Where No Mestiza Has Gone Before: Brokering Colonialism, Ethnogenesis, and Gendered Landscapes in Alta California, 1775-1845

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Chicanx Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The triple consciousness that is the Afro-Mestiza or Mestizo experience conjures nationalism, racialization, and ethnicity and thereby, the ongoing negotiation of identity on the Spanish and Mexican borderlands frontier. Where archaeology and historical studies are concerned, the effort to interrogate the lives of mestiza women within such contested landscapes is necessarily fraught. The entanglements of such liminal frontiers necessarily impact identity, material cultures, and their corollary forms of social expression. This paper therefore explores theoretical models of colonialism, historic and gendered landscapes, and processes of ethnogenesis and identity formations whose enduring character underpin the archaeology of Chicanismo in California and the West. We present a microscale genealogical analysis of successive generations of the Arballo lineage spanning 18th and 19th century Spanish and Mexican social formations and material cultures. The women under scrutiny constitute Alta California’s earliest Spanish colonial families, including Feliciana Arballo, María Ignacia Lόpez, and sisters Josefa and Ramona Carrillo. In the final analysis, this paper explores the lives of mestiza women on the Spanish frontier, particularly insofar as how such women served as both domestic partners and colonial cultural agents in the negotiation of indigenous alliances.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Chicanx Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25395