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Author:

Porter, Amy M., author.

Title:

Their lives their wills : women in the borderlands, 1750-1846 / Amy M. Porter ; foreword by Nancy E. Baker.

Publisher:

Texas Tech University Press,

Copyright Date:

2015

Description:

xvi, 192 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Subject:

Women--Mexican-American Border Region--History--18th century.
Women--Mexican-American Border Region--History--19th century.
Hispanic American women--Southwest, New--Social conditions.
Women--Mexico, North--Social conditions.
Wills--Mexican-American Border Region--History.
Material culture--Mexican-American Border Region--History.
Patriarchy--History.--Mexican-American Border Region--History.
Mexican-American Border Region--Social conditions.
Mexican-American Border Region--Religious life and customs.
Mexican-American Border Region--Economic conditions.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary:

"In 1815, in the Spanish settlement of San Antonio de B©♭xar, a dying widow named Mar©Ưa Concepci©đn de Estrada recorded her last will and testament. Estrada used her will to record her debts and credits, specify her property, leave her belongings to her children, make requests for her funeral arrangements, and secure her religious salvation. Wills like Estrada's reveal much about women's lives in the late Spanish and Mexican colonial communities of Santa Fe, El Paso, San Antonio, Saltillo, and San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala in present-day northern Mexico. Using last wills and testaments as main sources, Amy M. Porter explores the ways in which these documents reveal details about religion, family, economics, and material culture. In addition, the wills speak loudly to the difficulties of frontier life, in which widowhood and child mortality were commonplace. Most importantly, information in the wills helps to explain the workings of the patriarchal system of Spanish and Mexican borderland communities, showing that gender role divisions were fluid in some respects. Supplemented by censuses, inventories, court cases, and travelers' accounts, women's wills paint a more complete picture of life in the borderlands than the previously male-dominated historiography of the region"-- Provided by publisher.

Series:

Women, gender, and the West.

ISBN:

089672932X
9780896729322

OCLC:

(OCoLC)891616007

LCCN:

2015001535

Locations:

USUX851 -- Iowa State University - Parks Library (Ames)

OIAX792 -- Grinnell College (Grinnell)

OVUX522 -- University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City)