Revealing an Orphan's Tale from Nineteenth-Century Mexico

In 1854, in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, Petra Fernández, a nineteen-year-old orphan, petitioned the governor to emancipate her so that she might marry against the wishes of her guardian. Her efforts are chronicled in a case file that describes her interaction with male officials; it also offers a rare glimpse of family and community relations in provincial Mexico, and their intersection with government.  Drawing on theories of gender and linguistics, this paper frames Petra’s case file as an archive in and of itself, one that preserves a story of female agency encrusted with an assertion of male authority.  In uncovering that story, the paper disentangles the relationship between text and subtext in Petra’s case file so as to demonstrate a methodological response to the challenge of reconstructing a young woman’s experience from a body of sources generated by male officials.