Sarah N. Saffa - Kinship and Incestuous Crime in Colonial Guatemala

In 1810, Jos Rumualdo Fuentes denounced his father Vicente to colonial authorities for the rape of his wifeVicentes daughter-in-lawon two separate occasions. tried to interrupt the sexual violence, evidently referring to Vicente as her father in the process. However, Vicente had retorted that he was not her father, and her efforts to impede his attacks were ultimately unsuccessful. Rosala believed she was pregnant from their union, though this turned out to not be the case. Vicente initially denied the accusation, suggesting that Rosala was using him to cover up a sexual relationship with another man. However, he eventually admitted to the crime. Like many victims of sexual assault, Rosala was equally on trial, and debate ensued as to whether or not she consented to the incest. Both Rosala and Vicente were Indians, and defense counsel on either side drew from colonial constructions of Indianness in their attempts to exculpate their clients. Still, in the end, Vicente was sentenced to four years of imprisonment and twenty-five lashes, and Rosala to two months of interior service in the Beaterio de Indias (house of pious Indian laywomen) and spiritual exercises. There was also a mandate for the habilitation of their marriages, an ecclesiastical process that allowed spouses to resume married life with one another. As it turns out, the story of this Poqomam Maya family resonated with those of many other families in colonial Guatemala. And, taken together, episodes such as these shed light on the lived experience of kinship and its intersections with a colonial regime.

WesternersGuatemala was not always shared, nor were its various forms equally condemned. Further, incest codes and the criminal process impacted the articulation of kinship, with colonial actors often using the norms and nuances related to incest to their own or anothers advantage. These variables also contributed to the racialization of kinship models, as individuals drew from assumptions about a relationship between Indianness and incest, even in the face of evidence to contrary. Overall, incestuous acts and the legal proceedings surrounding them reflected and constituted various aspects of social relations in colonial Guatemala and prefigured elements of social life following independence from Spain.

Colonial Guatemala was a region within the viceroyalty of New Spain, which included territories within the southern United States, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean and Philippine seas. The Kingdom of Guatemala included the area between modern-day Chiapas and the Costa Rica-Panama border. Territories within todays nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Belize roughly formed the province of Guatemala within the larger Kingdom of Guatemala during the seventeenth century. Following the establishment of the intendency system in the late eighteenth century, El Salvador became its own intendency, and the province of Guatemala was reduced to areas within present-day Guatemala and Belize. All of the cases analyzed in this study took place within this province and span the years 16821821, the year in which independence from Spain was declared.