Female Citizens, Patriarchs, and the Law in Venezuela examines the effects that liberalism had on gender relations in the process of state formation in Caracas from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century. The 1811 Venezuelan constitution granted everyone in the abstract, including women, the right to be citizens and equals, but at the same time permitted the continued use of older Spanish civil laws that accorded women inferior status and granted greater authority to male heads of households. Invoking citizenship for their own protection and that of their loved ones, some women went to...

Pawning was the most common credit mechanism in Mexico City in the nineteenth century. A diverse, largely female pawning clientele from lower- and middle-class households regularly secured small consumption loans by hocking household goods. A two-tiered sector of public and private pawnbrokers provided collateral credit. Rather than just providing emergency subsistence for the poor, pawnbroking facilitated consumption by Creole and mestizo middle sectors of Mexican society and enhanced identity formation for those in middling households by allowing them to cash in on material investments to...

White Slavery and Mothers Alive and Dead brings together a diverse set of essays exploring topics ranging from public health and child welfare to criminality and industrialization. What the essays have in common is their gendered connection to work, family, and the rise of increasingly interventionist nation-states in Latin America, and particularly in Argentina. Donna J. Guy first looks at Latin American women from a general and international perspective. She explores which paradigms are most useful in studying gender history in Latin America. She also addresses the evolution of the...

Mexican Karismata chronicles the life of Francisca de los Angeles (1674-1744), the daughter of a poor Creole mother and mestizo father who became a renowned holy woman in her native city of Queretaro, Mexico, during the high Baroque period. As a precocious young visionary and later as the headmistress of an important religious institution for women, Francisca actively partook in the project to revitalize the Catholic cult in New Spain's northern regions led by her mentors, the Spanish missionaries of the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith. Her copious correspondence,...

In August 1960 the publication of Quarto de Despejo (Child of the Dark) created a sensation in Brazil and in the rest of the world as it appeared in translations in fourteen languages. That diary of a poor black woman from a favela on the outskirts of Sao Paulo became the best-selling book in Brazilian history. In it, Carolina Maria de Jesus chronicled her life as an unemployed, single parent of three children, eking out a precarious existence selling scrap paper and other detritus found in the city streets. She described how she wrote at night on the scavenged scraps. Her...

This innovative study considers how approximately seven thousand male graduates of law came to understand themselves as having a legitimate claim to authority over nineteenth-century Brazilian society during their transition from boyhood to manhood.

While pursuing their traditional studies at Brazil's two law schools, the students devoted much of their energies to theater and literature in an effort to improve their powers of public speaking and written persuasion. These newly minted lawyers quickly became the magistrates, bureaucrats, local and national politicians, diplomats, and cabinet...

In 1840 Gumerscindo Arroyo hoped to marry Francisca Canicoba, but her father forbade it. Consequently, Francisca took her father to court for permission to marry, where he objected on the grounds that Arroyo was simply too ugly. In the courtrooms of nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, children battled parents in order to fulfill their romantic desires and marry the mate of their choice. Parents and guardians also struggled for custody of young children, which some did out of love while others were greedy for child labor. In courtrooms and elsewhere, women challenged their traditional status as...

False Mystics provides a history of popular religion, race, and gender in colonial Mexico focusing on questions of spiritual and social rebellion and conformity. Nora E. Jaffary examines more than one hundred trials of "false mystics" whom the Mexican Inquisition prosecuted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the accused experienced many of the same phenomena as bona fide mystics-visions, sacred illness, and bouts of demonic possession-the Mexican tribunal condemned them nevertheless. False Mystics examines why the Catholic church viewed the accused as deviants and argues that...

When Porfirio Diaz extended his modernization initiative in Mexico to the administration of public welfare, the families and especially the children of the urban poor became a government concern. Reforming the poor through work and by bolstering Mexico s emerging middle class were central to the government s goals of order and progress. But Porfirian policies linking families and work often endangered the children they were supposed to protect, especially when state welfare institutions became involved in the shadowy traffic of child labor. The Mexican Revolution, which followed, generated an...