Suchergebnisse

Introduction: contextualizing race, gender, and religion in the new world / Nora E. Jaffary -- Frontiers -- Women as go-betweens? Patterns in sixteenth-century Brazil / Alida C. Metcalf -- Gender and violence: conquest, conversion, and culture on New Spain's imperial frontier / Bruce A. Erickson -- The very sinews of a new colony: demographic determinism and the history of early Georgia women / Ben Marsh -- Female religious -- The convent as missionary in seventeenth-century France / Susan Broomhall -- "Although I am black, I am beautiful": Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, Black Carmelite of Puebla / Joan C. Bristol -- Andean women in religion: beatas, "deceny", and the defense of honor in colonial Cuzco / Kathryn Burns -- Race mixing -- Incest, sexual virtue, and social mobility in late colonial Mexico, / Nora E. Jaffary -- "An empire founded on libertinage": the mulatresse and colonial anxiety in Saint Domingue / Yvonne Fabella -- Mediating Mackinac: métis women's cultural persistence in the upper Great Lakes / Bethany Fleming -- Networks -- Circuits of knowledge among women in early-seventeenth-century Lima / Nancy E. van Deusen -- Waters of faith, currents of freedom: gender, religion, and ethnicity in inter-imperial trade between Curaçao and Tierra Firme / Linda M. Rupert -- Afterword: women in the Atlantic world / Patricia Seed

Colonial authorities prosecuted surprisingly few women for the crimes of abortion and infanticide in viceregal Mexico. Although criminal courts tried hundreds of such cases in the nineteenth century, only a handful of trials survive from Mexico's colonial era. This article examines criminal and inquisition records, jurisprudence, and medical texts to try to explain this discrepancy. The available evidence suggests that women in colonial Mexico did commit infanticide and abortion much more frequently than the surviving documentary record implies but that neither their peers nor courts viewed the crimes as harshly as they would in later periods. Women successfully concealed the crimes, the public declined to view these acts as criminal, and criminal courts treated them with leniency. Justices, members of the public, and mothers themselves privileged other factors, particularly fiscal concerns and the maintenance of codes of female honor, above a concern with the crimes of infanticide and abortion.

AbstractPast studies of prostitution have mislabelled Mexican women as prostitutes when it is not clear that they had engaged in transactional sex. Here, we examine the history of prostitution between 1750 and 1865, detailing both legal frameworks and judicial evidence to address the reasons for the inflation of prostitution's presence in Mexico. These sources reveal that the exaggeration of prostitution's presence is explained by the fact that prostitution was often associated with another legal category – amancebamiento (cohabitation), and that female cohabiters were recreated in the minds of court officials and other observers when their 'scanadalous' behaviour rendered them prostitutes.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Maps -- Acknowledgments -- Map 1: Locations Featured in Documents -- Introduction -- Map 2: Transatlantic & Transpacific Journeys -- 1: Grant of Tacuba by Hernán Cortés to Isabel Moctezuma, Firstborn Daughter of Moctezuma II and Her Last Will and Testament (Mexico City, 1526, 1550) -- 2: Beatríz, India's, Lawsuit for Freedom from Slavery (Castile, Spain, 1558-1574) -- 3: Women's Wills (Potosí, 1577 and 1601 -- La Plata, 1598 and 1658) -- 4: Midwife Francisca Díaz's Petition to Return to Mexico (Seville, 1566) -- 5: Life and Love in Women's Letters to Spouses (Spain and Mexico, 1567-1576) -- Map 3: Letters Sent between Spouses and Lovers -- 6: Mothers and Wives in Labor Agreements (Arequipa, 1590 -- La Plata, 1602 -- and Potosí, 1571 and 1659) -- 7: Criminal Complaint by Angela de Palacios on Behalf of Her Daughter, Leonor Arias (Potosí, 1584) -- 8: Bárbara López, India, Accuses Her Husband of Abuse (Santa Fe, 1612) -- 9: Sor Ana's Travel Excerpt from Mexico to Manila (Mexico and Manila, 1620) -- 10: The Spiritual Diary of an Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Úrsula de Jesús (Lima, 1647-1661) -- 11: Isabel Hernández, Midwife and Healer, Appears before the Inquisition (Mexico, 1652) -- 12: Don Juan de Vargas y Orellana Accuses His Wife doña Francisca de Marquina of Abortion (Potosí, 1703) -- 13: Founding Corpus Christi, a Convent for Indigenous Women (Mexico City, 1723) -- 14: An African Woman Petitions for Freedom in a Colonial Brazilian Mining Town (Vila Rica, 1766) -- 15: Isabel Victoria García Sues the Hacienda del Trapiche over Land Ownership (Pamplona, Colombia, 1777) -- 16: Between Heaven and Earth: Thereza de Jesús Maria Jozé's Last Will and Testament (Cachoeira, Bahia, 1777) -- 17: Natividad, Negra, Sues Her Owner for Freedom (Lima, 1792) -- 18: A Colonial Cross-Dresser (Mexico, 1796)