Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since Late Colonial Times (review)

This strong collection of essays by Latin American and North American scholars, which grew out of a 1997 conference at Yale, treats the law as a lens through which to look at social and cultural issues. The contributors examine the interaction between individuals and legal institutions, the construction of criminality and punishment, and the relationship of these processes to state formation from the late eighteenth century through the mid twentieth century. The legal system is seen as a site of mediation and conflict among groups with different understandings of the law and society. Although elite visions of social hierarchy dominated state policy, this volume shows that such domination was based on constant negotiation.

Joseph’s preface and Aguirre and Salvatore’s introduction frame the issues, the latter by tracing the development of legal history in Latin America. The essays in Part I describe the use of courts to address individual and local concerns. Charles F. Walker discusses late colonial cases in which indigenous Andeans brought criminal charges of exploitation and mistreatment against local officials and in the process challenged imperial reforms designed to regulate them more closely. Arlene J. Díaz describes the late nineteenth-century Venezuelan state’s discursive exaltation of women’s domestic roles, its restrictions on women’s activities, and the effects on women defending their rights in court cases involving breach of marital promise, divorce, and rape. Women who did not fit feminine ideals did not win court approval. In Juan Manuel R. Palacio’s essay, twentieth-century Argentine tenant farmers went to court to enforce contracts with landowners, and in Luis A. González’s piece Brazilian sugar cane workers and growers used courts established by Vargas to mediate conflicts with mill owners and landlords. These essays address the relationship between litigation and other forms of protest. For example, Walker claims that the use of the legal system did not preclude rebellion in the Andes, while González claims that reliance on courts bound the sugar workers’ interests to those of the state, discouraging violent uprisings. This section shows courts communicating and enforcing state-defined standards of behavior while giving individuals a place to express their own ideas about the law and their rights.

The next sections discuss the use of medical ideas to construct categories of criminality (Part II) and punishment (Part III). Policies regulating individuals’ bodies were linked to policies regulating the body of the nation, as discussed in Cristina Rivera-Garza’s essay on efforts to regulate prostitution and control syphilis in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico. Prostitutes’ bodies became the focus of struggles between officials trying to enforce feminine ideals and create social order and women who resisted state control. Dain Borges examines the criminalization of witchcraft in late nineteenth-century Brazil. Witchcraft, including Afro-Brazilian practices and Kardecist spiritism, threatened the claims of physicians and the state to authority over Brazilians’ bodies and actions. Borges’s analysis of legal and literary texts uncovers competing ideas on the part of intellectuals, medical researchers, and the state about the value of these practices for Brazilian society. Kristin Ruggiero explores how passion, considered a medical condition in nineteenth and twentieth-century Argentina, was used as a defense for criminal acts, but when balanced by rationality was also deemed essential to Argentine national identity. Pablo Piccato shows how late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican policy-makers developed the idea of rateros, urban thieves, as a social category, different from the rest of the population and easily profiled. The discursive characterization of thieves as an organized group gradually became true, as alleged criminals shared information and learned to navigate the justice system while serving time. These authors provide examples of the ways that state-builders, often influenced by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s theories about biological propensities toward crime, defined groups as potentially dangerous, and...