Through the meticulous examination and analysis of the court records of the district of Arecibo in north-central Puerto Rico, Astrid Cubano Iguina brings fresh insight to the study of the island's history. Cubano Iguina's focus is on cases that dealt with violence: who reported violent action to the law, how the law responded, and how the ensuing dialogue among accused, accusers and judges played an active part in altering the population's relationship to the law and, over time, the law's to the population.
The district of Arecibo underwent significant change in the years under study, 1867–87. In its earliest years it was based on an economy rooted in sugar production and slave labour; by the 1880s a more urban population had emerged, with artisans, journalists, teachers, workers' associations, in addition to local elites, landholders and a mobile rural workforce. Cubano Iguina's study of the ways in which these changes were manifest in the legal records dealing with gender and violence demonstrates the value of a closely focused historical inquiry. She shows how the legal system itself was shaped by the ways in which people used it, and how in the years under study, the system changed from being part of the apparatus of colonial rule to being understood as part of the modern state wherein recourse to the law was the right of a citizen.
Within her argument she makes visible the meanings of gender, understood in the sense that many of the practices of violence arise from beliefs about ancient concepts of male honour as well as beliefs about male-female relationships. The great majority of cases brought before the law involved male-on-male violence, but the cases where a woman, or neighbours concerned for a woman's safety, brought charges against a man are deeply revealing, both of the ingrained notion of a man's ‘right’ to punish his wife or female consort, and of the law's tentativeness in dealing with an abused female.
Cubano Iguina takes on many of the sweeping ‘explanations’ for male violence -- that ‘class oppression’ is the source of violence, that interpersonal violence is biologically determined, that male anger rises from economic inequality. In her words: ‘Violence is about violence, not necessarily about poverty. The same holds true for explanations that add alcohol abuse as the key ingredient of violence. There are different ways of responding to alcohol, not all of them violent … I am interested in a less biological and more political/social/cultural interpretation of the instances of fighting, dueling, brawling and wife-punishing … ’ She takes great care to depict the wider social and economic circumstances of the participants in the violent cases she is examining, but does not lose sight of the specific circumstances of each incident.
At the heart of Cubano Iguina's thesis is the idea that ‘the law did not represent itself as a static framework but as an arena of tensions and negotiations’. This argument is well buttressed with evidence from the cases she examines. What is also evident is that gender and understandings of gender were central. The concept of male honour is a factor in almost every case, and when a woman brought charges of rape or assault against a male, it was often she who was closely examined. In cases of rape, the woman's virginity or sexual experience was a factor in whether the assault was deemed a criminal act.
Towards the end of the period under examination, the port of Arecibo became considerably more urban and new layers of society emerged: entrepreneurs, educators and an urban working class. Their politics, often nurtured in organisations with social, political and international dimensions, played a role in the establishment and acceptance of an autonomous Puerto Rican legal system. Cubano Iguina writes, ‘(t)he confidence in the rule of law came to be shared not only by people that went to the law to settle private disputes, believing that they exercised a right as Spanish subjects. It was also shared by those that used the law as a strategy to attempt to improve immediate conditions but were aware of its limitations, especially in terms of gender, racial and political issues.’
Cubano Iguina elicits from the documents evidence of changing attitudes toward the body, public safety, personal health, and the spread of the idea of progress in late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Physical injury and punishment were no longer as acceptable as they had been, particularly in the urban setting. Ritualised forms of male violence persisted, including duelling, though it took on new, less deadly practices. In Puerto Rico, cockfighting encapsulated issues of honour, prestige and combat before all-male audiences from all classes.
In conclusion, Cubano Iguina argues that ‘power is the key constitutive substance of the ethnic and gender narratives that have been presented in this book’. She places her research in comparative context with other studies of law and violence in countries undergoing transition from colonial to more autonomous rule, from slave to free labour, from predominantly rural to urban societies, and in each case highlights subtleties that illuminate the local distinctiveness of each situation. One example is her comparison with Lara Putnam's study of migrant workers on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, where, in contrast to the Arecibo district, violence was rife and a police presence virtually nonexistent.
The argumentative and analytic thrust of Rituals of Violence in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico emerge from a close reading of the legal archives and bring a fresh historical understanding of the multiple transitions shaping late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico.
