Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750-1856

7. Power, Sex, Hair, and Clothes

Aggression toward the body was the inverse of the respect that model individuals were supposed to display in their daily lives. Middle-period Mexicans, of all classes and ethnicities , were educated in the rules of politeness and conscious of their obligations to the codes of rank and courtesy. When they broke these rules they also knew the implications of their actions. When Mexicans hit at the head and other parts of the body, the attacks were meant to restore honor and authority and to punish recalcitrant wives and sexually promiscuous women. Hitting is an obvious form of aggression—blows are certainly painful and dangerous and make an impact by wounding, sometimes causing death. Pulling at the body was a less clear strategy, but certainly one that was practiced almost as commonly as hitting, and with similar goals: pulling either clothes or hair attacked the recipient’s dignity, albeit in a less drastic fashion. Middleperiod Mexicans most commonly pulled at hair and clothes but these yankings were really aimed at the body—the clothes and hair were extensions of the body. These assaults were part of a strategy of humiliation: although they might restore the honor 7. Power, Sex, Hair, and Clothes Power, Sex, Hair, and Clothes 212 of the attacker, the aim was to bring down the victim’s honor as his or her body was abased by these actions. While it may not seem obvious at first blush, hair and clothes have a lot in common, as they are both external extensions of the body and they both epitomize the outer representation of the inner being. An individual’s hair and clothes showed who a person was: gender, rank, and ethnicity were all indicated by form of hairstyle and dress. Even more significant, both also had important associations with morality. Because of this association with morality, clothes and hair become an extension of identity. As Bell writes of clothes, “it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.”1 Pulling at either hair or clothes could be done in a mild fashion just to get the attention of another person. Even this gentle tugging, however , was a breach of decorum.2 In the course of attacks much more violence was perpetrated on hair and clothes—men often dragged women by the hair and attire was often torn to shreds. These actions can be seen as a natural outcome of a brutal assault or they could be unintentional outcomes of a more generalized attack. As Hurl-Eamon shows for London residents, the ripping of clothes could be accidental, but more often it was a way to cast doubt upon the sexual respectability of another woman.3 But the statements of victims and the general culture of the times makes clear that although part of a fight strategy, these actions also had symbolic weight. The act of pulling aggressively at either hair or clothes affected a person’s posture, pulled them out of line, and affected their capacity to stay erect. It was a way of pulling down the head and the honor of another that mimicked the way that officials took criminals into custody and controlled them. As such, this pulling was part of a strategy to both control and to humiliate another. It represented an action that was rife with symbolic messages. More than any other aspect of the body, both hair and clothes Power, Sex, Hair, and Clothes 213 expressed the inside of a person to the outside world. They showed the soul, the morals, and the ethnicity of a person—they were the outer depictions of the inner self. There was a dialectic relationship between the two—they work on each other by enhancing or diminishing the impact of the body.4 Both hair and clothes had a high erotic charge and therefore they both communicated morality and were the subject of many rules and conventions to rein in their sexual nature. Clothes could act as a barrier to sexuality, at times replacing the house walls, which protected women from men’s prying eyes. Hair could be covered or tightly harnessed in braids, which prevented the kind of curls and loose locks that were eroticized. Both were located at the border between the inside and the outside—they both extended out of the body and thus they were a little like the threshold of the...