Bodies on borders: Sexuality, race, and conquest in modernizing New Mexico, 1880--1920.

Abstract

Bodies on Borders examines the encounter in turn of the twentieth century New Mexico between Anglo American newcomers, whose symbols and social institutions divided the populace according to binary racial and sexual distinctions, and native New Mexicans, for whom an alternate, at times more fluid, set of social distinctions determined appropriate public conduct, legitimate political participation, and the composition of the body politic. Using a range of research methods and primary sources like medical journals, newspapers, criminal and marriage records, and US Indian School documents, I argue that contests over certain body practices (length of hair, dress and bodily display, position of sexual intercourse, burial traditions, patterns of consumption and elimination) offer an especially clear view of the efforts to establish and maintain social order in a rapidly modernizing New Mexico. Bodies on Borders concludes that the description and classification of particular bodies and body practices proved fundamental to the creation of social order and the constitution of the body politic in New Mexico between 1880 and 1920. The project also explores how those constituted as others by Anglo discourse appropriated the terms of their exclusion and in the process helped craft a competing vision of modernity. New Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century, I suggest, stood poised at the literal and figurative borderlands between the United States, Latin America, and modernity.