Jóvenes imprudentes: conducta peligrosa y juventud liminal en Nueva España

Autor/innen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15460/jbla.60.2177

Schlagwörter:

Masculinity, Scandal, Mexico, Vagrancy.

Abstract

Eighteenth-century transformations in the ideas about manliness in New Spain gave rise to the perception of scandalous behaviour among the sons of elite families. These young men partied, drank to excess, gambled, womanized, and refused any respectable occupations—all activities that previously had been dismissed as the “folly of youth.” Where dangerous conduct within the period of liminal youth, from the ages of 20 to 25, had previously been tolerated, new ideas about masculinity made such actions a threat to family honour. Changes in vagrancy laws in the eighteenth century allowed families to use the state to discipline their offspring and supress the scandals. Families denounced their sons thus allowing themselves to take the high moral ground and to contain the scandal of their sons’ conduct. Using the ideas of Ari Adut, I explore the logic of the denunciations and their use by elite families in New Spain in order to understand the radical departure of conceptions of scandals among elite families and their deployment of vagrancy denunciations.

Autor/innen-Biografie

  • Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Carleton University

    Professor of History at Carleton University in Canada. Her work ranges from environmental to gender, emotions, and cultural history. She is the author of several monographs. The latest, The Origins of Macho: Men and Masculinity in Colonial Mexico, was the recipient of the María Elena Martínez Prize for Mexico History. She co-edited several the anthologies The Faces of Honor: Sex, Illegitimacy and Violence in Colonial Latin America and Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico.  Her many chapters, articles, and encyclopedia entries and essays cover a wide variety of topics. Currently, she is editing the nineteenth-century volume for A History of Love.

Veröffentlicht

2024-02-02

Zitationsvorschlag

Jóvenes imprudentes: conducta peligrosa y juventud liminal en Nueva España. (2024). Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas, 60, 69-94. https://doi.org/10.15460/jbla.60.2177