West of Sex by Pablo Mitchell

Author:Pablo Mitchell [Mitchell, Pablo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, 20th Century, Social Science, Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, American, Hispanic American Studies, Law, Legal History
ISBN: 9780226532738
Google: Kix3ZO4DjkcC
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-03-01T03:04:49+00:00

While Carmen Fonseca’s conviction was affirmed, and Maud Peña’s reversed, the women shared a determination reflected by many women in Mexican America. During an exceptionally difficult period for Mexicans in the United States, as forces of racial exclusion broadened their attacks, the Mexican women profiled in this chapter insisted on using the courts and forcing the American legal system to recognize their rights as citizens and members of the nation. None of the women, moreover, seem to be especially wealthy or politically powerful, suggesting that other women not ensnared in the courts may have shared the sense of entitlement and rights in the American legal system that the women in this chapter, and the book, seem to exhibit.

Talk of sex by and about Mexicans in the West spoke to multiple forms of inequality, including colonial hierarchies. Female colonial subjects in fact turned to the courts in a variety of colonial settings during the early twentieth century.44 Colonial rule was always unstable, especially at the points where promises of inclusion intersected with racial differentiation and inequality. This chapter, especially in its exploration of the colonial and countercolonial dynamics in the trial of Marina Torres, has suggested that Mexican women proved themselves quite capable of navigating such unruly and perilous colonial waters. The following chapter will proceed along a similar course, turning from the involvement of Mexicans in prostitution and commercial sex work to other nonnormative sexual practices, and desires, across the region.

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