A Father against his Daughter on Marriage Choice: A 1823 Rapto Trial in Chile

Rapto in Legal History and as a Social Phenomenon

Rapto, from the Latin raptus, has been practiced in several societies throughout history, as revealed by legal records on the matter. According to Caroline Dunn, in the Roman world, “raptus usually referred to thievery, and classical authors broadened the notion of property theft to include people.” ¹⁹ Early Roman law punished rapto with death for the perpetrator and the victim, if she had consented, although it was not officially coded as a crime until the sixth century. Later, Justinian abolished the death penalty for this crime and punished the rapto of widows, unmarried women, or nuns as property seizure. Punishment for rapto lessened over time, and marriage or the payment of a fine became possible consequences. ²⁰ This original meaning of rapto, to seize, persisted throughout the medieval period. However, in the later Middle Ages, the term expanded its meaning to encompass abduction, elopement, rape, and adultery. Marie Kelleher characterizes it as “a catch-all legal category of ‘forcible taking’” in the Middle Ages. ²¹

The Visigoth-Hispanic legal tradition would later inherit the basic structure of this crime—as crystallized in the Liber Iudiciorum and Fuero Juzgo—which can be committed with or without a woman’s consent. However, it is only tangentially considered to be a crime against the woman and primarily one against the honor of the man who is her guardian. Also, the crime is prosecutable only if the rapto is against a certain type of woman: widows, unmarried women, or nuns. Thus, this legal figure not only protects a father or a husband’s rights but also enforces a hierarchy of women in society. This is a fundamental aspect for the case that I explore, since the father desperately tries to argue that his daughter is one of those women worth protecting. It is also related to the idea that honorable women seem to lack the ability to consent, while women who have “bad reputation” do not. Las Siete Partidas, a thirteenth-century Spanish legal compilation, would innovate by establishing a difference between rapto by force and rapto by seduction, since for its creator, Alfonso X, persuading women by trickery or flattery was also a serious crime. Spanish legal compilations were passed on to the Americas during the colonial period and were binding law until the nineteenth century, with Las Siete Partidas being the most cited compilation at trials.

The topic of rapto goes largely unremarked in Chilean historiographical scholarship, with a few exceptions. Based on writings by chronicler Vicente Carvallo y Goyeneche, Horacio Zapater describes rapto as a common premarriage practice in Chile among the Mapuche indigenous people during the eighteenth century. The groom would abduct the bride with her father’s knowledge and implicit consent and take the bride to the woods for about three days. Afterward, he would make a payment to the father. Upon completing this process, the family would accept the marriage. ²² Other indigenous cultures of Latin America practiced variations of rapto. ²³ In larger Chilean society, the practice entailed a spectrum of different possible situations and nuances. Yet, two main forms have been highlighted by Chilean historiography on the matter: either a violent undertaking unrelated to marriage, in which a man forcibly takes a woman from her home somewhere else to possibly rape her, or a means for a couple unable to marry due to an ethnic or economic disparity to flee from society’s constraints and eventually force a marriage. Rapto also served as a strategy for a woman to leave a domestic situation in which she was unhappy. ²⁴

Camila Plaza wrote her master’s thesis on judicial cases of rapto and estupro (rape) in colonial Chile, encompassing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ²⁵ She argues that at that time, rapto cases were decided based on the status, legitimacy, and reputation of the woman; her family; and the alleged perpetrator. According to Plaza, although punishments in general were not severe or strictly enforced, men of lower status and class received harsher sentences. In the period she studied, she did not find a single case in which women were complicit in the rapto, thus all of them were either abusive or violent interactions. However, the 1776 Pragmatic Sanction that prohibited unequal marriage, and its later version applied to the Americas, provided a significant obstacle for unequal partners to marry. Thus, the Pragmatic Sanction set the stage for rapto as a means to fight parental authority.

Igor Goicovic addresses various aspects of rapto cases in nineteenth-century Chile in two of his articles on the topic. ²⁶ He proposes a typology which consists of consensual and forced rapto. According to Goicovic’s study, cases of consensual rapto or elopement were usually situations in which a couple wished to be together but violated social norms due to an ethnic or economic disparity. ²⁷ Although early nineteenth-century Chilean society had strict norms regarding sexual affairs and marriage, sexual transgressions were common, and honor was malleable and ambivalent, especially for the upper class. Consensual raptos were generally a means to enter into a marriage that was forbidden or made difficult by family. In my case study, the young couple fled because Gerónimo Reynoso did not accept a lower-class man marrying his daughter, though he did not argue this explicitly at the trial. As in this case, situations of rapto were usually associated with other, more permanent types of sexual transgressions such as concubinage, illicit friendship, adultery, illegitimate pregnancy, premarital sex, unfulfilled betrothal, and clandestine marriage. ²⁸ According to Goicovic, nineteenth-century Chile was mostly rural, but Santiago and some other areas were already urban centers, meaning that they were places in which the authority of Church and State had more power to enforce norms and persecute those who violated them. ²⁹ By contrast, then, more rural areas provided improper behavior some leeway. Although Goicovic’s studies are a relevant and founding contribution, his framework for analyzing rapto neglects women’s agency, and a comprehensive analysis of judicial files of rapto in nineteenth-century Chile stills needs to be done.

Katherine Sloan argues that although rapto cases have usually been portrayed as instances of female abuse and victimization in which women are powerless victims, most of the women involved in her study of rapto in nineteenth-century Oaxaca, Mexico, deployed tremendous agency in defying their parents and leaving their house with a man their family did not approve of. ³⁰ These women sometimes orchestrated their own elopements and afterward defied their parents in court as they sought their freedom and self-determination. I contend that my case study adheres to this logic and, in accordance with Sloan, that rapto in this case is an avenue for intergenerational conflict about marriage choice. In Sloan’s study, liberal nineteenth-century ideals of emancipation and citizenship played to the women’s advantage, and judges usually sided with them and allowed them to marry their choice, often someone from the same social background.

In Manuela’s case, the prospect of a highly unequal marriage and of being convicted of concubinage prevent her from achieving the same freedom. Although she is rebelling against her father, no one at the trial is aware of her desire to marry Manuel. In my view, the crux for understanding this case lies in the secret of Manuela’s consent to her several raptos. The folios addressing her petition to marry Manuel have mysteriously been separated from the first proceeding, and the legal actors involved only learn about them much later. Her consent, which her father makes a huge effort to conceal from the judges and other legal actors, is what disrupts the trial when it is brought to light. In this sense, the microhistory approach focuses on aspects of the subject’s agency otherwise overlooked by theoretical assumptions about rapto, such as those described by Sloan.

Some of the rhetorical and judicial strategies analyzed in this case are deeply intertwined with the phenomenon of rapto and the constructs of honor, gender, and class. For instance, arguments about a woman’s honor and sexual passivity are relevant to understanding how rapto is thought of and the way women in general are perceived at the time. The strategies deployed in arguing rapto cases reflect admissible and plausible beliefs from that time period regarding the crime and how they vary in relation to honor, gender, and class. My study thus preliminarily contributes to our understanding of both the legal–judicial culture regarding rapto in the nineteenth century and of rapto as a phenomenon, since the strategies deployed in this trial reflect the complex nature of the crime and the ample range of possibilities of sophisticated input from legal actors. ³¹ The issues raised in this case have several implications for broader social concerns in the early days of the Republic: who has a right to make an honor claim; how judges can sentence a case and treat a culprit if he belongs to a lower class; which criteria, if any, are acceptable in shaping a social hierarchy; what the social consensus around unequal marriages is and what judicial agency is available to young upper-class women. I tackle this case from what I interpret to be the fundamental opposition, between the father and daughter, both in their judicial and rhetorical strategies (there is also a conflict between Gerónimo Reynoso and Hilario Ureta, the public defender, but I argue this is not the fundamental one). Although Gerónimo strives to conceal this clash with his daughter, it eventually comes to light.

I present the analysis in two sections: the first one addresses how assumptions about women’s behavior are intertwined with honor, gender, and class, through the depiction of Manuela by several legal actors: her father, her lover, and the public defender. Each of these men appeals to tropes about women in order to bolster their cases and their own interests. I also analyze how her petition to marry Manuel evidences her judicial agency and disrupts the trial. Manuela’s legal status is debated and contested. It is not clear whether this sixteen-year old woman is a widow or a wife, which partly precludes her freedom to marry since the parallel procedure to determine whether she can marry Manuel lasts the entirety of the trial and the appeal, because her status is not clarified. Yet, her biggest hurdle to marrying Manuel is her father, who relentlessly argues to put shackles on him, have him whipped, and sent to jail farther to the south.

In the second section—broken into two subsections—I analyze Gerónimo Reynoso’s judicial and rhetorical strategies. In the first subsection, I address his efforts to neutralize and conceal Manuela’s consent to elope with Manuel and to preclude her marriage to him. ³² Reynoso radically ignores Manuela’s consent and focuses on the formal legal aspects, honoring a tradition of rapto that values “good” women as the valuable property of a man. For Reynoso and the sympathetic prosecutor (agente fiscal), the unequal marriage is clearly more disgraceful than the illegitimate pregnancy. ³³ In the second subsection, I analyze the debate between Reynoso and the public defender, in which they dispute nineteenth-century notions of honor and fatherhood. Gerónimo Reynoso’s conservative view of honor, which rejects Manuel as a potential suitor for his daughter, provides a lively contrast to the public defender’s appeal for a more liberal application of honor and love in the early Chilean republic.

A Contentious Petition

The parallel petition is one of the most contentious topics during the appeal. The public defender strives tirelessly to retrieve the folios regarding Manuela’s petition, since he claims these will clear his defendant of any wrongdoing. They are eventually copied by the notary during the appeal and effectively become part of the appeal's judicial file, and help clarify what had happened. Unfortunately, the documents do not include any record of Manuela’s original petition or any information on the court, except the judge’s last name: Palma. In a document among the folios of Manuela’s petition, Judge Palma explains how Manuela addressed him and filed her petition:

Doña Manuela Reynoso came to my court to ask for parental consent to marry, and since she cannot follow the procedure due to meager financial resources and proximity to giving birth, arguing that it was a different matter than the case that her father Gerónimo Reynoso was pursuing against her future husband; and thus the family council was reunited, according to the law: I pass this petition on to the other judge so that with the urgency that the case demands he might resolve the jurisdiction dispute, to whose resolution I now differ. ⁵³

In 1820, only three years before Manuela’s case and two years after Chile’s independence, the Chilean Senate decided to embrace the 1776 Pragmatic Sanction’s spirit and to create a new pragmatic sanction which largely mirrored the former, although with certain modifications. This legislation included a new legal strategy for a minor to fight an unreasonable parent. The law stated that a woman older than sixteen and younger than twenty-two, and a man older than eighteen and younger than twenty-four, could verbally ask a judge to determine whether their parent’s decision not to let them marry their choice was well-justified. If the judge agreed with the petitioner, he had to summon the family council—which would include the petitioner’s closest family members who were older than twenty-five—in front of which the parent and child would have to make their cases. ⁵⁵ This family council was meant to be a less antagonistic and formalized alternative to dissent trials which, despite undermining parental authority—in the words of the senators who discussed it—still enforced and continued the idea that the family had a right to advise and intervene in their child’s marriage choice. ⁵⁶ Thus, with this legislation, minors regained some legal rights against parents.

The folios on Manuela’s petition begin with Reynoso’s opposition to judge Palma’s authority to determine whether he is an unreasonable parent on the basis of a legal formality. He argues that Manuela’s authorization to marry Manuel should be discussed at the same court where Manuel is being tried. Paradoxically, even in the documentation that stems from Manuela’s agency, the overwhelming voice is the father’s, as he questions the court’s jurisdiction to oversee this matter. Reynoso again refers to his daughter’s innocence and to what he describes as the “abusive seduction” by Meneses. Yet, at the same time, he seems fully aware of Manuela’s determination to marry Manuel, as he argues that this issue needs to be discussed at the court where Manuel’s trial is taking place: “if doña Manuela considers herself free to marry again, she must follow course in the other court.” ⁵⁷ Reynoso thus argues that his daughter is a victim at the main trial while explicitly recognizing her will and agency in the parallel proceeding.

In this case, we do not know who constituted Manuela’s family council or what their eventual decision was, since this proceeding is dragged out through the entirety of the first instance trial and its appeal with no clear resolution. All we know is that Judge Palma defers jurisdiction to Judge Etchevers, and thus, a dispute over marriage choice collapses with a rapto trial when Judge Etchevers is informed of the parallel procedure, which frustrates Manuela’s hopes and renders her actions criminal. As is revealed in Judge Palma’s quote, Manuela was in a desperate situation when she reached his court. She was about to give birth and lacked financial resources, yet she attempted to defeat her father through a different court than the one where Manuel was being indicted. Judge Palma’s decision to defer jurisdiction on this matter to Judge Etchevers illuminates many aspects of Manuela’s situation at the time of her request. First, we learn that Manuela wanted her father to grant her permission to marry Manuel. She made a direct appeal to her father through the court, so that he would officially allow her to marry him. Even though she was probably a widow—a fact that was extremely complex to prove in this situation—she still needed her father’s permission to get married. ⁵⁸ While certain women were able to bypass this requirement, as Valentina Bravo details in her study, a couple who was fighting against an unwilling parent to get married had to make a very compelling case in order to convince judges to do so. ⁵⁹

Why would Manuela have wanted to make her petition in a different court from the one where the case of rapto is being debated? Judge Palma additionally claims that Manuela had an interest in her petition being addressed in his court because her petition to marry Manuel: “was a different matter than the trial that her father Gerónimo Reynoso pursues against her future husband.” ⁶⁰ Did she think that her petition could have rendered her actions criminal when overseen by the same judge who had to decide the case of rapto or did she fear her father’s influence over the judge in the first case? The level of professionalization of the judiciary at the time and the particular community values and social hierarchies toward which jueces legos were prone to be influenced by may have played a role. During the first half of the trial, the judge alcalde Agustín Larraín was in charge of the case, while Judge Etchevers would take over the second half. Judges alcaldes were men of good reputation without a legal education who participated in the judicial process. While there is not much information about Larraín, he seems to be biased in Gerónimo Reynoso’s favor. Addressing Gerónimo Reynoso, Larraín states: “this is how much I can inform you serving you in whatever I can be useful, your affectionate and certain servant who kisses your hands.” ⁶¹ It is unclear what specific information about the trial, besides its existence, Manuela was familiar with. However, her distrust of Judge Larraín may have caused her to argue a petition in another court to be able to marry Manuel Meneses.

Besides suing to marry Manuel, Manuela spoke directly to the notary José Joaquín Vargas. He was the notary for both the marriage petition and the criminal trial of rapto against Manuel Meneses. She addressed him, so that the record at the main trial would show that she was trying to marry Manuel Meneses: “I attest that Doña Manuela Reynoso told me that she is trying to marry Manuel Meneses, the defendant in the trial, and for it to be known I state it here.” ⁶² Why would Manuela have bothered with this, even after requesting her own procedure and after her father had testified? The time line of these documents seems relevant. Her father’s deposition and Judge Palma’s decision related to the parallel procedure are dated May 6 and 8, 1824, respectively. However, Manuela spoke to the notary on May 10. Why would Manuela want to make sure that in that Judge Etchevers’s court, they understood the exact nature of her petition? She addresses the notary in order to reassert her agency in another court. This development suggests she must have known her father was making every attempt possible to hide her consent from Judge Etchevers’s court and to portray her as a victim, neutralizing her agency. Perhaps Judge Etchevers only found out about the parallel procedure because Manuela made sure they were aware of her desires at the main trial.

Manuela was able to defy her father by pursuing and escaping with a man her father loathed and criminalized even after finding out that she was pregnant. She was willing to strategically fight her father using the judicial system in order to marry Manuel. Arguing in court for emancipation was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, yet Manuela’s petition risked many things: her father’s wrath, her own dishonor at the revelation of her illegitimate pregnancy, the sexual transgressions committed by a woman of her position, and the exhaustion of her financial resources—but nevertheless, she persisted. The images her father and the public defender strive to portray of Manuela are deployed as rhetorical strategies, which are legible in the context of a broader legal rapto tradition that presumes consent in the case of poor women who lack honor and violation in the case of upper-class, honorable women. The public defender also exploits the imaginary around widows in order to bolster the idea of Manuela as a seductress. These images are in line with the judicial -legal culture related to rapto trials in earlier centuries in Chile and other Latin American countries. The judicial mechanisms of the time allowed this young upper-class woman to deploy agency and to challenge and defy her father to the extent that her actions shaped the course of the trial, leading to her own conviction and punishment for concubinage, yet the same institution showed little regard for her testimony and reinforced prevailing social norms about unequal marriages and honor. ⁶³ Although family councils were created to address the issue of unreasonable parents, Manuela's unclear legal status precludes them from effectively doing so.

Gerónimo Fights to Neutralize his Daughter’s Judicial Agency

Spanish legal compilations such as the Fuero Juzgo, Fuero Real, and Las Siete Partidas, among others, were valid law in colonial Spanish America and also throughout most of the nineteenth century even after Chile and several other Latin American countries achieved independence. ⁶⁴ As recently emancipated countries, they created their own constitutions and laws to expunge regulations that were incompatible with republics. New laws in areas outside of criminal justice were produced in the Americas and codified through the creation of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias (1680). Older criminal law, however, remained in place for most of the nineteenth century, with Las Siete Partidas being the most popular compilation among legal actors as a framework to address rapto.

In Las Siete Partidas, Alfonso X established two modalities for the crime of rapto: by seduction or by force. The regulation in Las Siete Partidas is relevant for understanding the case, since this compilation is cited in the case by the prosecutor. For either kind of rapto to be prosecuted, the following was required: “In both titles, it was necessary for the women to have a good reputation, that their lives were considered honest and that they had been taken from their place of residence.” ⁶⁵ Only honorable women were considered valuable and worthy of protection, and consent for sexual transgressions was not presumed in their cases. Rapto was not considered an affront to them but to the man they were associated with. ⁶⁶ Since we know that Gerónimo Reynoso was aware of Manuela’s intent to marry Manuel because of her petition, it seems striking that he pursues a case of rapto. Furthermore, why does he argue for a case of rapto by seduction, when rapto by force would have been more serious and compelling? I argue that Gerónimo Reynoso uses rapto by seduction as a legal strategy, among others, to conceal his daughter’s consent from the courts.

From the outset of the trial, Gerónimo Reynoso tries to prove that his daughter was seduced by Meneses. Reynoso thinks he only needs to prove that his daughter led an honorable life, had a good reputation, and was taken from her home to establish that rapto has been committed. This argument actually works for almost all of the trial despite there being evidence pointing in the direction of Manuela’s consent from the very beginning. The first document of the judicial file is a deposition from Antonio Figueroa. He was obligated by the judge to go and find Manuela and Manuel the first time she was allegedly abducted. The second deposition is from Leonardo Ibarra, Manuel’s coworker at the bakery, who went with Figueroa to find the lovers. His declaration states the following:

That it is true that Manuel Meneses had been with Manuela Reynoso the time that is said more or less; but it was because she herself in this first time went to look for him at the bakery where Meneses and the witness work. After the second occasion when doña Manuela was deposited in Ramon Aris’ house, she came out and came to the bakery to look for Meneses, from which resulted that he left with her on the second occasion. ⁶⁷

Although in absence of other witnesses or compelling evidence to prove the crime of rapto, judge Larraín becomes convinced that Manuela was the victim of rapto exclusively through Reynoso’s testimony: “My friend and lord Don Gerónimo Reynoso told me to give him this in which I certify that Manuel Meneses is in jail, at my disposal to judge him because he stole his daughter.” ⁶⁸ Another voice that seems convinced that Meneses is guilty of rapto is that of the prosecutor. He alleges that the crime of rapto has already been proven: “The crime is proven with all its circumstances in the prisoner’s confession.” ⁶⁹ Yet, the only thing that is being considered to determine whether a crime was committed is Manuela and her father’s reputations as honorable members of society. In this sense, since nobody raises any concern at all about hearing her testimony, the case for rapto by seduction works effectively as a legal tool to hide Manuela’s consent from the judges, since assumptions about upper-class women’s behavior operate to her father’s advantage. Thus, rapto by seduction sidesteps an honorable woman’s consent by assuming she is inexperienced and unable to assess or fully understand a man’s seduction efforts, casting her as a victim. This was Alfonso X’s rationale when codifying seduction as a means to carry out an abduction, since an innocent woman could be corrupted by a man’s seduction efforts. Gerónimo Reynoso’s strategy is very successful.

Once Judge Etchevers learns of Manuela’s petition to marry Meneses, the situation abruptly changes since her consent can no longer be ignored. The legal categories switch radically from rapto by seduction to concubinage, and consequently Manuela goes from being a victim to a criminal. The change in legal terminology around the crime is curious since rapto has been a crime in which women can be complicit since Roman law. Roman law punished both the perpetrator and the victim, if she was complicit. Las Siete Partidas sustained the binary rapto by seduction/rapto by force, but this body of law also considered the possibility of women being complicit in and punished for the crime of rapto. Yet, when Manuela’s consent comes to the fore, the couple is instead convicted of concubinage, but Manuela is released from the conviction of spending time in a monastery since she is pregnant. The idea of elopement or consensual rapto does not exist within the judge’s legal repertoire. In this sense, even if the judges in this case acknowledge the double meaning of rapto described in Las Siete Partidas, they do not countenance the idea of a woman’s complicity in the crime.

Reynoso, however, is not intimidated by the new developments, and he promptly appeals the ruling, insisting that his daughter was seduced from the beginning, and the fact that she may have fled with Meneses after this first seduction should not change things. In his depositions during the appeal, he completely ignores the fact that Manuela was convicted, focusing instead on securing a harsher punishment for Meneses and repeating and enhancing his arguments about the alleged rapto by seduction. Thus, he categorically ignores her consent and agency both in the several raptos which took place and in her parallel petition, continuing to argue that she was a victim. In this sense, the appeal works as a judicial strategy that affords him a forum from which he can both defend his family’s honor and establish as much distance as possible between Manuela and Manuel:

The ruling I appeal today pardons the prisoner from the conviction in Baldivia since the last rapto of the young woman is not considered as such, and that she voluntarily sought him, let it be noticed that this saying is of the accomplice in the crime, and of the part interested in the prisoner’s acquittal, so it proves nothing, and nothing argues in favor of the prisoner, but even if these arguments required the greatest attention and solemnity, that voluntary action of doña Manuela, even if the prisoner did not seek for her, resulted from the flattery and the first seduction. ⁷⁰

Another strategy deployed by Reynoso is presented as financially motivated. While the trial is taking place, Reynoso complains systematically about his expenditures: “I spent several pesos on the trial, also in the processes of searching for him and collecting my daughter”; “after infinite expenditures”; “I have spent more than six-hundred pesos on what this evil man has me hooked.” ⁷³ According to Jorge Corvalán Meléndez and Vicente Castillo, criminal trials could be initiated in three different ways: “procedure by public initiative, private accusation and denunciation.” ⁷⁴ Expenditures at trials were associated with a private accusation. According to Tamar Herzog, trials conducted de oficio (or by public initiative) required no payment of fees for victims. Expenses could be substantial during a trial, which is why many victims preferred trials de oficio. Yet, it was possible to change the mode of the trial during its development. Because of Reynoso’s continuous protests, the judge offers to change the mode of the trial to that of de oficio, which would spare him the costs. ⁷⁵ The judge argues: “Although to spare Don Gerónimo Reynoso from further expenses the trial would be continued by public initiative, he must argue if he wishes to continue the trial by private accusation.” ⁷⁶ However, he seemingly prefers to continue with his private accusation, which affords him more control in the trial, since as the plaintiff he has the responsibility of partly driving the procedure. This grants him the possibility to exercise prompt action when needed, even if it costs him considerably, which is a very clever judicial strategy. His claims about his expenditures can be read as a rhetorical strategy to emphasize his wealth and commitment to the trial. His complaints are simply symbolic because he prefers to have control over the events and does not really wish to yield power to the judges.

Gerónimo Reynoso deploys several rhetorical and judicial strategies to hide his daughter’s consent from the judges, preclude her unequal marriage, and reestablish his honor. His sophisticated rhetorical and judicial maneuvers keep his daughter’s suitor in jail throughout the entire length of the trial and appeal. Although his relentless efforts to fight for his honor and conceal his daughter’s consent may be unparalleled in rapto trials in the nineteenth century, some of the arguments he turns to were usually deployed to reject—explicitly or implicitly—an unequal marriage. ⁷⁷ By the end of the appeal, Meneses no longer wants to marry Manuela, he only wishes to be released from jail. Thus, Gerónimo Reynoso places so many hurdles and complications for the lovers that with the help of a biased judiciary uninterested in his daughter’s deposition and a complex legal situation for Manuela’s petition, he ultimately wins.

Two Notions of Honor in Contrast: Gerónimo Reynoso and the Public Defender

Honor in general, and male honor in particular, is the cornerstone of this trial and the guiding light in Gerónimo Reynoso’s efforts. Male honor was a matter of the public sphere, which was clearly shaped by class. According to Lyman Johnson, the honor of lower-class men, among other things, implied not accepting insults without retribution or duels, while that of upper-class men involved competing for wealth and influence. ⁷⁸ Male honor also entailed playing the role of head of the household and protector of the family. ⁷⁹ All of Gerónimo’s efforts to conceal his daughter’s consent are led by the pursuit of honor. Reynoso systematically presents himself as honorable, belonging to the upper class, and to a family reflecting society’s ideals of marriage and legitimate birth. His occupation—although at the trial there are two versions: judge or merchant—situates him in the highest levels of society. ⁸⁰ The way that Reynoso assertively navigates the trial, suggesting punishments and demanding courses of action and even specific penalties; the deference and credibility he is granted by the judge alcalde; and the use of honorable forms of address such as “don” when referring to him, all reveal a social hierarchy related to honor, which is followed at the trial and the appeal. ⁸¹

Gerónimo Reynoso despises Manuel Meneses for lacking honor. He describes Meneses as a lowlife: “This despicable man (…) has committed all these shameful actions.” ⁸² Additionally, Reynoso wishes to inflict on him punishments, such as whipping and shackles, which are reserved for lower-class subjects. ⁸³ Reynoso suggests both be applied to Meneses: “it is necessary to put shackles on him, insinuate him that he will be whipped, if he does not confess and deliver my daughter.” ⁸⁴ Whipping was a punishment of public humiliation, intended to dishonor someone. In this sense, it was intended to delineate the social hierarchy and reinforce the divide among people by honor and class. In 1818, a provisory Constitutional project established that whipping was a punishment only for those who had lost their honra—a concept that overlapped with honor, but more specifically referred to public reputation—because of the publicity or repetition of their crimes. ⁸⁵ These punishments suggest that Reynoso saw Manuel Meneses as someone from an undignified social group who deserved humiliating penalties. Reenacting this hierarchy at the trial in order to humiliate and incarcerate Meneses is a sly strategy in order to prevent him from marrying his daughter. Thus, Reynoso’s hierarchical notion of honor clarifies that the real problem is Manuel’s social origin and class, in detriment to the aspects of legitimacy and sexual honor. Unequal marriage is implicitly an abhorrent transgression for Reynoso, worse even than the appalling alternative of illegitimate birth. ⁸⁶ When Manuel’s father appears at the trial and introduces himself in order to defend Manuel from the accusations and argue for his release due to health issues, he emphasizes that they also constitute a legitimate family: “Francisco Meneses from Nancagua, San Fernando, married and legitimate father of Manuel Meneses.” ⁸⁷ Although the early nineteenth century was a time when poor people started to make claims to honor that were recognized by the judiciary, belonging to a legitimately constituted family was not nearly enough for Reynoso, who upholds a conservative notion of honor.

Reynoso’s efforts to situate himself as honorable are performative, since he not only argues for a notion of honor but proves that it exists by the way he navigates the trial. He uses the term “don” for himself in every deposition or petition, and he demands and receives special treatment from the judiciary. Through all of these actions, the social hierarchy associated with traditional honor is enacted. In this sense, his strategy has a scope and effect beyond appealing to a particular notion of honor or worldview, since he is embodying and enacting claims which other social actors within the judiciary are receptive to. In contrast to Gerónimo’s arguments, the public defender provides a ten-page defense of republicanism and love regardless of social impediments, in which Reynoso functions as the embodiment of everything he is fighting against: “The accuser Don Gerónimo Reynoso forgot all the tender fatherly duties by giving in to the furious contempt with which human greed looks upon the poor man.” ⁸⁸ The public defender argues that Reynoso has dismissed Manuel as someone poor and unworthy of his daughter’s affection. However, he claims that although poor, a man can be honorable, if he works hard: “accomplish a man’s first duty by walking with his suitcases [for delivering bread], these being the proof of his honor to deserve any marriage. Thus he would be unworthy of being loved and unable to call himself son of don Gerónimo Reynoso?” ⁸⁹ Although Manuel might have an occupation as modest as delivering bread, a man is worthy of honor because his work ethic itself is what uplifts him. According to Ureta, this honor, stemming from hard work, is enough for any marriage, and unravels any claim that Manuel wanted to take Manuela’s honor from her.

Ureta’s notion of a work ethic is closely tied to republicanism and liberalism and the ideas associated with them. Individual value, meritocracy, and equality were core tenets of both movements. Merit, following these tenets, is the criteria by which to measure a man’s value at the beginning of the new Republic, so Ureta describes Gerónimo Reynoso as completely outdated: “To prevent the marriage, what is the rationale for so much arguing about status and privilege of Mr. Reynoso and to push Meneses away as a poor man? In a Republican state where equality rules, and only merit is of interest, for any benefit and dignity, are still these dead and chimeric prerogatives remembered?” ⁹⁰ The public defender describes Chile as a country in which the ideals of citizenship and equality have been sufficiently absorbed. This is a strategy to dismiss his adversary’s concerns, but they are misleading, since status was still a fundamental aspect shaping forms of sociality. Although the ideas of liberalism were shaping public debate, policy-making, and intellectual life, they were also contested and even interpreted in several contradictory ways in Chile. As explained by Milanich, liberalism was in a bind between two tensions: expansion of state power and regulation (particularly in some areas which were at the time the purview of the Church such as marriage and sexuality) and freedom in social and economic aspects. ⁹¹ This bind explains much of intellectual thinking in early nineteenth-century Chile, such as embracing the Pragmatic Sanction but including a recourse for minors.

Ureta addresses with irony certain distinctions that allegedly honorable people have such as the privilege of being referred to as “don” or “doña”: “of the unfortunate Manuel Meneses without “don” because he is poor.” ⁹² Although at the beginning of his discourse he refers to Reynoso as “don” and to Manuela as “doña,” he deliberately dismisses those marks of honor at times and refers to Manuela as “the Reynoso” (“la Manuela”) or to her father as “Reynoso” or “invincible old man.” This strategy is performative, since he is enacting a challenge to the core of the conservative system of honor: the hierarchy among subjects. Yet, it is interesting that he mixes these provocations with calling them “Don Gerónimo Reynoso” and “Doña Manuela.” Perhaps it was too dangerous to fully subvert the social norm and privilege of being referred to as “don” or “doña.” Therefore, he only allows himself this restrained provocation, detaching them momentarily from their privilege. With this discourse, he proves that conservative ideas of honor are not yet completely irrelevant in early nineteenth-century Chilean society.

Male honor is closely intertwined with ideas about fatherhood. Ureta argues against Gerónimo’s notion of a righteous fatherhood, yet he alternatively embraces conservative and liberal ideas to do so, depending on the claims he needs to present to best defend Manuel. For Gerónimo Reynoso, a father must protect the family’s honor and reinforce patriarchal authority at all costs. Yet, Ureta argues that Gerónimo is not up to the ideals of fatherhood, since he has humiliated his daughter and exposed her shame in front of several men at the course of the trial: “he has persecuted the miserable Meneses without noticing the damage he wrecked to his own honor in that of his daughter, whose weaknesses have been profusely written and seen, heard by the courts, judges, lawyers, and other subordinates. No man who hears about this case does not look at it with shame and impatience as if it was his own.” ⁹³ In Ureta’s opinion, Gerónimo is a bad father because he publicly exposes his daughter’s intimacy at a trial instead of managing the issue in a more private way. How to defend a family’s honor was, in fact, a very delicate matter that depended on the context, the family status, and the specifics of the situation. Sometimes publicizing a case through the courts was not in families’ best interest, while at other times not taking an issue to court could be deemed undignified and make families vulnerable to the claim that they did not care about their honor. ⁹⁴ Furthermore, Ureta interprets Gerónimo’s actions as an abuse of paternal authority, especially what he argues are his attempts to conceal the information proving Manuela’s widowhood: “To act this way abusing parental authority, he kept for himself the letter or notice about his daughter’s widowhood.” ⁹⁵  If these claims were true (since evidence of these documents is not provided in the judicial file), according to the law of 1820 which embraced the Pragmatic Sanction but also left room for minor’s protests, Reynoso would probably be deemed unreasonable.

In this section, I have argued that two notions of honor are in contrast. Reynoso and Ureta each provide a compelling, all-encompassing, and articulate notion of honor that they strive to prove is the prevailing one in society. The first one, defended by Reynoso and other legal actors, is a conservative, class, and legitimacy-based notion of honor intended to uphold strict social hierarchies and assert honor as the construct through which everyone has an exact and fixed place in society. In this notion, punishment is determined by social origin, and if boundaries are crossed by the lower classes, this insubordination must be penalized in humiliating ways. Consequently, unequal marriage is an affront to society’s values, as ingrained in the spirit of the Pragmatic sanction of 1776, which bolsters parental authority in order to avoid unequal marriages. In this sense, this concept of male honor reinforces the power of the father to administer and sanction his family’s destiny, constraining individual freedom. In contrast, Ureta argues for a more egalitarian notion of honor, which allows people of the lower classes to stake a claim to honor by working hard and being respectable, a notion which was gradually sinking into early nineteenth-century Chilean society. He utterly rejects notions of honor based on inherited or fixed status unrelated to a person’s efforts and merit. Yet, as Reynoso proves by the way he navigates the trial and the judiciary’s receptiveness to his claims, these values of meritocracy and equality were far from being fully embraced in early nineteenth-century Chilean society.

Final Reflections

Manuela and Gerónimo Reynoso were avid opponents in the judicial arena: one looking for emancipation and the freedom to marry a man who was not her social equal, and the other trying to reassert parental control and prevent his daughter from what he perceived as dishonoring the family. As Sloan argues, rapto works as an avenue to address intergenerational conflict. The context of this conflict is shaped by social hierarchies associated with honor and class, Manuela’s economic vulnerability and Gerónimo’s financial strength, the participation of judges with different levels of professionalization in the trial, and ingrained beliefs about the behavior of upper-class women. This final point prevents the judges from recognizing Manuela’s agency although it was asserted in one of the first testimonies at the trial. Manuela’s status as a minor and her uncertain widowhood complicate the family council’s ability to make a timely decision. More research is needed to address the judicial and rhetorical agency of women in rapto cases in order to have a more nuanced picture of the phenomenon in nineteenth-century Chile than the one offered so far by Chilean historiography. Young upper-class women were active parties in their elopements and turned to the judiciary in order to fight for their rights. More research will also help us to understand whether rapto was a common channel—even if a failed one—for emancipation and for fighting parental control.

Early republican Chile embraced colonial legislation and values while also making space for liberal ideas. The Chilean Senate embraced the spirit of the 1776 Pragmatic Sanction and passed a new version creating an avenue for the children of unreasonable parents to resolve issues through the courts. This legislation perpetuated parental authority but at the same time recognized the need to provide a strategy for children in which the state and the minor's extended family would have the final word. This path proves extremely complex and challenging for Manuela, not only because there is a parallel trial against her desired partner but also due to the uncertainty about her legal status, which drags out this proceeding until the very end of the appeal with no clear resolution. Although republican ideals of citizenship and equality are brought up by the public defender and prove that strict notions of honor were being challenged in the early nineteenth century, Manuel and people from his world are treated as inferior and have no credibility at the trial. Conversely, Gerónimo Reynoso is shown deference as someone belonging to a privileged social group, proving just how fragile this new ideology is in the early nineteenth century.

The microhistory approach allows the agency of individual actors we may have otherwise overlooked to emerge, thus suggesting a course of action taken by other women whose agency has been omitted. Focusing on the judicial and rhetorical strategies of individual actors and their relation to larger social practices provides valuable insight into the judicial system as an institution vulnerable to persuasion, claims to honor, and beliefs about women’s reputation and behavior, particularly when jueces legos were involved. In this case, several legal actors engage in rhetorical and judicial strategies in order to make their claims, some of them inserting themselves into a larger judicial - legal culture around rapto cases, particularly Gerónimo Reynoso and Hilario Ureta. The complex and strategic rhetorical and judicial behavior of the legal actors involved, teaches us to be careful when reading the archive, because subjects’ presumed interests when following a legal procedure may be hiding their real pursuits.