Sal Acosta. Sanctioning Matrimony: Western Expansion and Interethnic Marriage in the Arizona Borderlands.

Though he is not the first to examine intermarriage in communities of the American Southwest, in Sanctioning Matrimony: Western Expansion and Interethnic Marriage in the Arizona Borderlands, Sal Acosta provides an intriguing new take on the subject. Challenging ideas that intermarriage declined in Tucson, Arizona, especially from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Acosta uses quantitative and qualitative data analysis to argue that intermarriage persisted and that previous historians’ assessments have been incomplete because of scholars’ tendency to focus on whites in the intermarriages regardless of class. For Acosta’s study of the Tucson community, the most detailed data allows for a critical focus on the 1880s to the 1930s. Acosta divides his work into sections that analyze the history of Arizona’s miscegenation laws, the context of manifest destiny, prevalence and forms of intermarriage in Tucson, marriages between Mexican women and Chinese and African American men, and, finally, the workings of interethnic marriage and divorce. The first two chapters provide a solid historiographical foundation as well as important historical context for his study. Arizona had various miscegenation laws in place from 1865 to 1962, and while the first law began when Arizona was part of the New Mexico Territory, the laws persisted much longer than the New Mexico laws. Acosta notes that the laws on the books did not always accurately reflect their practice in courtrooms and in communities, and thus he provides a detailed look at the actual workings of the miscegenation laws. Adding nuance to the ideas of manifest destiny, Acosta points to the contradictions that allowed white men to marry Mexican women if they were elite and viewed as white by courts, but that also allowed lower-status Mexican women to marry African American or Chinese men. In this discussion, Acosta concludes that the rhetoric of manifest destiny did not always match the ideas that male migrants brought to Arizona. This rich context is very helpful to the reader, but there are times that additional historical context concerning the impact of major political and social events or influences in Arizona could offer a deeper understanding of the experiences of interethnic families in Tucson. For example, the role of religion could be examined in more detail. The role of Catholicism in divorces, or in discouraging divorces, is examined late in the book. Of course, a major point in the book is that despite other political and social changes the incidence of intermarriage did not decline.