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4. Unnatural Mothers and Reproductive Crimes: Infanticide, Abortion, and Cross-Dressing
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CHAPTER 4 Unnatural Mothers and Reproductive Crimes: Infanticide, Abortion, and Cross-Dressing The National Police and other authorities approached infanticide and abortion as crimes against motherhood, reflecting rhetoric elsewhere in Latin America, while highland women put fathers and husbands on trial for these acts. Of the fifteen cases of infanticide and abortion in the department of Chimaltenango from 1900 to 1925,¹ nine of the defendants were males and nine were females; in one case the police had no suspect (appendix 7).² The high rate of male defendants contrasts sharply with other areas of Latin America; in Argentina and Mexico, infanticide generally was committed by women to maintain their jobs or honor.³ Although some Guatemalan women committed reproductive crimes for similar reasons, those who accused men of these crimes demonstrated how the same gendered institutions that buttressed local patriarchies provided women with the tools to challenge the men’s perceived right to beat their wives. In effect throughout the Estrada Cabrera regime, the 1889 penal code defined “infanticide” as a crime that only mothers or maternal grandparents could commit.⁴ According to the law, infanticide litigation against men should have been tried as homicide. Yet as a manifestation of popular notions influencing Guatemala’s legal system, municipal officials and even a few department judges approached these felonies as infanticides in response to the new mothers and their kin who employed a broader definition of the crime. Using the legal system for their own ends, highland women complicated gendered notions of reproductive responsibilities and held men accountable for their violence. By accusing men of infanticide and abortion, women highlighted male reproductive responsibilities in a nation that, like most patriarchal societies, tended to view such responsibilities as primarily those Infanticide, Abortion, and Cross-Dressing 119 of females. Remarkably, the women often did so by using legislation that underscored this view. From 1900 to 1925, seven men and seven women were accused of infanticide in Chimaltenango (appendix 7). Of these, six identified as indigenous men, three as indigenous women, one as ladino, and one as ladina. The midwife and two other women who did not explicitly state their ethnicities all appear to have been ladinas. Including those whose ethnicities we can confidently infer, three ladinas and one female indígena were convicted of infanticide. By framing her act as a desperate attempt to protect her and her ladina matron’s honor, the indígena had her sentence reduced. Because the judges changed the charges from infanticide to homicide, the two indigenous male defendants who were convicted served longer sentences than their female counterparts. Of the eight people acquitted, four were indigenous men, two were indigenous women, one was ladina, and one was ladino . With only ten cases to study, discerning a ruling or sentencing pattern based on ethnicity or gender is difficult. The five abortion cases (one of which had no suspects) during this period make this challenge even more acute. Two men (most likely one was ladino and one indígena) and two women (one identified as indígena, and the other likely was) were defendants in those cases. None were convicted of abortion, though the indigenous male served a little over two years in jail as his case wound its way through the judicial system. As part of what emerged as a common theme in infanticide and abortion litigation, his incarceration provided his wife some respite from his physical abuse. Having lost a child or pregnancy, these female plaintiffs never won restitution, but by altering the intent of infanticide legislation and casting a broad net with abortion legislation , they often exacted retribution. Women who used the term “infanticide” to label crimes by men that were homicide as defined by Guatemala law were not doing so in opposition to state power or patriarchy. On the contrary, they used the state’s tools to criminalize individual men. With their own logic and worldviews and the help of municipal judicial officials who processed and referred the cases as infanticide to department judicial officials who often continued to consider them as such, female plaintiffs altered the context and confines of Guatemala ’s judicial system. Absent “an intentional politics of cultural opposition ” on the part of female plaintiffs and with some officials’ tacit approval, these reconfigurations of the law can be read as a “resistance of culture,” to borrow Sahlins’s turn of phrase, to the legal precepts laid...