Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America

Abstract

This collection of essays examines relations between the law and concepts of honor, status, and modernity in Latin America from the shaky triumph of political independence and liberal ideologies in the early nineteenth century through the rise of nationalist challenges to liberalism in the 1930s.Colonial Latin Americans had been all but obsessed with honor and status, and the Crown passed many laws to regulate these attributes through the final decades of the eighteenth century.Modernity was the obsession of the professional and political elites who eventually came to power in postindependence republics and enacted legal reforms they hoped would shake off the weight of their colonial heritage.In theory, liberals sought to abolish what they considered the outmoded concept of birthright as the legitimate foundation of authority, replacing it with notions of representative forms of government and judicial equality.In practice, most of them were equally or more concerned with establishing modern, generally capitalist, forms of social control without destroying existing social hierarchies.By connecting these liberal projects with popular understandings of honor, status, law, and modernity, this volume sheds new light on broad changes and continuities in the region as a whole over the course of what historians often call the ''long nineteenth century.''Although each essay presented here focuses on a particular historical setting, a remarkably coherent set of themes emerges when the essays are read together: the rise of liberal ideologies, shifting ideas about public and private spheres, the growing intervention of the state in defining and arbitrating individual reputations, and the enduring role of patriarchyand its corollary, paternalism-in apportioning both honor and legal

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