The Case of the Ugly Suitor and Other Histories of Love, Gender, and Nation in Buenos Aires, 1776-1870 (review)

Although the year 1810 marks the birth of the Argentine nation, historians continue to point out the persistence of colonial-era social attitudes, hierarchies, and relations well into the modern era. With regard to the legal realm, both in its ideological and its applied aspects, fertile scholarship is beginning to emerge among Latin Americanists that raises questions about changes and continuities in postcolonial law along with the effects on subjects of the nation-state, most interestingly on women, the poor, homosexuals and the intersexed, and other "subalterns." For instance, in Latin America the massive collection of laws known as the Siete Partidas (an enormous body of legal instructions periodically revised and renewed by the Spanish king) was left largely untouched by early-nineteenth-century revolutionaries and reformers. This new direction in Latin American historiography is significant, among other reasons, for its questioning of a triumphalist liberal view championed by mid- and late-nineteenth-century intellectuals and politicians and repeated by generations thereafter that saw a clean break between an enlightened modern period and a "backward" colonial past. The literature further shows that the emphasis on supposed change from previous eras was used to justify an ambitious set of reforms proposed, and carried out to varying extents, by dominant liberal political factions determined to advance their nations along what they perceived to be progressive lines.

Jeffrey M. Shumway, in his engaging study of Argentine society in the years preceding and following independence, takes up an important component: the slow and uneven transition to modern attitudes about marriage and family life as reflected in certain types of legal cases. Covering a period of about a century, he documents how legal decisions reflected many social customs from earlier eras, among them "patriarchal power, morality, honor, and ideas about marriage," that carried over into the early national period (22). Shumway focuses in particular on developments in the capital city of Buenos Aires, providing a subtle analysis of the changes as well as the continuities. In sum, Shumway describes for us the slow dawning of modern sensibilities about sex, love, marriage, and free will in matters of marriage and family among a variety of characters from all walks of life.

Shumway states early on in The Ugly Suitor that his goal is to tell, through the lens of court trials around marriage and family matters, the "real stories about the everyday family life of men and women, parents and children, and lovers and friends" (2) in late colonial and early national Buenos Aires. He furthermore suggests that these stories do more than promise to amuse the reader, that "on another level they help illuminate the larger history of the developing Argentine nation as it emerged from the shadow of Spanish colonialism to take its place among the independent republics of the Americas" (5). After a chapter describing Buenos Aires and its late-eighteenth-century milieu, Shumway proceeds to recount, in five brief and lively chapters, the competing ideas about family structure, including attitudes toward parental authority and children's status; free will and individual rights, especially regarding marriage choice; racial hierarchy and interracial marriage; and gender roles. In each chapter he weaves stories, culled largely from court cases, to illustrate the stubborn tenacity of many ideas from the preindependence era and the slow transformation of others.

Court records such as child custody cases and disensos, in which children contested parental authority over choice of marriage partner, form the bulk of sources for this book. Shumway also analyzes laws and legal decrees such as the Spanish-origin Siete Partidas and the Pragmatic on Marriage; legal dissertations from the University of Buenos Aires; and a variety of newspapers and publications from the period in question. That the majority of his source material comes from court trials makes sense, as Shumway seeks to find the...