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Overview
The captivity narrative, as Tinnemeyer shows, addressed questions arising from the incorporation of residents in the newly annexed territory. This genre transformed its heroine from the quintessential white virgin into the Mexican maiden in order to quell anxieties over miscegenation, condone acts furthering Manifest Density, or otherwise romanticize the land-grabbing nature of the war and of the opportunists who traveled to the Southwest after 1848. Some of these narratives condone and even welcome interracial marriages between Mexican women and Anglo-American men.
By understanding marriage for love as an expression of free will or as a declaration of independence, texts containing interracial marriages or romanticizing the U.S.-Mexican War could politicize the nuptials and present the Anglo-American husband as a hero and rescuer. This romanticizing of annexation and cross-border marriages tended to feminize Mexico, making the country appear captive and in need of American rescue and influencing the understanding of "foreign" and "domestic" by relocating geographic and racial boundaries.
In addition to examining more conventional notions of captivity, Tinnemeyer's book uses war song lyrics and legal cases to argue that "captivity" is a multivalenced term encompassing desire, identity formation, and variable definitions of citizenship.
Andrea Tinnemeyer teaches English, Chicano literature, and nineteenth-century American literature at College Preparatory School in Berkeley, California. She received her PhD from Rice University and was recently an assistant professor at Utah State University.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803220676 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska Paperback |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2008 |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 9.00(d) |
About the Author
Andrea Tinnemeyer teaches English, Chicano literature, and nineteenth-century American literature at College Preparatory School in Berkeley, California. She received her PhD from Rice University and was recently an assistant professor at Utah State University.
Read an Excerpt
Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848
By Andrea Tinnemeyer
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2006
University of Nebraska Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8032-4400-2
Chapter One
Mis(s)taken
Identity Politics of Captivity Narratives
in the Spanish Borderlands
To all our expostulations they only replied in substance that they knew
why we objected to [being tattooed]; that we expected to return to the
whites, and we would be ashamed of it then.
-Royal B. Stratton,
Captivity of the Oatman Girls (1857)
And yet I was too proud to tell you that the blackness of my skin would
wear off, that it was only stained by the Indians to prevent our being
rescued.
-María Amparo Ruiz de Burton,
Who Would Have Thought It? (1872)
Traveling overland from Independence, Missouri, in 1851, at times
taking the Santa Fe Trail, the nine-member Oatman family, which
had broken from the Mormon Church (they belonged to a splinter sect
called Brewsterites who followed James Colin Brewster), were seeking
their own "promised land of Bashan in the extreme southwestern corner
of New Mexico Territory, where the Colorado River neared the
Gulf of Mexico" (Dillon 46). Their party dwindled due to further
religiousfactioning, which resulted in the Oatmans diverting from the
Santa Fe Trail to take the Kearny-Cooke military road to the Gila
Trail (47). By the time they arrived at the mouth of the Colorado and
Gila rivers, eighty miles from Fort Yuma (the exact location where
the fictional captives of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Who Would
Have Thought It? were rescued), the Oatmans' food supply was almost
nonexistent and their hopes were low. As one of the only surviving
members of the famed Oatman massacre, Olive Oatman recalls some
Apaches approached her father: "They asked for more [food] and this
my father denied them, telling them that it would famish us.... They
carried huge clubs, which they brought out and brandished in the air
screaming and, leaping like so many deamons [sic], began their cruel
slaughter" (Oatman 10). All but Olive and Mary Ann were murdered;
their brother, Lorenzo, was left for dead.
Olive and Mary Ann were forced to travel long distances to where
the Yavapais lived, while Pimas nursed Lorenzo back to health and
later returned him to members of the migrant party (Ira Thompson
became his guardian). As Olive describes in her lecture notes, within
a year they "were sold [to a] partie [sic] sent by the Mohave Chief
to pay for [them]" (Oatman 16). Extreme drought marked Olive and
Mary Ann's residence with the Mohaves, and several tribe members
died of starvation; Mary Ann Oatman was among the dead. Mary
Ann's death was not the only event to mark Olive's time in captivity.
Both sisters' chins were tattooed with five lines traveling vertically
from their lower lips. Sketches and photographs of Olive accentuate
these telltale signs of captivity, and speculation continues regarding
their significance. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, Olive's chin
tattoo may have garnered as much interest from spectators who flocked
to her lectures as her harrowing tale of five years among the Yavapais
and Mohaves.
Olive Oatman's tale of captivity and rescue in the Spanish borderlands
first appeared in print in 1857; a fictionalized version with several
significant similarities was produced again in 1872 with the publication
of Ruiz de Burton's first novel, Who Would Have Thought It? In it,
Ruiz de Burton tells the fictional story of Doña Theresa Medina, a pregnant
woman whose daughter, Lola, born five months after her mother's
capture, was rescued at the confluence of the Gila and Colorado rivers
by an East Coast party collecting specimens of Southwestern flora and
fauna. Mohaves surrounded Dr. Norval and his party, but they were
spared only because Norval promised to treat the wounds of the chief
and his two sons. Lola's mother approached Dr. Norval at the Mohave
camp and told him "that she had been carried away from Sonora, in
Mexico, and she had never had an opportunity to escape until now;
that she had made an oath to the chief not to escape because in that
way he would relax his vigilance, and she be enabled to send her little
girl away" (35). Before Norval could secure her release, however, Doña
Theresa died. Her dying words: "Thank God Lolita is away from those
horrid savages!" (36). An important detail of their captivity, withheld
until late in the novel, is the skin dye applied to the face and hands of
mother and daughter to prevent their rescue.
Like Olive, Lola and her mother were trafficked between the
Apaches and Mohaves and, significantly, both captivities were inscribed
on their bodies. Lola and Olive were physically stamped by
their time in captivity, and this mark would be the crucible through
which they would have to renegotiate reentry into Victorian American
society. Olive's tattoo functions as an indelible reminder of her time
in captivity and of her proximity to "savages." Wearing the mark
of the savage in the form of a chin tattoo stands in for other forms
of commingling with the Mohaves. Lola Medina's skin dye, however,
proves temporary, as does her association with American Indians.
In the narratives of Olive Oatman and Lola Medina we witness
the same dynamics at play that animated the first U.S. captivity narrative
published after Mary Rowlandson and two of her children returned
home over two hundred years ago. As historian June Namias
argues in White Captives, our definition of this genre is grounded in
Rowlandson's account; such an origin, however, unwittingly privileges
East Coast racial encounters between Native tribes and early Puritan
settlers. Richard Slotkin's classic Regeneration Through Violence
prominently placed the West and the Southwest in the national imagination,
but tales of abduction in this expanded geography remained
indebted to the Puritan tradition. In outlining the pattern of captivity
literature, Slotkin highlighted both its racial and religious components:
"It contains a devilish visitation, an enforced sojourn in evil climes
under the rule of man-devils, and an ultimate redemption of body and
soul through the interposition of divine grace and the perseverance
of the victim in orthodox belief" (130). The two captivity narratives
discussed in this chapter-Olive Oatman's historical abduction (1851-56)
and the fictional story of Lola Medina (originally published in
1872 and republished in 1995)-take place in the old Spanish borderlands
and thus expand the boundaries of citizenship as they challenge
racial and religious components of the metonymic relationship
between woman and nation.
White Slaves and the Black Legend
The captivity narrative, with all its historical ties to colonialism, offers
an apt trope for railing against Manifest Destiny, or colonialism of
the U.S. variety, because in their multiple forms, captivity narratives
repeatedly reveal that what is at stake in the fate of captive females is
nothing less than the reproduction of the nation. Michelle Burnham
posits that "Since captivity typically takes place in colonial contexts of
cultural as well as military warfare, [its] rhetorical opposition serves to
justify the political and social antagonism that both propels and results
from the sentimental representation of captivity" (2). Namias divides
the representations of female captives into three historically marked
tropes, predicated on an ideological connection between national concerns
and the representation of its captives. She identifies the time
period spanning the Oatman and Medina captivities (1820-70) with
the emergence of what she terms the "Frail Flower," a literary model
that coincided with "the rise of True Womanhood and the mass marketing
of sentimental fiction" (36). "Frail Flower narratives," Namias
continues, "include brutality, sadomasochistic and titillating elements,
strong racist language, pleas for sympathy and commiseration with
the author's suffering, special appeals to her sad lot as a distressed
mother, and occasional invectives against dirt and sex among Indians"
(37). Note, however, the absence of religious appeal in Namias's
Frail Flower. "By the 1830s," Namias argues, "a culture of delicate
femininity had ... infiltrated much of the ideology of white middleclass
womanhood and an ever-present God had become modified and
removed ... for some captive women" (46).
By playing upon the literary model of the Frail Flower and its deemphasis
on religion, Oatman (through Rev. Royal B. Stratton) and Ruiz
de Burton are able to center their narratives within the national imaginary
and "whiten" their captives in the process. As mentioned earlier,
Oatman's family belonged to the Mormon Church and later to a
splinter faction within it; Lola and Doña Theresa Medina are californianas,
upper-class women who belonged to the rare social category of
"white Mexicans," but they are also Roman Catholics. In fact, Doña
Theresa makes Dr. Norval, an East Coast Protestant, promise to raise
Lola in the Catholic faith (36). Mrs. Norval's strong reaction to Lola's
black face is nearly topped by her anti-Catholic sentiments that are
reminiscent of the black legend. In both cases, the captives' religious
identities relegate them to the fringes of the national imaginary; what
better way to identify them as representatives of the U.S. nation than to
write them into what Nancy Armstrong considers to be a paradigmatic
genre. However, this is tricky business for Ruiz de Burton since the
United States has just invaded her land, laid claim to her ranch, and
threatened her privileged existence and claim to whiteness.
It's also a dodgy connection for Oatman to cultivate because of her
religious affiliation with the Mormon Church. In her lecture notes,
Oatman suppresses all reference to Mormonism. Instead of revealing
the religious motives for their emigration west, Oatman compares her
father's financial fate with that of "thousands" in 1842 who were
"bereft of all ... fortune and reduced to insolvency" (2). The family's
trek is thus folded into the larger western migration tradition, motivated
by economic and health reasons. "He became convinced that
if he would live to bless and educate his family, or would even enjoy
tolerable health, he must immediately seek a climate more congenial
with his state of mind and body and thereby recuperate his waisting
[sic] energies" (2). To account for the split in the emigrant party, which
was actually due to dissent within the Mormon Church, Oatman is
purposefully vague, referring to "religious peculiarities and strange
prejudices of certain restless spirits in our company" (4).
Olive and Lola belonged to groups outside the national imaginary;
their use of the nation-building genre of the captivity narrative served
their claim to symbolic citizenship. Ruiz de Burton articulates a narrative
of resistance against U.S. imperialism, or what she called "Manifest
Yankee trick," in a profound, paradigm-shifting manner by recasting
the captivity narrative in terms of the U.S.-Mexican War, when the
border between both countries was just being set and the border patrol
was formed to police for "Indian raids."
In Cartographies of Desire, Rebecca Blevins Faery argues that "the
figure of the white woman captive has been a primary site for the
construction of race, gender, and national identity in U.S. culture" (25,
emphasis mine). Historian James Brooks expands Faery's analysis of
the captivity narrative by locating it in the "captive exchange traditions
of the borderlands"; he sees "the solitary girl of virgin purity, whose
exact ethnic and kin affiliations seem deliberately shrouded, [to be] the
focal point for expressions of masculine violence and sentimentality"
(7, emphasis mine). Despite this difference of opinion regarding the
racial identity of the female captive, Faery and Brooks both emphasize
the captive's centrality in representing a larger group identity.
In his recent book Captives and Cousins, Brooks provides a comprehensive
study of captivity, exchange, and the redistribution of wealth
in the borderlands. For the Native tribes inhabiting the current state of
New Mexico, the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-48) did little to change a
two-hundred-year-old practice: "The captive exchange system [merely]
expanded to include new victims: Americans, European immigrants,
and African-descended slaves moving westward in the wake of the
Mexican-American War" (Brooks 259). Families whose members were
abducted after the war complained to local authorities that the U.S.
government didn't compensate them for their losses as the Mexican
government had (258-60). This point is key to my argument, because
the shift in federal policy regarding the trafficking of human beings,
outlawed in the peace treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, reveals much on
the subject of national identity: how the United States saw itself and
how it wanted to be seen after 1848.
The war annexed one third of Mexico's territory; with the addition
of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and parts
of Utah and Colorado, the United States nearly doubled in size. The
peace treaty between the two nations offered U.S. citizenship to all
former Mexican citizens and promised to honor Spanish and Mexican
land grants. The passage of the Land Commission Act in 1851 denied
several landowners rights to their own property. Ruiz de Burton personally
suffered the consequences of the war when Rancho Jamul was
taken from her; despite several years of fighting in the U.S. court system
and an eventual victory, Ruiz de Burton lost her lands paying court fees
incurred during the lengthy litigation.
Ruiz de Burton was residing in San Francisco when accounts of the
Oatman massacre and Olive's rescue began to appear in local newspapers.
I contend that Oatman's story permitted Ruiz de Burton to
address several issues regarding the status of Mexican residents in the
newly annexed Southwest: religious difference, full cultural and political
acceptance into the United States, and, based on the latter point, the
problematic insistence on the whiteness of californios. In short, the
terms negotiated for Olive's reabsorption into Anglo society (religion,
guardianship, sexual purity, and loyalty to Anglo-American culture)
made her captivity, and all the attendant media attention thereafter,
the ideal foundation for Ruiz de Burton to redress grievances after the
U.S.-Mexican War.
Olive's Return
In February 1856 the newspaper presses in California were working at
a feverish pace. News reached all over the newly formed state of the
deliverance of Olive Oatman, who had been rescued after five years
in captivity. The Los Angeles Star, San Francisco Herald, and Golden
Era, among others, published sensational accounts of Oatman's abduction
and rescue, including an interview with the former captive.
The California public was familiar with Olive and her sister Mary
Ann because of attempts by their brother, Lorenzo, to seek both the
state and federal government's aid in their rescue (Rice 98). Prior to
Olive's rescue, Lorenzo Oatman petitioned Congress to fund a search
party charged with locating the only other remaining members of the
Oatman family besides himself. 11 With Olive's return to civilization,
Californians voiced their criticism against Governor J. Neely Johnson
in the very newspapers that printed Lorenzo's plea.
Olive's five-year captivity, the famed massacre of her family, and her
celebrated return to Anglo-American society initially elicited reactions
of pity. Women in San Francisco's elite society were called upon to
offer their influence, maternal and financial, to erase the vestiges of
Olive's five years of captivity and reacquaint her with an adoptive
family and culture. A correspondent from the Daily Herald in San
Francisco called for "some of our philanthropic San Francisco ladies
[to] offer their services to either provide a home for her, or [to] use
their influence in procuring her admission to the Orphan Asylum"
(Rice 98). Quite swiftly, however, the tide of public opinion shifted to
tawdry speculation about Olive's chastity. As an explanation for crying
spells after her rescue, rumors began circulating that Olive mourned
her Mohave children-two sons borne to her and the chief's son. This
rumor was supposedly corroborated, thickened with detail by Olive's
fellow emigrant and old friend, Sarah Thompson. One newspaper
account published two months after her rescue discounted the rumor
quite plainly: "She has not been made a wife ... and her defenceless
situation [has been] entirely respected during her residence among the
Indians" (Golden Era, April 27, 1856).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848
by Andrea Tinnemeyer
Copyright © 2006 by University of Nebraska Press.
Excerpted by permission.
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