Border Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Borderlands

by Bernadine Marie Hernández

In this study of sex, gender, sexual violence, and power along the border, Bernadine Hernández brings to light under-heard stories of women who lived in a critical era of American history. Elaborating on the concept of sexual capital, she uses little-known newspapers and periodicals, letters, testimonios, court cases, short stories, and photographs to reveal how sex, violence, and capital conspired to govern not only women’s bodies but their role in the changing American Southwest. Hernández focuses on a time when the borderlands saw a rapid influx of white settlers who encountered elite landholding Californios, Hispanos, and Tejanos. Sex was inseparable from power in the borderlands, and women were integral to the stabilization of that power.

In drawing these stories from the archive, Hernández illuminates contemporary ideas of sexuality through the lens of the borderland’s history of expansionist, violent, and gendered conquest. By extension, Hernández argues that Mexicana, Nuevomexicana, Californiana, and Tejana women were key actors in the formation of the western United States, even as they are too often erased from the region’s story.

Genres: Feminism

244 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2022

Reviews

[Maria-Socorro Tabuenca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una investigación muy creativa

Fascinada por los años posteriores a la firma del Tratado de Guadalupe Hidalgo y por el marxismo-feminista, Bernadine Marie Hernandez reinterpreta el cuerpo de las mujeres y su contribución social y económica a la cultura de género fronteriza. Cartas, leyendas, memorias, música, re invención y fotografías aparecen como el testimonio de un grupo variado de mujeres cuyo genero y sexualidad son racializados y cuya existencia es visible a través de la violencia trasnacional que provoca el encuentro de la migración con el imperialismo. Una lectura obligada para las, los y les interesades por la historia de California, Nuevo Mexico y Arizona durante su camino a la integración en los Estados Unidos.
Rocio Irene Mejia