Spanish Law and Anglo Encroachment

Tejanas in the Borderlands prior to the onset of the Texas Revolution and the construction of the Republic of Texas’s legal codes based on English Common Law, enjoyed legal rights, which Bordelands and Women’s History scholar Jean A. Stuntz, discusses in her chapter “Tejanas: Hispanic Women on the Losing Side of the Texas Revolution,” in Women and the Texas Revolution, to be almost equal to that of men. Under English Common law, married women held no rights at all; however, under Spanish legal codes, all women could engage in business transactions, sue, write wills, and manage their own property, and legal records from the Bexár Archives demonstrate that women knew their rights and would exercise them. Women also retained a separate legal identity from their husbands and ownership of property held prior to marriage. However, with Texas's independence and admission to statehood, these historic rights were lost and were only regained with the emergence of the women’s rights movements of the 20th century, thus acting as an historical prelude to Latin@ involvement in those movements.

Ganilh himself also shows that, even in Spanish-influenced Mexican society in the Borderlands, within wealthier families, women continued to exert degrees of religious influence, not only in the community but also in the home, within Catholic practice. Regarding institutional practices, women participated in the lay Third Orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans, even holding prominent community roles within them. Additionally, Ganilh describes the practice of women caring for household devotion, which preserved syncretic Indigenous elements. For example, Ganilh describes los santos de la casa (the saints of the house), figures of saints decorated with finery to seek blessings, whilst they would be stripped of their vestments when no miracle was manifested. Ganilh notes, albeit condescendingly, that they were attributed human personalities and feelings, including vanity and resentment, which diverged from what was considered heteroprax Catholic saintly devotion, going as far as to compare them to the ancient Romans’ devotion to the household penates. These descriptions can then be seen as a possible account of how women in the Borderlands acted as transmitters of pre-existing Indigenous practices surrounding household spirits, while functioning under the titles and images of saints. Once again, another example of Indigenous practices continuing in the Borderlands, resisting suppression, such as the Mexican Inquisition, which Ganilh describes below.