Deena J. González analyzes the impact of the United States annexation of New Mexico on the lives of Spanish-Mexican women. This book poses several questions. How did New Mexican women react to and participate in the new social order inaugurated by Euro-American colonizing structures? To what extent did their traditional roles and daily routines change? In other words, how did Spanish-Mexican women respond when their world was crosscut by the border?
González successfully challenges the traditional scholarship on New Mexican history that has overemphasized concepts of tradition, conservatism, and cultural homogeneity. Instead, González presents a vibrant society where accommodation, social change, re-adaptation, and contestation were the norm, not the exception. González also contests another conventional paradigm in Mexican American studies which proposes that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought only defeat, ruin and subjugation to all people in the borderlands. González dauntlessly tears down the vision of Mexican women as...
