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54 In 1915 a young Maya orphan named Simona Cén appeared before the revolutionary military commander in Yucatán’s second-largest city, Valladolid. To avoid “dying of hunger,” she lived as a refugee in a local hospital with her sick baby son. Simona told the commander that she had been taking care of herself from the age of eight, when her parents died, and since that time she had experienced years of abuse. No one else could support her, leaving Simona with little choice but to work for the wealthy Andrés Perera household . At first, she helped with the family’s children, until on her twelfth birthday she moved to chores in the kitchen. There she labored for the next six years, grinding corn for tortillas and cooking the family’s food. When she turned eighteen, Andrés seduced her and demanded she move to his finca, where she gave birth to a boy that she named Antonio. Andrés soon tired of Simona, though, and as a pretext he insisted that she return with him to Valladolid in order to baptize their son. Once in the city, Andrés abandoned them, condemning Simona and the baby to a life of absolute poverty. And even though their small child was dying from hunger, Andrés refused to give Simona money for medicine or food. Yucatán was in the midst of a revolution, however, and people like Simona now had new options. Utilizing one such opportunity, Simona defied longstanding social conventions by coming before the revolutionary tribunal to request help and medicines. Adamant in her testimony before the revolutionary commander, Simona asserted that “now justice is done and the authorities protect the unhappy women, like me, who have been deceived.” When Andrés appeared before the same commander, he admitted that he had fathered the baby and paid fifty pesos as an indemnity.1 While not a great sum, for Simona the money represented many months of hard work, n n n n n n n n n n n Two the revolutionary judicial system Broken Promises, Broken Hearts t h e r e v o l u t i o n a r y j u d i c i a l s y s t e m n 55 especially since employers ordinarily paid young Maya girls a mere fifty centavos per month for household chores.2 In 1925, ten years after Simona presented her case, another Maya woman named Bernardina Poot viuda de Chim left her small town of Huní to appear before a Mérida court to testify about the rape and abduction of her fourteen-year-old daughter, Julia Chim Poot. By this time, Alvarado’s military tribunals were no longer in place and civilian rule had replaced military administration. Standing before the presiding judge, Bernardina courageously utilized the traditional court system to fight for justice. She began her account by testifying that on the night of 17 August, Antonio Barbudo seduced, abducted, and then raped her daughter. To make matters worse, Antonio abandoned Julia soon after the act, even though he promised to marry her. As was increasingly common in these cases, the judge ordered medical experts to physically examine Julia in order to establish the “truth” of her story. The medical-legal doctors did not support Julia’s statement. Failing to find signs of violence to Julia’s genital organs, and therefore no evidence of forced sexual relations, they instead decreed that Julia lost her virginity many months before the date in question. Furious, Bernardina protested this decision. She argued that these “socalled ” specialists examined her daughter too quickly and carelessly, missing the obvious harm done to her child. Bernardina further insisted she could prove that Antonio raped Julia if the courts would permit the use of midwives instead of physicians. According to Bernardina, women examiners would perform a more complete assessment because, being female, they better understood a woman’s body. And indeed, when the judge allowed two midwives to inspect Julia, they disagreed with the legal doctors’ opinion and instead determined that Julia had been “deflowered” quite recently .3 Nonetheless, when Antonio appeared before the judge, he denied all charges. Evidently, Antonio’s testimony proved more persuasive than either Bernardina’s or Julia’s reports, since soon afterward the judge ruled that not enough evidence existed to prove “without a shadow of a doubt” that Antonio had committed any of the alleged crimes against Julia. As such, the...

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