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Dissertation Information for Miroslava Chavez

NAME:
- Miroslava Chavez

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1998)

ADVISORS:
- Norris Hundley Jr.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- James Lockhart
- Laura Gomez
- George J. Sanchez

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Mexican women and the American conquest in Los Angeles: From the Mexican era to American ascendancy

Abstract: This study of Mexican women in nineteenth-century Los Angeles opens in the 1820s with the onset of Mexican rule and ends in the 1870s with the ascendancy of Anglo society. It explores the meanings and intertwining relationship of gender, class, ethnicity, law, property, and patriarchy as they underwent transformation in the shift from Mexican to American sovereignty. It begins with an examination of how gender, law, property, and ethnicity shaped social and class relations among Mexicans, Indians, men, and women. It draws special attention to how women dealt with the gendered-, class-, and ethnic-based hierarchies that gave elite Mexican men patriarchal authority over Mexican women as well as Indian men and women. It shows that, despite such power, females of different classes and ethnicities found ways to skirt constraints in the home and larger society. With the American takeover in 1846, the focus shifts to how the imposition of foreign legal, economic, linguistic, and cultural norms affected the status of Mexican women and male-female relations. Among the most significant findings is the manner in which the conquest weakened the economic position of both Mexican women and men while simultaneously increasing the leverage of Mexican women in their personal and social relationships with men.

This study sheds light on the ways in which the conquest altered Spanish/Mexican law and related institutions that carried over into the American era and how those changes affected women's rights. While legal scholars have shown the influence of the Hispanic principle of community property on American common and statutory law in California, few have studied how women fared in the courts and in their everyday lives. My work explores the relationship between law and practice by mining and analyzing several hundred little-used English- and Spanish-language court cases generated at the federal, county, and local levels; city council records; private family collections; church records; novels; newspapers; and scrapbooks.

A particular concern of this study is women's voices--to hear them speak for themselves in the first-person through oral transcriptions, petitions, and other records that reveal not only their expectations, attitudes, and anxieties, but also how females of different ethnicities and social classes led active, meaningful lives as they confronted patriarchy during the Mexican era and radical change following the conquest.

MPACT Scores for Miroslava Chavez

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-10-08 11:16:10

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Students under Miroslava Chavez

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None