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  • Runaway Daughters: Seduction, Elopement, and Honor in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
  • Sonya Lipsett-Rivera
Runaway Daughters: Seduction, Elopement, and Honor in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. By Kathryn A. Sloan. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. Pp. xi, 244. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.95 paper.

Mexican couples had a long tradition of circumventing the rituals of parental approval for their marriage by means of rapto. This procedure can be defined as the abduction of a woman by physical force or violence in order to satisfy her suitor’s carnal desires. In order to meet the legal designation, the woman had to be sixteen years of age or younger and a virgin. Along with some previous studies, Katherine Sloan shows many of the young women were willing participants in these “abductions.” They used their extraction from the parental home as a way to force consent [End Page 126] to a desired union that parents had previously opposed. By staining the young girl’s honor—the implication was that by spending the night with a man, she had lost her virginity—the onus on the parents was to repair this besmirching by allowing it to be covered over by marriage. Not all raptos followed the scenario of the willing abductee; as Sloan explains these were at times veritable acts of violence to which no amount of honor-repair could convince daughter or parents into a marriage.

Sloan’s study is primarily based on cases presented to judges in Oaxaca on the crime of rapto but she also supports her analysis with a myriad of other types of sources. Most interesting is her use of the popular literature of the time: broadsheets and chap books, some beautifully illustrated by the celebrated artist José Guadalupe Posada. These texts related sensational crimes—daughters who murdered their parents in cold blood or sons who turned on their fathers. The common theme was of filial obedience and gratitude overturned and rejected. They show a prevailing anxiety in the nineteenth century about a perceived increasing independence of offspring which was relevant to rapto because in its most common form (the willing abductee) it represented a defiance of parental authority. Sloan reproduces several of these lushly illustrated broadsheets which, along with the amazing cover art, make this study pleasing to the eye.

The book focuses on the nineteenth century when Mexico was defining itself as a nation, but its organization is not chronological but thematic. Sloan examines rapto from many different perspectives: cultural, community norms, and legal. Her discussion of the way that young men and women interacted with the legal system and the law provides a sense of how they understood the law and manipulated it to advance their cause. Young women, for example, consistently spoke of abusive mothers when they were brought before the authorities because such treatment was a legal rationale for breaking the bonds of parental authority. Men, on the other hand, weaseled out of their promise of marriage by maintaining that their erstwhile fiancées were not, in fact, virgins.

Sloan has a chapter on sexual honor, but she also refers to honor throughout the book. She uses honor as a societal norm that was constructed according to local values and was an inherent, inseparable part of daily life. As the study of honor progresses it will take its place in this way— as an accepted, normal part of the study of pre-industrial societies just as gender has become an integral part of historical analysis. Sloan also gives a feel for the daily life of nineteenth-century Oaxaqueños. She recounts how they met and courted, to what lengths they went in order to fulfill their desires and how they interacted with their parents, their neighbors and their friends. She provides an intriguing analysis of the symbolic culture around rapto—for example, when a man abducted a woman he usually either wrapped her in his serape or pulled her either by the braids or by her rebozo.

This book will clearly find an audience among specialists but it is so well-written that it has a lot to offer the non-specialist. I hope that it will be adopted for upper...

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