Earn When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, And Power In New Mexico, 1500-1846 Created By Ramón A. Gutiérrez Formatted As Paperback

only read the first third of this, the history up through the Pueblo Revolt, That's what I was interested in, I learned a lot from the book and really appreciate the scholarship, It's well written and easy to follow, A little dry but way more readable than the usual academic book, nnI'm somewhere between curious and skeptical about the author's methods, particularly the way he comes to very specific and detailed conclusions about what various things meant to Pueblo Indians in thes ands.
His primary sources are the records the Franciscan friars kept and he's careful at the start to talk about how problematic and biased those are, And sometimes, clearly fantastical. I respect that it's possible to read through that and come to something like the truth, I just wish he gave us more detail on that process and estimated his certainty.
nnConcerns aside, as a detailed socialfocussed history of early colonial New Mexico it's excellent, This book is mistitled. It is much more a history of Spain's New Mexico colony than it is about marriage and sexuality, Although there is some interesting arguments made about the importance of marriage laws and societal change from the Native American ways of life to the Spanish, too much of this just becomes statistics that are too much to comprehend at the end of the lengthy book.
Gutierrez earned a lot of criticism for this controversial history of marriage in New Mexico, primarily due to his outre account of Puebloan culture and sexuality, Among the Pueblo peoples, CORN MOTHERS argued, men and women occupied gendered domains with particular material responsibilities and spiritual powers, The male domain encompassed warfare, hunting, medicine, and the maintenance of sacred time the female included fertility, control of the family and household, and sustenance, The rituals wherein women and men reified this gendered power, Gutierrez asserted, often abounded with vivid sexual imagery, Marriage helped maintain balance within the community by uniting these powerful yet complementary male and female spheres,

Franciscan missionaries made in the seventeenth century a vigorous effort to destroy the Pueblo Indians spiritual old regime, They reserved their missions rations for Christian converts, allowed only devout Christian Puebloans to marry, and humiliated or persecuted Native American religious leaders, Rather than rejecting the domineering newcomers outright, many Puebloans chose to make a pretense of conversion for their own survival, Christianity had enough in common with traditional Pueblo religious life religious holidays, sanguinary rituals like flagellation, etc, to make this pretense possible, In the mids, however, revelations of priestly corruption and sexual abuse of Pueblo women undermined what little authority the padres enjoyed, The Pueblos again implored their masked gods, the katsinas, to protect them from disease and drought, The traditionalist revival empowered religious leaders like Pope who led the successful revolt of, A century of Spanish cultural imperialism had left its mark, however, Hispanizing the Pueblos language and material culture, After the Spanish reconquestmost became dependents or allies of their conquerors,

In the eighteenth century, New Mexicos demographically dominant groups became the Spanish colonists and their Ute and Apache genizaro slaves, The most important social asset in the province became not harmony or faith, but honor: male military and sexual prowess, female chastity, and familial “purity of blood, ” Hispanic New Mexicans turned marriage into a mechanism for preserving their families honor and property, with the Church and state serving as guarantors, Marriage became, over time, a contract between younger and younger men and women, as family choice came before individual choice, The ideal of romantic, companionate marriage changed this somewhat in the early nineteenth century, but marital unions remained racially endogamous even if they became less “statusendogamous, ” Genizaros, meanwhile, stood outside of this system of honorpreservation because the Spanish saw them as devoid of honor, They were conquered peoples, exploited physically and sexually, and lacked the colonists “uncorrupted blood, ” The Bourbon reforms ofdid free genizaro slaves from bondage and gave them some access to wage labor, but they remained a racially marginalized and socially dishonored group until after the end of Spanish rule.
I regularly recommend the book to anyone who visits New Mexico, Despite the academic title, its an easy read that quickly covers theyears of the states recorded history, For the native, its especially funny, as the sameor so families are still there, all still squabbling over a notreallyvaluable patch of dirt, For the visitor, the book explains what lies beneath the image so relentlessly marketed and sold by the locals, Not of fantastic readability but his claims are really interesting, and that makes up for some of that, There are a few places that seem to get passed over like where he mentions that the Pueblo had slaves before the Spanish arrived but doesn't discuss that in the least, even to say that there is little record of it.
A controversial book as far as obscure historical literature goes, the author writes about how sex and marriage helped the Spaniards toI guess you could say"infiltrate" Pueblo Indian society.
I guess that, sadly enough, any time any one writes about sex even in the most levelheaded way you're going to offend someone, At any rate, I thought it was an interesting idea, I really enjoyed this book, even though it was used for a class of mine, However, all the statistics and tables/charts in it lost me a few times I still found it to be incredibly informative and an easy read, Slightly repetitive, but relatively well researched, I had hoped it would focus more on Puebloan interactions with Christianity, Read for a class very long time ago and felt it a bit pretentious but it introduce some different points of view and isn't that good thing, This book

would be fairly good, but not more than that, without a few historical errors in the introduction that undercut its authority,

I'll get to those in a minute,

First, as one other reviewer notes, most of the "viewing" of the Puebloans is done through Spanish eyes, Can we be sure of that accuracy In the intro, Gutiérrez admits we still have a lot to work out about Puebloan prehistory,

Second, yes, sexuality between different cultures has always been in conflict, where they disagree greatly, But, putting the focus of two greatly different religions as primarily due to different takes on sexuality seems a cramped point of view, Not that some of the things that Gutiérrez narrates about this aren't quite interesting, But, I would have liked to see a broader focus,

And now, those errors

In the introduction, Gutiérrez says Acoma was "established perhaps as early as, " Actually, we have solid evidence of building at Sky City at leastyears earlier, He then claims it is "the oldest continually settled town in the United States, " Oraibi, the oldest Hopi village, goes back to at least, Taos is very likely pre, Even the Hohokam village at today's Tucson is considered as continually inhabited since,

These are errors that simply should not be made, and since the gist of the book is about early European historic Spanish interaction with the Puebloans, they undercut claims to reliability and authority by Gutiérrez.


Then, in the last chapter on Bourbon reforms, he says Charles III was the third and last Bourbon king of Spain, That would be news to the current, Bourbon, monarch of Spain,

Beyond THAT, Gutiérrez had other matters of "difference" he could also have discussed, We have, and had at the time of his book, some evidence that Puebloans engaged in tattooing preContact, We now know that goes backyears, sitelink sciencedirect. com/science

I bought this book because David Roberts recommended it in his book on the Pueblo Revolt, That was a clunker that said, the one big ding I gave THAT book was that Roberts simply couldn't grasp ideas of religious, and other, syncretism, Maybe that made this book more attractive to him than it should have been,

And with all of that, I knocked my originalstar rating down to, .