Newberry Library - Their lives, their wills : women in the borderlands, 1750-1846

Their lives, their wills : women in the borderlands, 1750-1846

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Title Their lives, their wills : women in the borderlands, 1750-1846

Creator Porter, Amy M

Date 2015-2015

Place New Southwest, North America--Mexican-American Border Region, North Mexico

Subjects Hispanic American women, Material culture, Patriarchy, Wills, Women

Summary "In 1815, in the Spanish settlement of San Antonio de Béxar, a dying widow named María Concepción 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"--Back cover.

Extent xvi, 192 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Link to Catalog View record

Call Number HQ1438.M45 P67 2015

BibID 958060

Projects Tag The Will of Eduarda Rita Garduño

Contributing Institution Newberry Library

Newberry Open Access Policy The Newberry makes its collections available for any lawful purpose, commercial or non-commercial, without licensing or permission fees to the library, subject to these terms and conditions.

Size 3600px × 2884px 1.37 MB

File Created 11/15/2022

Filename Porter_Their Lives_130-131.jpg

Unique Identifier NL116MLG