Weel 5 Post

The newly independent states formed out of Bolivar’s wars of independence in the early 19th century were established by liberal intellectuals influenced by ideas emerging from the enlightenment which drew from western models like the French revolution in order to facilitate their introduction into the “modern” world and break away from the Spanish colonial past. These states produced consitutions with the intention of transforming themselves from colonies to nation states and from royal subjects to citizens. Despite the creole elite’s dependence on the support of female, afro latino, and indigenous populations for the success of the wars of independence, the hierarchical structure of the Latin American state which emerged continued to resemble that which existed throught the colonial past. In this context Arlene Diaz’s piece analyzes public debates which emerged out of the potential execution of Vicenta Ochoa, a pregnant woman accused of murdering María de la Cruz, a samba female slave, and stealing her possessions.

The response mustered by males in Caracas was to come to Ochoa’s defense on the basis of her motherhood, with a flyer discussing the topic stating that Ochoa’s execution would be of no use because it woukd only generate sympathy for the women being executed and disgust towards the state carrying out the execution (Díaz, 42). Due to the inheritence of Spanish understandings of women being fragile and in need of defense alongside the custom of having had double legal standards for men and women, men in newly independent Caracas concluded that the execution of Ochoa would be a barbarous act that would set back to their nation’s efforts to “modernize”. Unsurprisingly, any sympathies which may have emerged out of men to come to the defense of Ochoa, a presumed white women, failed to do so for María de la Cruz, a samba female slave.

Ochoa’s response herself was to illuminate the sympathies that her case was produced, but when her appeal failed her final effort was to put forth that she was pregnant. Díaz describes the public support for Ochoa after her pregnancy is made public as “an implicit understanding that women’s reproductive capabilities were private property that society had a duty to protect” (45). This seems to be an interesting synthesis of both pre independence Spanish understandings of women as weak and having to be protected and the “modern” enlightenment’s understanding of the sanctity of private property. This seems to be how they overcome “the conflict between the constitutional dictum of equality before the law and a call for continued protection based on women’s sex” (Díaz 46). The commuting of Ochoa’s execution for exile is evidence of the strength given to arguments which fought in defense of women’s motherhood (or appeared to) despite the recent societal changes that had been stimulated as a result of the wars of independence and the liberal reforms of the 1830s.