Frontiers, Inc.
Dead Ends or Gold Mines?: Using Missionary Records in
Mexican-American Women's History Author(s): Vicki Ruz Source:
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1991), pp.
33-56 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3346574 . Accessed: 16/04/2011
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Vicki Ruiz
Dead Ends or Gold Mines?: Using Missionary Records in
Mexican-American Women's History
Peggy Pascoe and Valerie Matsumoto clearly delineated the
theoretical issues we face as feminist historians.1 Expanding on
their essays, I would like to discuss what is often ill perceived
as the flip side of theory that is, methodology. How do we use
institutional records (for example, missionary reports, pamphlets,
and newsletters) to illuminate the experiences and attitudes of
women of color? How do we sift through the bias, the
self-congratulation, and the hyperbole to gain insight into women's
lives? What can these records tell us of women's agencies? I am
intrigued (actually, obsessed is a better verb) with questions
involving decisionmaking, specifically with regard to
acculturation. What have Mexican women chosen to accept or reject?
How have the economic, social, and political environments
influenced the acceptance or rejection of cultural messages that
emanate from the Mexican community, from U.S. popular culture, from
Americanization programs, and from a dynamic coalescence of
differing and at times oppositional cultural forms? What were
women's real choices? And, to borrow from Jiirgen Habermas, how did
they move "within the horizon of their lifeworld"?2 Obviously, no
set of institutional records can provide substantive answers, but
by exploring these documents in the framework of these larger
questions, we place Mexican women at the center of our study, not
as victims of poverty and superstition (as they were so often
depicted by missionaries) but as women who made choices for
themselves and for their families.
Frontiers,
vol. XII, no. 1, ? Frontiers Editorial
Collective.
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