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Tales of Two Women: The Narrative Construal of Porfirian Reality*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Robert Buffington  and
Pablo Piccato
Robert Buffington
Affiliation:
St. John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota
Pablo Piccato
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York, New York
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Extract

It was the perfect murder, really. Illicit passions: two beautiful women-of-the-night feuding over a dashing young rake, a masked ball, casual taunts, thwarted assaults, escalating threats. Heinous crime: the lover's borrowed gun, midnight bordello visit, fighting words, a gun shot, a maid's scream, a young woman's tragic death. Cruel punishment: suicidal remorse (by some accounts), humiliating public trial, twenty lost years (the maximum sentence for a woman) in Mexico City's squalid Belem jail. The Tarasquillo Street murder had it all!

And so it happened that, in an era enamored of all things French, Mexico City had its very own cause célèbre. A scant twelve years earlier, professional francophile and amateur criminologist Rafael Zayas de Enríquez had devoted an entire volume of his Fisiología del crimen to notorious foreign criminals like Alfonse Dupont, the hunchbacked wife-killer, and Charles Guiteau, the deranged assassin of President Garfield. Now, Mexico too could claim a prominent place in the international annals of infamous crime.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , January 1999 , pp. 391 - 424
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1999

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Footnotes

*

Special thanks to The Americas' two anonymous readers for their penetrating critiques of the first version of this essay and to Heather Butkowski for her careful proofreading of the final draft.

References

1 de Enríquez, Rafael Zayas, Fisiología del crimen: estudio jurídico-sociológico, 2 vols. (Veracruz: Imprenta de R. de Zayas, 1885).Google Scholar

2 Ramón Corral quoted in Píña, Javier y Palacios, , ed. “Las Islas Marías a principios de este Siglo,” Criminalia 36:5 (mayo 1970), 216.Google Scholar

3 On the Mexico City press during the Porfiriato see Alcaraz, Florence Toussaint, Escenario de la prensa en el porfiriato (México: Fundación Manuel Buendía, 1989)Google Scholar and Lynn Smith, Phyllis, “Contentious Voices Amid the Order: The Porfirian Press in Mexico City 1876–1911,” (Ph.D. dissertation: University of Arizona, 1996).Google Scholar

4 Gamboa, Federico, Santa (1903; reprint, Mexico City: Eusebio Gómez de la Puente, 1922).Google Scholar

5 Macedo, Miguel, La criminalidad en México: medios de combatirla (México: Oficina Tip. de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1897), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar Late nineteenth-century statistics suggested that “the Mexican people were the most criminal in the world.” Roumagnac, Carlos, La estadística criminal en México (Mexico City: Imp. de Arturo García Cubas Sucesores Hermanos, 1907), pp. 10 Google Scholar and 27. Roumagnac considered these statistics very unreliable and Mexico’s unsavory reputation undeserved.

6 Gay, Peter, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 1, The Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 8 and 16.Google Scholar

7 This literature is extensive. For an overview and critique see Fuss, Diana, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989).Google Scholar A thoughtful and provocative example that explores the connection between “self” construction, sexuality and death is Bronfen’s, Elisabeth Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992).Google Scholar

8 See especially Bruner, Jerome, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar and The Culture of Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). To be fair, Peter Gay resists the term psychohistory and insists that his own work (as previously noted) is “history informed by psychoanalysis.”

9 Bruner, , Acts of Meaning, pp. 77 Google Scholar (his italics) and 95.

10 Bruner, discusses “the narrative construal of reality” in chapter seven of The Culture of Education, pp. 130–149.Google Scholar

11 Crímenes célebres desde el Chalequero hasta Gallegos: la delincuencia en México (Mexico City: El Gráfico, 1932), p. 199.

12 El Foro 50:63 (6 April 1899), 251.

13 On Mexican notions of honor see Stern, Steve J., The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar and Seed, Patricia, To Love Honor and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

14 Antonio Martínez de Castro, principal author of the 1871 Penal Code, acknowledged that dueling, although undesirable, was still commonly practiced by the Mexican upper classes and had the support of public opinion; thus, he explained, legislators had decided not to classify it as homicide or battery. de Castro, Antonio Martinez, Código Penal para el Distrito Federal y Territorio de Baja California [1871] (Veracruz and Puebla: La Ilustración,Google Scholar 1891, hereafter cited as CP 1871), p. 53.

15 El Foro 50:63 (6 April 1889), 251.

16 El Foro 50:71 (20 April 1898), 283.

17 The newspaper report indicated that the bullet hit the right eye, but at the trial the left eye was mentioned, Diario del Hogar 10 March 1897, p. 2; El Foro 50:66 (13 April 1898), 263; the dialogue appears in Ibid., p. 259.

18 See an example of the husband killing his wife in El Imparcial, 13 August 1897. Honor was explicitly acknowledged as a attenuating circumstance. Article 34 of the 1871 Penal Code established that the accused who acted “in defense of their person, honor, property or the person, honor, or property of others” were exempted from penal responsibility (CP 1871, p. 34). The husband who found his or her partner committing adultery and then committed battery, or found his daughter “in the carnal act” would receive a reduced sentence (CP 1871, pp. 534–535). In the case of homicide, articles 554 and 555 of the 1871 Code gave shorter sentences for offenses committed in similar circumstances.

19 See Nye, Robert A., Masculinity and Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).Google Scholar On honor, see Pitt-Rivers, Julian, “Honour and Social Status” in Peristany, Jean, ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (London: Weinfeld, 1965), pp. 21 and 29.Google Scholar

20 In January 1906, El Imparcial reported a similar case between women of even lower status. Two women, 40 and 60 years of age, engaged in a knife duel to end a protracted dispute over some chickens. They followed the dictates of the “code of honor,” meeting with witnesses (also women) in a neutral place, the road of La Piedad, and using the same weapons. One died, and the other was arrested shortly afterwards. The newspaper depicted the set up of the duel in an ironic tone, but described the fight itself as a “quarrel.” El Imparcial, 12 January 1906, p. 4, col. 1–2.

21 Archivo del Tribunal Superior de Justicia del Distrito Federal, Reclusorio Sur (hereafter cited as AJ-RS), 430156. Battery. 1904. In front of the judge, Rojas recanted this last detail: she declared that none of her friends had participated in the fight, thus protecting them from criminal charges.

22 See for example the case of María del Refugio Dorantes, who was seated on a bench, waiting for a tram, when Modesto Díaz accosted her, thinking that she was a prostitute, and offered her one peso. Dorantes did not reply; instead she hit him with a jar she carried in her hand. She explained that she had “a husband and couldn't accept the gift and was so insulted by his presumption” that she had to hit him. The judge did not accept the explanation and Dorantes was sentenced to two months and eight days of arrest. AJ-RS, 4301160. Battery. 1904.

23 For María’s account to Roumagnac, see Roumagnac, , Los criminales en México, pp. 108–111.Google Scholar For reports of the crime, see Diario del Hogar, 10 marzo 1897, p. 2.

24 Crímenes célebres, p. 207. This one of the most famous jury trials in Mexican history. The use of popular juries in common criminal cases was abolished in 1929. Excelsior, 8 October 1929, 2d. sec, p. 1.

25 For the aggressive role of judges in jury trials, and the lack of counsel for defendants, see Sodi, Demetrio, El jurado en México: estudios sobre el jurado popular (Mexico City: Secretaría de Fomento, 1909), pp. 315–319 Google Scholar and 144–147.

26 El Foro 50:62 (5 April 1898), 247.

27 See for example, El Imparcial, Zi January 1906, p. 1; El Imparcial, 16 August 1912, p. 1; El Imparcial, 10 September 1913, p. 1. See descriptions of jury trials in El Universal, 4 October 1923, 2d. sec, p. 1; La Voz de Mexico, 12 January 1906, p. 1. See also the cases defended by Querido Moheno in the late 1920s: Moheno, Querido, Procesos Célebres: Nidia Camargo: discurso en defensa de la acusada (Mexico City: Botas, 1925);Google Scholar Ibid., Mis discursos (Mexico City: Botas, 1923). See also Harris, Ruth, “Melodrama, Hysteria and Feminine Crimes of Passion in the Fin-de-Siècle” History Workshop 25 (Spring 1988), 56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 El Foro 50:66 (13 April 1898), 263.

29 El Foro 50:63 (6 April 1898), 251.

30 Ibid.

31 El Foro 50:62 (5 April 1898), 247.

32 El Foro 50:65 (12 April 1898), 259.

33 El Foro 50:70 (19 April 1898), 279.

34 El Imparcial, 19 September 1897, p. 3.

35 For an incomplete account of the trial, see El Foro, April 1898.

36 El Foro 49:100 (23 November 1897), 3. María attempted an appeal in the Supreme Court without success. El Foro 50:29 (15 February 1898), 1. The death penalty was abrogated for most crimes by 1900. Pedrueza, Antonio Ramos, La ley penal en México de 1810 a 1910 (México: Díaz de León, 1911), p. 14.Google Scholar

37 Roumagnac, , Los criminales en México, pp. 111–112.Google Scholar

38 On these efforts see Piccato, Pablo, “‘El Paso de Venus por el disco del Sol’: Criminality and Alcoholism in the Late Porfiriato,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 11:2 (Summer 1995), 203–24;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Buffington, Robert, “Revolutionary Reform: Modernization, Prison Reform, and Executive Power” in Salvatore, Ricardo D. and Aguirre, Carlos, eds., The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), pp. 169–193;Google Scholar and Rohlfes, Laurence J., “Police and Penal Correction in Mexico City, 1876–1911: A Study of Order and Progress” (Ph.D. dissertation: Tulane University, 1983).Google Scholar

39 Sociologist Anthony Giddens, for example, argues for a “transformation of intimacy” as modern societies abandon localized kinship networks which encourage gender segregation for spatially “liberated” nuclear families with the personal relationship of the married couple as their core. It’s the latter version of intimacy with its stress on interpersonal relationships that is transgressed by the illicit doings of María, Esperanza, and Salvador, . See his The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

40 Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 36–45.Google Scholar Giddens claims that “the reflexivity of modernity actually subverts reason … [that] we are abroad in a world which is thoroughly constituted through reflexively applied knowledge, but where at the same time we can never be sure that any given element of that knowledge will not be revised.” Ibid., p. 39.

41 On Posada’s crime broadsheets see Frank, Patrick, Posada’s Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery 1890–1910 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998),Google Scholar chapter 1.

42 Bruner, , The Culture of Education, pp. 139–140.Google Scholar

43 Posada y la prensa ilustrada: signos de modernización y resistencias (Mexico City: INBA, 1996), p. 214.

44 The poem translates loosely: It seems to me that I still see/my victim in front of me/with bloodied face/ and fervent look//Yes, yes, there you are Esperanza/pardon my treachery/torment me no more/my agony will be eternal//Forgive me, blessed God!/my crime is very immense/and each time [I see you]/the remorse grows in my soul//On the eighth day of March/of the year 1897/1 committed this horrible crime/fatal day … indelible//Oh, God, take my life/because now I can no longer live/because now death is preferable/to this incessant suffering. The second poem purports to be written by Esperanza’s mother and laments her daughter’s decision to go to Mexico.

45 Bruner, , The Culture of Education, p. 133.Google Scholar

46 Giddens, , The Consequences of Modernity, p. 92. He defines ontological security as “the confidence most human beings have in the continuity of their self-identity and in the constancy of the surrounding social and material environments of action.”Google Scholar

47 Roumagnac’s narrative technique is explored in much more detail in Buffington, Robert, Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,Google Scholar forthcoming), chapter 3.

48 Bruner, , The Culture of Education, p. 136.Google Scholar

49 Roumagnac, , Los criminales en México, p. 105.Google Scholar Roumagnac also provides physical data on María including various measurements and descriptive features. This data was collected using the French “Bertillon” method designed ostensibly to facilitate identification. Much of the data also carried racial (nose width for example) and cultural indicators (tattoos). Since María was “white” (pigmentado pequeño) and without tattoos this data too was ambiguous in her particular case. [bid., pp. 114–115.

50 Ibid., pp. 105–106.

51 Ibid., p. 106.

52 Ibid. According to Lara y Pardo’s classic work on Mexican prostitution, women from Guadalajara were considered especially desirable (probably because they were “whiter” than most Mexican women) by Mexico City bordello owners. Lara, Luis y Pardo, , La prostitución en México (Mexico City: Libreria de la Vda. de Ch. Bouret, 1908).Google Scholar

53 Roumagnac, , Los criminales en México, pp. 106–107.Google Scholar Trial records give his name as Salvador Ortigoza.

54 Although Roumagnac ignores the connection, Esperanza (La Malagueña) was Spanish too. Another reading, not highlighted in the sources but possibly implied in Posada’s print of her murder is Mexican María defending the national honor against the decadent gachupina.

55 Roumagnac, , Los criminales en México, pp. 107–108.Google Scholar

56 Ibid., p. 117.

57 For a description of prison conditions in late nineteenth-century Mexico City, see Macedo, Miguel, “El Municipio. Los establecimientos penales. La asistencia pública,” México, su evolución social, vol 1, Sierra, Justo ed. (Mexico City: Ballescá, 1900), pp. 698–699;Google Scholar Icazbalceta, Joaquin García, Informe sobre los establecimientos de beneficencia y correción de esta capital … (Mexico City: Librería religiosa, 1907), pp. 65–66;Google Scholar Ceballos, José, Memoria presentada al C. Lic. Manuel Romero Rubio Secretario de Estado y del Despacho de Gobernación por el… Gobernador del Distrito Federal y que comprende los años de 1886 y 1887 (Mexico City: Eduardo Dublán, 1888), p. 140.Google Scholar

58 Roumagnac, , Los criminales en México, p. 113.Google Scholar

59 Ibid., p. 123.

60 Ibid., pp. 122–3.

61 Ibid.

62 Prison officials often rewarded certain prisoners by promoting them to positions of authority where they assisted in the vigilance of their fellow inmates. Presidentes or mayores could enforce order with a club and had cabos at their orders. The use of violence was clearer in the men’s section, but the women’s section was organized along similar lines. For the organization in prisons, see Roumagnac, , Los criminales en México, pp. 215–216;Google Scholar Ceballos, , Memoria presentada, p. 147;Google Scholar de Cosío, Manuel González, Memoria que presenta al Congreso de la Unión el General… Secretario de Estado y del Despacho de Gobernación (Mexico City: Imprenta del Gobierno Federal, 1900), p. 886.Google Scholar

63 Roumagnac, , Los criminales en México, p. 131.Google Scholar In other cases, holding a charge was related with economic activities. Emilia M. was the presidenta of the kitchen with 52 female inmates under her orders, a salary of ten pesos a month, and the responsibility for the daily meals of all prisoners. Ibid., p. 127.

64 Ibid., pp. 113 and 121–3.

65 Emilia M. also recognized the option, but favored heterosexuality: “even if I desired a man,” she declared, “I would not be so dirty [tan puerca] as to mingle with a woman like me.” Ibid., pp. 107–8, 127 and 112.

66 See for example “La visita conyugal y otras consideraciones” by Dr.Enríquez, González, in Memoria del Primer Congreso Nacional Penitenciario celebrado en la Ciudad de México del 24 de noviembre al 3 de diciembre de 1932 (México: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1935), p. 124.Google Scholar

67 Roumagnac, , Los criminales en México, p. 113.Google Scholar

68 Little is known about the rest of María’s life. According to one account, she served for a long time and lived an “exemplary life” in prison as a teacher of her fellow inmates, helping them learn to write and sew. She finally left prison with her hair gray (Crímenes célebres, p. 207). She may well have been released earlier than her scheduled date (1917) but no reference has been found in the judicial archives of the Federal District.

69 The most prominent expression of this concern for Mexico’s national survival is in Sierra’s, Justo classic history, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, trans. Charles, Ramsdell (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969).Google Scholar

70 Gamboa, Federico, Mi diario, primera serie, vol. 2 (México: Eusebio Gómez de la Puente, editor, 1910), pp. 13–17.Google Scholar Except for the beginning, the ellipses, quotation marks, and italics are all Gamboa’s.

71 Many of Gamboa’s works, however, including his most famous novel Santa which some biographers suggest was inspired by this incident, exhibit considerable insight into Mexico’s social problems.

72 This theme is dealt with extensively in Sander Gilman, L., “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature” in Gates, Henry Louis Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 223–261 Google Scholar and in chapter seven of Bernheimer, Charles, Figures of III Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 200–233.Google Scholar Gamboa’s attitudes towards sexuality (including references to this diary excerpt) are discussed in Franco, , Plotting Women, pp. 95–98.Google Scholar Freud, Sigmund in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, vol. 18, Standard Edition (London: The Hogarth Press, 1920)Google Scholar argues that sexuality (eros) and death (thanatos) are inextricably intertwined in the human psyche.

73 Bernheimer, , Figures of III Repute, p. 221.Google Scholar

74 El Foro 50:62 (5 April 1898), 247.

75 El Foro 50:63 (6 Aprii 1898), 251. Roumagnac, , Los criminales en México, p. 110.Google Scholar El Foro 50:65 (12 April 1898), 259.

76 Gamboa, , Mi diario, p. 16.Google Scholar

77 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 220.Google Scholar She makes a similar point in “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History and Theory 24:3 (1985), 247–272.

78 Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 374.Google Scholar

79 Bronfen, , Over Her Dead Body, p. 13.Google Scholar

80 Bruner, , The Culture of Education, p. 133.Google Scholar

81 Ibid., p. xii.