The 'seductions' of Texas: The political language of gender in the conquests of Texas, 1690--1803

This dissertation examines the intercultural borderlands of colonial America and the dynamics of Spanish-Indian political interaction in the eighteenth century. Texas presents a unique arena for the study of colonial relations in the history of North America because its contestations put Indians as well as Europeans in the role of conqueror. Its stories of conquest coalesce around four major invasions---that of Apaches from the west, French from the east, Spanish from the south, and Comanches and Wichitas from the north. Because no one group ever achieved dominion over the others, a general political stalemate was the result.; This singular situation found reflection in the form and idiom the Spanish and Indians used to communicate and negotiate their power relations. Because survival was often contingent upon understanding and being understood by one another, Europeans and Indians had to find a common ground by which to relate to one another. Adopting the theory that people seek to relate the unknown to the world they know using characteristics that appear recognizable or familiar to them, this study argues that when the Spanish and Indians looked for something recognizable in the other, they latched onto representations of gender. Both groups used constructions of masculinity and femininity to allocate power in their own civil, economic, and political systems, and they recognized the existence of such distinctions in the other's social relations. In cross-cultural encounters, markers of gender became what in linguistic terms might be deemed cultural cognates, by which Europeans and Indians read and interpreted one another's words, signs, gestures, and behavior.; Although the seeming similarity of markers of gender offered Europeans and Indians limited entry into one another's systems of meaning, an examination of six realms of interaction---first encounters, religious conversion, warfare and violence, diplomacy, settlement and intermarriage, and captivity---indicates that these forms of communication did not help to stabilize Spanish-Indian relations. At the end of the eighteenth century, relations were neither more peaceful nor more structurally sound than they had been one hundred years earlier.