Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (review)

Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America. By Ann Twinam. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. 447. $60.00 (cloth).

In this study, Ann Twinam discusses Bourbon social policy between 1720 and 1820 through the stories of a group of individuals who lived within the Spanish empire and tried, with varying degrees of success, to negotiate its social geography and political structure. This book is a valuable resource for those who are interested in the daily lives and mentalities of eighteenth-century elites in colonial Spanish America, as well as for those interested in imperial policy. Twinam's excellent use of case studies to illustrate her points begins on the very first page, where she relates the story of Gabriel Muñoz of Medellín, the illegitimate son of a powerful man, who started a lawsuit in 1787 to force an acquaintance to address him with the honorific "Don" and who eventually applied to the Council of the Indies for an official decree of legitimation. The book goes on to report the concerns of many other elite men and women who tried legally to change the status of their births, those of their children, and even those of their dead ancestors. We get a sense of the ways that colonial elites formed relationships, constituted and understood the ties of love, family, and friendship, and identified themselves and their positions in local society and the imperial structure. These personal histories function on many levels. Twinam uses them to make important arguments about the character of the family, sexuality, and social mobility, as well as the history of Bourbon rule and the effects of Bourbon social legislation on people in the colonies.

The basis for Twinam's study is a set of 244 cases from all over Spanish America in which people petitioned the Cámara de Gracias y Justicia, a subcouncil of the Council of the Indies, to legitimate themselves or their family members. Almost all of these petitioners were white members of local elites who felt that they or their children were deprived of their natural privileges because of the circumstances of their births. Twinam found these petitions, as well as background material on individual petitioners, in Spanish and Latin American archives, and analyzed them using a variety of quantitative and qualitative techniques. Although, as Twinam acknowledges, the statistics drawn from applications for legitimation do not necessarily reflect demographic reality, she uses them to great effect to point to areas for further research and to bolster her claims about the representativeness of particular cases. She provides numerous tables and appendices to support her conclusions. Twinam's broad focus on the Spanish-American empire adds an important element to previous historical works on gender, sexuality, and illegitimacy in colonial Latin America, which have focused more narrowly on specific areas within the region. Yet, as Twinam is quick to note, the nature of the gracias al sacar cases necessarily limits the social focus to elites.

If their petitions were approved, illegitimates or their families would then be allowed to buy a cédula de gracias al sacar, a decree which made them legitimate. In Spain and its colonies, legitimacy and the related limpieza de sangre (blood that was clean, or free from the taint of non-Christian or nonwhite ancestry), were required in order to have honor. Honor was necessary in order to hold public office, practice certain professions, take holy orders, and attend university. Proof of legitimacy was also required to inherit family fortunes, and it was important in contracting advantageous marriages and in otherwise maintaining elite identities. However, as Twinam shows, "the price of legitimation proved to be much higher than the fees paid for the gracias al sacar" (p. 6) since a persuasive deposition had to include testimonies from the principal people involved as...