Runaway Daughters and the Liberalization of Mexico

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – A pivotal era in the history of Mexico is examined from an unusual angle in a new book by University of Arkansas historian Kathryn A. Sloan. She is the first historian to mine a rich collection of 19^th century court records to reveal both the significant role that the working class played in liberalizing social codes of conduct and honor, as well as the state’s expanded role in family life.

Runaway Daughters: Seduction, Elopement, and Honor in Nineteenth-Century Mexico is one of the few comprehensive studies of courtship practices and the negotiation of honor among young working-class couples and their families in post-colonial Mexico. In contrast to the colonial era, in which the family was dominated by strong patriarchs, in the late 19^th century the state increasingly assumed the parental role and sided with minors over parents.

Sloan examined 212 rapto trials from the court records of the state of Oaxaca for the years 1841 through 1919. Rapto involved abduction and seduction of a young woman. In the majority of the rapto cases examined, the woman was a willing participant in what was essentially an elopement, and the young couple planned to marry without parental approval. Fully 96 percent of the cases involved working-class individuals.

“In their testimonies, these ‘criminals’ discussed courtship, family relationships, sex, love and honor,” Sloan wrote. “It is one of the only sources where we can hear the voice of the historically silenced: minor girls, their poor suitors, and working-class parents and neighbors.”

Sloan called Oaxaca “a crucible of liberalism,” due in part to the culture of its indigenous villages. The majority of the population of Oaxaca was Zapotec and Mixtec, and Sloan noted that indigenous women historically played significant social and economic roles in village life, sometimes as village leaders and often as market vendors, handicraft artisans and agricultural laborers. Indigenous women appeared frequently in the courts to exercise their rights as citizens or to testify as witnesses.

Through using the judicial system, young women hoped to break free of parental control and marry the men of their choice. These working-class couples used concepts of honor to assert their rights as independent citizens of the state, “an honor that could be likened to expanded definitions of citizenship in Mexico’s liberal century,” Sloan wrote. As parental authority weakened and the court settled family disputes, honor was defined by individual merit – “a merit even the poor could claim,” Sloan wrote.

 “The state, in theory, wished to punish rapto as a backward rite that threatened public order and morality,” Sloan wrote. “But in practice, judges upheld principles of liberalism and free choice by allowing minors to continue clandestine courtship practices and freely choose their spouses as individuals.”

Sloan is an assistant professor of history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. An article excerpting from her book, titled “Disobedient Daughters and the Liberal State: Generational Conflicts Over Marriage Choice in Working-Class Families in Nineteenth-Century Oaxaca, Mexico,” was published in The Americas in 2007.