Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (review)
This excellent, complex book weaves dramatic narratives from the private lives of elite, eighteenth-century men and women from throughout the Spanish Empire. The details were presented in petitions to the crown for legitimation—the process of gracias al sacar. Puzzled by accounts of extraordinary efforts of upper-class colonials to have their birth status termed "legitimate" (contrary to fact), Ann Twinam embarked on an exhaustive quest to understand why being seen as "legitimate" was so important. This investigation took her to archives in Spain and throughout what had been the Spanish Empire, as she painstakingly pieced together impressive banks of individual data. This data includes 244 petitions of legitimation from 1700-1820, which also described the lives of 187 mothers and 187 fathers of petitioners (some had more than one child). This book is remarkable in presenting an empire-wide analysis of highly individual documents relating to private matters of sexuality and marriage. In the process of amassing data from throughout the Spanish Empire, Ann Twinam considered these petitions and cedulas from the perspective of a Bourbon social policy.