Sarah C. Chambers

Honor, status, and law in modern Latin America

This collection brings together recent scholarship that examines how understandings of honor changed in Latin America between political independence in the early nineteenth century and the rise of nationalist challenges to liberalism in the 1930s. These rich historical case studies reveal the uneven processes through which ideas of honor and status came to depend more on achievements such as education and employment and less on the birthright privileges that were the mainstays of honor during the colonial period. Whether considering court battles over lost virginity or police conflicts with prostitutes, vagrants, and the poor over public decorum, the contributors illuminate shifting ideas about public and private spheres, changing conceptions of race, the growing intervention of the state in defining and arbitrating individual reputations, and the enduring role of patriarchy in apportioning both honor and legal rights. Each essay examines honor in the context of specific historical processes, including early republican nation-building in Peru; the transformation in Mexican villages of the cargo system, by which men rose in rank through service to the community; the abolition of slavery in Rio de Janeiro; the growth of local commerce and shifts in women’s status in highland Bolivia; the formation of a multiethnic society on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast; and the development of nationalist cultural responses to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. By connecting liberal projects that aimed to modernize law and society with popular understandings of honor and status, this volume sheds new light on broad changes and continuities in Latin America over the course of the long nineteenth century. Contributors. Jose Amador de Jesus, Rossana Barragan, Sueann Caulfield, Sidney Chalhoub, Sarah C. Chambers, Eileen J. Findley, Brodwyn Fischer, Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha, Laura Gotkowitz, Keila Grinberg, Peter Guardino, Cristiana Schettini Pereira, Lara Elizabeth Putnam

Republican friendship: Manuela Saenz writes women into the nation, 1835-1856.

Manuela Sáenz has not suffered the fate of many women throughout history: she has not been forgotten. But the image of her that has lived on, for all its vivid color, is strangely flat. She is remembered as the lover of Simón Bolívar, the renowned leader of South America’s independence from Spain.1 Novels and biographies alike depict her as the passionate beauty to whom Bolívar wrote, “I also want to see you, and examine you and touch you and feel you and savor you and unite you to me through all my senses.”2 Her passions extended into the public sphere, where she dramatically defended the image of

Choosing to Be a Subject: Loyalist Women in the Revolutionary Atlantic World

Most scholarship on republican citizenship has emphasized the domestication of women and their exclusion from politics in the wake of the Atlantic revolutions, but attention to such loyalist women as Kezia Coffin in Massachusetts and María Antonia Bolívar in Venezuela reveals the ongoing viability of female agency in several arenas. This comparative study argues that, in choosing to retain their colonial identity within European empires, loyalist women in the Americas implicitly rejected the rising republican emphasis on the separation of public and private spheres. Coffin and Bolívar were motivated in defense of family position rather than individual political partisanship, but neither one would have identified herself primarily as wife or mother. Rather, they saw themselves as positioned in multiple ways within their kin networks and larger imperial communities, and this more supple and intersectional identity allowed their strategic deployment of power within overlapping economic and political fields.

To the Company of a Man like My Husband, No Law Can Compel Me: The Limits of Sanctions against Wife Beating in Arequipa, Peru, 1780-1850

Recent studies of domestic violence emphasize that the resiliency of patriarchy rests on ideologies that distinguish responsible exercise of power from abuse. While acknowledging the contribution of such analyses, this article explores the limits of public sanctions on wife beating and shifts the focus back toward womens own efforts to resist violence. Although wives in late colonial and early republican Peru sought protection from neighbors and local authorities, such strategies often were unsuccessful. As a result, many women took matters into their own hands. Although attacking female rivals as the cause of marital problems pitted women against each other, such actions also challenged the prerogative of church and state to set and enforce limits of proper marital conduct. Some women went even further by acting as if they had a right to leave abusive spouses, a recourse prohibited by husbands and civil and religious authorities alike.

‘Drying Their Tears’: Women’s Petitions, National Reconciliation and Commemoration in Post-Independence Chile

Public gratitude for good deeds can never be more justly awarded than when the blood of heroes is sacrificed for the Liberty of the Nation. The widows and mothers of the victors of Chacabuco deserve the recognition of the Government, for in them lives on the memory of the brave who extinguished tyranny; but the State’s lack of funds cannot provide a worthy compensation.1 In February of 1817, just as the winter snows were melting, Argentine and Chilean soldiers braved the high passes of the Andes and defeated the Spanish army at Chacabuco on the Chilean side. The dramatic nature of this campaign captured the imagination of contemporaries, as the government decree quoted in my epigraph shows, and it came to dominate commemorations of Chilean independence. But remembering and forgetting go hand in glove. Most subsequent narratives of independence reduced over a decade of civil war to this one battle and the complicated allegiances of participants to a dichotomy between active male heroes and their supportive yet passive wives and mothers. First, the official history favours a particular chronology that begins with Chileans’ initial efforts at self-governance in 1810, continues with the interruption of those efforts by a Spanish ‘reconquest’ of Chile in 1813, and culminates with the Battle of Chacabuco in 1817.

Political Ideas, Political Cultures: New Works on the Middle Period in Spanish America

CHILE: THE MAKING OF A REPUBLIC, 1830–1865: POLITICS AND IDEAS. By Simon Collier. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 271.

Masculine virtues and feminine passions: gender and race in the Republicanism of Simón Bolívar

65.00 cloth.) TRANSICIÓN Y CULTURA POLÍTICA: DE LA COLONIA AL MÉXICO INDEPENDIENTE. Edited by Cristina Gómez Álvarez and Miguel Soto. (Mexico City: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de UNAM, 2004. Pp. 308.) THE TIME OF LIBERTY: POPULAR POLITICAL CULTURE IN OAXACA, 1750–1850. By Peter Guardino. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. 405.

Rewarding Loyalty after the Wars of Independence in Spanish America: Displaced Bureaucrats in Cuba

84.95 cloth,

The Caudillo of the Andes: Andrés de Santa Cruz. By Natalia Sobrevilla Perea. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. xvi, 256. Maps. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index.

23.95 paper.) THE PLEBEIAN REPUBLIC: THE HUANTA REBELLION AND THE MAKING OF THE PERUVIAN STATE, 1820–1850. By Cecilia Méndez. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. 343.

Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1900: Volume I, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru (review)

84.95 cloth,