Trading Insults: Honor, Violence, and the Gendered Culture of Commerce in Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1870s–1950s
2003; Duke University Press; Volume: 83; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-83-1-83
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Colonialism, slavery, and trade
ResumoA 1911 provincial court case recounts a conflict between two ex-lovers: Tomás Aviles and Catalina Claros.1 Aviles, the plaintiff, claimed that Claros attacked his house with stones and a metal tube, insulted him with the words “thief of glasses and firewood . . . coward,” and accused him of incestuous relationships with his daughter and sister. In a passionate plea to the court, Aviles refuted the slurs. “I am an honorable and moral person,” he declared. “[M]y daughter is a minor, incapable of sin, and my sister is married and observes good conduct.” “Catalina Claros,” he continued, “is a callous woman who does not fear God or anyone else.” In her defense, Claros claimed that Aviles lodged the case because she refused to steal a glass from a chichería.2 “I may be poor,” she reportedly told him, “but I’m also honorable.” Aviles became angry, she said, took her hat and shawl, threw her outside, and locked himself in his room with her things. “[W]hy didn’t you take that glass with you,” she recounted him yelling, “I will never be gente [decent, respectable].” Claros denied that she had insulted Aviles. Instead, she claimed, Aviles beat her when she refused to help him steal, and accused her of sleeping with her own brother. Witnesses testified for both sides, but like so many other slander suits the case was dropped before the judge reached a verdict.One of thousands of such actions lodged, and presently decaying, in abandoned court archives, this mundane incident illustrates some of the central themes that marked verbal conflicts in the Cochabamba valleys during an era of profound changes in land, labor, and commerce. First there is the unruly behavior of a woman. Second, there are accusations of illicit sex. Such allegations were more commonly lodged against women, but they could also be a weapon against men. A third theme is robbery. In this particular instance, the accusation illuminates local meanings of morality and honor: outward signs of respectability, of being gente, could not be acquired by theft or other illicit means. If the case reveals that sexual morality might be a component of both female and male honor, it also shows that virtue alone was not the essence of women’s status. Honesty mattered too. Finally, there is conflict over social and racial status. The spark behind the altercation was the removal of two symbols of local status and identity, the plebeian woman’s hat and shawl. When he swiped Catalina Claros’ garments, Tomás Aviles stole her status as a “mestiza” and recast her as an “india.”3 To reclaim that identity, she employed an eminently common weapon: insults.This essay examines local conceptions of honor, status, and race as expressed in court cases over injurias and calumnias (insults and slander) of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Cochabamba. In looking closely at the social implications of slanderous words, it also explores why insults and insult litigation were such consistently central features of public life. Bolivia’s modern criminal codes defined injurias and calumnias as the public expression of words that dishonored, affronted, vilified, or discredited another person, and made them odious, despicable, suspicious, or ridiculous. Calumnias specifically implied that the insults attributed the injured individual with a crime. These laws also covered the revelation of secrets with the intention of harming another’s honor, fame, or public image.4 Together, such infractions against personal honor comprised the most common criminal offense in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Cochabamba. Although the proportion of insult crimes declined somewhat during specific years, court cases over sexual and racial slurs remained a highly significant judicial phenomenon over the entire period studied (see appendix 1). Cochabamba’s modern legal culture, in short, was deeply marked by the idea that words had the power to harm.5Lawsuits over dishonoring utterances provide a detailed sense of the moral and cultural criteria that local actors used to define boundaries of social inclusion and exclusion. They reveal the force of racial taxonomies, ideologies, and hierarchies even in a region where racial and social identities have generally been considered exceptionally fluid.6 Insult suits also point to the strong connections drawn between racial classifications and exclusionary discourses of gender and sexuality. Over a 70-year period of profound transformation, the negative stereotypes that gave rise to insult litigation continuously invoked images of refined, “disguised,” or intrusive “indias” or “cholas.”Subtle changes in emphasis nevertheless took place over time. A sample of cases examined for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals that violent, mocking words were often used to denounce or unmask a woman’s social pretense: she was accused of being an “india” or “chola” feigning an improved state, with finer clothes provided by armies of men, married and unmarried. Such insults revolved around and inscribed notions of inferiority, poverty, and powerlessness. They employed images of uncontrolled or transgressive sexual activity and racial hierarchy, often linking the two. In the 1940s and 1950s, expressions of verbal anger and anxiety continued to focus on sex and race, but with a difference: the sexually transgressive, economically successful woman became a central figure of negative stereotypes. An even more frequently invoked insult of these decades was the label alcahuete, a double sign for “go-between” and harborer of criminals or stolen goods. Court cases that address this charge set into play a series of associations between female promiscuity, personal gain, and social liability. At a time of increasing competition and insecurity, the economically empowered, uncontrollably sexual and loquacious woman was transformed into a sign of great animosity.7My discussion of the changing—and unchanging—dynamics of insult crimes draws on 277 court cases heard between 1878 and 1954 in Cochabamba, the departmental capital, and in three provincial towns—Cliza, Punata, and Quillacollo—all located in the department’s central valleys.8 This period spans the late-nineteenth-century liberal reforms to the 1952 revolution and subsequent agrarian reform. The impact of the liberal reforms in Cochabamba contrasts sharply with their effects in other Bolivian regions.9 Rather than the expansion of large estates, Cochabamba experienced the decline of the hacienda, the consolidation of a smallholding peasantry, and the emergence of new middle sectors. Crucial to regional patterns of verbal violence are the gender dynamics of this process. One key characteristic was women’s central role in the booming chicha industry and local markets; their prominence, in many cases, was coupled with men’s declining economic position. A second important aspect was the anxiety and tension that emerged precisely around many women’s relative economic strength. True, women traditionally occupied an important place in the region’s commercial life. Yet dramatic changes in land and commerce magnified the scale of competition and conflict during the early twentieth century. As hacendados lost control of the commercialization of chicha and other goods, female producers filled the void.The transformation of local economic life along lines of gender is key to understanding the conflicts over power and identity that characterized insult litigation. This is not to say that material changes automatically determined the language of abuse, but rather to suggest that the abusive repertoire had a material basis. Above all, it was local actors’ perceptions of changing land, labor, and commercial arrangements that shaped ideals of insult and honor.10 The essay further proposes that shifts in the gender dynamics of local trade were partly effected in the realm of insult litigation. Put differently: hurling, returning, and refuting slurs was central to middling women’s struggles for social ascent, distinction, and honor. Like schools, courts are often considered purely state institutions, sites of punishment and the inculcation of hegemonic norms and values. Instead I take the court as a more open forum where social identities were formed and contested.11 Injurias suits, in short, were not simply legal disputes over slanderous utterances. In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Cochabamba, insult litigation was integral to the “classification struggles” that characterize class formation.12 Those who pursued such actions used the court to help distinguish themselves as members of a group of honorable people, as “gente.”The study ends on the eve of the 1953 agrarian reform, which signaled the destruction of the hacienda in Cochabamba and the expulsion of rural landlords. Successful female merchants—resembling the upwardly striving litigants who bedeck these pages—occupied the ranks of the new rural elite that would replace the landlord class following the 1952 revolution.13 For these enterprising women, insult litigation was a crucial but contradictory vehicle, for it brought them both honor and dishonor.The essay first delineates women’s prominent role in slander proceedings and links this juridical pattern with the gendered transformation of landholding and trade. The next three sections delve into the language of insult. The idiom of verbal violence in Cochabamba—as elsewhere—often centered on sex. Yet the disputes examined here were not exclusively concerned with sexual behavior. They focused on women’s social mobility, pretense, and disguise, closely connecting sex with theft and “propriety” with honesty.14 Sex was central to insult crimes because it offered evidence of not working or of material gain by “illicit” means. The essay concludes with a discussion of local honor codes. No matter how forcefully litigants linked sexual politics with the race-class order, they did not simply affirm virtue or respectability in line with a dominant moral code enshrined in the law. As they refuted verbal affronts, courtgoers revealed their own conceptions of honor and dishonor.15 The insult could be central to both.The population that protagonized court cases over insults was nothing less than immensely heterogeneous.16 Small- and medium-property owners, rural workers (labradores), chicha producers and sellers (chicheras), market vendors (regatonas, matarifes, ccateras, and chifleras), and artisans of diverse trades pursued these contentious suits. Occasionally, landlords, lawyers, and local officials also litigated insult crimes. Men and women, young and old, rich and poor appeared as defendants, plaintiffs, and witnesses. Amidst this great diversity, however, middling sectors predominated. The bulk of the litigants appear to be upwardly mobile but not yet clearly established economically and socially. They were struggling to succeed in an exceptionally competitive commercial economy, where all manner of craftiness and confrontation played a role.17 Some of these middling sectors were prosperous artisans, merchants, or agriculturalists. Many others led more precarious lives, eking out a living from agriculture and informal commercial activity. In general, they were an upwardly striving group engaged in multiple economic activities that bridged both urban and rural worlds.18The women of these middling sectors, vendors and chicheras, are best identified by their emblematic clothing: the pollera (a layered skirt), shawl, and tall white hat.19 Intellectuals and politicians generally referred to these distinctively dressed women as cholas or mestizas. Local actors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, employed “chola” almost exclusively as a derogatory term. And while the categories “mestizo” and “mestiza” prevailed in official records, litigants rarely used mestizo/a as terms of self-identification.20 To identify themselves, most litigants instead stated their occupation or simply called themselves vecinos (residents) of a particular place.21The everyday struggles over power and identity waged by these diverse actors were played out against and shaped by a protracted crisis of the hacienda. Late-nineteenth-century economic reforms weakened Cochabamba landlords and the hacienda labor regime (colonaje) in the department’s central valleys. During the first two decades of the twentieth century a class of peasant smallholders with origins in the late colonial era expanded and became firmly established. The transformation of colonos (labor tenants on haciendas) into piqueros (smallholders) was a protracted process with profoundly uneven effects. Sometimes the new piqueros gained autonomy and even managed to accumulate wealth; often, however, their lives continued to be marked by poverty and servitude.22A second, closely related characteristic of turn-of-the-century rural life was male out-migration. In the late nineteenth century, the nitrate boom in northern Chile drew men from Cochabamba, primarily to work in seasonal activities such as llama- and mule-train driving. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, qhochalas (Quechua for Cochabambinos) became laborers in Bolivia’s booming tin mines and on Argentine sugar plantations. Men’s wage labor in the mines and women’s activities in the chicha industry helped generate the crucial capital to turn colonos into piqueros, and piqueros into owners of more extensive plots.23A third facet of the slow and multivariegated process of agrarian transformation in Cochabamba was the development of new middle sectors. These were small and sometimes medium landowners who combined agricultural production with commercial activities. Above all they profited from a burgeoning commercial economy rooted in the complex circuit of chicha. The fortunes of these new rural groups were volatile, rising and falling with successive generations. The successful ones would become the dominant rural elite after the 1952 revolution, when landlords were expelled from the countryside.24The women of these new middle sectors took the lead in Cochabamba insult suits. Of course men also litigated slander crimes, but women were the main participants. Over time, this gender imbalance deepened: Women comprised 55 percent of the participants in the early decades (1868–1929), and 68 percent during the later decades (1930–1954). And although men participated actively in both periods, they generally appeared with or against women. Lawsuits between men were few, and their numbers decreased over time; they fell from 20 percent of all cases for the early period, to just 8 percent for the later period. In contrast, the proportion of cases involving solely women remained steady at about 30 percent over the entire period studied.25 Further, women became the primary instigators of insult suits.26 During the early period, just about as many male as female plaintiffs initiated the cases, but more than twice as many plaintiffs (71 percent) were women in the later years.27 Why did women come to denounce insults more frequently in the courts? The answer lies in the peculiar gendering of race, rights, and honor, the discursive logics of judicial spheres, and the transformation of the regional economy along lines of gender.Bolivia’s late-nineteenth-century liberal economic reforms not only transformed land tenure arrangements and relations between landlords and peasants. They also changed patterns of commercialization and consumption, and altered the sexual division of labor. Until the mid–nineteenth century, Cochabamba’s primarily male artisans produced and exported a variety of goods. With liberal reforms, the construction of railroad lines, and an influx of inexpensive Chilean manufactures, artisans lost their extraregional markets and the local economy turned increasingly inward. By the end of the century, corn and its principal derivative—chicha—became the region’s leading products. The four provinces studied comprised the very center of Cochabamba’s chicha industry; together they accounted for two-thirds of the production of muko and chicha in the entire department.28In contrast to other artisan industries that were male-dominated, nearly every aspect of Cochabamba’s chicha economy relied on women. At particular junctures, even hacienda colonas participated profitably in chicha production, for example, by producing small surpluses of muko for sale (mukeo).29 There is no evidence that such mukeras in turn produced and sold their own chicha, however.30 The chicha industry’s main contenders were hacendados and independent female producers. Since chicha was the most lucrative business in early-twentieth-century Cochabamba, women’s prominent role within it had an especially powerful valence.Women certainly sold chicha in the colonial era, but a clear division between sellers and producers characterized the industry at that time.31 Cochabamba’s early-twentieth-century chicheras, in contrast, oversaw production, distribution, and commercialization.32 They accomplished this using family networks of real and fictive kin. Through such family economies, rural women also became central actors in town markets as vendors of agricultural goods. Men predominated in interregional commerce, and some earned a living as small-scale merchants in the departmental capital. But local commercial networks were controlled by women.33 Through their commercial activities, vendors and chicheras cast a web of social, economic, and cultural ties between city, provincial towns, and countryside. Such strategic significance and public prominence made these entrepreneurial women vulnerable to—and dependent on—local opinion, networks, and institutions.If women’s prominence in the local economy remained fairly steady across the entire period studied, the combined effects of world depression and the Chaco War with Paraguay (1932–35) deepened insecurities and tensions for both sexes after 1930.34 Most of Cochabamba’s new smallholding peasantry acquired landholding status between 1860 and 1930, with the bulk of land sales to colonos, smallholders, and artisans occurring in the 1890s and the 1920s.35 In some cases, rural laborers still acquired land after 1930, but the sales apparently declined with the Great Depression. One local symptom of the global crisis was the dismissal of thousands of Bolivian mine workers: they were abruptly pushed back to the countryside. Since a disproportionate number originated from Cochabamba, the layoffs increased pressures on land and other resources in the region, at a time of already heightened insecurity. Most piqueros’ parcels were notoriously small, generally less than one hectare. Over time, tensions certainly deepened, as population density increased and patterns of partible inheritance led to further subdivisions.36In broad strokes, then, early-twentieth-century Cochabamba was typified by the decline of the hacienda and a flourishing peasant economy still containing deep pockets of dependence and poverty. There were signs of a new dominant class in the making, as well as tension and conflict around the volatility of that very process. These uneven paths of social and economic change had fundamentally gendered valences. Chicha was the single sector that continued to prosper within the ever-deepening crisis, and it was women who controlled and benefited most from this essential source of family income. Migration, in turn, was one of the most important economic opportunities now available to men. In general terms, the profound changes of the era meant more social mobility for women and more physical mobility for men. Certainly, many women continued to depend on a male partner’s income, but the overall dynamics of gender power shifted.37 Women’s increasing participation in public affairs through their economic activities was punctuated by men’s long absences and abrupt returns from long-distance trade, war, or labor in the mines. So were their private lives and intimate ties. “[Y]ou dirtied yourself while your husband was away in the Chaco [War],” one string of insults reads.38 Women sometimes competed for the absent men, or the ones who remained. They were also locked in tough commercial battles with each other. It is no wonder there were so many insults.Procedures for filing slander charges in rural and urban Cochabamba followed a fairly typical pattern. Plaintiffs generally lodged complaints before the police, corregidor (the lowest-level state authority), or juez/alcalde parroquial (the lowest-level judge, named by the municipal council). If evidence was compelling, the accused would be summoned for a statement. An arrest order might then be issued, the defendant(s) delivered for questioning to the juez instructor (next-level judge), and witnesses called to testify. Depending on the gravity of the case and the proof presented, the process might be remitted back to the juez parroquial, advanced forward to the juez de partido, or simply dropped. Sometimes, cases originating in provincial capitals (like Punata) were sent for consultation to Cochabamba’s Superior Court.39Transcripts of insult suits—which range from 1 to over 300 pages in length—testify to the ways in which multiple criteria of race and class combined and collided with gender and sexuality in contests over local position and power. This dynamic is especially apparent in the use of two common insults: “india” and “chola.” In the 277 cases examined, the word “mestizo” appeared only twice, and solely in the initial description of a witness’ basic background. The words “chola,” “india,” and “indio” were uttered frequently, almost invariably as derogatory terms; “cholo” also surfaced, but much less frequently, and not exclusively as an insult. In one case, a man who was called “filthy cholo thief” said he could not tolerate such slander since he was a “citizen and artisan known for his honesty and irreproachable conduct.”40 “Cholo” was used in a positive sense in another case, however; it distinguished a higher-status artisan from a man who was merely a butcher (mañaso).41There was no such ambiguity in the meanings that qhochalas ascribed to “chola” and “india”; these labels were unequivocally negative. Litigants frequently associated both terms with robbery and promiscuity. Yet there was one basic difference: “chola” tended to imply “refinement” and the attempt to profit from a sexual relationship with one man (often someone of power and position), while “india” was more closely connected to poverty and the sense of being the common prostitute of poor men.An 1892 court case brought before Punata’s Juzgado de Instrucción clearly illustrates these associations.42 This case for mutual insults between doña Ramona Gutiérrez (the daughter of a prominent lawyer) and Gregorio Mendoza (a medium-sized landowner) concerned a dispute at a birthday party in the home of Gutiérrez’s compadre. In her declaration to the court, Gutiérrez stated that Mendoza pulled her by her hair to the ground and gravely injured her with the words “refined chola, home-breaking whore, adulteress.” Mendoza countered that Gutiérrez had instead insulted him and his wife. A witness corroborated Mendoza’s testimony, saying that she heard Gutiérrez comment at the party: “[T]here are individuals who wear polleras to please their husbands, but the monkey, no matter how much satin she wears, is always a monkey.” Mendoza insisted that Gutiérrez had directed these insults at his wife, along with the words “chola, disguised bigmouth.” When he came to his wife’s defense, Mendoza said, Gutiérrez also insulted him with the words “cholo, refined indio.” Presumably as a kind of additional proof, Mendoza noted that Gutiérrez was nicknamed “viper” for her “bad and provocative conduct.”In the course of the proceedings, witnesses testified that Gutiérrez had in fact insulted Mendoza and his wife, calling them “chola, bigmouth,” “black, refined, impudent Indian,” “impudent Indian, you’re going to respect us,” and “refined Indian cacique.” Described by the judge as a man of high social condition, Mendoza had been labeled with a lower status by Gutiérrez’s insults. But the words hurled at Mendoza’s wife were even more disparaging: they implied an elaborate sense of disguise and deception, and the (failed) attempt to appear better by donning finer clothing.Several other cases employed the term “chola” in just this mocking sense, to delineate a woman apparently feigning a higher social status. Another common usage implied that a woman was the “chola of” a particular man. This embedded within the very term “chola” the sense of being both a mistress and a servant. Thus one loudly voiced string of insults reads, “[Y]ou are my whore and my chola and I’m going to say it here or in Cliza, to the authorities.”43 Sometimes “chola de” implied a parallel household and the concomitant misappropriation of family resources by a second long-term partner.44“Chola,” then, was associated with talking too much, deception, false refinery, and being supported by another woman’s man. “India,” in contrast, tended to be linked with qualities like being mute, stupid, fawning, or poor.45 Both “chola” and “india” connoted illicit, uncontrolled sex, but “chola” implied the use of sex to achieve upward mobility, while “india” generally connected sex with poverty, exploitation, and abuse.46 For example, a woman in one case was called a mukeadora, which designated her an Indian since making muko was a task of Indians. At the same time, she was called muerta de hambre (a nobody), grandísima cama caliente (huge warm bed), opa (idiot, mute, very quiet), and babosa (stupid, fawning, sniveling).47 Another case linked similar concepts, including the Quechua terms india qhola (Indian prostitute), t[h]antosa (very poor), and manupetaca (someone in debt to everyone).48 In a third such case, a woman called her daughter-in-law an “idle scoundrel, who doesn’t work at anything . . . an india, who didn’t deserve my son, trapienta [dressed in rags], wretched person.”49 Finally, “india” was the term used when slanderers referred to victims of rape. In all such cases, the insulted woman was blamed for permitting a man to force her to have sex with him.50Although differences between “india” and “chola” were clearly delineated in many slander suits, sometimes the concepts become muddled. Like “mukeadora,” the common insult chuñu uyu (Quechua, dried-potato face) was associated with poverty. The term implied that a woman’s face was wrinkled, worn, and dark. Occasionally chuñu uyu was combined with “india.” More often it was used with chola-related insults having to do with sex, theft, and excessive talk. Additional slurs that focused on the face, such as cara de olla de tostar (face of a frying pan) and tjuru huya (Quechua, face of clay/mud) followed a similar line of association. In most cases these insults were directed at upwardly mobile women; the terms identified them with their faces, considered dark and old, or suggested that they were literally deformed.51 “India” and “chola,” in short, were subordinate categories that linked lowness with “improper” sex. If the “chola” disguised such lowness under finer clothes, the “india”’s lowness was depicted as something transparent and unmasked.52While verbal assaults often linked sex with race, many affronts focused on sex itself. Promiscuity was the issue in several such cases. Charges of sleeping with “all” the men or “[dispatching] everyone who presents himself” were not uncommon. Labels like “poor men’s mattress,” “merchants’ resting place,” and “skin of the barracks” were also hurled at women.53 In a great number of cases, marital status was the main concern.54 The “illicit” act in some such proceedings was sex with one particular married man. Numerous other injurias suits more randomly accused women of having sex with many married men. Thus one man claimed that a woman “takes married men from one side to another.”55 And a mother-in-law yelled at her daughter-in-law: “[Y]ou sleep with all the married men.”56 Two women complained that they had not just been charged with the “crime of adultery” but were accused of committing it with “all men.”57 Some insults that focused on sex with many men overlooked marital status to zero in on the men’s place of origin or trade. For example, a woman might be called “resting place for all the schoolboys.”58 Or it might be said that she had “married after finishing with all the men in the ‘Curtiduría’ [one of Cochabamba’s most populated neighborhoods].”59 Or one woman might accuse another of being the “chola of” all the drivers.60These varied accusations reveal a great deal about local moral codes, about what was considered acceptable and what transgressed acknowledged norms. Sex outside of marriage, in and of itself, was not the subject of disdain. Unacceptable acts were those that destroyed established equilibriums. Injurias litigants condemned sex with other women’s husbands, sex with many men, sex that destroyed relationships, and sex that left a woman alone with a married man’s child.61 A single woman sleeping with a single man was never the subject of an insult.Another group of injurias and calumnias focused on theft or fraud and the resulting “immoral” social advance. Theft was no random act in these cases and rarely involved money. The indispensable and costly perol or fondo (pots) used in chicha manufacture were occasionally objects of robbery.62 Once, a man was reproached for taking judicial records.63 Most of the time theft involved basic commodities (muko, grain, or livestock) or signs of status and identity such as women’s clothes and jewelry. For example, one woman accused another of stealing three pairs of gold earrings, accessories of the most elegant townswomen.64 In a second case, a woman was reproached for acquiring land and houses by fraud and de
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