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The Hidden Story—Violence and the Law in Guatemala

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Pablo Piccato
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Extract

Like all good historical research, “Gloria's story” raises more questions than it can answer. My reaction to the article, which I initially shared with the author as an anonymous reviewer for Law and History Review, assumes that this incompleteness is a welcome aspect of the historian's trade, rather than a gap that we should cover with theorization or redundant evidence. Yet the narrative structure of case studies like this makes it necessary to probe what is left outside the story, however unpleasant it might be. In these comments I will try to do that by inserting this fascinating case into a historical reflection about the relationship between violence and the law, an aspect of Guatemalan history that “Gloria's Story” reluctantly illustrates.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Summer 2006 , pp. 433 - 439
Copyright
Copyright © the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2006

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References

1. Wertheimer, John, “Gloria's Story: adulterous concubinage and the Law in Twentiethcentury Guatemala,” Law and History Review 24 (2006): 404CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Grandin, Greg, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (chicago: University of chicago Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, sees the massacres and extreme repressive violence of the late 1970s as a turning point in the use of violence instead of politics.

3. This has been examined in Joseph, Gilbert M. and Nugent, Daniel, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. See also Joseph, Gilbert M., “on the Trail of Latin american Bandits: a Reexamination of Peasant Resistance,” in Patterns of Contention in Mexican History, ed. Rodríguez, Jaime E. (Irvine: University of california Press, 1992)Google Scholar. For a useful review of recent changes in ways to address problems of law and society, see Horowitz, Joel, “corruption, crime, and Punishment: Recent Scholarship on Latin america,” Latin American Research Review 40. 1 (2005): 268–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Borah, Woodrow Wilson, Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real (Berkeley: University of california Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Herzog, Tamar, Upholding Justice: Society, State, and the Penal System in Quito (1650-1750), History, Languages, and cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds (Ann arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. See, for example, Rosalva aída Hernàndez and Hèctor ortiz Elizondo, “Diferentes pero Iguales: los Pueblos Indígenas en Mèxico y el acceso a la Justicia” (May 15, 2003). center for U.S.-Mexican Studies. Project on Reforming the administration of Justice in Mexico. http://repositories.cdlib.org/usmex/prajm/hernandez_ortiz.

6. For an account of the connections between land and labor, Mccreery, David, Rural Guatemala: 1760-1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

7. Full rights were not necessarily guaranteed by the urban labor market, particularly for women. See Mccreery, James, “‘This Life of Misery and Shame.’ Female Prostitution in Guatemala city, 1880-1920,” Journal of Latin American Studies 18. 2 (1986): 333–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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10. caldeira, Teresa Pires do Rio, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sāo Paulo (Berkeley: University of california Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Garland, David, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (oxford: oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

11. Wertheimer, , “Gloria's Story,” 386Google Scholar.

12. See acosta, Mariclaire, “overcoming the Discrimination against Women in Mexico: a Task for Sisyphus,” in The (Un) rule of Law, 169Google Scholar; caulfield, Sueann, In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity, and Nation in Early-Twentieth-Century Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

13. Johnson, Lyman L. and Lipsett-Rivera, Sonya, eds., The Faces of Honor, Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Piccato, Pablo, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Wertheimer, , “Gloria's Story,” 403, n.109Google Scholar.

15. acosta, “overcoming the Discrimination”; Piccato, , City of Suspects.Google Scholar

16. Bliss, Katherine Elaine, Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Stern, Steve, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

17. Wertheimer, , “Gloria's Story,” 385Google Scholar.

18. There is much work to be done to examine informal communal interventions and their interactions with legal institutions.There are important insights in Braithwaite, John, Crime, Shame and Reintegration (New York: cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “Microhistory” also means an approach that stresses the local dimension of long-term processes, even if that implies a challenge to grand national narratives. See Gonzàlez, Luis Gonzàlez y, San Jose de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Ginzburg, Carlo, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20.1 (autumn, 1993): 10–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. For a treatment of the dilemma, and an argument to maintain the good links between judge and historian, see Ginzburg, carlo, The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice, trans. Shugaar, Antony (London: Verso, 1999), 12–17Google Scholar.

20. See James, Daniel, Dona María's Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity, Latin america otherwise (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. Interviews, of course, would seem to erase the distinction between judge and historian, in which the latter is unable to produce sources. Ginzburg, , The Judge, 35Google Scholar.

21. Wertheimer, , “Gloria's Story,” 386Google Scholar.