On the Borders of Love and Power

Embracing the crossroads that made the region distinctive this book reveals how American families have always been characterized by greater diversity than idealizations of the traditional family have allowed. The essays show how family life figured prominently in relations to larger struggles for conquest and control.

David Wallace Adams is Professor of History at Cleveland State University and author of Education for Extinction. Crista DeLuzio is Associate Professor of History at Southern Methodist University and author of Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction
David Wallace Adams and Crista DeLuzio

PART ONE. DIVERSE FAMILIES AND RACIAL HIERARCHY
1. Breaking and Remaking Families: The Fostering and Adoption of Native American Children in Non-Native Families in the American West, 1880–1940
Margaret Jacobs

2. Becoming Comanches: Patterns of Captive Incorporation into Comanche Kinship Networks, 1820–1875
Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez

3. “Seeking the Incalculable Benefit of a Faithful, Patient Man and Wife”: Families in the Federal Indian Service, 1880–1925
Cathleen D. Cahill

4. Hard Choices: Mixed-Race Families and Strategies of Acculturation in the U.S. West after 1848
Anne F. Hyde

PART TWO. LAW, ORDER, AND THE REGULATION OF FAMILY LIFE
5. Family and Kinship in the Spanish and Mexican Borderlands: A Cultural Account
Ramón A. Gutiérrez

6. Love, Honor, and the Power of Law: Probating the Ávila Estate in Frontier California
Donna C. Schuele

7. “Who has a greater job than a mother?” Defining Mexican Motherhood on the U.S.-Mexico Border in the Early Twentieth Century
Monica Perales

8. Borderlands/La Familia: Mexicans, Homes, and Colonialism in the Early Twentieth-Century Southwest
Pablo Mitchell

PART THREE. BORDERLAND CULTURES AND FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
9. Intimate Ties: Marriage, Families, and Kinship in Eighteenth-Century Pueblo Communities
Tracy Brown

10. The Paradox of Kinship: Native-Catholic Communities in Alta California, 1769–1840s
Erika Pérez

11. Territorial Bonds: Indenture and Affection in Intercultural Arizona, 1864–1894
Katrina Jagodinsky

12. Writing Kit Carson in the Cold War: “The Family,” “The West,” and Their Chroniclers
Susan Lee Johnson

Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index