1. Genaro Padilla suggests something similar when he notes that Vallejo, in his Recuerdos históricos tocante a la alta California , tactically played on his lost institutional power by extending a public, personal, and verbal eloquence befitting his former station in society (299-300).

2. On the distinct era of Mexican-American politics, see García, Mexican Americans .

3. See, for instance, Kammen, Sovereignty and Liberty: Constitutional Discourse in American Culture (esp. 3-42), as well as Bercovitch, "The Rites of Assent: Rhetoric, Ritual, and the Ideology of American Consensus."

4. I will develop the notion of "homosocial desire" at length in the following chapter; for now, though, I propose the concept as a means of understanding the play of desires among men within patriarchy. This very efficacious play of desires taps the wide range that exists between the "officially" recognized poles of heterosexual and homosexual orientations in order to solidify affiliations and entitlements among men and at the strategic expense of women's interests.

5. Cynthia Gillespie takes up a discussion of this inaction in Justifiable Homicide: Battered Women, Self-Defense and the Law 136-39.

6. Tiffany Lopez offered a reading of this incest dynamic in "Silencio Nunca Mas: Incest and Child Sexual Abuse in Cherrie Moraga's Giving Up the Ghost ," MLA Convention, December 1991.

7. For examples of work tracing this legal interest, see Deena González, "The Widowed Women of Santa Fe," and Angelina Veyna, "Women in Early New Mexico" (discussed below).

8. The law is obviously not monolithic in this regard; however, a clear tendency toward authoritarian modes of argumentation has been identified by CLS scholars. For a reading of how both authoritarian and more "democratic" modes of argument are played out in a particular case, see James Boyd White, "Judicial Criticism" ( ILL 339-410).