Latina Domesticity and Agency in the Nineteenth-Century American West

This panel challenges nineteenth century conceptions of the American West as a place of limitless opportunities and unprecedented freedoms as we privilege the voices of women and people of color. Koehler and Lowrence begin by... [ view full abstract ]

This panel challenges nineteenth century conceptions of the American West as a place of limitless opportunities and unprecedented freedoms as we privilege the voices of women and people of color. Koehler and Lowrence begin by confronting these conceptions for women as they cite instances in which women faced overwhelming obstacles and bitter disappointments. Koehler utilizes Mark Fisher’s theory of the “weird” to advance what she terms the “proto-feminist weird West,” an innovative approach to examining the interactions between women and Western landscapes. Through Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Giant Wisteria” (1891) and Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind (1925), she argues that their stories complicate the mythical, regenerative quality attributed to the western frontier by inserting female and marginal voices that haunt the traditional western through the super-natural landscape. Lowrence contributes to this challenge by examining the ways in which Latinas negotiated various and often competing forms of domesticity in the American West. She analyzes the writings Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton to reveal the strict gender codes and challenges of white domesticity still at play west of the Mississippi.