"Speaking for Themselves: Rancheras and Respectability in Mexican California, 1800-1850"

Yvette Saavedra, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and 2021–22 OHC Faculty Research Fellow

My book project  explores how ideas of gender, sexuality, and nationalism took shape in early nineteenth century Los Angeles. In Mexican Los Angeles, women who violated social ideals of gender honor and propriety, were labeled with the letters MV—which stood for “mala vida,” or bad lives,  as a punishment for their alleged illicit behaviors and transgressions of social norms. Although intended as a mark of shame, I regard  la mala vida as a form of proto-feminism that allowed women to live outside immediate patriarchal supervision and helped them negotiate their social positions and identities. Rather than focusing solely on women regarded as  honorable  mothers of the nation, I examine the so-called “bad women” who rejected imposed ideas of feminine propriety to show how they redefined ideas of womanhood, nationhood, and motherhood on their own terms.

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