Narraciones de violencia masculina en el Puerto Rico del siglo XIX

Abstract

This article studies 19th Century narratives of violence as they appear in Puerto Rican court records. It explores their implications for the study of popular culture in the past and for the understanding of some of the processes that conformed Nineteenth-Century male working class, particularly the workers‘ relationship to the state and the law under Spanish late  19th Century colonialism. It argues for a historical approach to the study of violence and examines how, in a context of expanding agrarian capitalism, men went to the law either as victims or as witnesses to denounce or to avoid fights that could cause incapacitating injury. In doing this, men participated in a discursive contest to define manhood on alternative terms, or simply to express concern as salaried laborers who counted only on their able bodies to earn a living. Violent masculine contests, as forms of gendered interpersonal violence, were thus being constituted as punishable crimes.

URI: https://dire.upr.edu/handle/11721/1008