The Woman on the Windowsill: A Tale of Mystery in Several Parts. By Sylvia Sellers-Garcia (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2020) 281 pp. $32.50

Abstract

Billed as a mystery, a macabre and “sensational” crime story, and “as a watershed moment…that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order” in Spanish Colonial America, this book offers much more than such hyped-up promises. It is more significant for its method than for its history (or even for its framework as an Agatha Christie–style whodunit.)At the turn of the nineteenth century, in newly established Guatemala City, mutilated body parts began appearing on the windowsills of prominent citizens. They came from bodies in the local cemetery attached to a religiously run hospital at the edge of town, and from a morgue adjacent to the hospital. The local authorities attempted to discover not only who was responsible but also why he (the local magistrates at the time, like Sellers-Garcia, make that gendered assumption) was morbidly obsessed with the breasts, vulvas, ears, and hands of women, crudely separated from the dead. What message was he attempting to deliver? Was it meant to be blasphemous and anti-clerical? Was it class-derived (the windowsills belonging to leading figures in the city)? Was it more subtle? Or was the perpetrator simply deranged?Sellers-Garcia cannot say. Hence, as a thriller, the book is a complete failure. It never solves the mystery, leaving us thoroughly teased—but not perplexed. There are no potential culprits, except possibly the snobbish physician who investigated the cases and had his dissecting studio on the grounds of the hospital, but Sellers-Garcia never contemplates the medical man’s potential culpability. Nor is she able (after so many decades) to pinpoint possible perpetrators by type or name.But what Sellers-Garcia does so well is to use the mutilated bodies as a springboard to investigate the critical place of honor, the importance of decorum and civility, shame, policing, differential justice, the ease of femicide, the prevalence of spousal abuse, patriarchy, and class and race relations in colonial Guatemala. The mysterious body parts and the local and clerical authorities’ attempt to deal with them and to unravel meaning suggest a society where poverty and inebriation were common, where deviance of many kinds threatened public order, and where tension between common folk and gentry was inescapable.Sellers-Garcia has written a good social history, depicting the role and pursuits of the underclass in Guatemalan society admirably and fully. Her final chapter, about policia and policing, is important for what it says about civility, stability, and order in Guatemala and elsewhere. The conclusions that she develops are telling for much of Spanish America during the long eighteenth century.Despite these major accomplishments, the value of Sellers-Garcia’s book lies not primarily in providing a readable social history or the outlines of an unsolved moment-in-time mystery. Rather, Sellers-Garcia’s great achievement is to show readers how the most percipient historians employ their considerable talents. In a manner that very few other historians have exemplified so deftly in print, she follows trails blazed centuries ago in the hard-to-decipher archives as she questions her sources and reflects on the deeper significance of the archival innards. She invites readers to join her as she tries to solve not the mere mystery of the bodies but the critical puzzle of colonial lives and colonial social underpinnings.Historians think this way—such is her intent to make plain—pursuing their sleuthing instincts by cross-examining the available sources even when those sources are scarce, unreadable, or irreconcilable. Thus, what is unusually significant about this book is how Sellers-Garcia unveils her methodological instruments to invite even casual readers to share her mulling of incidence and coincidence, revealed and hidden events, and conjunctions of circumstance—all to demonstrate the craftsmanship and agile thinking of successful historiography.One more virtue: Her book fulfills what Sachs and Demos call “Artful History”—a narrative that is a literary as well as a historical contribution.1