In the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Latin American elites expanded political, cultural, and social control over what they viewed as an uncivilized and economically unproductive general population. Historians of Mexico and Guatemala have examined how these initiatives, through the histories of crime and violence, medicine and public health, and gender and sexuality studies, affected everyday vulnerable citizens. This panel examines these historiographies in conversation with one another to explore the similarities and differences of how state formation in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries inscribed everyday citizens’ bodies and identities as pathologized and physically and morally dangerous in various locations in Guatemala and Mexico; to make larger claims about state surveillance and intervention, contestations over private and public spaces, bodily autonomy, and identity formation.

Nicole von Germeten’s paper, “Sex workers, Night Watchmen, and Body Autonomy in Late Viceregal New Spain” explores two 1790 case studies of sex workers who physically resisted law enforcement after they were detained on the streets of Mexico City. Germeten argues that when the night watchmen violated the sex workers’ sense of identity and self-defined boundaries of physical contact, which resulted in the sex workers' verbal and physical resistance to arrest. Germeten places these 1790 case studies within the larger context of present-day conversations about bodily autonomy and resistance to law enforcement. Next, Sylvia Sellers-García’s paper, “Flawed Bodies: Enlightenment Institutions and the Case of Juana Aguila,” considers the criminal case of Juana Aguilar, an intersex person tried for crimes related to their relationships with women in colonial San Salvador and Guatemala. Sellers-García uses Aguilar’s criminal case as a “window” into the institutions of Enlightenment-era Spanish America to make larger historical claims about how individuals’ physical bodies and identities are defined through their interactions within institutions and social structures, such as medical science, criminal justice, race thinking, and religion. Furthermore, Luis Londoño’s “Crime, Emotions, and Law: The Role of Liberal Reforms in Female Homicide Cases in Yucatán during the 19th Century” examines shifts in legal defense strategies that claimed men’s emotions justified gender-based violence in nineteenth-century Yucatán. Londoño argues that this defense strategy led jurists to create a new Penal Code that established a new “Emotional Regime” that established criteria for the defense of this type and ultimately reduced the cases of emotional justifications for gender-based violence. Lastly, Alexandria Herrera’s paper, “The Making of Medical Criminals in Guatemala City: Public Health, Legal, and Criminal Surveillance of Venereal Diseases,” examines the efforts of late nineteenth to mid-twentieth Guatemala City public health, medical doctors, and government officials to stop the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea in the capital city. Herrera argues that everyday Indigenous and mixed-race men, women, and children who labored in jobs that required either physical touch or proximity to others, such as sex workers, teachers, hair barbers, and restaurant waiters, and children who were considered the future of a “progressing” nation were viewed as medical criminals by the city’s elite due to their potential to spread venereal disease.