“To Do as I Will:”: Marriage Choice and the Social Construction of Female Individuality in Nineteenth-Century Guanajuato, Mexico

“TO DO AS I WILL:” MARRIAGE CHOICE AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF FEMALE INDIVIDUALITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GUANAJUATO, MEXICO Daniel S. Haworth University of Houston-Clear Lake In the summer of 1854, eighteen-year-old Herculana Ortiz and Basilio Villagómez hoped to marry ahead of the impeding birth of their child. Standing in their way was the fact that her father steadfastly withheld his consent, believing that Basilio, a farm laborer, would never be able to support Herculana. By law, until she reached the age of majority at 23, Herculana could not marry without her father’s permission. His intransigence, if not also the fact that Herculana’s pregnancy was coming to term, drove the couple to abscond from their rural hamlet on the southern border of the state of Guanajuato, 150 miles northwest of Mexico City, to the district seat of Uriangato. There, Herculana and Basilio appeared before a justice of the peace so that she could file an appeal for emancipation (habilitación de edad), which only the governor could grant.1 Their calculated move allowed Herculana to step to the fore. By appealing for emancipation she made public a formerly private struggle to overcome her father’s opposition . Her action held seemingly contradictory implications. Being at once female and a minor made her doubly subordinated to male authority. She would remain so as a married woman, legally subject to her husband, and so long as he lived, an eternal minor.2 And above all, her fate lay in the hands of political patriarchs whose authority she set against that of her father. Thus Herculana had to work within rather than against the prevailing patriarchal order. Yet in seeking emancipation she also cemented her place as a full participant in the determination of her future. A total of 119 girls and young women appealed to the governor of Guanajuato for permission to marry between 1847 and 1854. Their stories are told in individually bound case files, each one consisting of documents related to the adjudication of the petitioner’s request. The case files may once have been archived together, but they now lie dispersed among unrelated documentation in the nineteenth-century records of the Guanajuato governor’s office.3 Every case file begins with a cover page declaring that the petitioner “made” the appeal or “asked for emancipation,” to marry her suitor without the permission of her parents or guardians. These words identify the petitioner as the agent, object, and subject of her appeal. Taking that reading as a point of departure, this article will argue that the appeals process represented the social construction of female individuality within C  2012 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 51 The Latin Americanist, September 2013 a framework of patriarchal constraint. The prime mover in this process was the petitioner herself. Through seeking emancipation to marry whom she chose, she actualized her individuality. The sources offer insight into the experience of female youths coming of age in a provincial society defined by the interplay of continuity and change consistent with the gradual formation of the republican order after independence. Mexico’s political transformation generated recurrent upheaval of which the sources bear almost no trace. In part, that may be explained by the fact that the petitioners sought emancipation in a period of relative calm framed by the U.S-Mexican War (1846–1848) and the ideologically inspired civil wars of the Reforma (1854–1867). While the latter conflict would signal the triumph of liberalism in national politics, the sources make clear that the advent of liberalism had yet to displace traditional values and ways of life surviving from the late colonial era in one of Mexico’s most densely populated and productive states. As of 1852 Guanajuato was home to nearly 800,000 people.4 Its borders encompass a landscape of dry, rugged uplands in the north and east that mark the southern flank of Mexico’s vast northern deserts, and a fertile plain known as the Bajío that spreads across the state’s southern half. Silver mining in the uplands, and the consequent demand for food and draft animals in the mining zone, fostered intensive...