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

8. Culture, Honor, and Gender in Mexico

How conscious are we of the ways that the buildings around us and the people with whom we interact affect our lives? To a great extent, individuals probably do not give these aspects of their existence much thought unless they live in a culture foreign to their own. It is only when trying to read the messages imparted by unfamiliar architecture and body language that such aspects of daily life are highlighted and become important . When struggling to understand alien surroundings and perplexing behavior, the manners by which culture forms us and provides us with a roadmap for our actions becomes much more apparent. Would middle-period Mexicans be aware of their interactions with their built environment and bodies? It seems that since it was relatively unlikely that they traveled between cultures easily or often or that they encountered many foreigners in their midst, they might not have been as sensitive to these nuances in the way that many people in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries would be. Yet middle-period Mexicans signaled their concern with proper behavior in certain spaces as well as with correct comportment and thus body language 8. Culture, Honor, and Gender in Mexico Culture, Honor, and Gender in Mexico 250 in both their reactions to others and their descriptions of incidents that disrupted social norms. The people who testified in court cases or wrote tracts on proper conduct and morality might not have deliberately set out to record the ways that culture constructed the mental map of their world. But, because these aspects of their lives were important, snippets and details slipped into their testimonies and books. It is only because this culture of bodies and space is so fundamental to the way that individuals organize themselves and their relations with others that it is part of the historical record. It is by understanding the way that culture shapes our behavior that we can recognize the means by which such frameworks affect the larger history of places and people. It is in this fashion that the stories related in this book can inform those scholars interested in the great men and events of traditional political history. Historians have often documented the battles and the duels that elite men controlled. More recently, authors have connected these events to systems of honor and belief; what this book does is relate the actions that dominated the lives of plebeians to concepts of honor in the larger sense, and more precisely, to the ways that these individuals understood the spaces and bodies around them. How people interacted with and understood their worlds were complex and interconnected. Although in this book space and body have been separated into two distinct sections for the sake of clarity, perceptive readers will have noted how the two categories did not entirely remain isolated. It was difficult not to mention how bodily language or violence was linked to particular spaces. Bodies and spaces are very much intermeshed, acting upon each other. People’s bodies take on attitudes depending on the context, but this context includes not just the other people around them but also the built environment. It is in this way that spaces and bodies are interconnected through Culture, Honor, and Gender in Mexico 251 a language of violence that flows out of and is connected to the grammar of bodies and spaces. At the most basic level there are two axes that provide a framework for this grammar: the horizontal and the vertical. These two directions are clearest for space that is divided into core and periphery as well as high and low. For bodies it is the high versus low axis that prevails, but in addition, people placed themselves within a horizontal axis when they operated within the spaces of core and periphery . They chose to push themselves closer to the interior of a church (the altar) or a room (perhaps the home altar) to make clear their position on this axis. These attitudes were a subset of the conventions derived from honor. The language of honor structured colonial and early national Mexico and provided a general code or rhetoric that all sectors of society understood albeit in manners specific to their rankings. The scholarly literature on honor has blossomed in the past few decades with studies on far-flung regions distant and different from the Mediterranean . The next step in the study of honor is to parse...