Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America

The history of honor has long been central to the theoretical radicalism of Latin American feminist studies. In the 1980s, when many feminist historians elsewhere were just moving away from “herstory” to discuss gender and sexuality, feminist scholars of colonial Latin America stressed the centrality of male control over female bodies in the construction of racial and class hierarchies and the balance between church and state. This collection extends their concerns into the postcolonial period, reinvigorating and expanding the category of honor and the methodologies used to explore its meaning. It convincingly situates honor as central to the building of Latin American modernities and not as residual baggage from a patriarchal, unenlightened, and illiberal past. The collection illustrates — in exciting and innovative ways — the vibrancy with which Latin Americans engaged ideas about citizenship, civil rights, equality, and justice and how changing conceptions of honor shaped ideas about the individual. The focus on law and legal apparatuses reiterates an important argument of earlier colonial scholarship: that honor is part of modern statecraft and governance and not a premodern or antimodern popular culture perpetuated by an authoritarian Catholicism. Honor is both profoundly political and utterly modern.This volume is also pathbreaking in the geographic distribution of its contributors, more than half of them Latin American academics. Long a goal of feminist scholars, this dialogue between U.S. and Latin American scholars is to be roundly applauded. Its noteworthy geographic coverage does not merely present a broad range of countries but juxtaposes distinct political geographies: Brazil and Spanish Latin America, indigenous Mexico and the highland Andes, Spanish and U.S.-controlled Puerto Rico, Jamaicans and Chinese in the Costa Rican Caribbean. The book is organized by theme: debates over nineteenth-century liberalism, popular uses of law and honor, and the policing of urban space and civic identities. Moving beyond cataloged comparisons about how “things happen differently in different countries,” it offers a deeper and more transnational reflection on the various political uses of honor within and across shared projects of nation building. This helps make it a workable classroom text for advanced courses — a noteworthy achievement, given how difficult it can be to teach edited volumes.In their solid and smart introduction, the editors argue that while gendered notions of honor in the national period showed great continuity with the colonial period — women’s honor remained tied to sexual comportment and family roles, while men’s honor was associated with economic independence and trustworthiness — its site of operation shifted from corporate entities and inherited status to individuals and acquired status. Honor was democratized and more intensively enforced as state attempts to shape and control citizens became integral to the state-building project and the protection of national honor. The modernization of honor often heightened, rather than flattened, social hierarchies, and its increasing association with citizenship produced an array of individualized markers of worth, such as employment, marital status, residence, and education.The fine essays on nineteenth-century liberalism connect honor and new forms of inequality. Sarah Chambers argues that the spread of honor among nonelite men in early republican Peru strengthened domestic patriarchy; she provides an insightful discussion about the meaning of labor in this process. Keila Grinberg proposes that the endurance of slavery delayed codification of civil rights and enshrined social hierarchies within Brazilian liberalism. Sidney Chalhoub’s poetic critique of the writings of nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis vividly illustrates such seigniorial dynamics, although he does not directly engage the concept of honor. Rossana Barragán, challenging the assumption that nineteenth-century statesmen perfunctorily embraced Napoleonic codes, posits that Spanish law often prevailed over French precisely because it retained hierarchical distinctions of reputation and status among male citizens and accorded limited civil rights to honorable women. To very different and surprising ends, Peter Guardino argues that the egalitarianism of nineteenth-century indigenous communities reflected an active embrace of liberalism. In step with the general liberal attack on inherited privilege, indigenous Oaxacans abolished the lineage-based cargos formerly reserved for the descendants of caciques and made them instead elective and rotating. This complicates enduring notions of Indian “resistance” and “community” as outside or juxtaposed to Euro-American ideas.The section on popular responses features lively and nuanced accounts of poor and working-class women’s recourse to the courts. Laura Gotkowitz and Lara Putnam analyze slander lawsuits brought by women against women in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Port Limón, Costa Rica; accusations of promiscuity were often proxies for broader grievances about ill-gained status and wealth. Putnam critiques the way histories of Afro-Caribbean and Hispanic American sexuality have been written in troublesome isolation and juxtaposition to one another. Eileen Findlay argues that elopement cases in late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico often were instigated by young women’s willful acts and astute understanding of courtroom theatrics in order to override parental objections. Yet in doing so, women reinforced ideas about female passivity that undermined their ability to be seen as victims of rape. She also uses Afro-Caribbean experiences to rethink historical scripts about Latin America and underscores how empire (both Spanish and U.S.) made racial anxieties central to ideas about honor. José Amador de Jesús also takes up the theme of imperialism in his essay on the transformation of the Puerto Rican musical genre plena, between 1900 and 1930, from a plebeian critique of racial and class inequality to an anti-imperialist anthem of the nationalist intelligentsia.The final essays of part 2 and those of part 3 emphasize the law’s central role in creating modern subjects. The modernization of honor intensified the vigilance and categorization of behavior, and gendered notions of honor were present across the many technologies constituting modern individuals. Foucault’s influence is most evident here, though with a well-delivered corrective to Foucault’s own lack of attention to gender. Brodwyn Fischer’s essay on slander in twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro foregrounds honor’s connection to state policy and popular nationalism. Under Getúlio Vargas, new documents such as marriage and birth certificates, work cards, and so on, were used to establish honor. Such state-endorsed honor increasingly displaced racial and sexual idioms of honor among the plebe; this was deeply attractive to many Brazilians and underpinned Vargas’s popular legitimacy. Sueann Caulfield examines Brazilian debates about the “Modern Girl.” A growing acknowledgement of — and disgust with — women’s apparent enthusiasm for sexual pleasure compelled the courts to turn away from concern with protecting mature women’s virtue and make the crime of deflowering explicitly an offense against minors. The Modern Girl did not represent a step toward emancipation but instead inspired new misogyny and negations of protection.Essays by Cristiana Schettini Pereira and Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha highlight the role of the Brazilian police in dividing urban space and urban bodies into legitimate and illegitimate categories. Schettini Periera examines the shift from prostitution as an activity carried out in a discreet part of a commercial edifice (“the back of the building”) to one carried out in a separate part of town (“the bad part of town”). Gomes da Cuhna charts the uses of new police technologies such as fingerprinting and case histories in tracking criminal suspects, laying bare the violence of modern honor. She argues that the criminal file (initiated by police suspicions and bestowing shame and a scientific diagnosis of physical-moral laxity) was the flip side of the civilian identity card (acquired by voluntary petition and endowing privilege). The author dryly observes that dishonor flowed less from the invasiveness of any particular technology than it did from the transformation of suspected illicit activities into permanent state records.This collection of fine scholarship encourages future research on the relationship between honor and modernity; it deserves a wide readership and will not disappoint

Honor · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

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