Crime Drama in Colonial Mexico

Normally when I think of law practices in the 1700's, I assume they were biased, unfair, and primitive. The negative connotations of the Inquisition and the role of the church in the trial and punishment of criminals makes it seem like the system must be corrupt. So I was somewhat surprised by the cases that we read of sexual crimes in colonial Mexico. Particularly the case of Catarina Maria and Juan Teioa. The complexities of the record and what actually took place in the proceedings reminded me of Law and Order or another of the crime shows that are so popular on television today.

I think the reason that these shows are so popular is that they have complex plots and mysterious outcomes, and at the same time show us a lot about our society and the way that different people act within it. Sometimes they display people that are considered "different" or outside of the normal confines of society, but often they tell stories of people that seem perfectly normal but have terrible experiences that cannot be explained without extensive investigation and exploration. The Latin American crime records are no different, containing information about the way things worked on a regular basis and what happened when someone came forward who did not fit with the typical attitude and structure of society.

The first important piece of information to be noted in this case is that the primary players are all Indians. Catarina Maria was an Indian woman, but was able to file a complaint on her own, without a father or brother doing it on her behalf. Juan, similarly, was given equal rights of trial and access to lawyers. His sister, also an Indian, was the most powerful witness in the case, and could give her testimony without corroboration from a man or a Spaniard. These facts alone show the law system to be less unfair than I would have assumed.

The story of these people seems just as complicated as a television episode as well. Catarina accuses Juan of rape, he claims she seduced him, his sister corroborates the point, other people discuss her sexual exploits in the past... And all of these revelations take place within the system of the courts, through formal testimony and documented statements. Certainly this goes beyond the quick, biased condemnations that are most often associated with the period. In doing show, it gives us evidence for looking at the motivations of people during this time, which were often no different than the desires that motivate people today.

For instance, we can ask what Catarina Maria's motivations were for turning Juan in. Her primary witness, she claimed, was Juan's sister, who ended up testifying against her by relating the contents of her love letters to Juan. Surely she would have known what the sister would say. Perhaps when her family discovered that she was no longer a virgin she accused Juan of rape to throw the blame off of herself, and they encouraged her to press charges. Regardless of her reasoning, the complexity of the case shows that women involved in sexual crimes in the colonial period were not just either an innocent victim or a whore, but could have complicated relationships which affected their sentencing in court.

Intentional Love

Patricia Seed's description of love in the colonial period reveals the heart and soul of their views of marriage and the way it changed. While in modern times we might think that love was not a factor in marriage several centuries ago, people at the time thought that love was extremely important, they just had a different concept of what love meant. It was inextricable with notions of honor and duty, and was tied to family obligations and expectations as well as individual emotion and desire. Furthermore, it effected the way that marriage relationships played out and the way that marriages were arranged to begin with.

In the early colonial period, when colonial society in Latin America was more focused on religion, marriage was most importantly seen as a form of honor and obedience to God. They were granted by the church and governed by the church, eventually becoming one of the Sacraments. Since a marriage was then involved in individual salvation, ideally both partners would be more committed to the guidelines for a successful union. The role that love played at that time was to validate the spiritual nature of a marriage and add to its religious justification. Spouses were instructed to love one another, and this love was displayed through an intentional commitment to the longevity of the marriage and pleasing one's partner.

"Love" remained a commitment even as marriage became more secularized. As wealth grew increasingly important to citizens of the Latin American colonies, unions were more commonly based on the union of finances and monetary holdings, instead of mutual acceptance and similarities in class and temperament. The state also took a lot of power away from the church, and the government now granted marriages and oversaw conflicts within them. However, love was still seen as important if the union were to survive, and it was thought to be shown through the responsibilities of a husband and wife. If a man upheld his honor by providing his wife with a comfortable life and protecting her reputation, that was a sign of his love for her. The love of a woman was displayed through faithfulness and the tasks that she performed within the home.

Basically, an honorable couple, whether joined by religious or financial concerns, would commit to love one another and grow more affectionate towards each other over time. The unions were not based on fleeting emotions or feelings that would not stand the trials of married life, but on an understood agreement that was to last a lifetime. Of course problems within marriages were still as numerous as they are today. People were not always content with their marriage partners, even if they had a positive opinion of their partner in the beginning of the relationship. When money became the most important aspect of a union, honorable conduct often took a lower priority. But I think their outlook on love and honor was probably a reasonable one. It took into account the true motivations for marriage, which were usually somewhat selfish and influenced by social norms instead of mutual regard. Yet they, in theory, vowed to be faithful to the union anyway, not only keeping up with their roles as a spouse, but earnestly seeking an affectionate relationship with their partner. It seems a much more honest attempt at a successful marriage, even though it was not necessarily more effective than our outlook on marriage today.

Chapter Seven of Indian Women in Early Mexico discusses the use of last wills and testaments in Mexica society. They were used by men and women alike to outline the inheritance of important family heirlooms and valuable possessions. The statistics given regarding these documents clearly show the unique situation of many Nahua people at the time, as they learned about Spanish culture and watched the effects of it on their own people.

One interesting aspect of these wills is their extensive use by women. In Spanish traditions (though not always in practice), women were not allowed to own property, but the Mexica valued the responsibilities of women, and the control of certain parts of land and possessions went along with their duties. Women usually left their wealth or holdings to their children, often to their daughters, in order to ensure that they would retain the rights promised them by the traditions of their people. The household goods that were often left to girls also helped teach them to value the traditional duties of a woman, and to expect the honor that their participation in society was supposed to give them.

The practice of writing wills was a Spanish one, and did not begin in Latin America until it was colonized. It would be easy to think, then, that the documents were drafted in order to please the conquistadors and conform to their society. But they were written in Nahuatl, which means they were meant for fellow natives to read and understand. It reminds me of the traditional Nahuatl dialogues, which were transcribed by a Dominican monk, but were intended for the education of the natives by their own leaders, and contained many praises of the old system, as well as references to the parallel gender system by which the Mexica society was structured. The wills, similarly, were a native adoption of a Spanish practice that they then used to serve their own motives, namely the preservation of traditions and society. The Spanish, after all, were vastly outnumbered by the natives in Latin America, so it was nearly impossible for them to spread their own culture as quickly as many people believe they did. They did not present a system that was infinitely better than the Mexica way of life, nor did they all spend much time trying to understand the native society. Consequently, the natives were able to retain much of their belief system, including their ideas about gender roles, by conforming the new Spanish practices to their traditional values.

The importance of these documents, then, comes both from their revelations about the preservation of gender and their revelations about the preservation of Nahua ideals in general. These natives were not ignorant or passive people. Though they are often portrayed as savages who practiced human sacrifice and were wiped out by the more educated Spanish, there were much broader motivations to their belief systems, based on their religion and their ideas about the order of the universe. Many of their attempts to pass these values through the generations were successful, which is why so much of the native culture remains prevalent in Latin America even in modern times.

The Commodity of Sex

The importance of credit to early modern Spaniards reveals much about the way that their economy and their society worked. The systems of trade based on trust and obligation emphasizes the importance of honor in Spanish culture and its influence on interactions between genders and classes. The general ideas of honor were attached to female chastity and male virility. The reputation of a Spanish woman was to be defended by her male family members at all costs, through the practice of dueling and other legal measures if necessary. This would certainly make it appear that sexual and gender identity was the most important component of honor to the Spanish at this time period. However, as Scott Taylor's article points out, the use of credit was just as important to the honor of men and women in early modern Spain as chastity was. The failure to pay a debt or honor a promise could bring about the same violence as an affront to virginity could. In fact, these were more common causes for such duels than slander or accusations of immorality. The entire economy was based largely on honor and the potential of one to repay his debt, and failure to uphold such promises could be damaging to many people. What is most interesting, though, is that in light of the importance of financial honor, the perception of sexual integrity seems to change. In fact, female virginity becomes almost a commodity that can be argued over much as the payment for any other product could be. While gender is important in the conception of honor, particularly among the elites, both men and women have other aspects involved in their social standing, as well as the ability to control such things. Due partly to the militaristic emphasis of the Reconquista, the fight for one's integrity and the integrity of family members was a part of life for men and women, and involved every aspect of one's reputation, not just the acceptable characteristics of gender.

Reasons for Slavery

In modern times, with the knowledge that we have about the horrors of slavery, it doesn't seem that it could in any way be reconciled with a Christian worldview. At the time of the slave trade, however, Europeans who bought, sold, and owned slaves found excuses for doing so in the Bible. The very Scriptures that would eventually be used in the cause of abolition were misconstrued in order to support human trafficking and violence to unknown people groups. The professed rationale and the true motives behind this terrible enterprise reveal a lot about the Europeans who developed the slave trade and the effect it had on African slaves in South America.

The Europeans looking for justification for slavery often claimed that, much as they were "civilizing" the natives that they encountered in the Americas by changing their culture and religion, they were helping the slaves by bringing them to a New World and teaching them about Christianity. This might have given some comfort to nobles who had concerns about the practice. However, the slave trade began as purely a financial venture, used to serve the needs of the Portuguese on their sugar plantations and other ventures that required more human labor than they could provide. Racial dynamics were not necessarily involved in the original capture of African slaves. In fact, African tribes helped the Portuguese by trading enemy prisoners for European products. While the Portuguese felt themselves superior to the Africans, it was as much due to their access to modern weapons and military power as it was to supremest ideas of religion and societal interactions. They merely understood that slaves taken out of their home to an unfamiliar world would be easier to subdue than those forced to work in their native environments.

While Africans brought to North and South America had similar experiences in their capture and transportation across the Atlantic, the cultures that they developed were surprisingly different. The number of slaves sold in Latin America was enormous compared to the number sold in the North, especially since the slave trade came to South America and the Caribbean about a century before the first slaves arrived in Jamestown. Due to the size of the African population in South America, the slaves retained more of their African culture, and relied perhaps even more heavily than before on the mystical, magical elements of their religions and societal interactions as a way of coping with the atrocities they faced. Even as generations were born in the Americas, this retention of African sensibilities affected the way the slaves interacted with the other people groups in Latin America and led to a unique subculture that has lasted into modern times

The "Congratulations to a Married Couple" written by Tetzcoco nobles shows both the influence of the Spanish and the heritage of the Nahua people. The intent was to standardize the expectations of people who considered themselves nobility. Part of this process involved the idealization of traditional pagan systems, but these were now combined with the value system of the Franciscan monks and the Spanish nobles who were beginning to influence the Nahua. Both the native and Spanish nobility felt that they were united by class similarities, so they were willing to modify elements of their cultures so that they could form mutually beneficial relationships.

One recurring element in the text is references to the God of the Catholic Spanish, as well as the Holy Mother and the sacraments. Though the Nahua had their own deities prior to the arrival of the Spanish, they were largely able to adapt their own systems of worship to the Catholic system in order to please the Franciscan monks and conquistadors. This made religion another unifying factor for the nobles, and this dialogue uses such imagery in order to emphasize the uniformity of the blended society.

The groom is encouraged to work on the provisions needed in the household and to constantly be alert to the needs of those around him. Even as he sleeps he is charged with protecting his family at all costs and ensuring their happiness. This responsibility is similar to the traditional roles of Nahua men. Going to war to gain worth and glory was the way they supported their families and their standing in the community. Even though the Spanish discouraged war and many of the blood sacrifices that followed the capture of prisoners, the Nahua retained the symbolic nature of their gender roles.

The bride's advice is to work tirelessly in the home to keep it clean and hospitable for her family and community. She is also responsible for the food and drink that anyone in the household needs, as well as the duties of spinning and weaving. These had been women's responsibilities throughout Nahua history, and while the Spanish usually thought of these jobs as acts of servitude performed by women as weaker creatures, the natives saw them as a way for women to wage their own war against chaos and evil spirits. So the translation of a similar worldview was not always based on the same motivations, but allowed the two cultures to merge.

One important thing to keep in mind about these dialogues is that they were a guideline for a new noble culture. Those who wrote them were hoping to unite the Spanish and Nahua nobility to increase their own power and avoid serious conflict with the newcomers. This does not mean, however, that all of the natives agreed with these new principles. They were merely an ideal guideline for interactions based on the ancient structures of Nahua society and the traditional ideals of the colonizing Spanish. But they do show how the colonial society developed in ancient Mexican cultures and the effect the changes had on the native peoples.

Although it seems that the parallelism of the Incan culture is vastly different from our own, there are many similarities. In the modern deconstruction of gender conventions, writers like Derrida have focused on the binary system of gender that is prevalent in western culture, their primary criticism being that, as we discussed, neither gender can be defined without reference to its differences from the other. Their proposed solution was a redefining of gender that would include broader definitions of the term. Unfortunately, our society has not, in general, moved very far beyond traditional conceptions.
The Incans, on the other hand, crafted a society that embraced the perceived differences between men and women and crafted a society based on the binary nature of gender. Their parallel belief system was nearly equal in its treatment of men and women, giving them each a hierarchical system according to class, with a male and female ruler at the top of society. Both genders had assigned tasks to further the success of their ayllu, and it could be argued that neither set of jobs was more difficult than the other. They embraced the fact that women were made for childbirth and men were made for protection and provision, but they did not see either role as more or less necessary than the other.
However, the system of convents described in the article by Garcilaso de la Vega does not seem to fit in this parallel scheme, since it involved only women. The virgins that were chosen for seclusion lived their lives without contact with the outside world, other than visits from the Coya and her servants. They were not given a choice in this fate, but they were revered as special servants of the huacas and the society in general, and the goods they produced were seen as more prestigious than normal ones.
When the Spanish arrived, the class distinctions that already existed within Incan society were exaggerated because of the way they fit into the social structures of the colonizers. The Spanish adventurers aligned themselves with the Incan nobles because they felt that their similarities in class standing outweighed their ethnic differences. For this reason, noble Incan women were often respected by the Spanish as potential partners, and their marriages were used as political alliances. This fit into the parallel structure of the Incans in a sense, but the male domination of the Spanish slowly began to affect this mixed culture.
Even though the Incan culture was still a binary definition of gender, it was in many ways more advanced than our own. The Incans celebrated the differences between men and women, and created a system of harmony. They also allocated specific jobs for women that allowed them to have a structured hierarchy within their own gender and a method of sustaining themselves and their families. This was a great help to the women as they began to interact with the Spanish, because they could hold their own and garner respect from men who were used to women being placed in roles of submissiveness and subjection.