Essay --

In the book, Refusing the Favor, Deena J. Gonzalez investigates how the lives of Spanish-Mexican women in Santa Fe were affected when the United States annex northern Mexico between the early and late 19th century. Her tame focuses on the cultural contrast among the Euro-Americans and the Spanish-Mexicans in the area. Gonzalez analyzes the histories of women of the period through the lens of those who would deliver upon them the favor of colonialism. Hence, she indicates her position through the title of her book. She illustrates how female inhabitants of the defeated grunge resisted and scorned the newly arrived powerful Anglo immigrants. She shows how womens responses to the seduction were extremely diverse and illustrates their efforts to refer their culture. Much of her work focuses on the economic effects and cultural responses to the influence of Americanization that took place in New Mexico after the United States took control of the territory. The agent challenges th e generally accepted history of the United States that has largely put forrard that the U.S. conquest was painless and beneficial to Spanish-Mexicans in Santa Fe. New Mexico, long sooner the United States took over, always had a degree of Spanish character. Her work focuses on Santa Fe which was one of the largest cities west of the Mississippi and oldest of all the territories of the Provincias Internas that opted to extend with Mexico in 1821. In 1846 the land was invaded and conquered by the United States. Much of her description is on the lives of women in the capital city utilizing a range of sources, from work literature, newspapers, wills, deeds, court records, Catholic Church Archives, Property Census records, and Spanish compose sourc... ...zalez 72). Although about half of the Euro-American men in Santa Fe lived with Spanish-Mexican women by 1850, these unions include only several hundred of some four thousand Spanish-Mexican women and were therefore less signific ant from the perspective of Spanish-Mexican residents (Gonzalez 74). Gonzalez is an germ with a mission she wants to regression traditional historiographical interpretations about the West, and specifically New Mexico. She wants to give life to the dead voices of women who lived in the era. It appears that Gonzalezs primary motive in writing Spanish-Mexican women into the history of U.S. conquest appears to show how the women of Santa Fe were affected and how they overcame a challenging systems which reshaped their lives. In the end, the author successfully achieves her goal of rescuing the voices of New Mexican Spanish Mexican women.