Colonial Baracunatanas And Their Nasty Men: Spousal Homicides And The Law In Late Colonial New Granada

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2001 by Victor M. Uribe-Uran

"...anoche te vi, habia otro que te chequeaba, montaste su moto, te brindo chicle, tambien galleta, prendio su motoneta y te marchaste con el mono del jean, el overall y la chaqueta ...

Por eso tu eres garuya, retrechera, abeja, bergaja, fulera, guaricha ... garosa, marronga, farisea, gorzobia ... Baracunatana."

"... last night I saw you, another man was taking you out, you got on his motorcycle, he gave you chewing gum, and also a cookie, he started it up and you rode away with that jean-, overall-, and jacket-wearing blond....

That is why you are rabble, slick, bee-like, rough, deceitful, strumpet ... greedy, whore, cat, hypocrite, filth ... Baracunatana."

"La Baracunatana" (Leonidas Plaza)

The male-composed song "La Baracunatana" was widely celebrated in Colombia. Back in the 1980s, when it was first released as a male-sung vallenato tune and during its 1990s female-vocalized rock revival, [1] Colombians of all ages enjoyed dancing to its catchy rhythm and loudly singing its slang-filled lyrics. The song's chorus was an overstated string of ugly slurs against a woman--the untranslatable La Baracunatana--whom the originally male narrator, probably her boyfriend or lover, accused of running away with another man. The words uttered against her, even those whose meaning was not entirely apparent to all listeners, were ostensibly insulting and aggressive. She was repeatedly called the equivalent of a deceiver, shrew, scum, bitch, whore, strumpet, harpy and so on.

Apart from the fact that Colombians, otherwise war-weary, violence-haunted and stressed out, have a compensatory inclination to produce and enjoy good 'tropical' music and bizarre (at times perverse) jokes about the very problems they face, it was hard to understand what made this song so likable. In it, a woman was verbally abused, trampled on, veritably trashed. [2] The song's excessive slurs were probably intended to mock common social behavior. Still, perhaps accustomed this sort of treatment of women (allegedly deceitful and otherwise), the country, men and women alike, loved the tune and went on blithely singing and dancing to it. [3]

During the colonial period, in this Spanish American region then called the viceroyalty of New Granada, women suffered repeated verbal and physical abuse, sometimes culminating in murder, at the hands of their spouses. The abuse itself, and the sometimes mild punishment the perpetrators met, are a deeply sad reminder that, although certainly not unchanging through the years, outbursts of violence against women seem to have been considered natural among the lower classes and state officials centuries ago. Certainly, this was also the case in other parts of the world. Wife-beating was a common practice, even a husband's right as a punishment for misbehavior, until as late as the nineteenth century in England, the United States, and probably elsewhere. [4] As this essay will show, both men and women were killed by their spouses with some frequency as a result of battering. Nonetheless, spousal homicides--the most acute form of domestic abuse, patriarchy and, also, female resistance--have received little attentio n. [5] In fact, specialized academic research about these crimes in the particular case of New Granada and the rest of colonial Spanish America is limited. [6]

However neglected they remain, such homicides are fertile ground for study, with significant implications for the understanding of violent crime in general. Gender-based disputes have been found to comprise a considerable share of all criminal violence in late colonial Latin America. [7] In addition, they express tensions and conflicts of unsuspected intensity among couples, bringing to the surface intriguing everyday facets of gender relations and family life. From the growing literature on the history of gender and the family in Latin America, we have learned a great deal about the economic, social, and political structures and roles of notable families and family networks. In particular, it has become clear that marriage strategy and alliances, frequently conflictive, were fundamental for attaining, maintaining and increasing social and economic prominence. [8] We have also gained a better understanding of family-based patriarchal structures, social values, and honor codes, all geared to ensure the subjuga tion of women and their strict adherence to "virtuous" behavioral patterns in a milieu dominated as much by gender as by class and race discrimination. [9] But only recently have we started to learn more about lower-class families' structures, daily routines, and gender interaction. Lower-class men and women appeared to have struggled with each other and with the larger society to assert their autonomy, individuality, and relative power. [10] Those struggles, exemplified by the spousal homicides under study, reflect deeply rooted and contested assumptions about the character of domestic life, appropriate public and private roles, acceptable sexual conducts, and so forth. Finally, the cases examined here are of particular significance to social historians because they reveal general day-to-day aspects of life in rural communities and constitute useful indicators of social values, popular culture, and living patterns.