Book Review

Canada and the United States

Antebellum Texas was a complex place, joining Native American, Mexican, African American, and Anglo populations. In this slender volume, Mark M. Carroll uses the body of law that evolved in that rich Texas culture to examine power in families and between households and the states. Nineteenth-century Texas law and society, he argues, were synergistic, changing and shaping one another as they made adjustments regarding families, sex roles, and race (p. xvii). Hispanic law blended with the common law widely used in the eastern United States, leavened with judicial activism that picked and chose relevant case law to create a society with relatively liberal gender roles for Anglo women, isolation for Natives, social stratification for Tejanos, and subjugation for African Americans.

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The generous land-grant policy begun under the new Republic of Mexico first enticed single male settlers, some of whom had abandoned their families back east. On their own, with a shortage of Anglo females, these men sometimes established illegitimate relationships with Native women that were never recognized under any law. They also turned to Tejanas, Mexican women living in Texas, as mistresses, and a few married Tejana women from upper-class families. Only Anglo men enjoyed such a wide choice of sex partners. For scarce Anglo women, contact with men from other ethnic groups was taboo.

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