Alejandra Dubcovsky's "Talking Back"

Alejandra Dubcovsky is associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Informed Power: Communication in the Early South.

Dubcovsky applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Talking Back marks the beginning of Chapter 4, when the violence of Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713) reached the gates of San Agustín, the main Spanish hub in colonial Florida. Women and non-combatants made-up the vast majority of those trapped inside the fort suddenly surrounded by enemy soldiers.

The women were screaming, and Florida governor Zúñiga y Cerda feared losing control of the situation. He had tried to ignore them, but he found their cries distracting, annoying, and above all else loud. And they were getting louder. Governor Zúñiga y Cerda had done his best to protect the main Spanish town in Florida from the large English and Native army that had laid siege to San Agustín during the first week of November 1702. Over one thousand people had crowded uncomfortably into the small Castillo de San Marcos as English and Native forces surrounded the town. The invasion had quickly faltered and become a stalemate. The English failed to penetrate Spanish defenses, and Spanish counterattacks failed to drive the English away.

On Christmas Eve, Spanish sentinels spotted two English supply vessels. News that the invading army had received reinforcements swept through the Castillo. Hushed whispers of surrender grew to a steady murmur, and within a matter of hours the fort was wrapped in a chaotic commotion. Defeat now seemed inevitable. And the women began making a bad situation even worse, the governor complained. Their wails soon proved infectious, increasing anxiety and lowering morale…

There are thousands of pages of correspondence, council meetings minutes, spy reports, military plans, and related documents about the siege of San Agustín. And from this Page-99 sample, you can see that in these materials about war, women were there. In fact, the women were so loud and their wails so infectious that the governor issued an order to silence them. That’s right, in the middle of this armed conflict, the governor thought it a priority to silence the women inside the fort. Talking Back argues that, in spite of the governor’s order, listening to these women’s voices is critically important.

The Page 99 Test gives a good sense of the type of evidence discussed in the book and provides some insight into how I center women’s experiences. Talking Back attempts to do this on a bigger scale, exploring how women, and in particular Native women, entered into colonial stories and accounts, how they recorded their experiences, and most importantly, why they chose to do so, arguing that these moments when women become visible (or audible!) help us interrogate the very content and structures that make them legible.

Follow Alejandra Dubcovsky on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue