Black Women and Post-Emancipation Diaspora: A Community of Army Laundresses at Fort Davis, Texas

Summary

This paper investigates the role black women at U.S. military forts took in post emancipation diasporic events and movement. Using materials related daily life at a late 19th century, multi-ethnoracial, Indian Wars military fort in Fort Davis, Texas, I show how army laundresses acted as cultural brokers, navigating often contentious social and physical landscapes. With their identity as citizens, women, care-takers, employees, and racialized individuals constantly in flux, these women balanced their relationship with one another, their families, the civilian community, and their military colleagues as a way of redefining and creating new personhoods and identities that were defined by their living on the geographic and cultural boundary of the American western frontier.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Diaspora and Dispersal   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 989