Their Lives Their Wills: Women in the Borderlands 1750-1846 (Women Gender and the West)

About this book

In 1815 in the Spanish settlement of San Antonio de Bxar a dying widow named Mara Concepcin de Estrada recorded her last will and testament. Estrada used her will to record her debts and credits specify her property leave her belongings to her children make requests for her funeral arrangements and secure her religious salvation. Wills like Estradas reveal much about womens lives in the late Spanish and Mexican colonial communities of Santa Fe El Paso San Antonio Saltillo and San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala in present-day northern Mexico. Using last wills and testaments as main sources Amy M. Porter explores the ways in which these documents reveal details about religion family economics and material culture. In addition the wills speak loudly to the difficulties of frontier life in which widowhood and child mortality were commonplace. Most importantly information in the wills helps to explain the workings of the patriarchal system of Spanish and Mexican borderland communities showing that gender role divisions were fluid in some respects. Supplemented by censuses inventories court cases and travelers accounts womens wills paint a more complete picture of life in the borderlands than the previously male-dominated historiography of the region.