SUEANN CAULFIELD, SARAH C. CHAMBERS, and LARA PUTNAM, editors. Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 331. Cloth $89.95, paper $24.95

Abstract

An emerging trend among historians of Latin America is the acknowledgment that law matters—not only in the sense that it shapes people's daily lives in numerous ways, but also (less surprisingly) that legal and prescriptive documents (in the present collection of essays, mostly criminal and other court records and law codes) are indispensable in writing the social and cultural history of societies in which literacy was limited until recent times, and where humble individuals left a documentary trace only when they bumped up against the state. The fourteen essays in this interesting and sophisticated anthology, ranging temporally from the early decades of the nineteenth century to about 1950, and encompassing research on Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, amply demonstrate this tendency and contribute materially to its consolidation. Although all the essays have something of interest, given the tilt toward cultural history in the field it may...