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Steve J. Stern. The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men and Power in Late Colonial Mexico. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. xiii + 478 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-2217-3. Reviewed by Paul Rich (University of the Americas, Puebla, Mexico) Published on H-LatAm (April, 1996) Contested Patriarchal Pacts in Old Regime Mexico: Revising the Canonof Gender This substantial,painstakingly documented, and well-written book is an important study of gender relationships among the marginalized in late colonial Mexico, 1760-1821. The author, Steve Stern, is professor of history as well as director of the Latin American and Iberian programs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has made several significant contributions to Latin American subaltern studies –“subaltern” being in his view “A word sufficiently elastic to embrace the subordinated peoples of popular culture...” p.x) – including Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest and his Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World. amount of material involved. Happily however Dr. Stern has been able to bring to his prose some of the facility and enthusiasm that he hasemployed in his research, so that The Secret History of Gender is not only scholarly but highly interesting. It is in fact an exemplary volume in every way, with an excellent index and extensive notes that indicate the publisher has been as fully committed to making a fine book as has been Dr. Stern in writing one.

There persists, as Dr. Stern suggests, a somewhat simplistic view of gender in LatinAmerican societies. It still to an extent exists as a subject off to one side, not fully incorporated into mainstream scholarship. He does not of course claim this is uniquely his disThe investigation he conducted of the original covery, and in fact emphasizes that he considers himsources on which the work is based is prodigious and self to be only part of a wide and developing effort to will itselfbe of use to others as a pointer to mate- incorporate gender into historical experience. rials. He spent an enormous amount of time in surThe generalizations made about Latin culture as veying the criminal records in the Archivo General patriarchal do little justice to the men and women de la Nacion as well as in the Archivo General del who were involved in “bitter, sometimes violent strugEstadode Oaxaca, Archivo Historico de la Ciudad gles over gender right and obligation”. (p.ix) Dr. de Mexico, Archivo Judicial del Tribunal Superior de Stern redresses this by considering legal cases with Justicia del Distrito Federal, Arhcivo del Tribunal Sugender aspects in late colonial Morelos, comparing perior de Oaxaca, Juzgado de Serie Oaxac, Biblioteca them with cases in Oaxaca and Mexico City.MoreNacional de Mexico, Coleccion La Fragua, Centro de los, which gave birth to zapatismo during the MexiEstudios de Historia de Mexico, Central Regional del can Revolution, is characterized by him as largely of Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (Oax“rural folk, a narrow majority of whom remained Inaca) and the Microfilm del Archivo del Juzgado de dian but who were drawn into a lifestrategy marked Teposcolula. He refers to this as “archival immerby considerable ethnocultural mixing and by direct sion” (p.439) and that is an apt description. Moreparticipation as laborers and vendors in hispanized over, added to the combing of the archives is a vast arenas such as haciendas and in major urban marbibliography of printed works that runs the gamut ketplaces”. (p.37) from HenryAbelove’s The Lesbian and Gay Reader Jose and Maria to Kersti Yllo’s Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse.

The book employs some 800 incidents involving If therefore the resulting lengthy book with its assault or moral transgressions, but begins with the numerous erudite footnotes was hardgoing for the case of one Indian couple in 1806, Jose Marcelino and reader, there would be a good excuse...