The Secret History of Gender

Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico

Steve J. Stern

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807864807
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

In this study of gender relations in late colonial Mexico (ca. 1760-1821), Steve Stern analyzes the historical connections between gender, power, and politics in the lives of peasants, Indians, and other marginalized peoples. Through vignettes of everyday life, he challenges assumptions about gender relations and political culture in a patriarchal society. He also reflects on continuity and change between late colonial times and the present and suggests a paradigm for understanding similar struggles over gender rights in Old Regime societies in Europe and the Americas. Stern pursues three major arguments. First, he demonstrates that non-elite women and men developed contending models of legitimate gender authority and that these differences sparked bitter struggles over gender right and obligation. Second, he reveals connections, in language and social dynamics, between disputes over legitimate authority in domestic and familial matters and disputes in the arenas of community and state power. The result is a fresh interpretation of the gendered dynamics of peasant politics, community, and riot. Third, Stern examines regional and ethnocultural variation and finds that his analysis transcends particular locales and ethnic subgroupings within Mexico. The historical arguments and conceptual sweep of Stern's book will inform not only students of Mexico and Latin America but also students of gender in the West and other world regions.

PART ONE
The Journey

CHAPTER 1
An Invitation to Readers

ONE FAMILY’S STORY

Enter the conflicted world of José Marcelino and María Teresa that fateful Wednesday, October 23,1806.¹ Young, Indian, and poor, the couple belonged to the stratum of land-poor villagers, common in the Morelos region, whose male household heads worked the lands of richer peasants or found jobs on the region’s sugar haciendas to keep the household economy afloat.² From Texalpa, where Nahuatl speakers such as José Marcelino and María Teresa had been born, raised, and married, work on haciendas such as Atlacomulco lay within an easy day’s walk.³ That Wednesday José Marcelino found no work in Texalpa, possibly because of the rains, and passed the time drinking and (presumably) talking with the other men. As the day slipped by, he did not bother to return home for a midday meal and exchange of words, nor did he venture farther afield looking for work.

To José Marcelino this sort of response to slack time seemed normal. To María Teresa, however, such liberties embodied her husband’s irresponsibility and laziness. When José Marcelino returned home that night, the tension mounted quickly. Asked where he had passed the day drinking and scolded that he smelled foully of cheap rum (chinguirito), José Marcelino retorted “that none of it was her matter.” In María Teresa’s eyes the assertion itself underscored José Marcelino’s failure to meet his obligations. María Teresa, who had not prepared the customary meal for her returning husband and was not about to do so, stormed out and took refuge in the house of her mother, Micaela María. José Marcelino tried to drag her back; but the two women resisted him, and he was forced to return home empty-handed—without wife, food, or authority. Alone, frustrated, and angry, José Marcelino vented his wrath by breaking up María Teresa’s kitchen belongings.

The target had its logic. The kitchen was a symbolic and practical seat of female identity. It served as burial site for the umbilical cords of newborn girls (the cords of boys were buried outdoors, in forest, field, or mountain).⁴ It constituted both an arena within which even poor women might exert a modicum of property rights and social control and a principal locus of female labor obligation in the economic pacts that, along with sexual and other pacts, sealed patriarchal arrangements between peasant husbands and wives. The target also had its irony, for José Marcelino’s anger and frustration would be compounded by hunger. Men depended on women for food preparation, an arduous task that required considerable labor, skills, and advance preparation to transform corn into the tortillas that made up the bulk of the diet of poor peasants. Particularly critical was the back-straining work of grinding soaked corn (nixtamal) on the woman’s grindstone (metate) to produce wet flour suitable for tortillas; depending on the size of the family, this part alone of the daily tortilla work normally took between one and a half and three woman-hours a day. A like amount of labor was needed for the rest of the process — the initial shelling and soaking of dry corn in water and lime and the final patting out and cooking of freshly ground tortillas on the woman’s griddle (comal).⁵ When a wife withdrew her labor in food preparation and a female relative did not discreetly step in, alternative means of acquiring food brought new complications. Poverty restricted discretionary income, and a married villager who acquired his meals by calling on credit, friendship, or kinship invited talk about the state of his marriage and household authority. That fateful Wednesday, José Marcelino returned home alone to face this dilemma.

Thursday morning José Marcelino left the house to find day work in fields that needed to be prepared for the next planting cycle, and María Teresa returned home to discover the kitchen breakage. As matters turned out, Wednesday’s drenching rains had left the fields too mucky to work, and José Marcelino, whose breakfast had been limited to a bit of raw rum (aguardiente) on his way to the fields and who had begun to feel dizzy and faint (algo trastornado) from the effects of drink and hunger, decided to return home to eat. At this point the outlines of the story diverge sharply according to the narrator. In José Marcelino’s version, almost certainly apocryphal,⁶ a niece warned him on the way home that the infuriated María Teresa wanted the community officials and elders to punish her father-in-law in the absent José Marcelino’s place. This led to an angry confrontation when José Marcelino returned home. To José Marcelino’s demand that his innocent father be left out of the dispute, María Teresa replied that she would press the community governor (gobernador) to whip both father and son. At bottom, a father who indulged his youthful son’s failings was responsible for the son’s abuse and negligence: “He was guilty of turning out a drunkard by not punishing him.... He was a lenient indulger of a father [un viejo consentidor].” Provoked by the threat and the slander of his father, José Marcelino picked up a rock, hurled it on María Teresa’s head, and fled to a milpa (cornfield) to sleep off the incident.

The wounded María Teresa was discovered by Micaela María soon thereafter. Micaela María arrived about midday with some squash, a symbolic and material gesture that might help reestablish the peace between daughter and son-in-law. In María Teresa’s version of the wounding, as told to her mother, María Teresa had not threatened to have her father-in-law whipped. The dispute— and José Marcelino’s wrath — focused instead on María Teresa’s insistence the night before on the right to abandon her home (and thereby her customary duties) in view of her judgment of José Marcelino’s behavior. This alone sufficed to provoke the violence notwithstanding María Teresa’s peaceable willingness to leave the earlier dispute behind: “Even though he had broken her kitchen things she had his food ready . . . [and] without any other cause he had broken her head with a rock.” That afternoon the community officials found and arrested the sleeping José Marcelino, who proceeded to escape — “considering,” he would later explain, “that the crime did not merit so much punishment.”

In fact, José Marcelino escaped with the hope that he might achieve a reconciliation by informal means. He found day work at Hacienda Atlacomulco, where he sought to redeem his standing as a responsible breadwinner. After collecting two days’ wages on Sunday, he returned to Texalpa hoping that the money would “remove his wife’s anger.” By this point, however, María Teresa had slipped into a coma and died. José Marcelino was again taken prisoner.

The drama of José Marcelino and María Teresa, although revealing and compelling, followed a fairly routine path through the second arrest of José Marcelino on October 27,1806. As we shall see throughout this book, it resonates with multitudes of similar minidramas that punctuated peasant and plebeian life in late colonial Mexico and therefore forms part of a larger pattern. Like many such dramas, however, it also had its more idiosyncratic — and equally revealing—quirks. In this instance the peculiar twist did not come until June 1807, after José Marcelino had languished in jail nearly eight months. On June 18 Micaela María came forward to pardon José Marcelino and to desist her criminal complaint.⁷ She claimed too much, however, when she added that she had pardoned her son-in-law “from the very moment her daughter Tereza Maria [sic] died.” The historical record of the case proves this assertion patently false. What had happened during the intervening two-thirds of a year? What pressures had driven Micaela María—after the kind of prolonged delay and bitter accusation that indicated determination to carry through the prosecution—finally to declare not only a pardon but also that she had forgiven her daughter’s assailant all along?⁸

The answer is community pressure — more specifically, a decision by the community’s male elders, who bolstered Micaela Maria’s belated pardon with testimonies designed to rewrite José Marcelino’s personal history. In testimonies by the current and former gobernadores of the village José Marcelino was said to have lived the life of a model peasant. He had generally treated his wife well, he was orderly and hard working, he was not prone to drinking, and he had a peaceable manner with everyone. This discourse transmuted the homicide incident into an anomaly, an accident in the heat of provocations for which José Marcelino was not responsible, rather than an expression of his character or of the social relations he had established with his wife. The community elders had decided that the time had arrived to lift José Marcelino off the criminal hook and to reintegrate him into the structure of community life and labor. Like other land-poor peasants, José Marcelino was customarily advised by the elders where he could find day work in agriculture⁹ and was counted on to contribute to the community’s tributary obligations to state and church. Few peasants of modest means, let alone an apparent widow like Micaela María,¹⁰ could withstand for long pressure to reestablish the facade of harmony that would draw an able-bodied man back into community service and life after a respectable interval of punishment.¹¹ We do not know when the campaign to release José Marcelino began in earnest and therefore cannot calculate how long, if at all, Micaela María resisted such pressures. We know only that eight months after she lost her daughter, Micaela María submitted to the wisdom of the elders and that her pardon and their testimonies, in turn, paved the way for a royal pardon of José Marcelino.¹²

ON THE MEANING OF A STORY

The story of María Teresa’s killing by José Marcelino invites us to reflect on the historical connections between power and patriarchy, politics and gender, in the lives of the Mexican poor. We shall have occasion to develop these concepts and connections with greater precision and formality later in this book. For now, let us reflect on the richness of the invitation. The details of such a minidrama bring into focus social dynamics and arenas normally clouded by personal discretion and cultural mythology. In this instance the view afforded by a single episode of gender dispute raises challenging questions about the received wisdoms, historical and theoretical, that shape our understanding of gender and its intersection with more well known issues of politics, community, and class in Mexico.

Let us begin with our understanding of gender relations and violence in the patriarchal culture of Mexico. The standard portrait blends the themes of women’s victimization and complicity. On the one hand, wives and daughters are the long-suffering victims of patriarchal dominance by husbands and fathers. On the other hand, “culture” consists of a body of values commanding a near-consensus among members of the participant society, and Mexican women subscribe to the honor codes and patriarchal values deemed to infuse Mexican culture in particular and Latin American and Mediterranean cultures more generally.¹³ The story of María Teresa and José Marcelino guides us past the mythological fog that protects the shadowy forms of an imagined picture. As we draw closer to the scene of action, the invented image of the submissive Mexican wife, ever the victim of gratuitous violence despite her obedience to an uncontested code of patriarchal values, seems either to disappear or to resurface ironically as a discourse mobilized in a sharply contested field of action. (Recall María Teresa’s assertion that she suffered the violence of her husband despite her submissive preparation of food and her peaceable willingness to forget the earlier dispute.) We begin to see a bitterly contested world of gender right and obligation. In this world women like María Teresa and Micaela María did not challenge the principles of patriarchal dominance as such but reinterpreted their operational meaning so markedly that conflict ensued on the practical issues that defined the meaning and limits of patriarchal authority in everyday life.¹⁴

In the tragedy of María Teresa, Micaela Maria, and José Marcelino we witness the emergence of three such conflicts in rapid succession. The first was the dispute over a man’s accountability for his physical whereabouts and activities. María Teresa asserted a right to monitor and evaluate her husband’s physical mobility and activities, an arena José Marcelino considered his absolute domain. The second arena of contestation extended the argument from men’s to women’s physical mobility. Did a woman have the right to abandon her home and to suspend meal preparations for her husband? The practical answer given by the two women asserted the right of a wife to abandon — at least temporarily—her dutiful place in a husband’s home if the husband-patriarch failed to fulfill his obligations or if he became abusive. The practical answer given by José Marcelino asserted a more unconditional domain of husbands over their wives’ physical mobility and labor. Finally there arose the question of rights of punishment. What was considered sufficient provocation to justify physical punishment of wives by husbands, what types of private patriarchal punishment were considered within the range of the permissible and the proportionate, and to what extent should a husband’s mistreatment or excess lead to his own punishment (or punishment of his relatives) by a higher authority? María Teresa, Micaela María, José Marcelino, and the male elders of Texalpa did not easily reach a consensus on these questions, although all might have conceded, in principle, the right of a husband-patriarch to discipline his wayward dependents.

If we shift the focus from gender relations as such to the intersection of gender and the more public and familiar arenas of politics, the story of María Teresa’s homicide again challenges a received wisdom. Until relatively recently one of the most widespread theoretical premises concerning gender and women’s social experience has been the bifurcation of society into public and private arenas of experience and interest divided largely by gender. In this bifurcation men’s important experiences connect primarily to the domain of public life and activity, the visible world of politics and power wherein the great issues of war and peace, order and disorder, and justice and injustice are experienced, contested, and perhaps compromised or resolved. This is a world of dynamism, consequence, and historical change. It is the arena that determines social winners and losers. On the other side of the great bifurcation women’s important experiences connect primarily to the domain of private life and activity, the shielded world of family and domestic arrangements wherein the natural functions of child rearing, sex, and familial reproduction hold sway. This is a world of little social consequence and comparatively gradual historical change. Its conflicts and tyrannies assume petty dimensions and are in any event rather isolated from the great political issues of the day. This is an arena closer to nature than culture.

The assumption of a sharp and gendered line of demarcation between public and private spheres of experience has exerted a pervasive and recurring influence in Western thought. One may find the dichotomy in Aristotle as well as nineteenth-century Victorians. As recently as the 1970s and early 1980s the power of this assumption was evident in the way it could mark otherwise antagonistic frameworks. Notwithstanding the agenda embodied in the important slogan “The personal is political,” some of the most valuable and influential early contributions to modern feminist social science and history built their critical frameworks on the analysis of public/private and culture/nature splits and on the study of male control of the articulation between public and private domains.¹⁵ On the other side of the spectrum antifeminist diatribes ridiculed historical analysis of private matters as trivial and prurient. Women’s history became an example par excellence of the ways an explosion of interest in the everyday lives and social history of marginalized groups with little power had diverted historians from the great issues and men traditionally examined in political history.¹⁶ Insofar as social history remained conceptually apart from political history (a claim of only partial accuracy), the conservative critique raised a valid point, albeit in caricatured form. But it did so by reaffirming a public/private split and labeling one side of the divide trivial, rather than asking the more profound critical question, to what extent was the great divide itself an obsolete intellectual artifice? Even Michel Foucault, who did so much to extend our perception of power to virtually all arenas of human activity and speech, saw the invasion of interior life by totalizing power — a kind of dissolution of historical boundaries between public and private as regimes of public power and expertise invaded and objectified human body and soul—as a relatively recent historical creation, the very measure of modern tyranny.¹⁷ Only recently, since the mid-1980s, has there emerged a thick cluster of feminist works calling into serious question, on a theoretical as well as historical level, the very premises of the public/private demarcation.¹⁸

The story of María Teresa’s homicide melts the public and private spheres of experience into a single whole: the separation of public and private becomes contingent, a temporary condition subject to reversal depending on circumstances, a historically constructed and reversible moment in a process of oscillation that includes both fusion and separation. In this respect it echoes in concrete form the conceptual thrust of the newer wave of feminist history and theory. Recall the fusions of public politics and private domains that occurred in Texalpa despite José Marcelino’s initial efforts to keep his domestic quarrel private and despite María Micaela’s personal interest in prosecuting the murder of her daughter. The community’s male elders and officials assumed a right and responsibility to take on an adjudicating role in family quarrels, schisms, and violence precisely because matters intensely personal might affect the well-being of the community as a whole. Contributing tributaries might be lost, the necessary facade of community harmony might be broken, and community cohesion in the face of external intrusion might founder. When such circumstances arose, the connections between public and private well-being gave the community’s leaders a platform for init...