Vicki L. Ruiz

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Vicki L. Ruiz | Nuestra América: Latino History as United States History | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Nuestra América: Latino History as United States History

As historians, many of us have had the experience of encountering a memoir, diary, or letter in which the individuals mentioned are far more intriguing than the author of the document. The chatty reminiscences of Señora Doña Jesús Moreno de Soza serve as a case in point. Born in California in 1855, she came of age, married, and cared for her family near Tucson, Arizona. When she was eighty-four, she recounted the following incident that had occurred at a local park some fifty years earlier:

They used to have a dancing platform. Once it happened that an Apache squaw called Luisa was dancing when Petrita Santa Cruz ... came along, and looking at the Apache squaw said, "That is enough, get out, we want to dance." The Apache squaw replied, "I am a person, too."

Moreno de Soza noted that Luisa later married the Apache son of a prominent Euro-American doctor. Given Luisa's rise in status, Moreno de Soza began to greet her as "comadre" (a term of endearment suggesting kinship). But Luisa kept her distance and purportedly responded to the overtures of friendship with the phrase, "Why don't you call me, Mrs. Handy?"¹

This tale from the 1880s reveals subtle registers of negotiation and contestation. In a recent essay Richard Ivan Jobs and Patrick McDevitt underscore the significance of microlevel narratives. "We as historians have the challenge of accounting for the manner in which individuals acted within the constraints and possibilities of their broader social world to fashion their own sense of place and community through interpersonal relationships."² The remembered interaction between Moreno de Soza and Luisa Handy lends insight into the ways Mexican Americans, American Indians, and Euro-Americans could inhabit the same social spaces and thus complicate U.S. western narratives that privilege a binary relationship between Euro-Americans and a designated "other." This unusual vignette also shades our understanding of the Spanish borderlands in showing that interactions between Spanish/Mexican settlers and native peoples could occur outside the specter of bonded labor. Yet, despite a florescence of scholarship on the Spanish borderlands over the past fifteen years, U.S. historians frequently give both the region and the era no more than a passing glance.

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