Petra Santa Cruz Stevens and the sexual and racial modalities of property relations in the nineteenth-century Arizona–Sonora borderlands

Abstract

The 1890s were a period of tremendous social and political upheaval. The intimate nature of boom-bust economies and the end of the Indian wars influenced US–Mexico borderlands social life, forming the basis of this article. A 23 March 1893 murder-suicide attempt by ex-Congressman Hiram Stevens against his wife Petra Santa Cruz in the Arizona territory sets the stage for how larger socioeconomic shifts in racialized capitalist production influenced historical memory. In particular, analyzing Petra Santa Cruz Stevens’ life history in the context of capitalism provides a window for a reassessment of borderlands history as it is currently practiced, the ways in which material objects account for the affective and social labor of producing legible subjects, the ways in which sexual and racial modalities informed property relations of capital, and finally, a feminist critique of social history and national formation by shifting our attention to how borderlands negotiations of violence and history were, and continue to be, central to US history. I argue that the murder-suicide reordered systems of meaning, serving as a microeconomic index of racial capital and nation-state formation.