa sees it in Borderlands, “was Mexican once/ was Indian always/ and is./

And will be again” (91). Like Anzaldúa, both Moraga and Viramontes call for a reclaiming of the land as part of their protest. Similar to Sarah Winnemucca’s protest of the exploitation of American Indians’ labor on reservations, and unlike Jackson’s romanticization of farm work in Ramona,Viramontes and Moraga make connections between the exploitation of people and a history of colonialism. Moraga and Viramontes 222

point to a history within which people became exploited upon the very land that was

taken from them. Moraga particularly emphasizes the multiplicity of her mestiza identity

as a Chicana with Mexican, Anglo, and Indigenous ancestors in Heroes and Saints, and throughout her writings. Because Chicana writers (including Viramontes and Moraga) do not attempt to identify with whiteness, but rather address that aspect of their identities, it is difficult to see Ruiz de Burton as a “predecessor” to Viramontes and Moraga (see

Chapter Three for a full discussion of this topic in Chicana studies). Yet despite Ruiz de

Burton’s elitism and racist attitude toward American Indians, her writing intervenes in colonialist history, and in Anglo feminisms in a way that is similar to the work that

Viramontes and Moraga continue in the late twentieth century.

As explicated in my introductory chapter, Emma Pérez’s theory of Chicana history in The Decolonial Imaginary is particularly helpful in bridging the century that lapses between these writers. She explains, “[w]omen’s voices and actions intervene to do what I call sexing the colonial imaginary, historically tracking women’s agency on the colonial landscape” (7). As Pérez observes in 1999, “at this juncture, I believe, the writings of Chicano history have focused on social change, but the discourse has been shaped so that gender/sex does not have to be part of the paradigm” (11). Ruiz de

Burton, Viramontes, and Moraga insist on “sexing the colonial imaginary,” looking at how the colonialist imagination affects colonized women. As Chapter Three articulates, many debates have taken place regarding Ruiz de Burton’s role or position in Chicana/o history and literary studies. Rather than attempt to place her as a predecessor or exclude her voice altogether, I place her writing within the Foucaultian paradigm of archeology 223

that Pérez utilizes. For Pérez, the “decolonial imaginary” is a “third space” between the colonial and the decolonial, a third space from which change is envisioned and where

Chicanas speak from the “interstices.” Pérez employs Foucault’s genealogy that “asks that disciplines, their categories, their girds and cells be exploded, opened up, confronted, inverted, and subverted; genealogy recognizes how history has been written upon the body” (xvi). Moraga’s Heroes and Saints as well as Virmontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus and Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don and Who Would Have Thought It? intervene from the “interstitial space where differential politics and social dilemmas are negotiated” to write Chicanas into history (6). Ruiz de Burton, Moraga, and Viramontes recognize the way that colonial male history has been written upon Chicana bodies and thus their writings employ a “decolonial imaginary;” by excavating Ruiz de Burton’s writing along with Moraga’s and Viramontes’s, an archaeology of a decolonial feminist imaginary can be unearthed. These writers make clear the ways various histories—

Chicano as well as Anglo—have been written upon Chicana bodies, but they make clear too that Chicanos also carry the burden of colonialism.

Part of the continuing colonial reality in the twenty-first century in mainstream

American culture, as well as in feminist theory and praxis, is the invisibility of the working conditions and daily struggles of farm workers. The importance of buying and consuming organic fruits and vegetables, for health conscious consumers, has made organic produce more visible at U.S. grocery stores, yet the damage that pesticide exposure causes to the health and lives of farm workers is all too invisible. However, the harmful effects of pesticide exposure are well known (at least scientifically). For 224

example, in an article in the Western Journal of Nursing Research, published in 2004,

Mary Salazar reports that farm workers come in contact with toxic poisons daily.clvii

Although the number of reported cases diagnosed by physicians is 10,000-20,000 each

year, the Environmental Protection Agency calculated in 1997 that every year

approximately 300,000 farm workers suffer from illnesses as a result of pesticide

poisoning, many of whom are children who are especially vulnerable (Salazar et. Al

147).clviii A 2004 article in Cancer Weekly notes that although guidelines were set up by

the Environmental Protection Agency in 1994 to attempt to protect farm workers and

their families, the poisons still cause “an important health risk that won’t be reduced”

without further changes (par. 1). In his article “Regulating Pesticides,” David Hosansky

provides an explanation for the fact that “the government is still struggling to determine

safe pesticide levels” (667). He points out that while farmers, who depend on using one

billion pounds of pesticides every year, are anxious that regulating pesticide use will have

dire consequences for their businesses, others assert that the government is moving too

slowly (668). The failure to establish safe guidelines for workers is largely due to a

political economy within which the profits of agribusiness outweigh the health and lives

of workers.

Both Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1994) and Viramontes’s Under the Feet of

Jesus (1995), published within a year of the United States government’s attempt to

establish “safe” guidelines for pesticide use, call for changes that would place the health

and lives of farm workers over economic profit. In these two literary works, Viramontes

and Moraga protest the use of pesticides and the racist ideologies that foster the notion 225

that farm workers’ lives are expendable; as well, they demonstrate how such racist ideologies—rooted within a history of colonialism—provide fuel for a capitalist system of exploitation. While dominant discourses of history have attempted to render invisible the exploitation of Chicanas and Chicanos in the United States, both Viramontes’s and

Moraga’s writings map the experiences of farm workers in California in the late twentieth century, locating the continued violences enacted on Chicana and Chicano bodies as rooted in a history of U.S. expansionism and imperialism. In a note to her play, Moraga explains that, although McLaughlin is a fictional town, Heroes and Saints responds to the events surrounding the 1988 farm workers’ boycott in McFarland during which Dolores

Huerta, Chicana activist for farm worker rights, was brutally beaten by police. Huerta had been holding a press conference to make it known to the public that the then- president George Bush refused to acknowledge the outbreak of cancer amongst farm workers. Although both Moraga’s and Viramontes’s protests were written a decade ago, they are still as relevant today, since a disproportionate number of farm workers and their children have developed cancer.clix In Under the Feet of Jesus, Viramontes tells the story of a Chicana mother, Petra, who along with her children works in the fields, earning substandard wages, and a Chicano boy, Alejo, who is dying from pesticide exposure and has neither the means to travel to a health clinic nor the money to pay for necessary health care. Moraga’s and Viramontes’s writings attest to the necessity for a continued counter-hegemonic strategic resistance to violence enacted upon the land and environment as well as the bodies of its Chicana and Chicano inhabitants, a history of violence that has dehumanized them as other, as foreign, as alien. 226

More specifically, Moraga and Viramontes point to the gendered experiences of

Chicana farm workers, experiences that include rape, pregnancy, and the struggles of mothers to care for their children. In this way, Moraga and Viramontes enact what

Chicana theorist Sonia Saldívar-Hull calls “feminism on the border”: “Chicana feminist theories present material geopolitical issues that redirect feminist discourse, again pointing to a theory of feminism that addresses the multiplicity of experiences, what I call

‘feminism on the border’” (48-9). Saldívar-Hull critiques the absence of acknowledgement of issues confronting Chicanas in mainstream Anglo feminisms, and as she situates her theory on the physical spaces of the border she calls attention to the necessity for transnational feminist alliances particularly between what she terms “U.S.

Third World women” and “Third World women” globally. Both Heroes and Saints and

Under the Feet of Jesus point to the possibility of alliances between women on a transnational scale, particularly regarding the exploitation of women workers.

Perhaps because they do not directly refer to feminisms, Viramontes’s Under the

Feet of Jesus and Moraga’s Heroes and Saints have not been examined in relationship to their intervention in feminisms or their critique of Anglo feminisms. In fact, very little critical work has been done on both of these works. Most literary criticism on Moraga is on her essays and her play Giving Up the Ghost. Julia de Foor Jay’s article,

“(Re)Claiming the Race of the Mother: Cherríe Moraga’s Shadow of a Man, Giving Up the Ghost and Heroes and Saints,” examines Moraga’s plays and her representation of women who are labeled as “Vendidas” or “La Chingada” (sellouts or traitors, or literally

“fucked” women) and reclaims them as leaders of revolution. Yarbro-Bejarano’s book 227

on Moraga’s work, The Wounded Heart, has a chapter on Heroes and Saints that focuses on how Moraga revisions El Teatro Chicano to include queer and disabled characters.

Most literary criticism on Viramontes focuses on her short story collection The Moths, particularly her story “The Cariboo Café.” Anne Shea’s article, “‘Don’t Let Them Make

You Feel You Did a Crime’: Immigration, Law, Labor Rights, and Farmworker

Testimony,” provides helpful contexts for reading the political protest of Under the Feet of Jesus and looks at the criminalization of farm worker subjectivity. Additionally, in

“The La Brea Tar Pits, Tongues of Fire: Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of

Jesus and Its Background,” Dan Latimer provides a reading of the significance of the tar pits in the novel, but does not locate this reading within a gendered, historical context. In addition to the literary criticism on these works, I add that the texts comment on some reasons for failures in the women’s movement and divisions between Anglo women and

Chicanas. In Viramontes’s novel, Anglo women hold powerful positions in the institutions of health care and education, and their racism toward Chicanas demonstrates how power and privilege can not only prevent alliances between women, but also cause many Anglo women to enact colonial power. The Anglo women in Viramontes’s novel are in positions of institutional power, and they are using the “master’s tools” that Audre

Lorde critiques in her 1979 essay “The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s

House.” In this essay that she originally presented as a conference paper for a feminist conference entitled “The Personal and the Political,” Lorde questions the complicity of

Anglo women who align themselves with Anglo men, with colonial power, in order to succeed. As Lorde explains, this will “never dismantle the master’s house”—it will just 228

allow Anglo women a more powerful role within that establishment. Lorde further asks

“what do you do with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor and third world women?” (100). Viramontes and Moraga ask, what about the Chicanas who harvest the fruit that Anglo women and their families eat? In the social protests of

Heroes and Saints and Under the Feet of Jesus, Anglo women are either absent, or antagonistic and racist toward Chicanas, suggesting that Anglo women are all too often either apathetic or unaware of the material conditions of Chicana farm workers or, in some cases, hold powerful institutional positions as a result of using the master’s tools— and from this position reproduce racism against women of color. One of the sites of power for the Anglo nurse in Under the Feet of Jesus is her family, and her ties to economic, white, heterosexual privilege. Both Viramontes’ and Moraga’s writings demonstrate the inter-relationship between white, heterosexual, and economic class privilege that are intertwined in ways that can explain resistance on the part of some

Anglo women to substantial social change.

Biographical Background on Moraga and Viramontes:

Cherríe Moraga was born in 1952 in Los Angeles to an Anglo father and a working-class Chicana mother who grew up doing farm work.clx Moraga was the first generation from both sides of her family to graduate from college, and earned a Master’s degree from San Francisco State University in 1980. She came out after college, and writes about her experiences as a Chicana and as a lesbian in her autobiography Loving in the War Years (1983). Influenced by El Teatro Campesino, she rights political plays but 229

revises the tradition by writing Chicana lesbians and gay Chicanos onto the stage.clxi In

1981, she published This Bridge Called my Back with Gloria Anzaldúa. By validating the experiences of women of color in the United States, the collection of writings made a crucial intervention in and critique of the mainstream Anglo feminist movement. In an

1986 interview, Luz María Umpierre asks Moraga, “what kind of feminism do you purport?” Moraga responds,

That is also hard to answer because I think I have been very discouraged by the Feminist Movement, so, you get me on one of my bad days and I’ll say ‘those feminists.’ I remember what Feminism meant to me when it occurred to me that there was an analysis on sexual oppression. I would never say I was not a Feminist. I thought feminism made visible a lot of very invisible kinds of oppressions that happened indoors. (64)

Emerging from Moraga’s discouragement with feminisms is her hope for more inclusive feminisms and alliances between women, themes that are woven into her writing.

In her 1997 memoir, Waiting in the Wings: A Portrait of Queer Motherhood,

Moraga recounts her experiences as a lesbian mother, and the homophobia she was

confronted with during her extended time in the hospital. The baby that she carried was

born extremely premature, so she had to visit him daily to breastfeed for months after his

birth. In this memoir she reflects on the multiple alliances that comprise her family:

“Nation. Nationality. I am to be the mother of a Mexican baby. . . a queer contract. And

I got a whitegirl lover” (39). She asked a dark, gay Chicano friend, Pablo, to donate

sperm and Moraga was artificially inseminated. Pablo, along with her Anglo partner,

Ella, and Moraga are the parents to her child. Her memoir reflects on a love story of

Ella’s “goodness to me in my pregnancy” (41) as well as the strain of her traumatic

pregnancy and the toll it took on her relationship with Ella. Due to complications, she 230

gave birth four months early and the baby almost died. Throughout the memoir, Moraga reflects on complex triangulations of identity, alliances, and forms of marginalization.

This includes the way her Anglo partner can pass as straight, but when Ella is in the hospital with Moraga as the other mother she is harassed. Moraga and Ella confront security guards on their daily trip to the hospital so that Moraga can breastfeed her premature baby:

Only immediate family,’ the young man tells us . . . He is taking his job very seriously. ‘Yes, we know,’ I answer for the hundredth time. ‘She (referring to Ella) is immediate family. Call the ICN. They’ll okay us.’ The same old ritual, the same harassment night after night. Then he can’t help himself, and a grin begins to crack the professional façade. ‘You say you’re both the moms!’ He eyes his buddies, his co-workers, and the street gang begins to form around us . . . ‘I didn’t know two women could have a baby together.’” (75)

Moraga expresses how she and Ella are allied through their love, and yet she does not romanticize this alliance: it is fraught with difficulties and complexities surrounding issues of identity, including sexuality and race.

In addition to queer alliances that take place across gender and race, another recurrent theme in Moraga’s writings is coming to terms with the Anglo part of her identity and her light skin. In This Bridge Called My Back, Moraga begins her essay “La

Güera” by discussing her mother’s childhood experience of being taken out of school when she was five years old to work in the fields and, later, her mother’s experiences working in various factories as an adult. Moraga reflects on her privileges in terms of her whiteness in comparison to her mother—it is through her own identity as a lesbian that she understood her mother’s subjectivity: “It wasn’t until I acknowledged and confronted my own lesbianism in the flesh, that my heartfelt identification with and empathy with 231

my mother’s oppression—due to being poor, uneducated, and Chicana—was realized”

(28). Moreover, Moraga’s articulation of the way subjectivity is constructed exemplifies

what Mary Pat Brady theorizes, in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies, regarding the

way that borders construct racialized, gendered subjectivities that are rooted in capitalism

and heteronormativity.clxii Although people do not often think of autobiography or fiction as theoretical work, I locate Moraga’s autobiographical and fictional writing as articulating theories of subjectivity within a racialist, capitalist, heteronormative landscape.

Sandra K. Soto critiques Moraga’s autobiographical writing as “contain[ing] an unusual objectification of racialization” (247). Using Joan W. Scott’s work that

nterrogates the use of experience as evidence, Soto warns that “the danger of the uncritical experience-as-evidence approach to difference is that it renders difference still more naturalized” (241). Yet Moraga’s autobiography theorizes not just her own personal subjectivity, but the relationships of subjectivity to culture, class, and community and the meaning of alliances between gay Chicanos, Chicanas, women of color, and Anglo women. For Moraga, the personal is theoretical and it should be recognized as such.clxiii What is at stake in Soto’s warning is reading autobiographical

writing such as Moraga’s without an understanding of the complex interplay between

history, culture, ideology, and subjectivity.

Helena María Viramontes was born in 1954 and grew up in East Los Angeles in a

large family—she had five sisters and three brothers. As a child, she spent most of her

summers picking grapes with her family in central California.clxiv In the public school 232

system in Los Angeles she was confronted with racism on a daily basis. In an interview with Isabel Dulfono, she explains,

I grew up the first five years of my life speaking Spanish, and then I went into the Los Angeles school system, and they made you feel very shameful. It was prohibited to speak Spanish. I would go home, and I knew that my mother, she’s third generation, understood English well, she went to the same high school I attended, but never graduated. (655)

Viramontes graduated from college and left an MFA program at UC Irvine where her advisor told her to “stop writing about Chicanos and start writing about people”—another instance of a history of dehumanizing Chicanos (53 Moore). She returned over ten years later and finished her program (she was able to work with different people). She was a coordinator of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association, has worked as a Professor of creative writing at Cornell for a number of years, and has recently accepted a position at the University of Miami. Regarding writing, Viramontes explains,

In terms of the imagination and refueling the imagination, there’s an incredible amount of anger. It’s a return to that sense of survival where you feel that your community is on the verge of being destroyed and you will have to do something about it. You have to find a way to do it. First you have to find out which ways didn’t work, and ten you have to re-imagine the fight. This is the challenge I have for all writers: re-imagine, reinvent. (Moore 60)

For Viramontes, the imagination is where protest begins: writing allows the imagination to act.

In the acknowledgments to Under the Feet of Jesus, she writes that “[i]t’s amazing to remember the times I wrote with Pilar strapped to my back or nursed

Francisco while typing” (177). The bodily influence of her children while writing Under the Feet of Jesus is evident: the struggles of Chicana farm workers who are mothers are central to her novel. Additionally, she dedicates her novel to César Chávez and her 233

parents Mary Louise LaBrada Viramontes and Serafin Bermúdes Viramontes as well as

all farm workers: “The food on the table: Thanks to the piscadores, who, with weary

bones and hard labor, feed me and you daily” (177). In the acknowledgments she

concludes by writing, “To all the Spirits of my ancestors, of the earth’s making, of the

heavens which protect and love me, my humble gratitude. To the generosity of mi raza,

who love to tell me stories of their lives” (180). Thus, even though Viramontes herself

experienced the harsh conditions of farm work, she is not telling a story of her life but

rather a story about a community.

Brief Overview of Concerns of the Chicano Movement and the Role of Chicanas:

In 1965, the year that most people mark as the beginning of the Chicano

Movement, the National Farmworker’s Association (later known as the United Farm

Workers) formed under the leadership of Dolores Huerta and César Chávez and the

Crusade for Justice began, led by Rudolfo Corky Gonzalez. Additionally, Reies López

Tijerina led La Alianza, which focused on land grants and redistribution of land, and, in that same year, a variety of student groups including MAYO and MECha formed to combat racism in education, including curriculum. In 1969, at the Chicano Youth

Conference in Denver, Colorado, several Chicanas voiced perspectives about traditional gender roles as limiting, but these topics were dismissed.clxv As Sonia López and others

have documented, Chicanas were expected to cook and clean during the movement and

not take leadership positions (though it is important to emphasize that some women like

Dolores Huerta still did).clxvi Sonia Saldívar-Hull notes Adelaida del Castillo’s essay,

“Mexican Women in Organization,” explaining that del Castillo “documents how 234

Chicanas in the Movement were ‘expected by their male peers to involve themselves

actively but in subordination’” (29). Many Chicana writers such as Ana Castillo, Cherríe

Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Bernice Zamora, la Chrisx (especially in her poem “La Loca

de la Raza Cosmica”), and numerous other Chicana writers have critiqued the

subordinated yet nonetheless important role of Chicanas in the Chicano movement, and

the failure of the movement to address sexism within and outside of Chicano culture. In

Loving in the War Years (lo que nunca pasó por sus labios), Moraga examines this

reality, explaining that “la malinchista” is the derogatory Spanish word often used to refer

to a women who questions sexism as a betrayer, and it is also the word often used to refer

to a lesbian as an accusation (103). Additionally, in The Last Generation, Moraga’s

essay “Queer Aztlán,” critiques Chicano nationalist politics and the exclusion of gays and

lesbians from the spaces of the visionary nationalism of Aztlán. Writers such as Ana

Castillo have pointed to the important roles Chicanas have more recently played in

protesting, despite the challenges they have been confronted with in terms of gender

roles. As an example, Castillo writes about the courage of Latina women, and their

leadership in the Watsonville canning strike in 1985 (Massacre of the Dreamers 54-55).

In Moraga’s Heroes and Saints and Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus,

Chicanas play an active part in the protests that take place. Each author negotiates central tenants of the Chicano movement such as land claims, exploitation, and the education system while also emphasizing the specific ways that these colonialist violences affect

Chicanas—in this process they situate Chicanas as active agents who have, despite criticism and challenges, played central roles in social protest and leadership. In the 235

introduction to her play, Moraga explains that it is based on the specific incidents

involving a social protest of pesticide poisoning that was led by Chicana activists in the

San Joaquin Valley in 1988, and she emphasizes the importance of women’s voices and

leadership in making their voices heard publicly. Although Viramontes’s novel does not

directly refer to specific historical protests, the centrality of Chicanas in her novel also

emphasizes the importance of Chicana activism and resistance.

As Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano explains, in 1965, Luis Valdez’s theatre, El Teatro

Campesino, “became a tool for political organizing and consciousness-raising in the

fields of California,” and accompanied the United Farm Worker’s protests (24).clxvii As a

“recognizable form of interventionist drama,” “Chicano theater has provided the

opportunity for Chicano audiences, traditionally excluded as subjects of the drama, to

identify with representations of their lives” (24). Still, as Yarbro-Bejarano points out,

Chicano theater did not “provide many opportunities for women (especially lesbians) or

gay men to be the subjects of the drama,” while in Western drama the lesbians who took

the stage were white and privileged (24).clxviii Moraga thus places on stage the Chicana who is excluded from the feminist movement and the Chicana lesbian who is excluded from the Chicano movement, making visible through peoples’ bodies the absences and limitations within each movement.clxix Though Viramontes’s novel is not staged, she too places Chicanas on center stage in a way that also points to the erasure, in the discourses of feminisms and the Chicano Movement, of the struggles and experiences of Chicanas. 236

Brief Overview of Limitations of the Women’s Movement and New Directions for

Feminisms:

Most Chicana writers (Anzaldúa, Moraga, Viramontes, Lorna De Cervantes,

Sandra Cisneros, Bernice Zamora, and many more) contextualize sexism within Chicano

culture by also looking at racist sexism from Anglo culture, combating a prevalent

tendency in American culture to critique machismo in Mexican and Chicano culture

while leaving Anglo men unaccountable for their misogyny and sexism.clxx In the anthology Chicana Lesbians, Emma Pérez writes, “Many Anglos, particularly white feminists, insist that the men of our culture created machismo and they conveniently forget that the men of their race make the rules” (163). While this is a problem that I have noticed in conversations with some Anglo feminists, I argue that this is rooted in racist ideologies in mainstream American culture. Further, many Women’s Studies departments in the U.S. emphasize the importance of addressing interlocking forms of oppression including colonialism, racism, economic exploitation, heteronormativity, and social constructions of gender. When teaching feminist theory classes, I emphasize the necessity of critiquing misogyny and sexism in relationship to colonialist violence and power so that Latino men are not demonized as exemplifying a “savage” kind of misogyny. Under the Feet of Jesus and Heroes and Saints dismantle such accusations by pointing to the various forms of power that Chicana and Chicano farm workers are confronted with, particularly as exploited working-class people, and by portraying men who do not embrace stereotypical “machismo” characters traits. 237

One of the critiques that Chicana feminists and other Third World U.S. feminists

have made of first and second wave feminisms includes using the term “woman” to

generalize about all women’s experiences in a way that really only includes bourgeois,

Anglo, heterosexual women. As Audre Lorde asserts, women do not “suffer the same

oppression simply because we are women” (95). In Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine

Mystique she assumes that all women have the privilege not to work, that all women are

college educated, and that all women are white and heterosexual (as bell hooks points out

in “Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory”).clxxi In what is often referred to as a

groundbreaking work in feminism, The Second Sex (1953), Simone de Beauvoir

postulates that “woman” is a category of “Other,” an object to man’s subjectivity. Her

work provides a strong analysis of gender, power, and identity, yet she does not consider

the way that women of color are othered doubly, or that men of color do not have the

same access to male power that Anglo men do. My critique of de Beauvoir intends to

serve as an example of how race can be absent from feminist theory. Feminists can learn

from such oversights, and we can build upon the important work of resistance that those

such as Friedan and de Beauvoir expressed as we envision feminisms for the future.

Regarding limitations of the women’s movement, many people cite Sojourner

Truth as the example of a woman from the nineteenth century who protested publicly

about her rights specifically as a Black woman.clxxii However, as I argue in the first three chapters of this study, Native, Anglo, and Mexican American women (such as Sarah

Winnemucca, Helen Hunt Jackson, and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton) have also been calling for new directions in feminism since at least as early as the nineteenth century in 238

the United States. Such work parallels the work of Moraga and Viramontes and their intervention in feminisms, and emphasizes the need for such work to continue.

In an attempt to deal with racism in the feminist movement, the focus for the 1981

National Women’s Studies Association conference was “Women Respond to Racism.”

In her report, Chela Sandoval writes that it was the “first sponsored by the women’s movement to confront the idea of ‘racism’ and over three hundred feminists of color attended from all over the country” (59). What happened at the conference, as Sandoval explains, was that discussions of racism were “controlled and constrained,” so some women demanded a separate meeting within the conference to address this problem. For

Sandoval, the coalition that emerged between some Anglo women and women of color was successful, and they proposed changes to the organization’s structure in order to

“directly address the issue of racism in the women’s movement” (69). Their proposal was not accepted by the Anglo delegates of the organization, however. Though nearly thirty years have passed since this meeting, there is still a need to further address racism within feminisms. As Ana Castillo writes in 1994 in Massacre of the Dreamers, “white women are members of a race that has proclaimed itself globally superior for hundreds of years” (24). Viramontes’s novel addresses the continued racist attitude of superiority amongst Anglo women that is rooted in history and, unfortunately, all too prevalent in the present.

In Moraga and Anzaldúa’s 1981 anthology This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, their prefaces express a hope for connections between women, and though there is particular emphasis on alliances between women of color, 239

Moraga states that she hopes it will be a “consciousness-raiser for white women” (xxvi).

Some of the goals of This Bridge include: addressing the “in/visibility of women of color” in feminist movement; noticing the ways “Third world women derive a feminist political theory specifically from our racial/cultural background and experience;” articulating the “destructive effects of racism in the women’s movement;” and the theme of writing and revolution for a feminist future (xxiv). Regarding alliances between

Chicanas and Anglo women, Anzaldúa writes,

Many feel that whites should help their own people rid themselves of race hatred and fear first. I, for one, choose to use some of my energy to serve as a mediator. I think we need to allow whites to be our allies. Through our literature, art, corridos, and folktales we must share our history with them . . . they will come to see that they are not helping us but following our lead. (85)

Moraga too seems to see herself as a kind of cultural mediator for alliances between women. Noting that within the women’s movement “connections between women of different backgrounds and sexual orientations have been fragile, at best” (30), Moraga hopes that by confronting problems collective resistance against oppression is possible:

It is essential that radical feminists confront their fear of and resistance to each other, because without this, there will be no bread on the table. Simply, we will not survive . . . we women need each other . . . the real power, as you and I well know, is collective. I can’t afford to be afraid of you, nor you of me. If it takes head-on collisions, let’s do it: this polite timidity is killing us. (34)clxxiii

Both Viramontes and Moraga portray the realities of the lived experiences of Chicana

farm workers to confront the lack of awareness or concern amongst (too many) Anglo

feminists, and the continued violence against Chicanos and Chicanas as rooted in a long

history of racism. Their portrayals of the harsh working conditions for farm workers in

the United States recognize limitations in feminist movements in the United States, and 240

also allow for the possibility of making further connections to exploitation in the context of globalization. Both texts make subtle gestures toward transnational feminist alliances between U.S. Third World feminists and women of color globally.clxxiv

Re-mapping Feminisms: the Exploitation of Chicanas in Under the Feet of Jesus and Heroes and Saints

Both Moraga and Viramontes situate their critique of current exploitation within the context of United States history and constructions of race that have been used by

Anglos to attempt to justify exploitation. In the early twentieth century, Dr. George

Clements, from the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce’s Agricultural Department, stated that “‘due to their crouching and bending habits,’ the ‘oriental and Mexican’ were suited to tasks in the fields, while whites were ‘physically unable to adapt’ themselves to such work” (Takaki 321). Such ideologies attempt to naturalize white supremacy while defining Chicana and Chicano bodies as naturally suited to harsh conditions of field work. Similarly, in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the

Urgency of Space (2002) Chicana theorist Mary Pat Brady refers to early Anglo travelers in what used to be Mexico, who mapped Mexicano and Mexicana bodies as cheap labor: they took stock of ways to exploit the land and the people inhabiting the land by defining

Mexicana and Mexicano subjectivity as suited to labor (21). Brady also historicizes the production of spaces such as borders, monuments, and other sites that represent and manage colonial power, pointing out that the production of spaces includes the regulation of what space means: the “labor” of that space serves to construct dehumanizing identities at the same time that it “naturalizes violent racial, gender, and class ideologies” 241

(6). Brady’s theory of the “labor” of the border is exemplified in the way that Moraga and Viramontes denaturalize such violent, racialized ideologies about Chicana and

Chicano subjectivity to render visible the exploitative labor of Chicanas. Given the history of exclusion of working-class women and women of color in feminist movements, such renderings ask how these women’s daily lives can be better addressed in feminist movements and organizations.

Viramontes confronts the erasure of the realities of exploitation in mainstream

American culture by questioning the way that grapes are packaged for consumption, specifically the romanticized image of a female farm worker on the front of a raisin package. The farm worker on the package, named a “Sun Maid” by the raisin company, also serves as the name of the raisin company. The smiling, packaged Sun Maid exemplifies how knowledge about the working conditions of laborers is constructed and produced. Viramontes clearly responds to the famous political painting by Chicana artist

Ester Hernandez, in which the Sun Maid, a skeleton, smiles from beneath her sun bonnet on the package of a raisin box. Like Hernandez, Viramontes dismantles this pre- packaged epistemology of farm work. She describes what agricultural work is like for

Estrella, the thirteen-year-old heroine of the novel who works in the fields with her mother:

Carrying the full basket to the paper was not like the picture on the red raisin boxes Estrella saw in the markets, not like the woman wearing a fluffy bonnet, holding out the grapes with her smiling, ruby lips, the sun a flat orange behind her. The sun was white and it made Estrella’s eyes sting like an onion, and the baskets of grapes resisted her muscles, pulling their magnetic weight back to the earth. The woman with the red bonnet did not know this. Her knees did not sink into the hot white soil . . . (49-50)

242

Viramontes demythologizes the pastoral, gendered romantic images of farm space; her

portrait is distinctly different than the image Jackson paints in Ramona of “the delicious, languid, semi-tropic summer [that] came hovering over the valley. The apricots turned golden, the peaches glowed, the grapes filled and hardened, like opaque emeralds hung thick under the canopied vines . . . it was like an enchanter’s spell” (107). Jackson’s description of the harvest time in California erases the physical strain of labor, and

Viramontes responds to such a history of romanticizing farm work. Reappropriating the image of the Sun Maid with the bonnet, Viramontes confronts the oppressiveness of the heat of the sun and other bodily effects on farm workers. Just as the woman with the red bonnet did not know the difficulties of agricultural work, so too are most consumers unaware of the conditions within which commodities are produced. Such ideological oversights and lack of knowledge in American culture effects many feminist discourses, praxis, and theories, and it is in this way that Under the Feet of Jesus intervenes.

Moreover, many Americans, including feminists, are unaware that so much farm labor is done by children. In 2000, the writer of The Peace Review notes information from the National Agricultural Worker Survey: approximately 409,000 children comprise about 25% of the agricultural labor in the United States (466). Viramontes makes visible the labor performed by child farm workers. As Anne Shea points out, federal laws protecting workers, including the laws against child labor, do not apply to agricultural workers (127). Additionally, as Shea indicates, employers are not required to pay minimum wage, overtime, or allow breaks (127). Further, she explains that “[a]s a result, it is not unusual for farm workers to labor ten to twelve hours a day seven days a 243

week, without adequate breaks, food, water, or sanitation facilities (127). Throughout

Under the Feet of Jesus, Viramontes testifies not only to inhumane working conditions,

but also to the difficulties that many families experience because the wages they earn are

not sufficient even to purchase enough to eat. The image Viramontes paints of the Sun

Maid portrays her not as basking in the sun, but rather as a child weary under the burden

of her labor and from malnourishment. While Moraga’s writing specifically critiques the

exploitation of Chicanas and Chicanos in the San Joaquin Valley in California,

Viramontes does not name a specific location for the setting of the novel, except for a

reference to a radio station the workers pick up out of Baja, California. Thus, the setting

could be anywhere in the Southwestern part of the United States. Since she does not

directly name the location, Viramontes’s novel can be read as a critique of the systemic

problems within the agricultural industry. She does not allow readers to think that the

problem resides in just one exploitative farmer; instead, Under the Feet of Jesus points to

a capitalist industry that masks its exploitation by romanticizing the labor of the people

who it exploits.

Throughout Under the Feet of Jesus, Viramontes often refers to Petra as “the mother,” emphasizing her role and responsibilities as a mother and the ways she is doubly burdened—by her work in the fields and her work as a mother—and thus effectively confronts discourses about motherhood that focus on work for women as an empowering opportunity that began with and resulted from the feminist movement.clxxv

Viramontes writes of the burden on the mother bodily: “The mother struggled upward,

straightening one knee then the other, and Estrella noticed how purple and thick her veins 244

were getting. Like vines choking the movement out of her legs” (61). Such an image conveys, with haunting violence, how the labor has consumed her body, and the grapes are like a parasite devouring her body from within. Varicose veins often occur when pregnant women spend too much time standing up, thus the image conveys the double labor of farm workers who are mothers. Further, Viramontes carefully emphasizes that women still labor while they are pregnant: “Even then, the mother seemed old to

Estrella. Yet, she hauled pounds and pounds of cotton by the pull of her back . . . The sack slowly grew larger and heavier like the swelling child within her” (51). In telling this story of one woman, Viramontes evokes a history of Chicanas who have labored doubly, in the field and by giving birth. For instance, Rosaura Valdéz, a female farm worker in the 1930s, testifies to a triple burden:

I am an agricultural working woman. I came to this camp with my husband and baby. I have to get up before the men get up. I feed my baby and then I am supposed to help in the kitchen. . . . Although there is a paid cook, I am supposed to help. I have to go out with the men at the same time, taking my baby with me. . . . Really I am suffering doubly. There must be several thousand women like me in the fields. (Between Borders 47)

She thus labors doing unpaid “women’s work” in the kitchen of her employer, the unpaid work of caring for her baby, and the extremely low paid work in the fields. In “Chicanas and Mexicanas Within a Transnational Working Class,” Elizabeth Martínez and Ed

McCaughan contextualize Valdéz’ testimonio, and stress that “from the early days of

North American colonization, Mexicana women have been superexploited, performing the unrecognized and unwaged labor of producing and reproducing labor power in the home while filling the lowest-paid, most exploitative jobs outside the home” (47).

Further, Martínez and McCaughan explain that the example of Valdéz in the 1930s is “all 245

too true today” (47). Avoiding references to Estrella’s mother’s name throughout most of the novel, and instead referring to Petra as “the mother,” Viramontes critiques a long history of a political economy within which mothers’ labor is doubly exploited: their bodies labor in the fields but the labor of childbearing also produces children, the products and laborers of a future capitalist system. Viramontes draws attention to the economies of this gendered landscape, mapping various effects of a history of exploitation on women. Thus, Under the Feet of Jesus overturns myths about women working outside of the home beginning in the 1960s or 1970s, as many working-class

Chicanas have been working outside of the home long before that.

In addition to the bodily burden of labor, Viramontes points to the reality of mothers whose income does not provide them with enough food to feed their children— another bodily experienced oppression. One particular scene renders the emotional and mental violence of hunger: in an attempt to entertain her siblings and help them forget the pangs of their hunger Estrella dances with an empty box of Quaker oats. While her siblings scream in the background, Estrella tries “to feed the children with noise”: “One foot up, one foot down no more dancing with the full of empty Quaker man” (20).

Viramontes points to the violent irony that farm workers and their children perform the physically burdensome labor of picking fruit in an environment contaminated by pesticides and yet do not earn wages sufficient enough for adequate nourishment. The

Quaker oats brand name also carries a particular connotation of freedom in American culture, since the Quakers have stood up against violence, war, and slavery. But for

Estrella’s family that freedom is an empty box. Viramontes portrays the mentally 246

debilitating effects of such oppression on Petra as a mother when she cannot feed her crying children: “Petra broke, her mouth a cut jagged line. She bolted out of the apartment . . . The twins so hungry and her feet too heavy, too heavy to lift” (19). Petra runs through traffic, and the way that Viramontes portrays it conveys understanding for her momentary breakdown: her “mouth a cut jagged line” is suggestive of bodily violence.clxxvi Viramontes links images of mouths and hunger to bodily oppression, both physical and mental.clxxvii

Viramontes and Moraga both stress the reality that female farm workers often have children who are poisoned by pesticides. In Under the Feet of Jesus, after Petra,

Estrella’s mother, finds out that she is pregnant again, she wonders, “Would the child be born without a mouth, would the poisons of the fields harden in its tiny little veins?”

(125). The mouth imagery also suggests, for both Viramontes and Moraga, the voicelessness of their characters as well as the silencing of protest. Petra’s anxiety is not one of paranoia. In 2004, an article in Cancer Weekly explains that “adults exposed to pesticides can experience neurological deficits, increased risk of cancer, and reproductive problems. Effects for children can include birth defects and developmental delay” (par.

3). In her play Heroes and Saints, published in 1994, just a year before Under the Feet of

Jesus, Moraga also emphasizes the struggles of mothers whose children either die from or are born physically debilitated from pesticide poisoning. Moraga critiques the fact that the rancheros (growers) try to keep these deaths invisible, hidden from view of the public.

To protest this, the farm workers in her play begin putting babies who have died from pesticide exposure on crosses in the fields. Their actions expose that which many would 247

like to remain hidden, particularly because these actions draw the attention of the media.

While Hosansky points out that “much of the controversy [regarding pesticides] has focused on the risk to consumers” (667), Moraga makes visible the risks to those who pick the fruit that the consumers eat. Hosansky further explains the economic justifications for the use of pesticides: “Without these products, growers say they would lose billions of dollars in crops. Food would cost much more, and produce would be full of blemishes” (667). Moraga explicitly critiques the political economy within which so many children are dying and demands that her readers and audience answer the question: at what cost are these pesticides being used?

The heroine of Heroes and Saints, Cerezita, was born without arms and legs due to pesticide poisoning. She maneuvers around on a platform by pushing a button with her chin. If the written play causes readers to visualize Cerezita, conveying her physical immobility, so much more must the play when performed. Her name, Cerezita, means little cherry in Spanish: she literally embodies the physical disabilities of pesticide poisoning and her name causes her to become the fruit that has no arms, no legs, and even no torso. After her sister’s baby dies, despite the fact that the growers have threatened to shoot anyone who enters the field at night, Cerezita decides to put the baby’s body on display in the field. As Cerezita puts it, “Nobody’s dying should be invisible, Juan. Nobody’s” (2.6.49). The same year that Moraga’s play was published,

1994, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set up the Worker Protection Standard but as of 2004, ten years later, pesticides were still causing disproportionate incidences of cancer amongst agricultural workers.clxxviii Moraga unmasks the goals of profit and 248

production that motivate crimes committed against farm workers each day in the fields.

In the process, Moraga’s cartography of a troubled land maps the effects of pesticide poisoning on Chicana bodies—both in the case of Cerezita who is physically disabled, and in the physical and emotional suffering of her sister Yolanda, whose breasts ache with the milk of her dead baby. While the children in Under the Feet of Jesus suffer malnourishment, Yolanda’s baby in Heroes and Saints cannot be nourished by his mother’s milk because he has died from pesticide poisoning. Moraga and Viramontes thus link physical bodily oppression of women, of mothers specifically, and the emotional trauma that accompanies it.

The Chicana mothers in Heroes and Saints suffer, but they do not suffer silently: their protests gain the attention of the media. Based on real incidents surrounding protests in the late twentieth century in California, Heroes and Saints emphasizes the importance of the efforts of so many Chicanas who protested in the past as well as the work of Chicana activists in the present. Moraga explains in the introduction that

Amparo, a Chicana activist in the play, “is my tribute” to “Dolores Huerta, a woman whose courage and relentless commitment to Chicano/a freedom has served as a source of inspiration to two generations of Chicanas” (89). Amparo leads a protest to voice the demands of mothers in the community, which include: 1) that a contaminated well be shut down; 2) that the government pay families to relocate to a safe environment, since their houses are contaminated; and 3) that the government establish a free health clinic for families and to “monitor the growing incidence of cancer in the region” (2.3.6-14).

The demands made by Chicana protesters in Heroes and Saints provide concrete 249

solutions for institutional changes that still need to take place and, like the women in

Winnemucca’s, Ruiz de Burton’s, and Jackson’s writing, these women voice protests to a

government that continues its legacy of colonialism at the expense of Chicanas and

American Indians for the purposes of profit.clxxix

By making Chicanas central to the protest in the play, Moraga emphasizes the

importance of their continued activism, but she also evokes a history of protests by

Chicanas, particularly in this region. Many have noted the importance of Mexican

American women in protests well before the Chicano movement in the 1960s. For

example, as Takaki points out, in 1933, 12,000 laborers went on strike in the San Joaquin

Valley of California, a strike in which Mexican American women were particularly

active (325). During a protest in Heroes and Saints, a policeman assaults Amparo with

“slow, methodical blows” and injures her spleen (133). As Moraga informs her readers

in the foreword note, Dolores Huerta was brutally beaten in 1988 during a “press

conference protesting George Bush’s refusal to honor the boycott” against pesticide

poisoning (89). Moraga thus critiques a specific incident in history in which a Chicana

was violently punished for voicing protest.clxxx Further, Moraga scathingly questions the systemic lack of recognition by the government for the concerns, health, and lives of farm workers. As Heroes and Saints makes clear, the refusal to acknowledge people’s labor conditions and concerns reflects the ideological standpoint that their lives are dispensable. Moraga’s portrayal of Amparo’s opposition decries the attempt to silence her protest of a capitalist, racist system of exploitation and voices urgency for social change. Moraga maps the specific ways that women are affected by a violent geography, 250

writing Chicanas onto a cartography of continued resistance to the brutal landscape of injustices held in place via a collusion—even if not openly acknowledged—between government, police, and agribusiness.

For both Moraga and Viramontes, the land does not figure as a romanticized space; in fact, their writings can be seen as anti-pastorals in which violence is enacted against both land and women. In one example, Viramontes depicts the threat of rape that

Estrella must contend with. While Estrella is picking grapes she

did not recognize her own shadow. It was hunched and spindly and grew longer on the grapes. Then she noticed another overshadowing her own, loitering larger and about to engulf her and she immediately straightened her knees and rubbed her eyes. She went over to the vine clutching her knife. (56)

At this point Estrella thinks she sees another worker across the rows and calls out. A man then stands up fully—“uncertain as to why she called”—so Estrella quickly thinks to offer him a peach that she happens to have in her pocket (56). Viramontes subtly conveys the importance of his presence at that particular moment: “He thanked Estrella, but it was she who was thankful” (57). Viramontes articulates Estrella’s fear, thinking she is by herself out in the fields when a shadow suddenly looms over her. In this scene,

Viramontes points to the reality of rape but she also shows how Estrella is hunted doubly: as a woman and as someone who is brown and thus assumed to be foreign. Just a few pages after the threat of rape in the fields, when Estrella is on her way home, the lights of a baseball game shine in her eyes and blind her; she attempts to

shield them with an arm. The border patrol, she thought, and she tried to remember which side she was on and which side of the wire mesh she was safe in. . . . The perfect target. The lushest peach. The element of surprise. A stunned deer waiting for the bullet. A few of the spectators applauded. Estrella fisted her knife and ran, her shadow fading into the approaching night. (59-60) 251

Viramontes expresses through metaphor the way that Estrella is doubly hunted and dehumanized: as a woman and as someone assumed to be “alien,” perceived as an animal for the predators that hunt her.clxxxi The mother often tells Estrella to remember that her legal documents, including her birth certificate, lie safely hidden “under the feet of Jesus,” the statue in the corner of their living space. Estrella’s fears of being harassed or deported also points to her racialized status—even though a citizen of the United

States, her subjectivity is marked as other, foreign, alien. After running home from the baseball field, she breathlessly says to her mother, “‘Someone’s trying to get me.’ ‘It’s La

Migra. Everybody’s feeling it,’ the mother explained” (61). By paralleling the two threats—rape and deportation—Viramontes leaves readers questioning to what extent the legal system does justice to Chicanas who are survivors of rape. The title of the novel,

Under the Feet of Jesus, signifies the statue under which the children’s birth certificates are protected, but this statue falls in the end and “the head of Jesucristo broke from His neck” (167). Throughout the novel, they fear the INS because anyone who appears to be

Mexican risks deportation and/or harassment. The broken statue, though, suggests that even Jesus cannot protect them, and that even the birth certificates, the “print of her children recorded, dated, legal, for future use to establish age to enter school, when applying for working papers, establish legal age for rights of franchise, for jury or military service, to prove citizenship . . .” cannot protect them from exploitation and hardship (italics Viramontes’s 166). Under the Feet of Jesus asks how exploitation thrives off of accepted notions of who qualifies as an “American,” of racist conceptions of both documented and undocumented Latinos and Latinas in the United States, and 252

constructed definitions of subjectivity such as “illegal alien.” Viramontes asks how such accepted ideologies contribute to exploitation of both U.S. citizens and non-citizens. For feminist theory and praxis, such questions point to the necessity of transnational feminist alliances to resist the construction of Chicanas who have migrated to the U.S. as “illegal,” when in reality their exploitation should be illegal. Viramontes also raises questions for feminisms about how rape can be theorized and how anti-rape activism can take place without considering how class, race, difference, citizenship, and power affect the concrete reality of rape and the justice system in the United States.

History for Viramontes: Writing the “Decolonial Imaginary”

Paralleling the threats of deportation and rape with the violence of pesticide poisoning, Viramontes contextualizes a landscape of violence and exploitation of farm workers in relation to the history of people who had been living on that land for centuries.

It is no coincidence that the child in Under the Feet of Jesus—poisoned by pesticide and left to die in the end of the novel—is named Alejo Hidalgo. This name recalls the historical context of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, when the U.S. government had promised Mexicanos citizenship and rights to their land, but in reality denied people their land claims. As Takaki points out, many Mexicanos found themselves working as laborers for white ranchers on that very land.clxxxii Viramontes recalls the past to express opposition to a history of continued violence. When a plane flies over and sprays Alejo, only fifteen years old, with pesticides, Viramontes describes how “air clogged his lungs and he thought he was just holding his breath, until he tried exhaling but couldn’t” (77).

Then he 253

closed his eyes and imagined sinking into the tar pits. . . . Black bubbles erasing him. Finally the eyes. Blankness. Thousands of bones, the bleached white marrow of bones. Splintered bone pieced together by wire to make a whole, surfaced bone. No fingerprint or history, bone. No lava stone. No story or family, bone (78).

Viramontes uses the image of the tar pits throughout the novel as a metaphor for the history of violence enacted on Mexican Americans in the United States and for the erasure of that very history. The repetition of the word “bone” emphasizes the death, destruction, and violence enacted on people’s bodies. Tar pits are created from thousands of years of death, and the erasure of the history of the animals and people who died in the tar pits parallels the history of those who die from pesticide exposure: their histories too often vanish with them into the earth, unacknowledged by dominant discourses. For example, Algimiro Morales, a farm worker, explains, “Our words mean nothing to the

Americans. They don’t listen to us and we have no way of showing them that they’re wrong, that the problems in this country come from inside their own society” (qtd. in

Shea 133). Viramontes’s novel voices such invisibility. In Under the Feet of Jesus, the land figures metaphorically and literally as a site upon which there has been and continues to be an erasure of violence. In the context of the history of feminisms in the

United States, the voices and concerns of women of color have too often been invisible: present realities as well as the past are often erased in the depths of metaphorical tar pits.

Divisions Between Women: Political Economies of Violence

Given the portrayal of Anglo women in Under the Feet of Jesus, a reading of the tar pits as feminist history in the United States elucidates the intervention that

Viramontes’s novel makes to colonial history and feminist movements. Poisoned by 254

pesticides, Alejo Hidalgo becomes seriously ill, and Estrella, her mother, her siblings, and Perfecto Flores compile all their money to take him to a medical clinic. The blond

Anglo American nurse there charges ten dollars instead of the regular fifteen, because

“times are hard” (144), for an examination that tells them what “they already knew”

(147): that they must take him to the hospital. But after paying her all their money, they will not have enough for gas to get to the hospital, let alone to compensate for further medical care. At this point, Estrella

remembered the tar pits. Energy money, the fossilized bones of energy matter. How bones made oil and oil made gasoline. The oil was made from their bones, and it was their bones that kept the nurse’s car from not halting on some highway . . . that kept them moving on the long dotted line on the map. Their bones. Why couldn’t the nurse see that? (148)clxxxiii

It is their labor, their bodies, their energy that is used and exploited; just as oil forms from bones over time, so too is money and wealth made at the expense of farm workers’ bodies. And yet in an exploitative economy they do not have enough “energy matter” to get Alejo the health care he needs. As Viramontes visually places them “moving on the long dotted line of the map” (148), her cartography locates them within a history of capitalist exploitation and profit that has been and still is at the expense of the bodies who produce the “energy matter” (148). It is their labor, then, that fuels the nurse’s car, that empowers her to be mobile, and to commute to her job. She benefits at their expense.

Viramontes questions why for the Anglo nurse the political economy is invisible.

As Shea explains, “For the nurse, Alejo’s pesticide poisoning does not appear to be an act of violence” (139). Viramontes thus vehemently protests not only the poisoning of

Chicana and Chicano bodies, but also the apathy that many Anglo Americans have about 255

it. In 1996, Kayann Short records in “Bitter Harvest: A Talk with Helena María

Viramontes,” that

as Viramontes informed me, even chemicals that have been voluntarily withdrawn from the market by pesticide manufacturers are still allowed in California, proving that cheap and cosmetically perfect fruits and vegetables are more valuable than the lives of the people who pick them. (5)

The violent paradox is that the food, the “energy matter” harvested by farm workers is considered more important than people. The nurse symbolizes Anglo women who are not aware of the effects of exploitation on Chicanas, and who have benefited from feminism. When Estrella asks “Why couldn’t the nurse see that?” (148), the text points to the history of exclusion of the struggles of Chicanas from feminist movements. In the medical clinic, Estrella and the others need to get their money back so they can pay for the “energy matter,” the gas needed to drive Alejo to the hospital. They attempt to explain their situation to the nurse. The nurse holds a position of power, representing authority in the medical field—though she has benefited from feminism, as a nurse she inhabits a very gendered space, lower on the hierarchy to doctor. She does not even listen to Estrella: “she didn’t even look up as she filed the folder away” (148). Because of the ineffectual results of voicing their needs, Estrella takes a crow bar and slams it on the nurse’s desk, a tactic the nurse listens to. Estrella demands their money back for the health service that they never received. She reflects on the situation with her mother later, “You talk and talk and talk to them and they ignore you. But you pick up a crowbar and break the pictures of their children, and all of a sudden they listen real fast” (151).

Dan Latimer refers to this moment as “an act of violence,” and asserts that she “steals the

$9.07 from the clinic nurse” (336), but really Estrella’s use of the crowbar raises 256

questions about the reality of violence inflicted on farm workers everyday as a result of

pesticide poisoning. Further, Estrella did not “steal” the money from the clinic—she

merely demanded their money back for a service that was useless. By breaking the

pictures of the nurse’s children, Estrella symbolically threatens the safety of the nurse’s

children and family, evidencing the distance/divisions between a privileged Anglo

woman and her concerns for her own family versus the families of farm workers. Her

class privilege in inextricably linked to a kind of white heterosexual privilege,

symbolized by the photos of her children that evoke the institution of family. She cannot

extend her concern for her own family to Estrella’s suffering family. Such a portrayal

does theoretical work of pointing to some of the ideological divisions between women

that have prevented alliances between women—or, in this case, the divisions that cause

Anglo women to be aligned with colonial power and institutions that exploit Chicanas.

By portraying the Anglo woman in the way that she does, Viramontes suggests the

necessity for change. Because this Anglo woman is so unsympathetic, it effectively

urges her Anglo women readers to not be like this Anglo nurse in a similar way that

Winnemucca’s autobiography encourages her Anglo women readers to not be like the women in the West ready to lynch her.

Viramontes draws a parallel between the institutions of health care, the family, and education—and Anglo women’s roles respective roles—and the naturalization of violence against farm workers and racism within agribusiness. Under the Feet of Jesus denaturalizes the racist words of the teacher, Mrs. Horn, who taught Estrella that “words could become as excruciating as rusted nails piercing the heals of her bare feet” (25). 257

Estrella “hated when things were kept from her. The teachers in the schools did the same, never giving her the information she wanted” (24). She wanted to learn, to be empowered through knowledge,

[b]ut some of the teachers were more concerned about the dirt under her fingernails. They inspected her head for lice, parting her long hair with ice cream sticks . . . They said good luck to her when the pisca was over, reserving the desks in the back of the classroom for the next batch of migrant children. Estrella often wondered what happened to all the things they boxed away in tool chests and kept to themselves. (25)

The tools of education are denied her in the school system, as she is tracked as just another one of the farm workers’ children. The institutionalized racism in the school system is part of the ideological fuel that fires the machinery of capitalism: Viramontes confronts racism in both the educational and health care systems, revealing its inextricable link to capitalist exploitation. Readers are then left to question how violence is defined. They are headed to the medical clinic when the car gets stuck in mud. At this moment, Estrella “thought of the young girl that Alejo had told her about, the one girl they found in the La Brea Tar Pits. They found her in a few bones. No details of her life were left behind, no piece of cloth, no ring, no doll . . . Estrella’s shoes were completely buried in the mud” (129). Estrella sinks into the mud, and her life and her struggles are metaphorically paralleled with the girl in the tar pits. As Carlos Gallego explains, when

Estrella learns of the girl who dies in the tar pits she understands the economic realities of her life in relation to others (Lecture). Dan Latimer makes a similar point when he states that “Estrella eventually will connect these bones with the energy expended by the labor force which consists mostly of her own people, the Chicanos involved in the California pisca” (335). Significantly, the physical act of resistance by Estrella takes place after she 258

thinks about the tar pits, the history of the land, and the political economy of exploitation that the nurse—and by implication many other Anglo Americans—cannot see. With her tool in her hand, Estrella, which means star in Spanish, radiantly challenges the ways that

Chicanas and Chicanos have been forgotten in the dominant discourses of history, erased from a history of the land.clxxxiv Because Estrella uses the crow bar as an act of resistance, her character is an allusion to the corridos of Gregorio Cortéz’s that Américo

Parades writes about in With His Pistol in his Hand. In contrast to the male hero who resists the Texas rangers and challenges stereotypes for Chicano men, Estrella confronts stereotypes for young Chicana women, but she does so defiantly and with a tool, a weapon for self-defense, in her hand. Viramontes suggests the necessity for tools of resistance, tools for excavating a past and a present that many would prefer to be silenced.

Because these tar pits are named as the La Brea tar pits, near Los Angeles,

Viramontes’s novel can be read as a call for excavation of that specific region so that neither the people nor the history of the people inhabiting that region are made extinct in the depths and pits of the histories of dominant discourses. The tar pits can also be read to evoke the absences of women of color in what Chandra Mohanty, Chela Sandoval, and others call “hegemonic feminisms.”clxxxv The imagery and metaphor of the La Brea tar pits are significant—in the minds of the characters and specifically to Estrella’s consciousness of her own oppression and her resistance: Viramontes’s novel specifically situates resistance in relation to knowledge about the past, the land, an excavation of histories of injustices, and Anglo women. 259

Because Estrella remembers the tar pits when dealing with the Anglo nurse, it is the tar pits, these symbols of history, labor, and erasure, that link the racism of the health care system (embodied by the Anglo nurse) and the education system (embodied by Mrs.

Horn) to an additional source of racism: the Anglo family. Estrella and Maxine

Devridge, whose “hair was so white on her face, her eyebrows were invisible” (30), first become friends because Maxine has comic books and magazines that she shares with

Estrella. For Estrella, “The teachers in the schools had never let her take picture books outside of the classroom. The only book she had ever owned was a catechism” (31).

Maxine’s family is Anglo, and Maxine and Estrella work in the fields together. After working in the fields, Estrella reads to Maxine, who is two years older but does not know how to read: “Tell it to me, she asked, and Estrella did and that was how it began” (32).

Their friendship grew “day after day,” until one day they find a “drowned, bloated dog, which floated in the canal” and, by implication, died of pesticide poisoning from the water (33). At this point Maxine accuses Estrella’s mother of having sex with Estrella’s grandfather: “Then why you let your grandpa fuck your ma fo’? . . . My ma says it makes for one-legged babies not the wa . . .” (34). Estrella’s mother is in a long term relationship with Perfecto Flores, who is substantially older then her, and they are having sex, but he is not related. Maxine believed her mother’s accusation of incest in a way that reveals how racist “knowledge” gets learned from one generation to the next. In response, “Estrella pulled Maxines’ stringy sandy hair with such pure hatred it startled even her. For a moment she felt as if she could kill the white girl. She clawed and wrapped Maxine’s hair around her fingers, pulling clump after clump . . .” (35). That day 260

marked the end of their friendship. Even though Maxine and Estrella might have shared an alliance due to working the fields together, or as girls, racism prevents their friendship from growing. The learned racism of Maxine, combined with the nurse and the teacher, all mark failed alliances between Chicanas and Anglo women. In the context of a novel that evokes so graphically the violence of history and its parallels to the present, it allows for an interrogation of Anglo women’s complicity with institutionalized Anglo power.

The Absence of Anglo Women in Moraga’s Heroes and Saints and the Portrayal of

Chicano Masculinity:

Whereas in Under the Feet of Jesus two Anglo women and one Anglo girl point to the reality of racism on the part of Anglo women and to a history of divisions between women, in Moraga’s Heroes and Saints Anglo women are absent. Like Estrella’s voiced resistance that the nurse attempts to silence, the police and agribusiness industry in

Heroes and Saints attempt to place the voices of Cerezita and Amparo in the silent depths of the metaphorical tar pits of Viramontes’s novel. Given the emphasis that Moraga places on alliances across race in Loving in the War Years, Waiting in the Wings, and

This Bridge Called my Back, the evident lack of Anglo women in Heroes and Saints attests to the reality of the failure on the part of Anglo women to protest the exploitation of farm workers. The public protests in the play are organized by Chicana mothers who are farm workers and whose babies have died. A Chicana, Amparo Manríquez, who

Moraga explains is based on Dolores Huerta, founds the “Mothers for McLaughlin” protest movement, and the play is centered around the effects of pesticide poisoning on

Chicana mothers. Because it is based on a real historical protest that took place in the 261

1980s, Moraga’s choice not to include Anglo women is grounded in historical reality. In

Massacre of the Dreamers, Ana Castillo supports the grape boycotts and asserts that these boycotts are not over. She calls upon Xicanistas (a term she uses to refer to

Chicana feminists) to support the boycott (61). The absence of Anglo women in Heroes and Saints should suggest to Anglo women audiences and readers—especially feminists—the necessity for joining and supporting such boycotts and other forms of protest by Chicana farm workers.

Moraga maps a gendered geography of a violent landscape, from the police brutality against Amparo—based on the beating of Dolores Huerta—to the damages that pesticide poisoning causes mothers’ reproductive systems and the wounds inflicted on

Chicana bodies. The opening lines of Heroes and Saints describe the setting of the play:

“The hundreds of miles of soil that surround the lives of Valley dwellers should not be confused with land. What was once land has become dirt, overworked dirt, overirrigated dirt, injected with deadly doses of chemicals and violated by every manner of ground-and back-breaking machinery” (91). The land is overworked and poisoned, just as the people who labor on the land are broken down by the back-breaking machinery. In the final scene of the play, Cerezita gives a speech, boldly protesting exploitation, pesticide use, and attempts by ranchers to cover up the numbers of babies who have died. She proclaims, “Put your hand inside my wound. Inside the valley of my wound, there is a people. A miracle people” (2.11.80-81). Cerezita’s body is itself a wound. As a talking head she literally represents the physicality of violence enacted against farm workers: she has no arms, no legs, not even a torso. This character’s physical disability further 262

renders her other, and yet she uses the only weapon her body has: her tongue. Early in the play she even looks up the word tongue, and reads: “tongueless. Mute. Tongue-tied.

Unable to speak freely” (1.8). But in the end, reminding them that they presumably live in a “land of plenty,” Cerezita tells the farm workers to have courage, empowering them to resist: “today, this day, that red memory will spill out from inside you and flood this valley con coraje. And you will be free. Free to name this land Madre. Madre Tierra.

Madre Sagrada. Madre . . . Libertad. The radiant mother . . . rising” (2.11.101-104).

Moraga connects protest and social justice for farm workers to the land, to the environment. After this powerful speech Cerezita uses her chin to push a button on her motorized platform and exit the stage with Juan, the Priest, to put Cerezita’s sister’s dead baby on a cross in the vineyards. A helicopter sound, followed by machine gun fire, presumably kills them; their act of protest had been deemed illegal because it drew attention to the public the death that results from pesticide poisoning. Is Cerezita a hero, a saint, or both? In the last scene Cerezita is “draped in the blue-starred veil of La Virgen de Guadalupe” (2.10), and thus is heroically aligned with La Virgen. Banners of La

Virgen were used in the very first United Farm Workers strikes—the image of La Virgen guided their resistance.clxxxvi Yarbro-Bejarano asserts that “[b]y making a person (of color) in a wheelchair the key player in the community’s struggle, Heroes breaks ground in Western theatre and redresses the absence of satisfying representations of this group of people” (72). By putting a cloak of La Virgen on Cerezita, Moraga alludes to the

Chicano movement, but places the leader of protest in the body of a severely disabled 263

Chicana and renders her heroine and saint, effectively collapsing dominant notions of both terms.

Cerezita’s brother Mario had left to live in San Francisco, but it is crucial that he reappears for the final protest scene and that it is a queer Chicano and a severely disabled

Chicana who rally the people to resist. Mario’s role in the play suggests the importance of alliances between gay Chicanos and Chicanas. In the last words of the play, he suggests, “Burn the fields!” and the people, El Pueblo, reply “¡Enciendan los files!

¡Asesinos! ¡Asesinos! ¡Asesinos! (2.11.107-110). The people support Mario’s radical call to burn the fields, echoing it in Spanish, along with a just accusation aimed at the murderers, the betrayers of the farm workers. Mario had previously left the farm worker community, and had been rejected by his mother Dolores for being gay: “Why you wannu make yourself como una mujer? Why you wannu do this to the peepo who love you?” (1.12). As Yarbro-Bejarano points out, Moraga uses Dolores to critique the way that Chicanas perpetuate homophobia in Chicano communities.clxxxvii When Mario’s mother suggests that he get married, Mario explains to his mother that he does not want to be like his father, a womanizer who abandoned his family: “That’s not the kind of man I want to be” (1.9). Mario’s character thus rewrites possibilities of Chicano masculinity as well as sexuality and simultaneously envisions and acts in resistance to colonial male power and profit in the agribusiness industry.

Both Moraga’s and Viramontes’s depictions of Chicanos challenge the assumption that Emma Pérez rightly critiques, that Anglos, including feminists, all too often critique Chicanos as sexist but fail to recognize that “men of their race make the 264

rules” (163). Moraga also portrays a straight Chicano positively, further questioning the negative stereotype of Chicano machismo and suggesting that men have choices about their actions. For example, Don Gilberto plays a minor, but significant supporting role as actor, as husband to Amparo. Right before her protest speech that is being covered by the news, she confides to him: “I think I got the cold feet” (1.9). He replies, “Pues, warm

‘em up quick. You got all this gente here esperándote. (She hesitates). ¡Adelante, mujer!” (1.9). He encourages her, reminding her that all the people are there waiting for her. Later, he explains that he does not want to be like his own father: “When a man leaves his wife alone to raise his kids, well to me that no longer qualifies him to be a man” (1.12). His character challenges definitions of masculinity, and alongside Mario’s character they both question gendered expectations for Chicanos. Because Mario does not want to be like his father, Moraga points to the reality that definitions of masculinity are learned, and can thus be unlearned and questioned rather than repeated.

In Under the Feet of Jesus, Perfecto Flores is a good man whose struggles emphasize that the Anglo farmers and the Anglo woman in the medical clinic “make the rules.” His name alone, in English, means Perfect Flowers, which causes him to symbolically embody what would be thought of as opposite to masculinity. He teaches

Estrella how to use tools, and it is the crow bar that she uses to resist the Anglo woman and get Alejo to the hospital. When they arrive at the hospital they leave Alejo at the door because they cannot pay for help. Perfecto Flores is powerless as a man to do anything more for Alejo except hope that the hospital will care for him. Estrella thanks him, and he reflects: 265

He had given this country his all, and in this land that used his bones for kindling, in this land that never once in the thirty years he lived and worked, never once said thank you, this young woman who could be his granddaughter had said the words with such honest gratitude, he was struck by how deeply these words touched him. (155)

As a Chicano farm worker he is not valued in American culture—he does not have the power that those who run the agribusiness have. Similarly, Moraga demonstrates through

Don Gilberto, a janitor, and Mario, a gay son of farm workers, that feminist analysis of gender oppression and masculinity necessitates attention to intersecting issues of race, class, and sexuality. Mario’s lack of privilege, as a working-class queer Chicano, and

Cerezita’s lack of privilege as a disabled Chicana whose working-class mother hides her in a closet, serve to underscore the inter-relationship between the Anglo nurse’s white, heterosexual, bodily, and economic class privileges in Under the Feet of Jesus, privileges which contribute to resistance on the part of some Anglo women to radical social change.

Conclusions: Intervening in Feminist Theory and Praxis

Under the Feet of Jesus echoes the act of resistance in the end of Heroes and

Saints. Petra notices, for example, “‘[f]or the pay we get, they’re lucky we don’t burn the orchards down.’ This came from the mother. ‘No sense talking tough unless you do it,’ replied Estrella” (45). Estrella’s words foreshadow her own act of resistance to the nurse later in the novel and her opposition beyond the ending of the novel. The ambiguous ending suggests further action. Estrella enters the barn, thinking “[t]here was no going back now” (173); remembering that she forgot her matchbook, she looks at her lantern and “lowered its flame instead, enough to keep the kerosene burning” (172). She

“imagined golden flaming eels dangerously nipping at the straw on the ground” (174). 266

Yet, in the end as Estrella stands on the roof of the barn, readers are left to wonder what will happen, not just in this story but in the future beyond the story. In an interview with

Deborah Owen Moore, Viramontes refers to the ending of Under the Feet of Jesus as

“more hopeful” (58) than her second novel. The images of dead birds—haunting the novel throughout—make obvious the effects of pesticide poisoning on the environment, but when Estrella stands on the top of the barn with the kerosene lantern, there is a sense of hope that her resistance will continue to burn. Both Viramontes and Moraga encourage their readers to imagine a future that burns with heated flames of resistance.

Moraga and Viramontes protest the naturalization of continued violence against

Chicanos and Chicanas, but also the prevalent ideologies about labor and the people who perform it. In 1994, just a year before Under the Feet of Jesus was published, and the same year that Heroes and Saints was published, Proposition 187 was passed in

California. The proposition attempted to refuse state services such as medical care and education to undocumented people and their children (Cacho 389). Basically, as Lisa

Marie Cacho explains, the “supporters of 187 requested that mothers give birth in the streets, that people die from curable diseases, and that families go hungry. But, they did not ask that undocumented workers stop working” (389). The passing of this proposition reflects the anti-immigration and racist cultural contexts during which both Under the

Feet of Jesus and Heroes and Saints were written. Further, the passing of such a proposition reflects the ways that racism attempts to justify exploitation of people by dehumanizing them and attempting to deny them basic necessities such as health care.

Unfortunately, the fairly recent passage of Proposition 200 in Arizona, a proposition with 267

similar goals as California’s 187, attests to the fact that the attempt to deny undocumented people equal rights and services is still a cause that most voters had been all too eager to support in the 2004 elections a decade later.clxxxviii Given the current militarization of the U.S. Mexico border (compared to the attention the U.S. Canada border earns), and the executive actions by President George W. Bush in 2007 to build what he calls a whole new “infrastructure” along the border, there is an urgency to further work in feminisms that emphasizes the effects of such violent government practices on

Chicanas.

Under the Feet of Jesus points out that ideologies about the border affect undocumented workers as well as citizens of the United States, and thus suggests a necessity for feminist transnational alliances that address the effects of exploitation on

Chicanas, Mexicanas, and Latinas. Perhaps, as we continue to decolonize feminisms, there will be more Anglo women acting in solidarity and protesting anti-immigration, pesticides, and exploitation. Given Moraga’s emphasis on alliances between women in her other writings, Heroes and Saints asks viewers and readers to consider the absence of

Anglo women. Both Moraga’s play and Viramontes’s novel function to raise awareness, which would then ideally lead to action. In the case of Under the Feet of Jesus, the negative portrayals of Anglo women confront the reality of racism on the part of Anglo women, but they also serve to encourage awareness and an unlearning in the way some

Anglo women think—and have been taught to think—about Chicana farm workers.

Attempts at making more alliances need to take place. For Anglo women these alliances need to be predicated upon their unlearning of racism. As Audre Lorde rightly suggests, 268

romanticized notions of sisterhood that do not confront racism are useless: “For then beyond sisterhood, is still racism” (97). The unlearning of racism is just a beginning though, especially since economic class and white privilege often cause Anglo women to resist social change. The nurse in Under the Feet of Jesus represents not only lack of awareness, but a kind of ease for an Anglo woman to be allied with white male institutional power. The safety that her heterosexual class privilege affords her is ruptured when Estrella breaks the pictures of the nurse’s family, a moment in the text that raises questions about tactics for resistance and social change.

Heroes and Saints and Under the Feet of Jesus intervene in feminisms and call for changes, for theoretical changes in feminisms and practical changes in praxis. As

Moraga explains in This Bridge Called My Back, in her essay “La Güera,” “We have failed to demand that white women, particularly those who claim to be speaking for all women, be accountable for their racism. The dialogue has simply not gone deep enough”

(33). Viramontes and Moraga write the violences committed against the land and the people who labor on the land, mapping a geography of oppression within the gendered, racialized spaces of a capitalist system. They point to the reality that working-class

Chicanos do not have access to the institutionalized corporate power of Anglo men, and thus suggest the necessity of not lumping all men under the label of patriarchy. Under the Feet of Jesus and Heroes and Saints de-romanticize the “corporate made” image of the “sun maid” as well as the colonial imaginings of a Southwestern landscape that erase the political economy of exploitation. Under the Feet of Jesus marks the brutality of industrialization on the land: “Still on her feet, Estrella turned to the long stretch of 269

railroad ties. They looked like the stitches of the mother’s caesarean scar as far as her eyes could see” (59). The railroad, the often celebrated symbol of industrialization and

American expansionism, is likened to the wound on a mother’s body. Similarly, in

Heroes and Saints, Cerezita speaks of her body as a wounded landscape. Within a troubled landscape of exploitation and a history of colonialism, both Viramontes and

Moraga write counter-hegemonic cartographies that de-romanticize labor and imagine further resistance.

Further, Heroes and Saints points to a connection between the exploited people in the United States and the exploited people in San Salvador: a radio broadcast reports that six Jesuit priests, and their housekeeper and her daughter, were “brutally murdered”

(1.11). They had been “outspoken opponents to the ruling rightist ARENA party” (1.11).

Moraga thus makes a connection between Latina workers in San Salvador and Chicana workers in California. This moment in the play, when considered next to Moraga’s emphasis on alliances between women, points in the direction of transnational feminisms.

Likewise, Under the Feet of Jesus addresses the realities of exploitation within the United

States in a way that allows for alliances between women across national borders— particularly when considering that Latinas are exploited around the world by U.S. corporations. Considering the context of globalization and a political economy within which maximization of profits occurs more and more at the expense of women’s bodies, there is an urgency for people to see the scars that Moraga and Viramontes expose and strategically act in opposition to try to heal troubled lands because, as Estrella challenges, there is “[n]o sense talking tough unless you do it” (45). Estrella’s bold statement could 270

also be read as a call for Anglo feminists to think about how racism has affected their lives and ideologies and to (continue to) work toward decolonizing feminisms—not just in theory but in praxis—in the twenty-first century. 271

EPILOGUE

In this comparative study I have emphasized the ways that Ruiz de Burton,

Winnemucca, Jackson, Moraga, and Viramontes negotiate women’s rights movements to offer new directions for feminisms that are anti-racist and anti-colonialist. It is my hope that such a study elucidates some of the problems within feminisms in the United States at the same time that it provides suggestions for continued change, and for potential feminist solidarity. Readers might learn, from these writers, to create further tactical strategies for resistance in battles against global corporate power, and the particular ways that exploitative working conditions affect women workers, beyond the U.S. agribusiness of Viramontes’s and Moraga’s protests. As all the writers in this study have stressed, in order for solidarity to take place between Anglo and women of color, Anglo women need to first recognize the ways they have benefited from colonialism, from their connections to Anglo men in power—whether through the heterosexual institution of marriage or otherwise—and be willing to unlearn racism. Resistance to such an unlearning could be due to lack of awareness, such as the nurse’s lack of knowledge about farm workers’ lives in Under the Feet of Jesus, but it is also woven into a fabric of privilege—race, class, and heterosexual privilege—that causes some Anglo women, who continue to benefit from such privilege, to resist social change, not wanting to tare that comfortable fabric.

Winnemucca, Jackson, Ruiz de Burton, and Viramontes condemn Anglo women’s complicity with racism and with colonial male power to suggest possibilities for change. 272

While Ruiz de Burton argues for Mexican Americans right to class privilege, Viramontes and Moraga question the relationships between Anglo women’s privileges in terms of access to economic power, heterosexual alliances with Anglo men, and whiteness.

Studying such efforts of writers from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries allows us, as scholars and teachers, to see overlap between the past and the present, both in the ideological limitations of women’s rights movements and in authors’ visions of something different for feminisms. In an ever increasing globalized market place within which some Anglo feminists, and even less women of color, are gaining power—albeit power that is still below Anglo men hierarchically—the critique that these authors provide of Anglo women’s choices to be complicit is increasingly relevant.

These writers call on Anglo women not only to question their complicity with whiteness and the ways they have profited from colonialism, but to ask themselves what they will do with that awareness. Will Anglo women be like Jemima Norval or Mary

Darrell? By the time Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus is written, Anglo women are allowed into Congress, but, unfortunately, this has not caused Congress to prevent unjust exploitation of farm workers or set safe standards for pesticide use. The Anglo nurse and the school teacher in Under the Feet of Jesus have both benefited from women’s rights, but they continue to reenact colonial power and do not see the violence against farm workers that they actively participate in. In Moraga’s case, because of the absence of

Anglo women in Heroes and Saints, she subtly conveys the reality of apathy on the part of Anglo women regarding the protests and concerns of Chicana farm workers. Will such apathy continue in the real spaces of life and the imagined spaces of fiction? 273

Such literary studies are helpful in understanding the progress of feminisms— theories, practice, movements, activism—and the ways feminisms are still limited by a history of racism and colonialism. Recognizing such limitations, however, can provide hope for furthering anti-racist and anti-colonialist feminist practices, pedagogy, and scholarship. Viramontes’s metaphor of the tar pits is useful in thinking about the continued violence that takes place as a result of the exploitation of Chicanos’ and

Chicanas’ bodies. By paralleling the tar pits with the stories of the Anglo women’s racism, Viramontes alludes to a history of racism and complicity on the part of Anglo women in a way that provides a critique of these problems as they are reflected in feminisms as well as in mainstream American Anglo culture in general. As Chapter Four has demonstrated, the tar pits are symbolic of a political economy within which Anglos profit from the exploitation of people of color. For the nurse who drives to work using that fossil fuel, she does not realize that her privilege is at the expense of those whose bodies have produced that fuel. The novel leaves readers to question what she would do with that knowledge if she had it.

In addition to what this study contributes to feminist historiography, and feminist tactics for resistance in the twenty-first century, it asks for recognition of the ways that nineteenth-and twentieth-century woman writers have intervened to question colonialism and simultaneously call for a redefinition of women’s rights movements. I emphasize that these writers participate in theoretical work of dismantling white male colonialist violence and imagining change: this theoretical work takes place between women in the 274

pages of writers imaginations at the same time that they point to the realities of racism that come in between women.

In The Methodology of the Oppressed (2000), Chela Sandoval articulates a theory about what she calls a “differential consciousness . . . a strategy of oppositional ideology that functions on an altogether different register” (44). She looks at how U.S. women of color, between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, used a “kaleidoscoped” method of resistance that negotiated and moved “across diverse social movements” (44). Sandoval articulates this theory, in part, to situate the ways that U.S. women of color have negotiated what is often termed “hegemonic feminism”—feminism that reinscribes and maintains hegemonic forms of power. In the alliances that the authors in this study imagine—including an Anglo woman, Jackson—they enact a “differential consciousness” to intervene in hegemonic feminisms and write a “decolonial imaginary,” a landscape imagining social change and envisioning resistance to the oppression of bodies of colonized women. Following a similar, though decidedly different,

“differential consciousness” as women writers from the nineteenth century, Moraga and

Viramontes also use a “kaleidoscoped tactic” of resistance as they negotiate feminist movements and the Chicano movement and recognize the failures of solidarity between

Anglo women and Chicanas.

The study I have provided of Winnemucca’s negotiation of women’s rights and

Native people’s rights, her tactics of “differential consciousness,” deserves further study in terms of the ideologies that she combats and their relationship to Native women activists and writers in the twenty-first century. We might ask why, in many American 275

Indian women writers’ novels, alliances between Anglo women and Native women are rarely imagined, and how this absence relates to a history of racism in the women’s movement, including a history of the exclusion of issues affecting Native women—such as sovereignty, health care, education, injustices in the justice system, and land rights— within feminist organizations. For instance, in Choctaw writer Linda Hogan’s Solar

Storms (1995), she envisions alliances not between Anglo and American Indian women, but rather between generations of American Indian women who act in solidarity to resist the destruction of sacred homeland. Other writers, such as Debra Magpie Earling

(member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian

Reservation), in Perma Red (2002), convey the violence enacted by Anglo women against Native children in boarding schools. The portrayal of Anglo women in American

Indian literature merits further study, particularly so that it is situated within a colonialist past that continues in the present.

Of all the works by American Indian women writers that I have read, the only instance in which Anglo women are successfully allied with American Indian women takes place in Evelina Lucero’s Night Sky, Morning Star (2000). San Juan/Isleta Pueblo writer Lucero protests the unjust incarceration of American Indian men as part of a continued cycle of colonialism, and imagines an Anglo woman nurse as an ally. Julian

Morning Star has been unjustly imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. Lucero alludes to the injustice of Leonard Peltier’s imprisonment through her character, Julian, who, as a result of his activism in the American Indian Movement, is held as a political prisoner in jail in an attempt by the United States government to silence his protest. 276

While in prison, Julian is beaten up by the guards to punish him for his activism in prison, for his “struggle to get us Indians our religious rights in the correctional center”

(43). As a result of the violence against Julian’s body, his voice box is injured and he cannot speak. When he arrives at the hospital, an Anglo nurse, Peggy, prays for Julian

Morning Star, for, as he thinks of it, “healing of my innermost being” (42). Although he cannot speak, she hands him a pen and a legal pad and he begins telling Peggy his story.

He writes to her that “[y]ou are the first and only Christian I ever met that truly acted like one” (44). Her prayer does not impose her religious views on him (even though she does mention Jesus once). Rather, her prayer is a gesture of her concern for his well being and safety. Lucero thus imagines an alliance between an Anglo woman and an American

Indian man that is different than those who called themselves Christians in

Winnemucca’s testimony who used religion to profit at American Indians’ expense. At this point, the narrator reflects that Peggy “probably didn’t know Christianity was used against Indians” (46).

Like Aunt Ri, Peggy starts out “somewhat naïve, too,” but she soon learns about injustices and, like Aunt Ri, is a model for Anglo women readers to follow (46). Peggy first tells Julian that “[o]ur American system of justice stands the best in the world . . . A person takes for granted that kind of stuff—injustice, treating people like human refuse, violating human rights—doesn’t happen here in America” (46). Upon listening to Julian, though, “a glimmer of understanding that she possessed a privileged status solely because of the color of her skin” (47) occurred. Most of the survivors of violence that Peggy has witnessed as a nurse are “often women, beaten so badly their face is one purple blotch” 277

(47). Later, Julian’s son, Jude, is reading a newspaper article about injustices committed by the FBI, and thinks about Leonard Peltier. The article next to it is about men’s movement rallies and a “male backlash in response to feminism” (181). Jude then

“wondered if all these different news articles weren’t related in some way” (181). In this way, like Ruiz de Burton, Jackson, and Winnemucca, Lucero connects violence against women to violence against a colonized “other.” Further, Lucero connects the backlash to feminism to the backlash to the American Indian Movement by paralleling two movements of resistance to white male power. Once Peggy reads and hears Julian’s testimony to injustices of the past and the continued violence against American Indians, her mythologized notion of the United States crumbles and she confronts reality.

Near the end of the novel, Cecelia, the mother of Jude whose first love was Julian long ago, “sets aside her largest storyteller with a multitude of children enfolded on the woman’s arms” and, deciding not to sell it, “I took it for Peggy, who had befriended us all” (224). Cecelia symbolically extends appreciation for Peggy’s humane treatment of

Julian in the hospital, for listening to his story, and for hearing it. In this way, Lucero imagines the potential for an Anglo woman and a Native woman to become allied. That

Peggy does not try to “convert” Julian, but instead respects his political activism for religious freedom in prison, is more meaningful when considering the critique

Winnemucca makes of missionaries and the Women’s National Indian Association in the nineteenth century. She envisions a different kind of alliance between Christian Anglo women and Native people, suggesting the potential to move away from the ideological limitations of the past. 278

By looking at how writers comment on the past and the problematic bridges that have been built—by the Women’s National Indian Association or suffragists like Gage who espoused alliances only to appropriate Iroquois culture to argue for rights for Anglo women—we might imagine a feminist future built on solidarity, built on unlearning racism. We might construct a bridge that is not built on anyone’s back but rather on solid ground—with a recognition of the history of the land and the landscape of violence upon which such bridges might be built—in order to combat current colonialist violence. This study has focused on ways American Indian, Chicana, Mexican American, and Anglo women might be allied against violent white masculinity within the United States, particularly in order to battle a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies. I have also pointed in Chapter Four to a reading of Viramontes and Moraga as suggesting transnational feminist alliances with Latinas across the U.S. border and within the United

States. This study has looked at historically specific contexts of alliances within the

United States, but further work could be done to look at representations of alliances between women across national boundaries. Such a study would tie in well with a study of the authors in this project, especially since Winnemucca’s arguments are particularly focused on tribal sovereignty. No work has been done to address transnational feminisms in relation to tribal sovereignty in the United States, and this project has further, potentially productive, implications when framed in that way. Significant too is that

Viramontes, Moraga, Ruiz de Burton, Jackson, and Winnemucca all point to the ways that colonialism has oppressed American Indian and/or Mexican American or Chicano men, complicating a notion of feminism as combating patriarchy alone. 279

I would like to end with the idea of hope, for without some form of hope resistance could not take place. Without hope for change, why conduct such a study?

The authors in this study envision a “decolonial imaginary” and voice resistance in ways that theorize potential for the future. What we can learn from studying these texts can help direct decolonized feminist praxis in our classrooms, our scholarship, and outside of academia. These texts confront difficult issues and build awareness, but they do more than that: they ask that readers take action. After all, as Estrella in Under the Feet of

Jesus so rightly challenges us, “there’s no sense talking tough unless you do it” (45). 280

FOOTNOTES

i See Sarah’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman, and Angelina’s Human Rights not Founded on Sex in the Heath anthology. ii See Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class chapters 1-4 for a discussion of these politics and the racism in the suffrage movement. iii See Linda Kerber and Jane DeHart Mathews’s Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, Cott’s The Grounding of Modern Feminism, and Notorious Victoria for discussions of various women’s rights concerns in the nineteenth century. iv See Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored for full details on her notion of “free love.” v See “The Combahee River Collective: A Black Feminist Statement” in This Bridge Called My Back.. vi See Alarcón’s “The Theoretical Subjects of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism.” vii Though the word dusky, which implies a racialized inferiority, is problematic here. viii My methodology emphasizes Indigenous theory and scholarship over European theorists, as I prefer engaging American Indian literature with theorists who deal with specific contexts of colonialism in the United States. ix As Gae Canfield observes, “the program bore little relationship to the true life of the Paiutes, but it did fulfill the public’s notion of a good stage show, such as they might expect from an Indian troupe” (39). Their performances included scenes such as “The Indian Camp,” “The War Dance,” and “Scalping a Prisoner,” as well as a series of scenes portraying Pocahontas saving John Smith’s life, the role of which was played by Winnemucca. Such a production sounds in many ways like a minstrel show, as it must have provided Anglo viewers with already constructed images of what they thought “Indians” were. After all, as the titles of the scenes suggest, they promoted images of Native brutality. From one perspective, Winnemucca took part in reproducing the myth of Pocahontas, a myth that continues to ignite the imaginations of twenty-first century audiences today. It is a myth that in its romanticized rendering (such as that of Disney Productions) depicts Pocahontas as a sexualized woman (rather than the twelve-year-old girl that she was) who is smitten at the first site of an Anglo man and is willing to betray her father and her people to save John Smith. The romanticized version romanticizes the past, turning a story of genocide and forced removal of Native people from their land into a love story. x See Canfield, Chapter Two, for a discussion of this massacre and the conditions the Paiutes suffered from. See also Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes Chapter Five for her rendering of this massacre. xi See Chapter Six in Life Among the Piutes for Winnemucca’s scathing critique of the “Indian agents’” corruption and oppression of Piute people. xii See Chapter Fourteen in Canfield on Yakima and Chapter Eight in Life Among the Piutes for Winnemucca’s testimony regarding these events. xiii While Winnemucca served as a translator for the agents, she states that “I have worked all the time among my people, and never been paid for my work. At last my military money came” (215). Thus, her work as translator for the agents went unpaid. xiv In “Tiresias Speaks: Sarah Winnemucca’s Hybrid Selves and Genres,” Cari Carpenter writes that “[t]he claim that Winnemucca sold out is reminiscent of the story of an Aztec woman who was Cortez’s advisor, translator, and mistress: a figure known in Chicano culture as ‘La Chingada,’ meaning the ‘fucked one’ or La Vendida, a sell-out to the white race (71). xv Her position working for the U.S. army during the Bannock war, which she narrates in her testimony, follows being fired as translator for the “Indian agent” at Malhuer. xvi Agent Reinhard had sent affidavits to Washington D.C. preceding her arrival in an attempt to disparage Winnemucca’s name, calling her a prostitute and thus relying on degrading stereotypes associated with the word “squaw” in order to remove himself from criticism (Canfield 172-3). xvii See Canfield’s Chapter Sixteen for a discussion of their trip to Washington, the failed promises, Schurz’s letter to them, and their meeting with President Hayes. 281

xviii See the last lines of her testimony for her brief reference to her marriage to Hopkins (246). Winnemucca’s brief reference to her marriage suggests that she did not see it as important or relevant to her protests. For a discussion of her marriages to Anglo men, and their treatment her, see Zanjani’s, Gehm’s, and Canfield’s biographies. xix See Walker (149) and Canfield (200) for further discussion of the roles these editors played in the production of the text. xx As Canfield explains, early accounts spelled their name “Piute,” which is why it is spelled that way in the title of her narrative (3). xxi Brigette Georgi-Findley notes the way Winnemucca’s text is framed in the prefaces and appendixes and the “the issues of power and authority surrounding editor-narrator relations” to emphasize the ways the editors influenced Winnemucca so that she could appeal to her audiences (223). xxii Senier writes that it is “impossible” to know what is the editor’s influence and what is not (108). Sands cites the same letter as evidence that Winnemucca composed her autobiography with very little help from Mann (275). However, Georgi-Findley interprets the letter as suggesting that Mann “may have interfered in the original text more than she cared to admit in her preface” (231). However, as most current scholars agree, Winnemucca was fully capable of writing in English; I would add that to suggest otherwise has similar implications as those who question the ability of a former slave to construct her or his narrative based merely on doubt that former slaves would have been capable. xxiii They would not have used the term Anglo, but it was implicit in their arguments. See Sarah’s letter VIII and Angelina’s letter XII in Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Women (2013- 2022 in Heath). xxiv See both Berkhofer’s The White Man’s Indian and Roy Harvey Pearce’s Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind. Berkhofer asks, “Why has the idea of Indian persisted for so many centuries?” (4) Additionally, he writes that, “For most whites throughout the past five centuries, the Indian of imagination and ideology has been as real, perhaps more real, than the Native American of actual existence and contact” (71). Additionally, the authors of As Long as the River Shall Run note that in western Nevada, between 1860 and 1870, 30 Anglo Americans and 287 Native people were killed in “conflict outside the theaters of acknowledged warfare” (83). Further, as Martha C. Knack and Omer C. Stewart note in As the River Shall Run, a twentieth-century federal court acknowledged that two-thirds of the Paiute population “were killed during the period of contact” (82). xxv She was the principal of the Chestnut Street Female Seminary in Philadelphia. xxvi The belief that their reform was supported and backed by god, and that it challenged encroachment but posed missionary work as the solution is an interesting twist on Manifest Destiny. xxvii As Mathes points out, like many reformers of the time, they “believed sincerely that it [the Indian way of life] needed to be replaced for the good of the Indian” (2). He provides a summary of the petitions sent in 1879 and 1880 with thousands of signatures that these women gathered. The petition asked the President and Congress to “prevent the encroachments of white settlers upon Indian Territory, and to guard the Indians in the enjoyment of all the rights which have been guaranteed to them on the faith of the nation” (2). Bonney and Amelia Quinton (who wrote the petition) along with other missionary groups, gathered 13,000 signatures of people from 15 states and sent it to President Hayes on February 14, 1880. In 1884, the new president following Bonney, Mary Lowe Dickinson, viewed Anglo women as “a most potent adjunct in the solving of the social problems that press upon enlightened conscience in this day of grand endeavors for the up-lifting of the race” (6). xxviii Georgi-Findley emphasizes the values of Anglos of the time such as “morality, domesticity” etc. that must have had a large impact on the “production, reception, and promotion of the text” (230). xxix Jespersen notes that several scholars have argued that with Mary Mann’s influence, she made her text “palatable to late Victorian women readers” by emphasizing “purity, piety, domesticity, and submissiveness” (185). Other readers, she states, claim that Winnemucca makes “outrageous frequently public acts palatable by remaining always a lady” (185). Overall, she argues that while this is certainly a part of the text, it also carves out “alternative female subjectivities” and “approaches the question of womanhood from quite a different perspective” (185). 282

xxx I do not wish to assert that the Women’s National Indian Association created these ideologies, but only that they were one of the disseminators of this constructed “knowledge” about Native people. xxxi Although biographers such as Canfield, Sally Zanjani, and Katherine Gehm discuss Truckee’s allegiance to Anglos, there has been no recognition of the way that the presence and absence of Mexicans function in the text or its historical context. In the history of California, before it was such, some Mexicanos did displace Native people from their land, and both Mexican Americans and Native people were denied promises made to them in treaties with Anglos. Both groups were encroached upon by Anglo squatters, yet neither Winnemucca nor her contemporary María Amparo Ruiz de Burton imagine an alliance between Mexican Americans and American Indians against Anglo Americans’ colonialist agenda (reflecting, in part, the historical reality of conflict between the two groups. All three groups have a long history of wars against one another and have either been forced—or in some cases have chosen—to co- exist). For Winnemucca, Mexican Americans are a backdrop to the narrative, a memory of her grandfather’s. No alliances are imagined (either with Mexican American women or Mexican Americans as a group) even though both groups were defined by dominant discourses as other, as “savage,” in relation to a supposedly “superior,” Anglo “civilization.” Berkhofer theorizes that the construction of the “Indian,” along with the reproduction of stereotypes of inferiority and savagery, created a “negative” to Anglo definitions of identity; in other words, the “savage” defined what the Anglo was supposedly not (27). This applies to the contemporary definition of Mexican Americans as well, a subject that will be more thoroughly addressed in the Chapter on Ruiz de Burton. xxxii See Davis’s Women, Race, and Class, especially Chapter Seven, regarding women’s suffrage and the effects of racism within this protest. xxxiii At an Equal Rights Association meeting, Frederick Douglass called for the group’s unity on these amendments, arguing that until white women are dragged from their homes and hung on lampposts, and so long as segregation exists, that Black suffrage is more urgent (82). According to Davis, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her followers viewed the Republicans’ move to get the vote of Black males as a move to “extend to Black men the full privileges of male supremacy” (75). Further, Davis points out that James Brooks, a congressman who supported woman’s suffrage, was “enthusiastically lauded by Susan Anthony and her colleagues” despite the fact that he was a “self-avowed white supremacist” (80). Davis also quotes Henry Blackwell, who argued that if women are granted suffrage, then “the political supremacy of your white race will remain unchanged” (114). Interesting that in the context of capitalism a motivation for granting white woman’s suffrage could have been hope that their vote would maintain the interests of white supremacy and middle- or upper-class interests. Later, Susan B. Anthony did not take a stand against the 1893 reversal of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (which effectively sanctioned segregation and lynching). Davis points out that despite the fact that Ida B. Wells, an African American friend of Anthony, had friends who had been victims of lynching and that Wells had compiled research on the numbers of documented victims, Anthony took a “noncommittal stand on racism,” implying that lynchings” were “not a concern” of hers (119). xxxiv See Kerber’s book on women’s rights as well as Angela Davis regarding this issue. xxxv Canfield’s biography reports on this but does not analyze this point further it relation to the Women’s National Indian Association or Winnemucca’s testimony. xxxvi She cites this as the reason Gage was “written out of history” of women’s suffrage and replaced by Anthony. She notes Sarah Matilda Gage as someone who “mined extensively” Lydia Maria Child’s work on the “concept of Indian culture as a matriarchal alternative to American white patriarchy” (259). Landsman does not discuss Winnemucca in relation to these issues. xxxvii Landsman also explains that the suffragists were familiar with the work of ethnologist Henry Louis Morgan, whose book Ancient Society (1877) notes the more egalitarian role of women in what was considered a “savage” society in comparison to the role of women in a “civilized” society (264). xxxviii Landsman asserts that “data suggest that images of the ‘other’ were formed not through the discovery of objective truth but in the context of validating and/or advancing the story of woman’s suffrage” (252). xxxix Landsman also discusses the Sacagawea myth and how it was constructed and used by Anglo feminists (215). Additionally, she examines two recent representations of Iroquois people: one in 1988 suggests the “Indian roots of American democracy” while another by Anglo women, the Women’s Peace Encampment 283

in 1983, situates their own protest for peace within a long history of women protesting war, using Iroquois women and their protest of war in 1590 as an example (249). Unfortunately, the appropriation of Native women for the causes of Anglo women has continued into the twentieth century. xl Georgi-Findley writes that “in an inversion of the Indian captivity narrative, she casts white people in the role of savages and cannibals” (232). xli Mathes notes that one of their primary concerns was the care of Native women and children. xlii Her statement also dismantles a prevalent myth, best expressed by Thomas Jefferson, used to attempt to justify colonialism: The [Native] women are submitted to unjust drudgery. This I believe is the case with every barbarous people. With such, force is law. The stronger sex imposes on the weaker. It is civilization alone which replaces women in the enjoyment of their natural equality. . . were we [a people of] barbarism, our females would be equal drudges. (qtd. in Pearce 93) In this passage he claims that Native women are as slaves to Native men, whereas for Anglos “natural equality” means women are in their “proper spheres.” Further, he implicitly states that Anglo women of civilization are worthy of having Black women labor so that they can have the ease and comforts of “civilization.” xliii Regarding Winnemucca’s comment about women in Congress, Ruoff states that Winnemucca points out the “political power that was denied to white women in ‘civilized’ society” (264), but Ruoff does not develop this point (or situate it in relation to the Women’s National Indian Association or other reform movements). xliv One recent captivity narrative where these ideologies are reproduced is the film The Missing. xlv See A. LaVonne Ruoff’s “Three Nineteenth-Century American Indian Autobiographers” for a discussion of how the “strong criticism of white injustice reflects the desperate plight of Indians by the end of the century and also parallels the growing militancy in the slave narratives published after the mid-1850s” (266). Ruoff points out that Winnemucca’s tactic to appeal to Anglo women is similar to Harriet Jacobs’ tactics in her depiction of sexual assault. Ruoff also notes shifts in American Indian autobiographies in the nineteenth century, and compares Winnemucca’s writing to William Apess’s and George Copway’s autobiographies. She asserts that Winnemucca’s text does not have ‘spiritual reminiscences” as do Apess and Copway and that her narrative “owes more to tribal narrative traditions than to religious ones” (261). xlvi In “Three Nineteenth-Century Autobiographers,” Ruoff summarizes some of Winnemucca’s discussion of rape to argue that it was a subject of both captivity and slave narratives, but that in contrast Winnemucca is “not a victim but rather an independent woman determined to fight off her attackers” (264). I would argue that Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative positions herself in a similar way: she resists and evades her attacker. xlvii Winnemucca does not explain why the Paiutes were fighting with Anglos against the Bannocks, though she does explain that her father and other Paiutes are held prisoners by the Bannocks. My point here is not to speculate on why this occurred as it did, but to note that Winnemucca gets U.S. soldiers to protect her and other Paiutes from Anglo settlers as they travel to rescue the Paiutes from their captivity. Apparently, the U.S. soldiers needed a scout, and no one else would go there. xlviii See Canfield for further explanation (39-43) and Danielle Tisinger’s “Textual Performance and the Western Frontier: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkin’s Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims” for a discussion of her performances, which some have referred to as theatrical performances or entertainment. Though Tisinger notes Winnemucca did it to raise money, it could be emphasized more in her article. Of interest to me is the way that Winnemucca first performs stereotypes and images that Anglo people expected to see of Native people, and the politics of the gaze as Anglos looked upon her performances for entertainment. In comparison, it is interesting to question to what extent her public lectures were a curiosity for her audience as well as the ways she later disturbed audiences’ expectations and gave them a harsh look at life among the Paiutes. xlix Winnemucca only mentions one Native man, Captain Dave, as an exceptional case of violence against Paiute women by Paiute men. She notes that he “blew a young girl’s brains out because she refused to marry him” and that it is “no secret” that he “exposes his wife to bad white men for money” (98). Dave’s exploitation of his wife involves violence on the part of Anglo men as well; moreover, her prostitution is 284

within a political economy of exploitation and war against Native people. As Winnemucca points out, his case is an exception amongst Paiute men; the most threatening, eminent danger for Native women is posed by Anglo men, not supposed “savagery.” l The notion of demonizing the colonial male other, as was done to Black men who were slaves, and erasing the sexual assault of Anglo men against colonized women, as was done in the context of slavery, has a long history in this nation. Given that an Anglo woman of the West was ready to lynch Winnemucca, it is unfortunate that she did not recognize that the then public fear and myth of the Black male rapist was, like the discourses about “savagery” of Native men, part of a similar colonial agenda. li See Kolodny’s “Among the Indians: The Uses of Captivity” for further discussion on this. lii For example, Tisinger refers to Winnemucca as crafting herself as a “woman warrior” to “help appeal to her audiences’ sense of drama” (185). Ruoff also refers to Winnemucca as a “woman warrior” in “Early American Women Authors” (88). In Winnemucca’s critique of “white presence” (229), Georgi-Findley argues that “issues of sexual violence and miscegenation are revealed in the violation of native women’s bodies by white men” (229). liii In addition, the appendixes to the narrative attest to the fact that Winnemucca’s character was in dispute. Several critics have noted this, and given the fact that accusations come mostly from the “Indian agent” Reinhard, who she criticizes most vehemently, it is clear that the attacks on her character are an attempt to discredit her protest as a Native woman. Perhaps this is why she chose to leave her experience in prison out of the narrative. liv Berkhofer notes that “Columbus concluded from his very first meeting with the Indians: ‘They should be good servants and of quick intelligence, since I see that they very soon say all that is said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians” (118). He also discusses how “the idea of the Indian” as a “justification of White policies” (113). He explains that the “primary premise of that imagery is the deficiency of the Indian compared to the White. At bottom, to Europeans and Americans this means Native Americans must be reformed according to White criteria and their labor, lands, and souls put to ‘higher uses in line with White goals” (113). lv Canfield also notes the agent at Pyramid lake “did nothing for” Native people dying of measles, typhoid fever, and consumption (59). lvi That Winnemucca stresses the particular experiences of Native women within this exploitation follows a similar kind of definition given by recent Chicana feminists of what feminism is. For instance, Cherríe Moraga writes that Chicana feminism is very much rooted in and inspired by the Columbee River Black feminist organization, and that “one of the major components of Black feminism is that women of color embody the coalition essential for revolution and that each form of oppression is part and parcel of the larger political strategy of capitalist and racist patriarchy” (Loving in the War Years 124). Overall, the violence that Winnemucca critiques is rooted in a capitalist, racist, political economy in which Native people are defined as “savage” and inferior. lvii Historian Wilcomb E. Washburn explains that: “The allotted land was to be held in trust for a period of 20 years, after which the Indian had unrestricted power to use and sell. Unalloted lands on the reservation were designated as surplus and ceded to the government, which then sold them to whites, placing the proceeds in trust for the tribes concerned. Sixty million acres were lost through the sale of lands designated ‘surplus’ by the government after the allotments had been made to the Indians. In addition to this tribal land, 27,000,000 acres or two thirds of the land allotted to individual Indians was also lost by sale between 1887 and 1934” (qtd. in McClure 4). lviii See also Georgi-Findley (225) and others for a discussion of the Dawes Act and Winnemucca. lix Andrew McClure points out that “very little work has been done” on Winnemucca. His theory for this is that, like Bataille and Sands and Catherine Fowler, many people feel uncomfortable with her writing because she seems “overly assimilated.” This is due mostly to her support of allotment, which would later become the Dawes Act of 1887. lx Overall, he argues that Winnemucca exploits the romantic image of Native people and turns it on its head. He defends her assimilationist stances, and her performances and public lectures in which she adorned herself in ways that fulfilled racist stereotypes, as taking on ideas of the “dominant culture in order to gain power and respect from Euro-Americans” (par.2). He notes the difficulties of getting a text 285

published without help from Anglo Americans, and that “she had to carefully anticipate manipulating her work to a specifically non-Native audience” (30). See also Noreen Grover Lape’s essay on assimilation. She writes, “I will explore how liminality in Hopkins's frontier autobiography gives rise to double consciousness and how her double consciousness is manifested in the complex rhetorical strategies she uses to convince her White audience of the civil wrongs done to the Paiutes on the reservation, and the legal claims she makes on their behalf” (par. 1). Further, Lape writes that “[m]any critics place Hopkins's narrative within the tradition of ‘bicultural composite composition,’ a term Arnold Krupat attributes to most nineteenth-century Native American autobiographies. . . Krupat suggests by mirroring in their origins the meeting of cultures, bicultural compositions are the "textual equivalent of the frontier” (par. 6). Hence, Lape asserts that many critics view White and Native voices in bicultural compositions as separate and distinct entities that are divided and conflicting, (par. 7), however, according to Lape, “Hopkins uses her double consciousness to enlighten her White audience and correct their misconceptions and prejudices about Paiutes.” Overall, she acknowledges that an assimilationist stance is abusive, but that Sarah Winnemucca’s embracing of Anglo Americans to civilize American Indians is less “pernicious” than dying; further she argues that the “double consciousness” Winnemucca uses to appeal to her audience to get them to advocate for Paiute rights and that she still questions the notions of civilization. Cheryl Walker argues that Winnemucca “did not advocate complete assimilation” (140). As with many critics, Walker discusses Winnemucca as a mediator. Walker writes that “[i]t is typical of her desire to bring peoples together and allow passage of ideas from one group to another that she served in this capacity” (142). lxi See Canfield’s biography for the details on Winnemucca’s school (239). lxii On top of that, the Indian Rights Association, which had goals similar to the Women’s National Indian Association but did not allow women to be members, succeeded in causing many people to doubt Winnemucca’s trustworthiness (Canfield 235). Another reason that some people were hesitant to fund her endeavors was due to Reinhard, the agent she condemned most scathingly, who wrote affidavits in an attempt to disparage her (Canfield 235). lxiii Zanjani reports on this news report but does not develop an argument about it in her biography of Winnemucca except to say that it “underscored her dissent from the policy of eradicating Indian culture to assimilate the Indians” (258). lxiv Sally Zanjani also notes in her biography on Winnemucca that the founder of the Indian Rights Association, Herbert Walsh, and Charles Painter, its lobbyist, “not only rejected Sarah but endeavored to alienate her supporters” (247). This is likely due to her public protest to missionaries. lxv As Mihesuah underscores in Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism, “no one Indigenous woman can speak for all of us, and it is not possible for any one feminist theory or thought to summarize Native women. Native women do share historic oppression, but the cultural, racial, and economic variations among Native women render any sort of national coalition virtually impossible” (xx). lxvi Laguna poet and scholar Paula Gunn Allen defines herself as a tribal feminist—“if I am dealing with feminism, I approach it from a strongly tribal posture, and when I am dealing with American Indian literature, history, culture, or philosophy I approach it from a strongly feminist one” (222). In this statement Allen avoids labeling herself as either one or the other, tribal or feminist, and instead defines herself as both. lxvii For example, Jesperson notes that in most adventures of the frontier, Native women “serve as guides and lovers for adventuring heroes or are conflated with the landscape and treated as objects of conquest” (186). It is significant that Winnemucca does not fit this stereotype for Native women. Jesperson continues by arguing that Winnemucca “offers her readers an example of adventurous female subjectivity that encourages mobility, bravery, leadership and honor,” all of which contrast starkly with the image of domesticity in the nineteenth century. I agree that for her Anglo female audience this narrative may seem adventurous; still, in the context of frontier genocidal violence the term “adventurous” for female subjectivity is problematic. lxviii See other entries in This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color for various critiques of racism within the feminist movement in the late twentieth century. 286

lxix Additionally, she writes, “Issues such as equal pay for equal work, child health and welfare, and a woman’s right to make her own choices regarding contraceptive use, sterilization and abortion—key issues to the majority women’s movement—affect Indian women as well; however, equality per se, may have a different meaning for Indian women and Indian people. That difference begins with personal and tribal sovereignty—the right to be legally recognized as peoples empowered to determine our own destinies” (214). lxx Avila adds an articulation of sovereignty regarding feminism that places Native women at the center: “[w]hite feminists are not at our center. For many of us, they never have been. White feminism, for me, has always been marginalized, on the periphery, where it should be. It’s not about us, we’re about us. I do recognize that there are white women who are good strong allies but we are also good strong allies. They are not leading us. We lead ourselves. And their narratives will never tell our stories the way we do” (537). For Avila, Anglo American women can be allies, but such an alliance is not the central focus. lxxi Historian Martin Padget writes that today historians agree that there were about 300,000 Native people living within what is now California when the Spanish began colonizing in 1769. In 1821, the year of Mexican independence, it was down to 100,000 and fell to 50,000 during that time. Between 1846 and 1860 only 30,000 were left. The 1900 census recorded 15,377 people. lxxii In a letter to her husband while writing Ramona, Jackson explains, “I write these Indian things in a totally different way from my ordinary habit of composition—I write these sentences . . . as fast as I can write the words” (qtd. in Mathes 3). lxxiii I use the term nation state in an Althusserian fashion to connotate a specific power dynamic of the institutional state apparatus, and the accompanying attitudes and ideologies of control and power of an Anglo, male-led government. lxxiv My point in using the word elite here is to point out that Jackson did not protest injustices suffered by Mexican Americans who did not own land and who were not a part of the upper class. Yet she does emphasize the unjust way that the United States government took land away from Mexican Americans. For example, she writes: It might be asked, perhaps, just how General Moreno owned all this land, and the question might not be easy to answer. It was not and could not be answered to the satisfaction of the United States Land Commission, which, after the surrender of California undertook to sift and adjust Mexican land titles; and that was the way it had come about that the Señora Moreno now called herself a poor woman. Tract after tract, her lands had been taken away from her; it looked for a time as if nothing would be left . . . No wonder she believed the Americans thieves, and spoke of them always as hounds. The people of the United States have never in the least realized that the taking possession of California was not only a conquering of Mexico, but a conquering of California as well. It is a marvel that a Mexican remained in the country; probably not did, except those who were absolutely forced to it. (12) lxxv These groups and others are often referred to as “Mission Indians,” but I will not refer to them as such because not only does the term impose a colonialist name on them, it also makes them seem to exist only for the mission. Jackson refers to Alessandro as both a Temecula Indian and Luiseño. lxxvi Jackson lost two children and her first husband, and thus the sympathy with which she portrays this loss is derived from personal experience. lxxvii Willa Cather and Mary Austin are two more examples of authors who I would like to incorporate into this study when I revise it as a book. lxxviii I have chosen to use the term “violent white male masculinity” to emphasize the constructedness of masculinity as well as the constructedness of whiteness, both of which together are part of a constructed identity rooted in colonialist violence. Therefore, I refer to this construction as such and the actual people as Anglo men. The Anglo men who took on this identity both ideologically and in their actions thus embraced violent colonialist white masculinity. lxxix This information and the following information is from Kate Phillips’ biography of Jackson. See pages 11-39. lxxx See Phillips’ biography for an excellent detailed account of Jackson’s writing, and her literary interests before writing Ramona. 287

lxxxi See Kate Phillips’s biography and others on Jackson’s literary influences. lxxxii During a 15 year span she wrote over thirty books and “hundreds of poems, articles, and essays” that were published in The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, St. Nicholas, New York Independent, and Scribner’s Monthly (introduction vii). For an extensive biography on Jackson’s literary career and life see Kate Phillips’s more recent biography. For a biography focusing on her personal and family life see Evelyn Bunning’s book. The first biography by Ruth Odell notes that Jackson had a slave in her home in the 1850s (52). lxxxiii See Mathes’ The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson 1879-1885 for further discussion of this (40). lxxxiv See Mathes (40). lxxxv Again, see Mathes’ The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson 1879-1885 for further discussion of this (210). The report that she wrote about the Cahuilla, San Yisidro, Saboba, and San Pasquale tribes, called the Jackson Kinney report, wherein she recommended allotment, and the removal of Anglo encroachers also serves as the premise to the ideas she writes about in her novel. For an extensive line by line close reading of the report and the ways the writing from the report makes it into the novel see John R. Byers’s “The Indian Matter of Helen Hunt Jackson’s ‘Ramona’: From Fact to Fiction.” Byers does an excellent job documenting the novels’ basis in fact, including the stories Jackson hears from Native people. Her recommendations were supported by such groups as the Women’s National Indian Association, and failed each year to pass in Congress until 1891, six years after Jackson died, when ideas proposed in the report passed as the “Act for the Relief of the Mission Indians in the State of California.” She asked for a law firm to be hired, a just distribution of farm equipment, funds for food for the old and sick, and more schools to be built. See Mathes’s The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson 1879-1885 for a discussion of this and of what the report entailed (215). The Jackson/Kinney report was sent to Commissioner Price to Secretary Teller, and then to President Arthur. Although the recommendation of allotment is considered by many people to be an assimilationist policy, Mathes argues that Jackson was “less interested in assimilation of the American Indians and more interested in the protection of their land rights and adherence to treaty provisions” (5). As in the discussion of allotment in my chapter on Winnemucca, it is possible that Jackson did not know that the way the allotment act would be employed would end up negatively effecting American Indians, causing a diminishing of two-thirds of their land base in the U.S. lxxxvi Alessandro’s father is described as peaceful, “[b]ut he was not a civilized man; he had to bring to bear on his present situation only simple, primitive, uneducated instincts and impulses” (54). Such statements explicitly suggest that Native people are inferior to “civilized” Americans. lxxxvii I want to thank Daniel Cooper-Alarcón for offering this way of reading Ramona as History with a capital H. lxxxviii Luis-Brown refers to the problematic ideologies that are coupled in these novels with an attempt at social reform as “simultaneous contradictory conflicts,” a phrase he borrows from Stuart Hall (829). lxxxix While other reformers were anti-Catholic, as Mathes notes, Jackson portrayed a “sympathetic picture of the Franciscan missionaries in California” (5). xc Jackson’s ability to write such a mystical, paradise fantasy of the hacienda is truly poetic, albeit vastly inaccurate. xci Ironically, as Mathes points out, the success of Ramona was a “strong boost to tourism in southern California” (218), not the kind of influence Jackson was looking for. xcii Before Jackson’s death, she wrote to a friend that “My ‘Century of Dishonor’ and ‘Ramona’ are the only things I have done of which I am glad . . . They will live, and . . . bear fruit” (qtd. in Mathes 219). Just four days before she died, Jackson asked President Cleveland to read A Century of Dishonor because, as she explained, he was “destined to strike the first steady blow towards lifting this burden of infamy from our country, and righting the wrongs of the Indian race” (qtd. in Mathes 219). Since its publication, Ramona has been through over 300 editions and it continues to impact American culture regarding attitudes toward American Indians. xciii Like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” I do not mean to suggest a positivist view of history that implies if only the subaltern would speak the real truth about history would 288

be heard but rather the importance of critiquing an author who takes on the task of speaking for and about the subaltern, and examine the ideological underpinnings of such a task. xciv Or, as in another passage, she writes, “If the Fathers could have stayed . . . why, Alessandro could have had work to do for the Fathers, as his father had before him. . . it was very different now. The Americans would not let an Indian do anything but plough and sow and herd cattle. A man need not read and write, to do that” (51). xcv He notes contemporaries Pedro Fages and Hubert Bancroft as protesting the Mission system and its coercive forms of exploitation, whereas Jackson “emphasizes their desire to civilize a savage race through discipline, religious training, and paternalistic compassion” (7). xcvi For further discussion of this see Yolanda Venegas’s essay “The Erotics of Racialization: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of California,” especially page 73. xcvii See the Pechanga tribal website for history, culture, traditions, economic issues, and an explanation of the importance they place on teaching children the Luiseño language. http://www.pechanga- nsn.gov/page?pageId=6 xcviii In another such example Jackson begins to question the use of manifest destiny, but her critique is smoothed over, and thus hardly reaches the heights of Winnemucca’s scathing critique of Christian hypocrisy. Father Salvierderra says “God’s will be done” twice, and Alessandro questions “how can it be God’s will that wrong be done? It cannot be God’s will that one man should steal from another all he has. That would make God no better than a thief, it looks to me. But how can it happen if it is not God’s will?” (67). Jackson then writes, “Generations of the oppressed and despoiled before Alessandro, had grappled with the problem in one shape or another” (67). Jackson thus questions manifest destiny, yet at this point Alessandro is not allowed to have an intelligent answer to his own question. Still, Jackson allows readers to grapple with the question to some extent. Dorris notes that Jackson was not concerned with “particular tribes’ aspirations for tribal sovereignty” (xvii) but he does not expand on this. Because Jackson’s depiction of the mission system clearly euphemizes servitude of American Indians and even suggests that the missions were helpful for American Indians, her novel fails to uphold an argument for tribal sovereignty, or for traditional ways of life prior to the Spanish missions. xcix Senier argues that the Women’s National Indian Association advocated “aggressive missionizing” while Jackson was most concerned with “preservation of the indigenous land base” (41). c See the website “Voting Rights in America: A Timeline Since 1776” for more details on the history of voting for women and people of color in the United States. http://www.autry- museum.org/explore/exhibits/suffrage/suff_time.html ci Further, in an essay Jackson published, entitled “Wanted: A Home,” Phillips explains that she “protests the Women’s Rights people” (141). cii See Phillips pages 141-145 on this. She submitted an essay against women’s suffrage to the Tribune in 1871 but it was rejected. In 1879 she referred to herself as “not being a suffragist” ( Phillips 142). While Jackson published an anonymous satire of Stanton and Anthony in 1870, the suffragist Women’s Journal reviewed Jackson’s work favorably. ciii See Phillips pages 141-143 for further details on this. civ See Angela Davis’ Women, Race, and Class for a lengthy analysis of this history. cv See Jean Humez’ Harriet Tubman: The Life and Stories for an excellent discussion of women’s rights groups and Black women. cvi An additional target of Aunt Ri’s protest is the hypocrisy of Christians who condone violence against American Indians. In the end, after Alessandro’s death, and after Señora Moreno becomes ill and dies, Ramona’s adopted brother Felipe goes on a long journey to try to find Ramona. He makes it to San Bernardino and happens upon Aunt Ri, who leads him to Ramona. An Anglo man named Sam Merrill is their guide, and he says he does not blame Farrar for killing Alessandro. (Felipe does not speak English so he is unaware of Merrill’s racism). Aunt Ri replies to him, Young man, I dunno much abaout yeour raisin.’ I’ve heered yeour folks wuz great on religion. Naow, we ain’t, Jeff ‘n’ me; we warn’t raised that way; but I allow ef I wuz ter hear my boy, Jos, . . . ef I should hear him say what yeou’ve jest said, I allow I sh’d expect to see him struck by lightnin (339). 289

In this way, Jackson critiques people who espouse to be religious but who hold racist views that accept and even advocate murdering Native people. cvii This will be addressed briefly in my epilogue, and more thoroughly in my book-length project. cviii Given Jackson’s own shift in her consciousness in her travel writing that caused her to go from not seeing a Native woman as human to recognizing her humanity, it is likely that she was hopeful that other Anglo women could unlearn the “Anti-Indianism” that is taught in American culture. cix See the letter to readers in which Harriet Jacobs specifically appeals to the conscience of Anglo women in the north. cx Daneen Wardrop argues that “to counteract political alienation, Jackson flatters her audience by acknowledging their femaleness. The overwhelmingly female readership of nineteenth-century novels— and even more so, of those novels written by women—would have noticed the ways in which Jackson accorded her novel a female authority” (27). I argue that the female authority is more than simply flattery—it is an attempt to articulate a politics of protest to male led colonialist violence. cxi See Barbara Goldsmith’s Other Powers on this issue as well as the disputes between various groups of women’s rights activists on this issue (208). cxii For some historical texts on this see Barbara Goldsmith’s Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull and Mary Gabriel’s Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored. cxiii As historian Albert Hurtado explains in Intimate Frontiers, “[w]hite men kidnapped and raped native women with little fear of retribution from legal authorities. Under California’s state constitution, a white person could not be convicted solely on the basis of Indian testimony” (88). cxiv See Castañeda’s essay “History and Politics of Violence Against Women” for a discussion of this. cxv From the beginning, the Señora resents having had to adopt Ramona, as “[s]he did not wish any dealings with such alien and mongrel blood. ‘If the child were pure Indian, I would like it better,’ she said, ‘I like not these crosses. It is the worst, and not the best of each, that remains” (30). In Louis Owens’s Mixedblood Messages, he reflects on his own family and some of the difficulties of having a mixedblood identity. As he puts it, as “Choctow-Cherokee-Welsh-Irish-Cajun I have learned to inhabit a hybrid space” (176). Ramona, however, does not adopt a hybrid space and the complexity of her identity as someone who has an Anglo father and a Native mother and has been raised in an elite Mexican American household is not adequately dealt with in the novel. The Señora’s hatred for Ramona not being a “pure” race is not questioned in the novel, thus reifying the notion that their even is such a thing.cxv Because Ramona has adopted some of the cultural ideologies, traditions (including Catholicism), and language of her adoptive Mexican American family, her identity and the treatment of her identity in the space of the borderlands deserves further analysis (though it is beyond the scope of this project). cxvi Ramona’s captivity is told with the kind of terror reminiscent of eighteenth century gothic novels. cxvii At the same time, this makes it seem as though Ramona’s love for Alessandro is acceptable only because she is truly American Indian like Alessandro. As Jacobs points out, “race appears to be a matter of blood” in the novel. Ramona “cannot escape the supposedly innate qualities that Jackson associates with Indianness” and Alessandro never considers marrying Ramona until he learns that she, “has Indian blood in her veins,” as the narrator of Ramona puts it (217). cxviii Margaret Jacobs notes that both Jackson and Ruiz de Burton use “evil stepmother characters” but does not discuss it in the ways I am here. cxix See Delyser for a discussion of the several versions of the films. There was a 1916 version and a 1936 version with Loretta Young. Despite internet, ebay, and various library searches I have not been able to attain a copy of any of these versions to view. cxx In 1928, a traveler wrote, “no matter on which highway you travel in California, signs, booklets, and people inform you of Ramona landmarks” (Delyser xi). cxxi See Delyser’s book for a discussion of the history behind this tourism growth and the claims to real places in the novel. Unfortunately, the tourists inspired by reading Ramona have not been inspired to instead spend their money and time traveling to and protesting in Washington D.C. cxxii In May of 2006, the 83rd annual Ramona Pageant, staged in Hemet California, began with an Anglo man stating, “Today we honor three cultures: the Native, the Mexican, and the American” as three people 290

on horses held a Spanish, Mexican, and California flag. In attempting to be celebratory of California’s multicultural history, he presumed that to be an American meant to be Anglo only (and I am still not sure which flag was supposed to represent Native cultures). He preceded to say “thanks to all the veterans who have served in this country.” This overflow of patriotism in the post 911 era seemed to suggest that the play would not convey the harsh criticisms of colonial violence that Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona accomplishes. However, it becomes clear that thanking the many Anglo American veterans in the audience is an attempt, on the part of the pageant producers, to appeal to the audience so that they would more likely listen to the message of the play. cxxiii I use the term “brown face” to be more specific but allude to the history of “black face” in American culture in such as films by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. cxxiv For the most part, the Pageant does a respectful job of recreating the novel, and it preserves the critiques that Jackson makes. Unfortunately, it turns the servant Luigo into a character who serves as comedic relief for the audience, playing up a stereotype of a “lazy Mexican” who falls down after doing only a little bit of work. Also, for the purposes of comedy, jabs are made at women which are not in the novel. For example, Juan Canito says things such as, “I wish my leg was as active as your tongue, woman” and “I’d rather manage forty sheep than one woman” all of which make the audience snicker as though they are watching a sitcom like “Married with Children.” In the end of the play, Farrar, the man who kills Alessandro, is hand cuffed by Anglo settlers including the sheriff, while the audience boos him off stage. In effect, it suggests that there is and was such a thing as justice in the history of the United States and thus erases Jackson’s critique of the “justice” system. These problems are worth writing a letter to the pageant’s director. While it is marred by such problematic poetic license, it also provides a lens into history that has the potential to cause audience members to re-think the violent history of the United States (so long as they do not focus only on the love story). cxxv Wardrop points out that, “paradoxically, she appropriates these cultures in order to advocate for them” (28). cxxvi See Delyser for more in depth discussion of this. cxxvii In the reporter’s eyes, the Native woman of Jackson’s novel is not human, much like the tourist attraction on the I-10 between Tucson and Wilcox where a tourist can pay a fee to see “THE THING.” For a small fee, a tourist can view a mummified Native woman’s body. Her history, her story, her life are all erased and instead she is named “THE THING.” Such disrespect should remind us that the issues from the nineteenth century, addressed by Jackson, are still with us today. Despite Jackson’s ideological limitations she is still ahead of our times in some ways. cxxviii Alessandro says in agony, “They are a pack of thieves and liars, every one of them! They are going to steal all the land in the country; we might all just as well throw ourselves into the sea, and let them have it” (177). As Jesse Alemán argues, “Ramona maintains the ‘natural’ categories of racial identity that predestine Native Americans to extinction, mestizos to removal, and whites to cultural dominance” (63). His critique is an important one, and needs to be made. Further, he argues that “despite Jackson’s best intentions to write a protest novel that defends the rights of Indians, Ramona turned out to be a romance narrative that inadvertently reenacts the removal of Indians from California’s literary landscape” (75). This is an excellent point, and one of the central problems with the novel. A different ending would have changed its effect ideologically. cxxix As part of his study he also reflects on his own family and mixedblood identity as, he puts it, as “Choctow-Cherokee-Welsh-Irish-Cajun I have learned to inhabit a hybrid space” (176). cxxx Additionally, as Larzer Ziff explains, “Treating living Indians as sources for a literary construction of a vanished way of life rather than as members of a vital continuing culture, such writers used words to replace rather than to represent Indian reality” (qtd. in Vizenor 8). cxxxi For example, the documentary about AIM activist John Trudell’s life, by film director Heather Rae (Ojibwe), emphasizes surviving cycles of violence brought on by European invasion. cxxxii I have chosen to use the terms “white masculinity” and “violent white male masculinity” to emphasize the constructedness of masculinity as well as the constructedness of whiteness, both of which together are part of a constructed identity rooted in colonialist violence. Therefore, I refer to this construction as such 291

and the actual people as Anglo men. The Anglo men who took on this identity both ideologically and in their actions thus embraced violent colonialist white masculinity. cxxxiii I would like to thank Daniel Cooper Alarcón for his assistance fine tuning this particular translation. cxxxiv I use the term feminisms here in the way that many twentieth-century theorists do to recognize that there are many definitions or approaches to feminism, thus I recognize the plurality of the concept. cxxxv In her letters she also critiques manifest destiny: “’Manifest Destiny’ . . . De todas las malvenidas frases inventadas para hacer robos, no hay una más odiosa para mí que ésa, la más ofensiva, la más insultante . . . Si yo pudiera creer en el ‘Manifest Destiny’ dejaría de creer en la justicia o la sabiduría divina. No amigo mío, el Manifest Destiny no es otra cosa que ‘Manifest Yankie trick’ como sus ‘wooden hams and wooden nutmegs’ del Connecticut. (281). [“Manifest Destiny . . . of all the bad intended phrases made in order to rob, there is nothing more hateful to me than this phrase, nothing more offensive and insulting. If I could believe in manifest destiny, I would have to abandon believing in justice or divine wisdom. No, my friend, manifest destiny is nothing more than a “Manifest Yankie trick” like the wooden hams and nutmegs in Connecticut.” [translation mine]. cxxxvi See Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror, Chapter Six, for a more detailed discussion of Vallejo’s loss of land. cxxxvii See José Aranda’s “Contradictory Impulses” for more details about her biography and a discussion of how this biography enters into the recuperation project in Chicana and Chicano literature. See also the introduction to The Squatter and the Don for a biography as well. cxxxviii See Aranda’s chapter “All Strangers in a Strange Land: When Anglo and Mexican Histories Collide” for further details (92). cxxxix During this time she lived in a number of places including Rhode Island, New York, Washington D.C., Delaware, and Virginia. Jackson’s first husband was also in the U.S. military and died in an accident in 1863, which lead Jackson to turn to writing to support herself. cxl According to Crawford it was “litigation that would cease only with her death” (204). Pita and Sánchez suggest that some land was validated by the U.S. supreme court in 1889—though this vastly reduced land was heavily mortgaged. Aranda’s “All Strangers in a Strange Land” explains that she was in legal disputes with squatters throughout the 1870s and 1880s and was finally “granted a homestead,” to secure a portion of her land, by the California Supreme Court in 1889. By then she had had to mortgage much of her remaining land to pay for legal costs, and in 1895 her son was forced to sell the rest of the ranch. See page 95 for further discussion. cxli See Aranda’s “All Strangers in a Strange Land” for a discussion of Ruiz de Burton’s financer and friend who loaned her money to help publish her novels (98). cxlii See Olsen for details on Jackson. See also Aranda’s “Contradictory Impulses” and Kathleen Crawford’s “The General’s Lady” for a discussion of Ruiz de Burton. cxliii He cites a visitor to California who wrote in 1846 that “The Indians are the principle laborers; without them the business of the country could hardly be carried on” (117). In another article, “South by Southwest . . . ,” Pérez discusses The Squatter and the Don within the social and historical context of hacienda culture pre-1848 to argue that its nostalgia for aristocratic hacienda life is similar to plantation narratives of the south (109). cxliv He also examines the cultural work of romance to elucidate how “gender, racial, and class dynamic of erotically familiar relationships enable the making of nation itself” (27). He emphasizes how “the novel’s drive for acculturation and intermarriage with whites reflected the restructuring of citizenship along lines of race in the construction of national unity I will label the ‘white nation’” (28). cxlv He further argues that she is no “Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers Union or a Gloria Anzaldúa of the borderlands in nineteenth-century clothes” (555). He cautions against those who would “like to read Ruiz de Burton as a prototypical Chicana feminist” (555). “She saw herself as part of a white, educated elite—aristocratic in its origins and with a history in Alta California as colonizers—not as colonized” (558). cxlvi On Jackson, see Kate Phillips’s “Helen Hunt Jackson’s Lasting Amherst Ties”—she mentions that in 1884 the novel was a best-seller (1). Also, Michael Dorris’s introduction to the novel mentions the number 292

of editions is has since been through. On June 23, 1860 she wrote again to Vallejo, “Creo que lo mejor que yo puedo hacer es escribir un libro. ¿Qué tal? ¿No lo leería? ¿No quiere que lo haga uno de mis heroes? Las escenas deben ser en California, el contexto y diferencia de las razas es un gran tema” (245). [“I believe that the best thing I can do is write a book. What of that? Would it not be read? Don’t you want to be one of my heroes? The setting should be in California, the context and differences of the races the great theme.”] (my translation). cxlvii See the documentary ¡Chicano! for more details regarding this issue. See also Ronald Takaki’s chapter “Strangers in a Strange Land…” in A Different Mirror for the history of the land losses. cxlviii My use of the word feminism here and throughout is done with the understanding that this term did not exist as such in the nineteenth century. However, the concept did and my use of the term is done in such a way so as to apply our understanding of feminism to the context of the nineteenth century. cxlix See Lois W. Banner’s “Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Early Marriage and Feminist Rebellion” for a full discussion of this issue. cl Later, Susan B. Anthony did not take a stand against the 1893 reversal of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (which effectively sanctioned segregation and lynching). cli See Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored for a full analysis of her activism. clii See chapter 7 in Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror for further discussion of the effects of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the promises that were not kept in this treaty. By 1904 Mexican American men represented 3% of voters in Santa Barbara (179). cliii As one website puts it, a common term used in this time to refer to American democracy was “linchocrasia.” See www.neta.com/~1stbooks/law1800s.htm . This site, along with many others, documents the lynchings that happened throughout the western part of the U.S. cliv It could also be argued that Dr. Norval is sexually attracted to his adopted daughter, Lola. Finding out Dr. Norval would leave for Abyssinia, Lola “burst out crying, pouring on him a shower of most emphatic kisses” (83). He is “much moved” by this “innocent fervor” (83). That he is moved is quite ambiguous, but such statements, combined with the following, suggest something more: “The doctor was taken by surprise with this loving avalanche. His heart, however, quickly responded to it, throbbing and warming up at the passionate pleasure of the little arms thrown around his neck . . .” (84). She’s 14 now, and “he made her sit on his knees, and he laid on his breast the little head, so graceful and perfect in shape, with its wealth of silky, wavy black hair” (84). “The doctor kissed Lola several times and embraced her to bid her good night” (22), to which Mrs. Norval says later, “Don’t you know, doctor, that you kissed that Indian child more affectionately than you kissed your own daughters?” clv See Norma Alarcón’s essay “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo- American Feminism,” bell hooks’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” and many other feminists in the twentieth century who make such critiques. clvi These genres are not particularly separable for Moraga. clvii See the Western Journal of Nursing Research article, published in 2004, for extensive documentation of numerous sources attesting to the harmful working conditions due to pesticide exposure that farm workers are still exposed to in the twenty-first century. clviii Even so, the number of diagnosed cases of pesticide exposure is clearly much lower than the reality of illnesses people experience. For one, many people do not have access to and cannot afford health care. A number of sources attest to the harmful effects on children. An article in the Western Journal of Nursing Research explains that “[b]ecause these youths are smaller and still developing, they are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of pesticide exposure” (147). For another article on this subject see “Cancer Clusters Among Children: The Implications of McFarland.” McFarland is the town upon which Moraga’s play is based. See also “Environmental Toxins: Changes Needed to Reduce Migrant Farm Worker Exposure to Pesticides” in Cancer Weekly and Hosansky’s article. The later cites the disproportionate incidents of cancer among workers, child laborers, and residents of the area. In addition, the article by Salazar covers the dangers of exposure to pesticides. 293

clix See the above mentioned articles for more information on this subject. Also, Anne Shea writes that “[w]hile agricultural profits have soared over the last decade, the wages of farm workers in real terms have plummeted” (127). clx In Moraga’s own autobiographical work, in interviews, and in biographies on Moraga her father’s class background is never mentioned. Moraga’s own identification with her mother may account for the absence of discussion of her father. clxi See Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s The Wounded Heart for background on this topic. clxii Rather than call upon Homi Babha, Franz Fanon, Michele Foucault, and Louis Althusser (as useful as their theories are) for Chicana studies and literary theory, more work needs to be done to recognize theoretical works already within Chicana studies, with specific Chicana historical contexts and material conditions in mind. Additionally, as well as fiction are numerous theoretical works by writers such as Mary Pat Brady, Norma Alarcón, Tey Diana Rebolledo, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, María Herrera-Sobek, Yvonne Yarbro Bejarano, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others. clxiii Chicana feminist Sonia Saldívar-Hull also emphasizes the importance of validating personal experience as the work of theory in her book Feminisms on the Border. clxiv See the interview with Dulfano, Dan Latimer’s article, and Kayann Short’s interview for biographical information. clxv See Sonia López’s essay “The Role of the Chicana within the Student Movement.” clxvi See the documentary ¡Chicano! as well for further discussion of Chicanas roles in the movement. clxvii See also Catherine Wiley’s “Teatro Chicano and the Seduction of Nostalgia” for a discussion of the way nostalgia about the vision of Aztlán, and about the past before Mexico became the United States, effects the ways Moraga’s audiences “(Chicano and non-Chicano) perceive the realities of contemporary Chicano culture outside of the theater” and how they see her plays inside the theater. clxviii See also Aída Hurtado’s “The Politics of Sexuality” in Living Chicana Theory (386). Regarding Moraga’s play Watsonville, David DeRose notes that “the audiences attending Watsonville demonstrate how Moraga’s dialogue spills off the stage and into the community. On any given night one might see a lesbian couple sitting next to an old Chicano husband and wife, who are in turn sitting next to members of the affluent white ‘arts crowd,’ sitting next to some tough young barrio cholos” (78). clxix In an interview with Mary Pat Brady and Juanita Heredia, Moraga explains, “[t]he reason I continue to write theater is because I feel it is the one place that I can expose the poesia in the common tongue. Traditionally, people do not put those two things together. Yet, the way we grew up, basically anyone bilingual, people learned to speak English in a beautiful combination—the spoken Spanish with the written English. To me this is very poetic particularly when I grew up among cuentistas. The theater is then one way that allows me to contribute to that” (159). clxx I notice this most when teaching. Anglo students often easily criticize Latino men for being sexist, but cannot so easily see similar behavior in Anglo men. clxxi See also All the Women are White, and all the Blacks are Men, but Some of us are Brave (1982) by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Beel-Scott, and Barbara Smith for a discussion of the problematic ways race and gender and discussed as separate issues and women of color are erased in the process. clxxii See Chela Sandoval’s The Methodology of the Oppressed, Patricia Collins’ work, and many others. clxxiii In Feminism Without Borders, Chandra Mohanty calls for feminist pedagogy and practice that she coins a “comparative feminist studies model” (243). Such a study would show the “interconnectedness of histories, experiences, and struggles of U.S. women of color, white women, and women from the Third World/South” (242). Such a comparative study that is “attentive to power” “suggests attentiveness to the interweaving of the histories of these communities” (242). clxxiv Looking at transnational alliances between Latina women of color in the context of globalization is something that I would like to do when I revise this as a book. clxxv See bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center for an excellent critique of work as empowering for all women. clxxvi As I revise this for a book, I would like to include a discussion of the La Llorona myth. Viramontes revises the myth to show that the real threat to Chicana and Chicano children is not their mothers but rather the water that has pesticide poisoning. See Ana María Carbonnell’s “From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue 294

In Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros” for a discussion of La Llorona in their short stories. Carbonell does not discuss Under the Feet of Jesus, so there is a lot of work to be done on this topic. clxxvii I want to thank Amy Hamilton for this insight into the text. clxxviii See the above mentioned articles for information on this subject. clxxix See Julia de Foor Jay’s essay, “(Re)Claiming the Race of the Mother: Cherríe Moraga’s Shadow of a Man, Giving up the Ghost, and Heroes and Saints” for a discussion of mother/daughter relationships in Moraga’s plays. She contends that these relationships are restorative and healing, “rendering a vision of revolution, led by courageous vendidas” (95). clxxx In Hal Gelb’s article in The Nation, he argues that “[w]hen Moraga contrasts the mother with an older woman activist based on Dolores Huerta, we know we are seeing the acceptable role model. Moraga isn’t able or doesn’t wish to get inside the way the mother has internalized her oppression as she gets inside Cerezita’s yearing or Yolanda’s agony” (519). For Gelb, “it’s here that Heroes and Saints fails in its aspirations” (519). It is true that we do not get inside Dolores’, Cerezita’s mother’s, head, but I think Gelb is being extreme by saing that the play fails as a result. We do not see her turmoil, but we see the effects of the turmoil rendered in her reaction to everything—she shuts down and gives up hope in contrast to Cerezita and Amparo. clxxxi See Shea for a description of the history of deportation of people of Mexican descent in the United States. She points to the history of immigration laws that recruited Mexicans to the U.S. when there was a labor shortage and deported people during the Depression. Between 1929 to 1935 “80, 000 people of Mexican descent, regardless of their legal right to be in the United States, were deported to Mexico” (124). clxxxii See Takaki’s chapter “Foreigners in Their Native Land” in A Different Mirror for further discussion of and historical background on this issue. He notes that “[i]n 1910, the Laredo La Chronica described the degradation of many Mexicans from landholders to laborers: ‘The Mexicans have sold a great share of their landholdings and some work as day laborers on what once belonged to them. How sad this truth!’” (183). Takaki also notes that eventually, “most of the great Mexican rancheros in northern California lost their lands” (181). See also María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s historical novel The Squatter and the Don (1885) for a critique of the U.S. government for failing to recognize Mexican Americans’ claims to their lands in California, and for imposing unjust taxes on Mexican Americans which forced many of them to sell their land. clxxxiii Dan Latimer asserts that Estrella “eventually will connect these bones with the energy expended by the labor force which consists mostly of her own people, the Chicanos involved in the California pisca, the harvest. The petroleum becomes, in her mind, the correlative, the estranged value, of the labor of her underpaid, under-appreciated people. These thoughts lead her to an act of violence, not her first; she steals the $9.07 from the clinic nurse (336). While Latimer makes a good observation that Estrella does in fact make a connection between the oil and exploitation, he does not develop this point. Instead, he notes it as the motivating factor for Estrella to use a crowbar to get the $9.07 from the nurse. However, he does not note, as the following discussion does, that the nurse was charging them for a service that told them nothing of value. Estrella was simply taking back the money they had paid for a worthless medical examination so they could get Alejo to a hospital. clxxxiv With this play on words, I suggest that Estrella is a female embodiment of the heroism in the popular corridos of Gregorio Cortéz. These corridos, collected and analyzed in Américo Paredes’s With His Pistol in His Hand, are ballads of armed resistance that question Anglo American stereotyping of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, their unjust treatment by the border patrol in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a number of other injustices regarding and following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848. clxxxv See Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes,” and Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed. clxxxvi See the documentary ¡Chicano! for further details about La Virgen and the Chicano Movement. clxxxvii See Chapter One, entitled “(De)Constructing the Lesbian Body,” of Yarbro-Bejarano’s The Wounded Heart for an excellent analysis of Moraga’s writing on this issue. clxxxviii Additionally, the anti-immigrant propositions on the ballot for the 2006 Arizona elections reflect fierce battles that are being waged to increase current oppression and injustice against immigrants and anyone assumed to be an immigrant from Mexico. 295

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