Gendered Frontiers: Labor, Law, and Intimacy in the Making of Colonial and Postcolonial Latin America

Curated by Rebeca Martínez-Tibbles

Thematic Collections are assortments of past and recently released articles in HAHR about key issues, events, individuals, or historiographical trends. These collections can be used as gateways into a specific historical subject, demonstrations of methodology, or sources for classroom discussion.

“Gendered Frontiers” explores how gender and sexuality intersected with imperial, legal, and economic systems across Latin America from the colonial era through the postcolonial period. The collection highlights how women and men negotiated structures of power within households, workshops, religious institutions, and courtrooms, revealing gender as a constitutive force in the making of law, labor, and intimacy. The essays gathered here examine how gendered hierarchies shaped both the regulation and experience of everyday life. From the convents and Indigenous towns of early modern Mesoamerica to the slave plantations and urban neighborhoods of nineteenth-century Brazil and Argentina, these studies demonstrate how historical actors navigated systems of coercion and opportunity. They collectively underscore that gender was not a static category but one intertwined with race, class, and empire, reshaping colonial legacies and informing modern debates on labor, reproduction, and domestic authority.

Cassia Roth and Robson Pedrosa Costa’s “‘Maria Simoa, Who Birthed Twenty-Four Children’: Slavery, Motherhood, and Freedom on the Benedictine Estates, Pernambuco, Brazil, 1866–1871” traces enslaved and freed women’s reproductive labor and the legal ambiguities surrounding motherhood and manumission. Julia Ogden’s “‘The Age of Malice’: Estupro, Consent, and the Foundations of Victim Blaming in the Criminal Courts of Buenos Aires, 1853–1878” investigates sexual violence trials to uncover the patriarchal logic underpinning Argentina’s emergent liberal order.

Laura Matthew’s “Two Bigamists in Tehuantepec: Global(ized) Itineraries in Southern Mesoamerica, ca. 1600” situates men’s illicit marriages within the transimperial mobility of European and Mesoamerican subjects in colonial Mexico. R. Alan Covey’s “Inca Religious Women in the Male Imagination” analyzes how Spanish chroniclers and administrators obscured ideas about women and empire to promote colonial initiatives.

Gabriela Mitidieri’s “Las costuras de Buenos Aires a mediados del siglo XIX: Una historia social con perspectiva de género del trabajo de la aguja y el hilo” brings a gendered lens to the informal textile economy of nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, foregrounding the blurred boundaries between domesticity and wage labor. Finally, Inés Pérez’s “Un ‘entrañable amor paternal’: Divorcio y paternidad en el sudeste de la provincia de Buenos Aires, 1985–2000” examines family courts in the late twentieth century, tracing how post dictatorial reforms reconfigured fatherhood, affect, and authority.

Together, these essays reveal how the negotiation of gendered power, whether through marriage, motherhood, work, or faith, constituted a frontier of historical transformation. In centering women’s experiences and the legal, economic, and emotional worlds they inhabited, “Gendered Frontiers” invites readers to reconsider the foundations of colonial and postcolonial Latin American societies.