Caballero by Jovita Gonzalez and Margaret Eimer (who wrote under the name Eve Raleigh) is a historical novel set back in the mid-19th Century. The novel begins in 1846 as neighboring racheros, elite Mexican families who have lived between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers for generations, begin hearing rumors that no longer are their lands a part of Mexico. In fact, this is the time period during which the shared US-Mexico border was pushed south to the Rio Grande and many Mexican families experienced an immigration of Anglo settlers. Through a narrative both tragic and hopeful, the reader experiences the events with the Hidalgo Rancheros (the Mexican noble families) as Anglo immigrants arrogantly move in to the lands and challenge the social structures and customs the Hidalgo Rancheros had defended for generations with their blood.[1] Caballero, then, is a heart-wrenching story that takes the reader through love, death, happiness and treachery to illuminate a history of ‘Americans’ who cared for the lands of northern Mexico for generations before the Anglo immigrants came and forcibly took those lands for the United States of America.
This novel focuses on the Mendoza y Soria family who have lived and died, cried and loved, in their beautiful hacienda, Rancho La Palma de Cristo, passed down from father to son for generations. Don Santiago is the classic male patriarch of the family and a man of draconian traditionalism and staunch resolution. “Such was Don Santiago, lord of land many miles beyond what his eye could compass, master of this hacienda and all those that would soon gather before him.”[2] He is married to Maria de Petronilla, a meek woman, who, after years of dutiful submission and obedience, is left with little will nor choice. She firsts appears, “[gliding] like a black ghost… [appearing with] self-effacing meekness and… faded thinness.”[3] Dona Delores, Don Santiago’s sister, lives with them in their hacienda as a result of having been widowed at a young age. Dona Delores is remarkable as she is the only character in the book to consistently stand up to Don Sontiago’s severe traditionalism and to advocate for family members around her. Don Santiago first describes her entering with, “dignity slowly propelling the full skirt of stiffest silk…, [she] took time to look at the flowers along the portico, quite as if she did not see them a dozen times a day. To aggravate him, he knew, because yesterday she had come sooner than he wished and he had told her so.”[4]
Don Santiago and Maria de Petronilla have four children. Their oldest son and heir is Alvaro, a handsome young man who is eager to begin his own path as head of a family and guardian of tradition. His, “spurs clinking, [Alvaro] swaggered past the servant women, lustful, possessive eyes on the youngest and prettiest ones.”[5] Luis Gonzaga is his younger brother. Luis defies all traditional masculine roles in his talent as an artist and is unceasingly harassed by his father as a marica (an extremely derogative term equivalent to ‘fag’) for his effeminacy. Don Santiago thinks of Luis Gonzaga, “Painting pictures like a woman, and he a Mendoza y Soria! An artist – insult to a father’s manhood! A milksop, and his son!”[6]
Don Santiago’s oldest daughter is Maria de los Angeles (Angela). Driven by a most devout nature, Angela fashions herself in the image of utmost humility and piety preferring the nun’s habit over the soft, silk clothes customarily worn by the hidalgo women. She, “had wanted to go to the convent and, forbidden to do so by her father, had bought the convent to herself, inasmuch as she was able.”[7] The youngest daughter, Don Santiago’s pride and joy, is Susanita. The picture of innocence, she reveals the, “heritage from [Don Santiago’s] Asturian ancestors – already so rare among his people that it seemed a gift from heaven,” with her golden curls of hair, light creamy skin, delicate red lips and “eyes… like limpid green water upon which a vagrant cloud had left a remembrance of gray….”[8]
This novel primarily centers around the events that take place the winter of 1846 as the Mendoza y Soria family, along with many other Hidalgo Ranchero families, make their annual stay in Matamoros for the winter holiday services. In Matamoros, the families are able to show off their extravagant fineries with lavish dinners and excessive dresses and to settle promising marriages between their children. The latter enterprise consumes vast amounts of time and calculation as families craft the most desirable unions that preserve the purity of their noble blood and the honor of their family names. With the news of widespread Anglo presence, Don Santiago decides amidst the dismay and distress of the women in his family that they will not make their way to Matamoros (Susanita desperately prevails, “Why, papacito, don’t you want to show the Americanos what a handsome caballero looks like – why in your Sunday suit you are the handsomest man in the world!”[9]). Very quickly, though, Don Santiago receives a message from neighboring rancheros compelling him to bring his family to Matamoros such that the heads of families may convene to address the increasing intrusion of the Anglos and what strategies might be affected to resist them.
This single event, when Don Santiago is convinced to restore his originals plans for Matamoros, represents the greatest irony of the novel. Matamoros has actually become a theatre in which, due to the close proximity of Anglo soldiers stationed at Fort Brown, Anglo and Mexican cultures collide and mix. By resuming travel to Matamoros in order to organize against Anglo infiltration, Don Santiago in fact facilitates even more quickly the process by which foreign Anglo customs and influences irrevocably change the Hidalgo way of life and proceed to tear his family apart. Maria Cotera observed,
“What the hidalgos (male aristocrats) do not realize [about Matamoros] is that prolonged exposure to Americano men and Americano values have a profound effect on those people in their culture who are not insulated by power, and who are not included in their decision making: their wives, children, and peones. Slowly, as [Don Santiago’s] children leave him to explore a wider range of possibilities in the world of the Americans, and his peones reject the slave-like system of the hacienda in order to explore their identities as free labor in a world of capital, the power base that Don Santiago has been consummately unaware of, yet which has held his hacienda together, begins to erode beneath him.”[10]
Don Santiago, finally aware of the pervasive Anglo influence, prematurely ends his family’s stay in Matamoros and flees back to his domain of Rancho La Palma de Cristo.
The remainder of the novel chronicles the ensuing break up of Don Santiago’s family. Luis Gonzaga leaves the hacienda after proclaiming his love for are and being disowned forever by his father. He moves to Maryland with an Anglo Captain Devlin amidst their budding romantic relationship. Captain Devlin shares Luis Gonzaga’s passion for art and is eager to facilitate Luis Gonzaga’s involvement in formal instruction. Susanita similarly finds love in Anglo Officer Robert Warrener. After heroically saving her brother, Alvaro, from certain death only to receive reprimand and rejection from her father, Susanita joins Warrener once again in Matamoros to be wed. Maria de los Angeles, too, finds companionship in a charismatic and gregarious politician, Alfred “Red” McLane with whom she moves to San Antonio. Their union, however, is not one based on love but rather one based on personal motives mutually facilitated by the other. Married to McLane, Angela would have the opportunity to pursue a life of service to others especially as his large fortune allowed. McLane, on the other hand, was motivated by the strategic advantage Angela would provide him to access the large Tejano population whose political loyalties had not yet been cultivated. Alvaro, grabbed by brash pride, joins the merciless guerrilleros of Juan Cortina to harass Anglo forces crossing into Mexico. He gains a reputation as “El Lobo and a wolf he is, too. He’s a bad hombre….”[11] The last straw to destroy Don Santiago as a man, though, comes with Alvaro’s unremarkable death when he is shot by a ranger while they are out riding along the Rio Grande. Don Santiago, who witnesses this, realizes that Rancho la Palma de Cristo, the laws by which he knew himself as ruler and master, and the noble family name of Mendoza y Soria, precious treasures which his ancestors before him had vowed to protect with their lives and which they had passed down from father to son for generations, would no longer be.
[1] Often times, though, this challenge was less direct than outright confrontation (although that did happen, too!). In many cases it was merely the presence of the Anglos and their contrary beliefs that discursively challenged Mexican traditional customs and structures.
[2] Gonzalez, Jovita and Eve Raleigh. Caballero. Texas A&M University Press, 1996, 3.
[3] Ibid., 4.
[4] Ibid., 5.
[5] Ibid., 5.
[6] Ibid., 7.
[7] Ibid., 4.
[8] Ibid., 5.
[9] Ibid., 28.
[10] Cotera, Maria. "Deconstructing the Corrido Hero: Caballero and its Gendered Critique of Nationalist Discourse." Perspectives in Mexican American Studies 5 (1995): page uncertain.
[11] Gonzalez, Jovita and Eve Raleigh. Caballero. Texas A&M University Press, 1996, 268.
No comments:
Post a Comment