The two books under review both address the law as an instrument of colonial power and the occulted role that women play as often silent subjects of this power. While one book addresses this topic in relation to Mexican American women in the Texas borderlands, New Mexico, and California and the other in relation to indigenous women in the United States and Canada, both emphasize the significance of women’s self-expression, especially through literature, to give voice to the limits and constraints of legal discourse, especially as it relates to issues of land ownership.
Archives of Dispossession is structured around a key discrepancy between the legal regimes of Mexico and the United States after 1848. Under Spanish and then Mexican law, women were able to inherit, manage, and pass along land to their heirs, while under the US legal system imposed after the Mexican-American War, women’s rights to own and manage...
