Reconsidering Genre, History, and Haunting in Caballero: A Historical Novel

In this paper, I argue for the reclassification of Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero: A Historical Novel (1996) as a Frontier Gothic text, demonstrating that its engagement with the repressed history of colonialization of Indigenous lands is essential to its narrative power as well as its historical and romantic elements. While the novel is conventionally dubbed a “historical novel” or “historical romance,” this analysis employs Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds’s Frontier Gothic framework to reveal how the anxieties of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands fundamentally shape the Mendoza y Soría family’s experience. By employing close reading of character interactions and setting descriptions through a Gothic lens, this paper argues that Caballero’s true significance lies in its powerful portrayal of how the violence and rigid tradition of colonization in North America become the perpetual haunting mechanisms dismantling the patriarchal empire from within.