Reviewed by: Colonial New Mexican Families: Community, Church, and State, 1692–1800 by Suzanne M. Stamatov Anna M. Nogar Colonial New Mexican Families: Community, Church, and State, 1692–1800. By Suzanne M. Stamatov. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2018. Pp. 256. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-826-35920-9.) Suzanne Stamatov’s instructive, well documented Colonial New Mexican Families: Community, Church, and State, 1692–1800, offers readers an even-handed view into the pragmatic interactions among New Mexicans during the second half of the Spanish colonial period. The text centers on family and community interactions—marriage, inheritance, domestic conflict—as recorded in civil and religious records. Stamatov consulted the archives of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and the New Mexico State Archives, centering her work on U.S.-based collections pertaining to colonial New Mexico. Since this documentation arises from exchanges between individuals and institutions, the negotiations it relates pertain to processes, rules, [End Page 216] and appeals. Stamatov skillfully and selectively extrapolates conflicts and relationships from the bureaucratic shadows they cast in the archive. Colonial New Mexican Families is divided into six content chapters. The first two, “The Setting” and “Civil Authorities, Civil Law and the Family,” establish the historical context and explain the relationship between community expectations and the law. Stamatov outlines this dynamic balance: “community members in New Mexico intervened in the ‘private matters’ of neighbors, becoming involved when they perceived injustices or transgressions of community standards” (p. 28). The next four chapters explore various facets of family-church-state-community interactions: “The Sacrament of Marriage,” “Sexuality and Courtship,” “Marriage,” and “Domestic Life and Discord.” In each, the book approaches the primary documentation from the established perspective of dynamic balance between community and the law. One of the book’s strengths is in the appealing and historically accurate vignettes Stamatov crafts of out of archival materials. She opens and closes the book in this manner, with an extended exposition of a 1766 legal case brought by a grandmother, María Luisa de Aragón, against her son-in-law, who had attempted to block a marriage proposal for his daughter. Stamatov unfolds the testimonies of the two contestants, as well as reports of the villagers from the community of Tomé, where María Luisa had raised her granddaughter. Drawing historical individuals out of the record and providing them with carefully chosen detail makes what could have been a dry archival analysis lively and engaging. The tables, figures, and charts presented in the index provide a synthetic presentation of the ideas explored in the book. They include information regarding household composition, surname clusters, and data for ages of marriage. All of this is very interesting, though one might ask why there are no charts explaining household composition for homes headed by women, as widows made up a substantial proportion of the population. This small gap surprises, as Colonial New Mexican Families ably demonstrates the extent to which Hispana women in New Mexico possessed agency in their private and public affairs and employed ecclesial and civil systems to assert it. Further, Stamatov makes clear that nuevomexicanas controlled their own estates and did not suffer from the male-centered inheritance laws that would later plague the region once it came under American rule: “documentation shows that [New Mexican] parents tried to implement inheritance laws fairly and endow their male and female children equally” (p. 6). Colonial New Mexican Families is restrained in its conclusions, prudent rather than sweeping. This is one of the book’s noteworthy features: it favors a measured perspective over grand generalizations. When Stamatov asserts that “overall, people recognized that their community’s strength lay in living together peacefully . . . they interpreted the laws flexibly to avoid alienating the neighbors whom they needed in order to survive in the remote Kingdom of New Mexico” (p. 8), the argument is convincing rather than overextended. This quality makes the book an excellent [End Page 217] choice for history scholars of the Southwest, Mexico, and the Spanish colonial period, of course. However, it will also hold appeal for students and researchers in the fields of Latin American studies, gender and women’s studies, and Catholic studies. The book’s accessible...
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Feb 19, 2024
Bartosz Trojanowski 
Open Access
