Emage Grant
Academic Book Review #1
The book “The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction” by Linda Gordon is about a group of nuns that are from New York that brought some Irish orphans into Arizona at a mining camp so that they would could live with Catholic families. Eventually the orphans ended up getting kidnapped and he nuns that were trying to save the children almost got killed because they thought that they were doing a kind act for the children. The Catholic families that the children were with were basically seen as inferior because of the fact that they were Mexican and Catholic, but all the whites in Arizona were Protestant and looked down on them. “These children, stolen or rescued, depending on one's point of view, were mostly Catholic,
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Another main point of this book kind of dealt with race as well because the Mexicans were seen as inferior to the Whites as well as the other races that were there in Arizona. It seemed to be a problem that the Mexican families were trying to adopt White children and it turned into a big issue of why they can’t keep the children. I felt that the author proved her point in writing this book because she explained all of the things that the Nuns went through with these children and how they were nearly killed for what they thought might be a kind act in God’s eyes. The orphans from New York entered into a racial predicament, which eventually got worse by the Anglo women. They were the ones who did not agree with the nuns giving children to Mexican families, and these Anglo women told their husbands and they had a vigilante resolution. Linda saw this as an example of how women could step beyond their traditional limitations on things so that they could have a say so. And this applied to both Mexican and Anglo women, the Mexican women who agreed to adopt the children and Anglo women wanted to take them away from them. Mexican wives wanted to adopt the children because they believed that a white child would make the family better