“No Country Will Rise above Its Home, and No Home above Its Mother”: Gender, Memory, and Colonial Violence in Nineteenth-Century Texas

Abstract

Abstract This article examines Anglo-American colonization in nineteenth-century Texas and the construction of its historical memory, highlighting the interwoven roles of kinship, women’s labor, and gendered ideology. Building upon social, economic, and cultural roots in the U.S. Southeast, settler colonialism in Texas was a multi-generational project structured heavily by kinship. Anglo-Texan women served as active colonial agents through their productive and reproductive labor, which bound them firmly to more overt forms of colonial violence by men and the emerging state. In the face of Native resistance, Anglo-Texans highlighted Indigenous acts of violence against White women and families in order to invert responsibility for colonial violence and to justify the dispossession and destruction of Native peoples. Beginning as early as the 1830s, direct Anglo participants, including many influential women, wrote the first histories of Texas colonization, interpreting that process and its violence from within the deeply gendered and personal framework of kinship. Their efforts have marked both popular memory and historical scholarship to the present day.