Laura Shelton’s monograph is a welcome addition to the rapidly growing literature on gender and nineteenth-century liberalism in Latin America. Her study focuses on early nineteenth-century Sonora, a frontier state in northwestern Mexico, in the midst of violence created by indigenous uprisings. Shelton seeks to trace how the transition from colony to nation-state affected family and gender relations. She bases her study on roughly seven hundred civil and criminal records, as well as census data, military reports, and travelers’ accounts.
Shelton finds that gender was key to understanding how Sonorans conceived of themselves and their citizenship during this period. As she asserts, “In early republican Sonora, family relationships, gender roles and sexual mores denoted ‘civilization’ in the face of ‘savage’ social, moral and political disorder” (p. 3). That is, as armed resistance and ethnic violence increased, Sonorans believed that political order could be established by order through gender roles. Men...
