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The Heart in the Glass Jar
Love Letters, Bodies, and the Law in Mexico
By William E. French UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8416-6
CHAPTER 1
Section One
The Letter of the Law
Having yielded to their desires as well as to the strong arms of the brothers O., the Martínez sisters were spirited out of their parental home in Balleza, a relatively populous agricultural municipality within the Parral mining district in Chihuahua, one night during the dry season in 1901. Unlike many fathers who found themselves in similar situations, their father, having denied his permission for his underage daughters to marry, stubbornly refused to change his mind after their abduction. Rejecting the seeming fait accompli of their elopement, he recovered his daughters, deposited them in a respectable home for safekeeping, and then sought to recoup family honor by denouncing the brothers before judicial authorities. Much like his honor, however, the walls of their new house of detention were soon breached. Promising marriage, one brother again abducted a Martínez sister (although a different one than he had the previous time) with what she stated to be her full consent and cooperation and the complete absence of violence. Brought yet again before judicial authorities, he admitted that, while he had done something wrong, his actions were justified as they had been in aid of a worthwhile goal, that of marriage. How could these acts have constituted a crime, the Martínez woman added, when she herself had set the time and date for her abduction to take place? By contrast, in an unrelated incident that had taken place a few years earlier, when another young woman, aged fifteen and from the same district, changed her mind shortly after leaving the parental home to accompany her suitor, things quickly turned violent. Rather than allowing her to return, she testified, her suitor had grabbed her by the arm and, threatening her with a knife, forced her to accompany him into an empty house where, fearful of being beaten or worse, she did not resist, she told the court, while he sexually assaulted her. No promise of marriage was formally offered and none took place.
Despite the differences in intent, circumstances, and outcome, the men mentioned in the two above examples (with the exception of Señor Martínez, the father of the underage daughters) appeared before judicial officials to answer for the same crime, that of rapto. It is in the commission of this and related crimes that the love letters that form the basis of the present book came to be part of the archive of the judicial system in Chihuahua, Mexico. In crimes like that involving the Martínez family—those having to do with the unauthorized removal of a young woman from the household of her parents or guardians and, often, with the subsequent initiation of sexual relations, referred to, respectively, as the crimes of rapto and estupro (discussed further below)—love letters could serve as a form of legal proof and, thus, enter into the official record as evidence of a written promise of marriage from a man over the age of majority to a young woman. Significantly, the love letters that form part of the evidentiary base in these types of cases, comprising about half of all the letters consulted for the writing of this book, are written exclusively by men.
In the second category of cases, more akin to the second scenario outlined above, love letters written by women are present, lamentably. Here, the good fortune of the historian in having such a source available for consultation is only made possible through the horrific end suffered by these women at the hands of their suitors. Their relationships over, these particular suitors, like many others, one imagines, met one last time to return the love letters each had written to the other. In contrast to most failed courtships, however, here the man killed the woman before committing suicide, usually by turning a gun on himself; arriving at the scene of the crime, judicial officials collected all the letters they encountered as part of their investigations, thus preserving the letters by entering them into the official record.
Given the narrowly defined circumstances under which love letters came to be deployed as evidence in judicial procedures and, arguably, the singular nature of the cases concerned with murder-suicide, one begins to see how understanding the accident of their availability might be important to the ways we read, understand, and draw conclusions from such sources. Their presence in the archive makes apparent that many other letters must also have existed, those exchanged by men and women whose courtships proceeded relatively smoothly to marriage, for example, or those who managed to resolve their disagreements or disputes without entangling themselves in legal proceedings, or even those for whom marriage was not a particularly desirable or even realistic option. It forces us to ask questions about the circumstances that compelled people, particularly young women and their parents or guardians, even to have taken recourse to the law. How might they have weighed the disadvantages of such public disclosure of their lives, often linked to the beginning of sexual activity, against the necessity of avoiding private misfortune, such as the costs of raising a child alone or the possible diminishment of one's odds in the marriage lottery, should they aspire to take their chances in it at some later date? Alongside this multitude of personal predilections and variously constrained options must be placed the agenda of the law itself; hardly innocent, the judicial system was fully implicated in various strategies through which rule was accomplished, especially through the teaching of civic values and the enunciation and policing of various class, gender, ethnic, sexual, and other hierarchies.
The demands of the judicial system also required those involved in its formal proceedings to construct narratives about themselves as well as about their relationships, actions, and expectations. This was the case for women and men, children and their parents. As a result, women's statements to judicial officials form a central part of each of these proceedings, as do those of their suitors and parents or guardians. From these narratives, we can approach an understanding not only of the requirements of the judicial system but also of the dynamics of courtship itself, its tensions, both intergenerational and between men and women, engendered by multiple negotiations over resources and sexuality; its lived intensity as a time of promises; and its dangers, potentially capable of altering the trajectory of young lives. The prominence of the stories men and women spun before the court in shaping our understanding of courtship and the role of love letters in it makes it all the more imperative to begin with a consideration of how the structure, tone, and content of such narratives, or legal scripts, performed in front of judicial authorities might be best seen as examples of "fiction in the archives."
In a similar manner, the judicial system itself was preoccupied with constructing and enforcing categories and personas. At each step in the judicial procedure in such crimes and around which the present section has been organized—beginning with the formal complaint and then moving, in the following order, to the questioning of the principals and witnesses, the gathering of evidence, the submission of medical reports and love letters, to the formal petition desisting from the complaint or the judgment, if there was one—judicial officials interested themselves in determining the legal personalities or judicial personas of those involved. Only after doing so did officials move to establish whether or not the acts they heard being recounted before them satisfied the legal criteria for the commission of the various crimes of rapto, estupro, and violación as set out in the criminal codes that will be discussed shortly. Understanding how the judicial system, like any process that generates an archive, gave shape to the material that comes to be located in it helps highlight the highly mediated nature of such material as well as the need to take great care in determining even the kinds of conclusions that can be reached by using such sources. Moreover, as for the law, only certain categories of individuals and families, as you will see, merited its consideration. As it is not possible to know from the documents that form the judicial archives the links, if any, that existed between judicial officials and those appearing before them or the degree of enthusiasm with which various cases were processed, little else other than the letter of the law seemed to matter.
Codes and Procedures
Far from boring or mundane, the task of drafting the first penal code for an independent Mexico must have seemed, to its framers, to have placed them at the very apogee of Mexican liberalism and patriotic virtue. Formed in 1862, shortly after Melchor Ocampo's death by firing squad, and composed of men of the "Benito Juárez generation," the commission charged with its writing had had time to complete only one book of revisions to the hodgepodge of colonial-era laws before its work was interrupted by foreign invasion. Having defeated Emperor Maximilian by mid-1867, victorious liberals wasted little time reconstituting the commission; by September, 1868, commission members were back, hard at work on the code. As Antonio Martínez de Castro, the head of the commission, glossed it—implicitly criticizing the recently deposed emperor through reference to a longer period of imperial rule, that imposed by Spain—ancient Spanish laws still in force in Mexico dated from a different era, one characterized by ignorance and absolutism. They were no longer acceptable in a Mexico that was "independent, republican, and democratic," where equality was a foundational principle, among a people who enjoyed "liberties and rights that weren't even known in the time of Don Alonso the Wise."
Along with representing the triumph of liberty over tyranny as well as republicanism over absolutism, the new penal code was also meant to serve as a persuasive argument for Mexico's entry into a new club, that of modern nations, each distinguished by their own modern criminal code. For commission members, Spain, Portugal, and France, among other nations, provided important points of reference and marked Mexico as a participant in a global conversation concerning the crafting of modern judicial structures. Far from a mere copy, however, Mexico's new code, although it would come to contain many of the same dispositions as those found in other modern codes, would be modified to fit Mexico's specific circumstances. While the Portuguese code mandated, for example, that if the person responsible for rapto (abduction), estupro (the initiation of sexual relations), or violación (rape) offered to marry the woman whom he had offended and she refused without a legitimate motive, no penalty would be applied. This appeared to be a particularly dangerous precept for framers of the Mexican code, one that very well might serve as a stimulus to such behavior rather than a deterrent. After all, explained Martínez de Castro, if a man motivated either by interest or passion wanted to marry a woman, all he had to do, no matter how loathsome she found him, was to remove her from parental control and initiate sexual relations. Once apprehended, if he offered to marry her, there were only two possible outcomes: she could agree to marry him, thus achieving his original goal, or, if she refused, he would be free to go with no legal consequence for his action. You will see below how the framers of the Mexican code dealt with these and other concerns in such cases.
Taking three years to complete their work, commission members delivered the new penal code to Mexican legislators for their approval in late 1871, to come into effect in 1872. Initially meant to be restricted in its jurisdiction to the Federal District and the Territory of Baja California, with national application limited to crimes against the federation, the 1871 Penal Code, as it has come to be known, was subsequently approved by many of the Mexican states with little or no modification. In the state of Chihuahua, with which this book is concerned, the 1871 Penal Code was adopted, with some modifications, in 1883 and then superseded in 1905 when the state, under Interim Governor Enrique C. Creel, decreed its own penal code, known as the 1905 Penal Code of the Free and Sovereign State of Chihuahua. The two codes, national and state, were similar in organization—both were divided into four parts, or books, with the first book concerned with criminal responsibility and the application of punishment, the second with civil responsibilities deriving from crimes, the third with specific crimes, and the fourth with various categories of misdemeanors. The following year, that is, in 1906, the Constitutional Congress of Chihuahua decreed its own code of criminal proceedings in which it set out, in some fourteen chapters, the general principles for the administration of justice, covering everything from the organization and responsibilities of the judicial police to the form that criminal judicial procedures were to follow to the execution of sentences. At the national level (and in some states) the 1871 Penal Code remained in force until the adoption of a new penal code in 1929. Yet despite the attempt to draft a code that would fit Mexico's changed circumstances of the late 1920s, this code, the subject of immediate criticism, was replaced by yet another new penal code promulgated in 1931, which was not only more enduring but was also meant to serve as a model for all such state codes.
Most relevant for the purposes of the present study, the replacement, in 1905, of the 1871 Federal District penal code with that of the state meant that the cases we are considering as a single body of documents, stretching from the 1880s to the 1920s, were actually adjudicated under two different criminal codes. However, too much should not be made of this change. The dominant assumptions and values that structure the codes as well as the definitions of the crimes with which we are concerned, particularly rapto and estupro, remained more or less the same. In both codes, for example, rapto and estupro were delineated in the third part or book, that dedicated to specific crimes. Covering a wide array of offenses grouped into a number of sections ranging from crimes against property to those, variously, against individuals, public health, public order, and internal security, the third book in both codes also contained a section entitled "Crimes against the order of families, public morality or good customs," and it is in this section where the crimes of rapto and estupro can be found, along with offenses against the civil state of persons, against decency, outrages to public morality or good customs, the corruption of minors, rape, adultery, bigamy, and the public encouragement of crime.
Although some Mexican legal scholars in the twentieth century would subsequently describe lumping together such diverse infractions as those found in "Crimes against the order of families, public morality or good customs" as lacking in the principles of sound legal methodology, for those drafting the codes the section was far from a poorly organized collection of random offenses. Rather, shared assumptions concerning the nature of authority, the place of the family as an entity within liberal law, and the importance of morality in determining who qualified for protection under the law, among other things, provided for lawmakers a powerful underlying logic that gave coherence to the section. At the most fundamental level, the codes enforce a certain vision of morality, one in which moral behavior in public, defined in the sections of the code dealing with public morality, good customs, and the sanctions against the public encouragement of crime, on the one hand, and the bolstering of the legal authority of a certain kind of family, as set out in the crimes of rapto, estupro, adultery, bigamy, crimes against the civil state of persons, and the "improper" acquisition of the "rights of family," on the other, are seen as related, even complementary categories. Linking the two was a metaphorical bond that seemed to make of family and society interchangeable concepts, or the first a microcosm of the second. While I discuss the type of family the code envisioned at greater length below, at this point it is sufficient to stress that, in the face of discussion about the relationship between liberalism and individualism, and in view of attention paid to the attempts to incorporate individual rights and guarantees into nineteenth-century law, the "official family"—that is, the kind recognized by drafters of these codes—must be acknowledged, alongside the "individual," as an important fictive addressee of much nineteenth-century liberal legislation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Heart in the Glass Jar by William E. French. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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