American Law, Hispanic Traces: Some Contemporary Entanglements of Community Property

Abstract

T | SHE history of the American family conventionally starts with English families in the northeastern corner of the area of the North American continent that became the United States. Carole Shammas's article encompasses English families, but it also addresses Native American and Hispanic ones-all placed in a perspective that illuminates the distinctiveness of each. I will discuss the importance and some of the implications of this comparative approach. There are two central reasons to develop a multistranded narrative of American families that includes Hispanic traditions. The first reason is to understand how Hispanic traditions of family governance mediate family relationships in a culturally mixed way in United States Hispanic communities. The attendant negotiations and adjustments of family relationships incorporating elements of Anglo culture are examined in such works as Richard Rodriguez's Days of Obligation and Jose Limon's Dancing with the Devil. 1 The second reason is that Hispanic legal traditions concerning inheritance rules and ownership of marital property have powerfully shaped practices of governance among families of all ethnic and national origins in the southwestern part of the United States.2 This influence flowed from the region's historical ties to New Spain and Mexico; the legal systems of Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and California were originally Spanish.3 Although nearly all these states disavowed most elements of Patricia Seed teaches in the history department at Rice University. She wishes to thank George E. Marcus for sharing notes from his fieldwork in Galveston, Migual Ramos for digging out newspaper articles, and Hans Baade and Joseph McKnight for advice on the intricacies of Texas law. 1 Rodriguez, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (New York, 1992), and Limon, Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (Madison, Wis., I994). 2 Spanish and Portuguese inheritance systems were not modified by contact with indigenous peoples. The major legal code for Spanish America, the Recopilacidn de leyes de los rey nos de las