Trading Insults: Honor, Violence, and the Gendered Culture of Commerce in Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1870s-1950s

A 1911 provincial court case recounts a conflict between two ex-lovers: Tomás Aviles and Catalina Claros. ¹ Aviles, the plaintiff, claimed that Claros attacked his house with stones and a metal tube, insulted him with the words "thief of glasses and firewood . . . coward," and accused him of incestuous relationships with his daughter and sister. In a passionate plea to the court, Aviles refuted the slurs. "I am an honorable and moral person," he declared. "[M]y daughter is a minor, incapable of sin, and my sister is married and observes good conduct." "Catalina Claros," he continued, "is a callous woman who does not fear God or anyone else." In her defense, Claros claimed that Aviles lodged the case because she refused to steal a glass from a chichería. ² "I may be poor," she reportedly told him, "but I'm also honorable." Aviles became angry, she said, took her hat and shawl, threw her outside, and locked himself in his room with her things. "[W]hy didn't you take that glass with you," she recounted him yelling, "I will never be gente [decent, respectable]." Claros denied that she had insulted Aviles. Instead, she claimed, Aviles beat her when she refused to help him steal, and accused her of sleeping with her own brother. Witnesses testified for both sides, but like so many other slander suits the case was dropped before the judge reached a verdict.

One of thousands of such actions lodged, and presently decaying, in abandoned court archives, this mundane incident illustrates some of the central themes that marked verbal conflicts in the Cochabamba valleys during an era of profound changes in land, labor, and commerce. First there is the unruly behavior of a woman. Second, there are accusations of illicit sex. Such allegations were more commonly lodged against women, but they could also be a weapon against men. A third theme is robbery. In this particular instance, the accusation illuminates local meanings of morality and honor: outward signs of respectability, of being gente, could not be acquired by theft or other illicit means. If the case reveals that sexual morality might be a component of both female and male honor, it also shows that virtue alone was not the essence of women's status. Honesty mattered too. Finally, there is conflict over social and racial status. The spark behind the altercation was the removal of two symbols of local status and identity, the plebeian woman's hat and shawl. When he swiped Catalina Claros' garments, Tomás Aviles stole her status as a "mestiza" and recast her as an "india." ³ To reclaim that identity, she employed an eminently common weapon: insults.

This essay examines local conceptions of honor, status, and race as expressed in court cases over injurias and calumnias (insults and slander) of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Cochabamba. In looking closely at the social implications of slanderous words, it also explores why insults and insult litigation were such consistently central features of public life. Bolivia's modern criminal codes defined injurias and calumnias as the public expression of words that dishonored, affronted, vilified, or discredited another person, and made them odious, despicable, suspicious, or ridiculous. Calumnias specifically implied that the insults attributed the injured individual with a crime. These laws also covered the revelation of secrets with the intention of harming another's honor, fame, or public image. ⁴ Together, such infractions against personal honor comprised the most common criminal offense in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Cochabamba. Although the proportion of insult crimes declined somewhat during specific years, court cases over sexual and racial slurs remained a highly significant judicial phenomenon over the entire period studied (see appendix 1). Cochabamba's modern legal culture, in short, was deeply marked by the idea that words had the power to...