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The main conflicts in “Caballero” by Jovita Gonzáles and Eve Raleigh occur within the family of Mendoza y Soría. Their home, or hacienda, resides on a sprawling rancho between a famous tract of land—that of the land between the Río Nueces and Río Grande, in Southern Texas. This land, among other territories at the time, was in dispute during the US-Mexican War (1846-1848). The patriarch, Don Santiago, was the true caballero. He was always the aristocratic gentlemen that had his traditions and culture from which he vowed never to sway. His ancestors had settled the family ranch, Rancho La Palma de Cristo, on the said land around 100 years before his own reign as the hidalgo of the rancho. Don Santiago was virtually a king on the rancho. His subjects were the peons who worked faithfully for him without pay, but for a roof over their heads and food to eat. This long tradition was hard to change with the “invasion” of the infidels, Americanos, who were quickly settling the area once it had been ceded to the US Government by Mexico with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Don Santiago’s sense of tradition and culture was so ingrained in him that when assimilation to the new Americano culture had become a prerequisite to survival in the state, he couldn’t budge from his ways. This theme of a dying old order occurs very often in literature about 19th Century. The old order is dead, and a new order must rise to replace it. It hurts the don even more when his family, or at least most of it, successfully absorbs the Americano culture into their own. It eventually kills him. A summarization of how each of his family members assimilates into the Americano culture is the best way to summarize the novel’s events.
We’ll start with the oldest son, Alvaro. He was too much like his father. He was extremely patriotic…to Mexico, and when he joined the guerrilleros, a band of mercenaries if you will that harass the American armies, this only showed how unmoving his personality was when concerning the “new order.” Also, when his sister knowingly risks her reputation to save him from a hanging once the American army finally catches him, he insults her for it: “Couldn’t you let me die instead? It would have been an honor to our name, dying for my people and my country, now you have dishonored us forever”(270). The rule that applies in this novel--accept the new order or die--certainly applied to Alvaro. He was shot in abrupt, almost surreal conflict with Texas Rangers shooting from the other side of the Río Grande.
Next is the other son, Luis Gonzaga. His father never did favor him very much because of Luis’ artistry. He loved to paint, draw, etc., which his father made out to be too feminine: “Painting pictures like a woman, and he a Mendoza y Soría! An artist—insult to a father’s manhood! A milksop, and his son”(6)! He even refers to his own son as a marica, or fop. It may be because of this passion for art (or perhaps not, but it happens anyway) that Luis Gonzaga leaves his home to study art in Baltimore, Maryland with an American doctor traveling with the Rangers at that time in southern Texas. Captain Devlin, a fan of art himself, offers to take Luis Gonzaga to Baltimore to study art, an offer that Luis accepted, and in doing so, showed that he had assimilated into the Americano culture. One thing to mention, though, before continuing is that Luis was an effeminate man, and there was a feeling of homoeroticism about him. His relationship with Captain Devlin, though it’s never outright said to be homosexual, is still suggested to be so. This sort of relationship is considered a sin in the Catholic religion (many of Mexico’s citizens and those who later became American were Catholic), so the subtle “sin” here in the novel explains why the captain’s name is an allusion to the Devil.
The eldest daughter, María de los Ángeles, was extremely religious. So much so that she wished to live as a nun for the rest of her life: she “ had wanted to go to the convent and, forbidden to do so by her father, had brought the convent to herself, inasmuch as she was able…(Enough of anything was enough. He had, he told himself, been patient with Angela far too long. When they went to the town house in Matamoros next winter that doleful nun's garb would be forbidden)”(6). She was proposed to near the end of the novel by Alfred “Red” McLane, a politician. He explained to her how being his wife would channel her “gift”(211) to where she felt she could do good: “Think of yourself…so lovely a hostess that none can forget you. Then remember that many…who are ignorant of the beauties of your Church and faith and in their ignorance think badly of it. Will they not think less harshly after knowing you are one of its devout members?…Consider, then, the good you can do your people. Many will be homeless and will need comfort…You can go to the humble homes of the poor, there will be sick to visit and comfort”(211). Her faith, so strong that she felt that just as God loves all creatures, she should as well (“we must not hate”(15)), helped her to successfully absorb the Americano culture in marrying Señor McLane and living within the American society.
The youngest daughter, Susanita, a sort of culmination of the hidalgo line, had uncommonly beautiful features: green eyes, blonde hair, light skin. Her father loved her dearly and “could not bear to let her go”(7) by marrying her to another of the elite class, though her time was up as a child. Her need to marry for love, though, fueled a very forbidden romance with an Americano named Robert Warrener, an officer in the army at Fort Brown. This affair was discovered when Warrener visited the rancho to ask for Susanita’s hand in marriage (the denial of which was given to Warrener in the form of a very ungentlemanly whack on the head by a cane on a spot still healing from a previous incident). Don Santiago questioned Susanita about it: “You love this—this Americano and feel no shame when you admit it”(234)? She answered quite truthfully: “Yes, I love him with all my heart and soul and I am not ashamed. I am glad”(234). Don Santiago’s answer to this problem was to marry her to Don Gabriel, who was old enough to be her father. However, after the escapade she went through to save Alvaro’s life, the don disowned her as a daughter (something I entirely don’t understand from my own perspective). She took this opportunity to marry her beloved Roberto, and thus assimilated into the Americano culture.
Even his widowed sister and wife had assimilated by the end of the novel. It’s important to mention that Don Gabriel had also blended himself with the new order. He took Alfred McLane’s advice to have his land marked and the papers taken care of for when the worst of the American immigrants began to take up land without discretion to whom was living there. When he and Don Santiago’s widowed sister, Doña Dolores, married after discovering a love they had never known existed between them, their marriage showed how both had absorbed into the new Americano culture. Lastly, his own wife, Doña María Petronilla, had managed to accustom herself to the new order. She loved all of her children dearly, even Alvaro, who was quite abrasive towards the peons and to his other siblings. She protected them as best as she could, and also began to come out from underneath her shell of passivity as the conflict within the family grew: “Twenty-five years of passive humility and unquestioned obedience to all his moods and desires—now defiance. He had expected weak dissent and tears but not this…‘I tell you, Alvaro, I will not hear of it…I say you are not going…Alvaro’s place is at the ranch, with the wife it is his duty to take. Honorable war, if it comes to our door, yes, but a guerrillero…—no’”(127)! The Mexican culture raises its daughters harshly and moves its wives to be passive and obedient, so Doña María Petronilla defiance to her husband during the family’s troubled times, shows that she is becoming part of a new order where women are more equal to men.
The issue about the role of women in the novel is very prominent. Doña Dolores had always been outspoken, a trait that Don Santiago tried consistently, but without success, to suppress. For example, Don Santiago once said of Doña Dolores' late husband: "He had enough purgatory in the two yeras of his married life...it is no secret that you helped him get to the other world with your independence and sharp tongue, my dear Dolores"(25). Doña María Petronilla’s increasing outspokenness showed a rebellion against the culture’s tradition of passivity in women as well. Also, the contrast between how women are treated in the Americano culture versus the Mexican culture is an indicator to the women’s role issue. For example, when a French trader discussed his sons-in-law with Doña Dolores, Susanita, Inez, and other women, he says that “If pampering and deference can be called good, then he [his American son-in-law] is very good indeed to her. More than my French son-in-law”(81). Another example is when Inez, Susanita, and some of their friends discuss the Americanos as secretly as they can, for it is a forbidden subject to them: “Chonita, my duenna, has heard that they love wonderfully, these Americanos, and marry for love, and let their women ride a horse after marriage and give them things. I would like a husband who makes love to me after marriage, too”(40). The girl had a somewhat naïve way of putting it: Americanos feel marriage to be less of a duty and more of a religious sanction of the mutual affection, if not love, between a man and a woman. In the Mexican culture at the time, perhaps even today (I’m not sure), marriage was considered a duty by the children in order to continue the family line (at least for those of the aristocratic class). There are exceptions, of course, but it is an issue discussed in the novel.
Finally, Don Santiago’s role in the novel... After suffering the death of his oldest son, the loss of his other children to the Americano culture, the loss of his wife and somewhat abominable sister to the Americano culture as well, and his own inability to assimilate to the new order kills him. He dies of natural causes in front of a large stone cross on a hilltop near his hacienda as he holds his traditions in his hand—dirt from the land that he owns. The rule has applied to him in this: accept the new order or die. Some other observations can be drawn from his death. He is found by his youngest daughter’s husband, Robert, who gently closes his eyes. Warrener, who can certainly represent the new order, has replaced Don Santiago’s role in Susanita’s life, which was the old order. Also, the fact that Don Santiago died in the place where his ancestor first surveyed the land brings to circle the cycle of the old order. There it began, and there it ended—a sort of framing technique.
This was a great book. I often noticed that Don Santiago’s hatreds ate at him until his logic in many things became distorted, which was hurtful to read, but its inclusion was necessary. Five stars!!