Letters, Bodies, and Crimes: Love Letters and the Anatomy of Sentiment in Northern Mexico, 1876-1929

As perhaps no other field of inquiry, the history of emotion, especially romantic love, seems dominated, almost premised upon, a search for attributes experiencing some sort of prolonged “rise” (and never “fall”). Romantic love has been the scale used to chart, variously, the rise of the civilizing process (as in the work of Norbert Elias); the rise of emotional self-control (as in the work of Peter and Carol Stearns); the rise of sentimentality; the rise of “American individualism” (as in Karen Lystra’s book, Searching the Heart); and the rise and/or spread of intimacy (as in Stephanie Coontz’s work, Marriage, A History). Yet another rise, this time of introspection and the quest for self, is the dominant concern of Volume IV of A History of Private Life, where Alain Corbin’s emphasis on the increasing need for self-scrutiny and for the development of techniques of self-comprehension, leads him to stress the importance of writing (as in private diaries and letters, a point to which I want to return).
Instead of contributing to such teleologies (or adding another of my own), I’d like to begin with a different premise, one that stresses the historicity of romantic love (and emotion more generally). Many of the contributors to Cuidado con el corazón: Los usos amorosos en el México moderno (INAH, 1995), published more than ten years ago, for example, insist on the importance of studying what they refer to as the norms of romantic morality in specific regional and temporal contexts. In common with more recent anthropological work concerned with the relationship between love and social and cultural change in places like Nepal and rural China, the goal becomes understanding how emotions accrue meanings only through specific interactions, in particular places, and at given moments of time, creating dominant (and not so dominant) “structures of feeling”that come to characterize any given era (making periodization of such eras a problem for investigation rather than assumed to follow divisions based on traditional political criteria). What I’d like to do in my talk is to look briefly at love letters, one of the means by which a history of emotion, especially romantic love, might be undertaken.

William E. French is associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is the past director of the Latin American Studies Programme at that institution. He is the author of A Peaceful and Working People: Manners, Morals, and Class Formation in Northern Mexico (1996) and coeditor of Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (1994) and Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America since Independence (2007). He has published articles in the Hispanic American Historical Review and the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and contributed to the Oxford History of Mexico. He is currently completing a book on love letters, diaries, and courtship in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico.

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