A State of Violence: Bourbon Justice in Spanish America

Bourbon reforms in the late eighteenth century created a more policed urban landscape in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Did they, as a result, create a safer landscape? This paper examines how violence shaped the character of Spanish American places and how Bourbon-era efforts to prosecute a broad variety of social “crimes” resulted in altered public and private spaces for women.  Violence affecting residents of Spanish American cities was not universal, but nor was it infrequent. It shaped decisions of when to travel or walk city streets, and it undeniably influenced the experience of life at home. Bourbon-era prosecution influenced the possibilities and consequences for violence. Men were accused, tried, and sometimes punished for domestic abuse, where such cases had gone untried before. A man who delivered his wife multiple wounds with a long-sword (while drunk) might be tried for endangering her life, despite his protestations that she had invited the punishment. At the same time, women were closely observed and regulated in their behavior, and they were punished for activity that was seen to invite violence. A woman walking alone at night without a mantilla (veil) might spend the night in a city jail for taking such a risk. How did this marked shift in how violence was defined, targeted, and purportedly prevented change the private and public lives of Spanish American women? This paper argues that the weight of these trials empowered neither men nor women. Controlling the instruments and uses of violence resulted, instead, in the radical empowerment of the state.  As violence became, increasingly, a monopoly of the state in the late eighteenth century, Spanish American cities were more regulated but not necessarily safer.