ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the lives of Spanish-Mexican widows living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, between 1850 and 1880. The terms widow and widowhood can be misleading, however, and require qualification. For some groups of southwestern women a more apt description would be “unmarried,” a category that included not only widows but also the far larger community of women who were divorced, separated, or deserted. The chapter inquires into a woman’s widowhood but place it within the postwar period’s surrounding turmoil and accompanying economic displacement. It focuses on specific characteristics of a widowed population as well as on impinging socioeconomic forces and argue that a widow’s life was shaped by the interplay of a changing society and an economy imposed on her by wealthy newcomers, and not solely by her widowhood. At the end of the 1870s, when the railroad tracks had nearly reached Santa Fe, unmarried women stood at another critical juncture.
