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Respect and Identity: Horizontal and Vertical Reference Points in Speech Acts*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Richard Boyer
Richard Boyer*
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia
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Extract

This essay presumes the baroque texture of colonial Mexico in its multiple styles, voices, and peoples differentiated by race, ethnicity, locale, culture, place of origin, position, wealth, and clientele. It also presumes, using Marina S. Brownlee's words, a “selfreflective and distorting” tendency of baroque societies to spin off countercurrents and transpositions of dominant culture. “Profusion of detail, hierarchy, and contrast,” Irving Leonard's well traveled characterization of the Mexican baroque, could not be confined easily to fixed orderings and orthodoxies. From the first, in fact, the project to order the colony created more rather than less diversity by “introduc[ing] new, upsetting influences.” These influences—new cultural valuations, “a new, exclusive religion, and new laws and procedures”— may have “unified a congeries of independent states and empires.” But they also combined in different ways, rates, and degrees with pre-existing and newly emerging political and cultural forms. Not as a uniform flood plain but as diverse sedimentations, the colony was formed by back-eddies and cross currents more than a single stream.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , April 1998 , pp. 491 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1998

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Footnotes

*

The research for this essay, part of a larger research project on identity in colonial Mexico, was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My thanks to Kim Hanger for organizing the session at the AHA meeting for which this essay was originally prepared and also for her editorial suggestions for revisions.

References

1 The characterization comes from Brownlee, Marina S., “Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain,” in Brownlee, Marina S. and Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, eds., Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 10.Google Scholar

2 Leonard, Irving, Baroque Times in Old Mexico (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), p. 9.Google Scholar

3 Borah, Woodrow, “Assistance in Conflict Resolution,” Transactions of the Jean Bodin Society for Comparative Institutional History LXIII (Bruxelles, 1996), 217.Google Scholar

4 Ibid.

5 In another context I have discussed some of the ideas in the following paragraphs. See Boyer, Richard, “Negotiating Calidad: The Everyday Struggle for Status in Mexico,” Historical Archaeology 31:1 (1997), 64–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 I have adapted “mapping” as “appropriating” from David William Cohen (after Harley, J.B., “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26:2 (Spring 1989), 1–20),CrossRefGoogle Scholar The Combing of History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 143.

7 Hobbsian in the sense that on an axis of domination/subordination the affirming of a given identity was often taken as a challenge to another identity. Examples below with reference to a marriage suitor and master/slave exchanges imply this dynamic. Among equals, I assume something quite different, at least in some instances, a mutually supportive collusion to inflate identity in conventional exchanges. This would be possible among friends and a cement that helped make friendship rewarding.

8 In fact “fornicator” was the language of the courts, not the streets. The category more likely to be applied to women would be “mundana” or “muger mundana” whereas no term that I am aware of refers to male fornicators in an equivalently negative way.

9 This would depend on whom slaves were stealing from as we shall suggest below.

10 I am thinking here of the power and status of one’s interlocutor and the nature of the audience (for example, whether “insider” or “outsider”) witnessing the exchange.

11 I see this point as a variant of Cheryl Martin’s observation that “the social order, far from being static, remains subject to continuous modification … [for] words and gestures may either reinforce or undermine accepted standards of behavior and social precedence.” Martin, Cheryl English, “Popular Speech and Social order in Northern Mexico, 1650–1830,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32:2 (April 1990), 305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 To simplify, my notion of “peer” assumes a common locale, fellow “insiders” as I call them in Table 1. Obviously horizontal might also apply to strangers of roughly equal station meeting and interacting in distant places. When they did, they often fabricated an identity, but always with conventional references to lineage and locale (tierra) in a standard rhetoric of legitimation. See Boyer, Richard, Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), pp. 168–75.Google Scholar

13 In this essay I am not dealing with praise for the following reasons. (1) It is seldom documented except in particular areas such as the visual and performing arts, feats of saintliness, and exploits of courage. (2) Elevation took place as a process, not a single event because accumulated gradually with age and service to a community. (3) Praise, when it occurred, probably had the effect of solidifying, rather than elevating, identity. An exception codified in law would be the a manumitting of a slave who saved a master’s life by revealing a would-be assassin or by defending him or her in a revolt. But if such manumissions resulted in changes of identity, the elevation to freedman from slave should probably be viewed more as the equivalent of a material reward than the recognition of ethical merit. For a fragment of praise in a plebeian setting, the memory of a former wife’s “beautiful tortillas” as recorded in an Inquisition file (see Boyer, , Lives of the Bigamists, pp. 216–7).Google Scholar

14 Martin also stresses the importance of audience in refereeing exchanges. Popular Speech, pp. 316, 319.

15 McCaa, Robert, “Calidad, Class and Marriage in Colonial Mexico: The Case of Parral, 1788–90,” Hispanic American Historical Review 64:3 (August 1984), 477–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Taylor prefers the term “fighting words” to insults in his discussion of words leading to homicide. Equally important, he concerns himself with the settings and behaviors that went with words. Taylor, William B., Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), pp. 81–3, 77–80 and 109.Google Scholar Martin also analyzes the language of insult, noting that “virtually every verbal assault proceeded to attack the sexual honor of the target’s household, regardless of that target’s gender.” Martin, , Popular Speech, p. 312.Google Scholar

17 And it is unlikely that an outsider could effect such damage.

18 Chasteen, John Charles, “Violence for Show: Knife Dueling on a Nineteenth-Century Cattle Frontier,” in Johnson, Lyman L., ed., The Problem of Order in Changing Societies: Essays on Crime and Policing in Argentina and Uruguay, 1750–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), pp. 48 and 55. Google Scholar

19 Weinrich, Harald, “Los Tiempos y Las Personas” (Dispostilo (ESTUDIOS) 3:7–8 (1979), 26–7.Google Scholar I am grateful to my colleague Antonio Gómez Moriana for calling my attention to this essay.

20 Ibid., p. 19.

21 Ibid., p. 29.

22 The starting point for speech act theory remains Austin, J. L., How to Do Things With Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).Google Scholar My thanks to my colleague Teresa Kirschner who helped orient me to what has become an enormous literature on speech act theory.

23 Ibid., pp. 132–46, but some concern for this issue appears throughout Austin’s book.

24 Performatives must be spoken in the present tense and the first person singular. “I will baptize,” “I ought to baptize,” “I was baptizing,” Austin points out, do not do anything. The third person, one should note, automatically creates a “narrative.”

25 They were also, therefore, performances as we shall see below.

26 In note 8, I anticipate this point about friends tacitly agreeing to support one another’s (probably small) inflations of identity, but do not have space to develop the point in this essay.

27 Schwartz, Stuart B., “Colonial Identities and the ‘Sociedad de Castas’,” Colonial Latin American Review 4:1 (1995), 186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Frye, David, “Telling Histories: A Late–Colonial Encounter of ‘Spanish’ and ‘Indian’ in Rural Mexico and in the Archives,” Colonial Latin American Review 3:1–2 (1994), 115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The remainder of this paragraph is drawn from Frye’s excellent essay (pp. 115–138).

29 Borah, , “Assistance in Conflict Resolution,” p. 224.Google Scholar Borah points to an important contemporary distinction, apparently a customary and informal one, between “pobres honestos” and “brawling, often lawless léperos of Spanish cities.”

30 Frye, “Telling Histories,” p. 132.Google Scholar

31 Boyer, , Lives of the Bigamists, pp. 85–6.Google Scholar

32 She would not have known these other details.

33 I use “humble” in the sense of lowly, to pick up the sense of pobre Indio. The adjective pobre provides additional stress to the notion of humility inherent in the prescribed identity Indio.

34 Or more precisely, by looking at his remembered reaction to the words. That they remain, even after some time had elapsed, a simple and somewhat artless restatement of his distraught state makes me think that they indeed reflect a state that he experienced at the time.

35 The tenses of the translations, of course, reflect the intervention of the notary who transposed first person speech to third person written testimony. For some further comment on notaries in Inquisition trials see Boyer, , Lives of the Bigamists, pp. 21–22.Google Scholar

36 See, for example, Robinson, Daniel N., Wild Beasts & Idle Humours: The Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 129–34. Google Scholar

37 Mme. Toussaint-Samson, , A Parisian in Brazil, tran. Toussaint, Emma (Boston: James H. Earle, 1891).Google Scholar The discussion that follows is based on Mme. Toussaint’s, chapter “La Fazenda,” pp. 71–107.Google Scholar