Jovita Gonzalez pursued further education after graduating from high school with great dedication. In fact, she was forced at various times even to leave school and work as a teacher along the borderlands and in Rio Grande City just to save up money for schooling. She ended up receiving her teaching certificate from the Summer Normal School and spent one year at the University of Texas in Spanish studies under Lilia Casis. Following that she finished her bachelor’s degree at Lady of the Lake College in San Antonio. In 1929 she won the Lapham Scholarship that allowed her to finish up her master’s work in history under Eugene C. Barker at the University of Texas by collecting research from along the Texas-Mexico border for her master’s thesis, “Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties.”
The year that Jovita Gonalez was born, 1904, was a pivotal year during which the Saint Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railway construction was finished. The area between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers until this time had supported a fragile stability of intermarriage and coexistence between the Mexican-American ranching elite and Anglo settlers due to relative isolation from the rest of the country. Land speculation then brought massive numbers of Anglo Midwesterners into the region and introduced into the region, “a poisonous racial ideology that was often at odds with that of the established Anglo-Mexican ranching community.” [2] Sadly, “Within fifteen years of the construction of the railway system, the Texas Mexican people of the border region, with a few exceptions, were reduced to the ‘status of landless and dependent wage laborers.’ In the end, the modernization process that brought South Texas into the national and international flow of goods and service led to the demise of the world that Jovita Gonzalez new.”[3]
Maria Cotera, in an interview, suggested that it was in this context that Jovita Gonzalez then became determined to document the “first-ness” of Mexican inhabitants in the border regions of Texas and what had been northern Mexico[4] and introduces the idea of Jovita Gonzalez’ works as “counter-histor[ies]”.[5] Jovita Gonzalez struggled against two different discourses regarding Mexican history in the border regions as she attempted to document this Mexican history, culture, and life. The first was that of a “‘whitewashing’…. a ‘rhetoric of dominance’ that made the exclusion and domination of Mexicans and Indians seem natural and even justified,”[6] by Texas Anglo historians and folklorists. These people were her professors, J. Frank Dobie and Eugene Barker at the University of Texas, and her colleagues in the Texas Folklore Society to whom she made various presentations, such as her first that explored the masculine world of the ‘vaquero’ through song and legend. Maria Cotera sees in Gonzalez’ works this “counter-history” such as in master’s thesis when she, “enacts a subtle but devastating critique of dominant narratives about the ‘founding fathers’ of Texas. In effect, she recasts the ‘heroes’ of Texas – from the politicians to the ‘freebooters’ and the ‘entrepreneurs’ – not as defenders of freedom against Mexican despotism, but as despoilers of legitimate democratic movements.”[7] In these Anglo spheres of intellectual academia, Gonzalez represents a new voice that challenges dominant perceptions and narratives of Texas history justify Anglo imperialism and “establishes the rootedness of Mexicans in Texas.”[8]
At the same time, Jovita Gonzalez works to combat representations of Mexican life that, while celebrating it, fail to acknowledge the real social inequalities that existed. What she is resisting can be seen in the works by Americo Paredes who portrays the ‘Tejano’ community as “some prelapsarian utopia.”[9] Maria Cotera notes, “Instead, she [Jovita Gonzalez] offers an unflinching examination of the oppressive ideologies and social contradictions that fractured the Tejano community along race, gender and class line before the influx of Anglos….”[10] Gonzalez spends significant portions of her works looking at women’s spheres of activity and influence bringing them into visibility, exploring the system of peonage and its inherent similarities to slavery, and dissecting the draconian patriarchal culture and gendered contradictions that allowed, “an action which in a man was overlooked as insignificant [to be] an offense for a woman.”[11] She then leaves us with a narrative that seems, “perhaps less satisfying” as an attempt to whole-heartedly celebrate Mexican history but that is a “more realistic vision of the borderlands as a geopolitical zone rife with conflict and contradiction with respect to both its less-than-utopic past and its future possibilities.”[12]
[1] Cotera, Maria. “Introduction” In Life Along the Border, edited by Maria Cotera (Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 9.
[2] Ibid., 8.
[3] Ibid., 9.
[4] Cotera, Maria. Interview by Sofia Bolanos and Walter Hyde. 24 November 2009. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
[5] Cotera, Maria. “Introduction” In Life Along the Border, edited by Maria Cotera (Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 17.
[6] Ibid., 4.
[7] Ibid., 18-19.
[8] Ibid., 17.
[9] Ibid., 21.
[10] Ibid., 21
[11] Gonzalez, Jovita. "Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties." In Life Along the Border, edited by Maria Cotera (Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 81.
[12] Cotera, Maria. “Introduction” In Life Along the Border, edited by Maria Cotera (Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 23.
No comments:
Post a Comment