Respectable Ponce: Deciphering the Codes of Power, 1855–1898

My sister is a poor orphan, with no patrimony but her honor. —Presbítero Velez, "Contra Andrés Nieves Servano," 1901, AGPR

The declarant says that she has had romantic relations for about a year with Antonio Laubriel, who visited her house with her parents' consent. But people began to murmur that she was pregnant, which was untrue. Since she had already been slandered by the public, she decided to go and live with my lover.... The declarant states that Laubriel neither persuaded her nor forced her to go with him. That night she lost her virginal state, which she had carefully conserved until then.

—"Sobre rapto de Francisca Vega," 1887, AGPR

On Christmas Eve 1894, sixteen-year-old Teresa Astacio ran off in the middle of the night with Santos Vargas, a pardo laborer who had been hired to pick coffee on the farm of Teresa's father. The next morning, the news spread like wildfire in Montes Llanos, the rural sector of Ponce where the Astacios lived. After unsuccessfully searching for the two, Don Dionicio Astacio, a widowed smallholding landowner, stormed into the home of the alcalde de barrio and denounced Vargas for kidnapping his daughter and "robbing her of her purity."

When the couple was finally located and brought into court several months later, they told rather different stories. Facing the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence for having dishonored a virgin, Santos insisted that after they had established a courtship, Teresa admitted to him that she was not a virgin and asked him to take her away with him. The two left Teresa's home, had intercourse, and began living together. Despite her alleged lack ofvirginity, Santos claimed, he had intended to marry Teresa and thus redeem her stained honor. But when he left her alone one night about a week later, Teresa left Santos to take up with his good friend Balbino Zayas, who was also a landless day laborer. Balbino and Teresa had been living together at the home of Balbino's father ever since. Consequently, Santos was no longer interested in marrying his former sweetheart; he prevailed on the court to recognize his claim that he had not deflowered her and consequently to refrain from punishing him.

Teresa, on the other hand, insisted that although she had left her father's house with Vargas, intending to make love and live with the impoverished laborer after only a two-week courtship, she had indeed lost her virginity that fateful Christmas Eve and therefore was honorable. Teresa confirmed that she had left Santos to live with his pardo friend Balbino, but not, as Santos had implied, owing to her immorality. Rather, she left "because it was not convenient to continue living with Vargas. He set me up in a house that didn't even belong to him, and he made me serve him like a servant; I'm not accustomed to that."

When interrogated about his role in the drama, Balbino said that he had never asked Teresa whether she had been a virgin when she left her father's home; it had "never occurred to him to do so." A number of wealthy, white, landowning neighbors, however, did not show the same disinterest in Teresa's virginity. Their testimony centered on her "unstained" sexual reputation. Teresa had never been known to have had a romantic relationship with anyone before. Before her sexual escapades of the last few months, she had always been "properly contained" within her father's house and therefore had been considered by everyone who knew her to be a virgin and a respectable young woman.

Before the court could render a decision in the matter of marriage and the reparation of Teresa's honor, however, Don Dionicio and Teresa appeared before the judge and pardoned Santos Vargas. Teresa was no longer interested in marrying him (if she ever had been), and Don Dionicio perhaps feared that the court would either formally find that his daughter had indeed not been "pure" when she left with Santos or that it would order a socially unacceptable marriage.

Officially recorded cases of cross-class romances between poor, Afro-Puerto Rican men and daughters of allegedly white landholders, even illiterate landowners such as Don Dionicio, were rare in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Teresa and Santos's story—and the story that each told about it—offers some fascinating glimpses into a number of issues to be explored in this chapter.

The script of female honor, based on the maintenance of a woman's virginity and sexual fidelity, which, once lost, was only reparable by marriage to the conquering male, was clearly well known by all parties involved. Teresa, Santos, Don Dionicio, and the Astacios' neighbors all employed elements of this discourse in their presentations to the magistrate. Yet each hoped to achieve different ends by appropriating the common language of honor andrespectability. Indeed, honor, as we can see from this case, could be profoundly contradictory. Restoring Teresa's honor by ordering her marriage to an impoverished pardo man would have subverted the class and race hierarchies that cemented Don Dionicio's superiority over landless Afro-Puerto Rican laborers, rather than confirming them, as the defense of female honor was intended to do. In addition, the very definition of respectability could vary widely from class to class. Balbino's acceptance of Teresa's shifting sexual alliances contrasted markedly with her white, wealthy male neighbors' preoccupation with her chastity.

Furthermore, the divergent social expectations of women across Ponce's class spectrum helped produce very different experiences of womanhood, as Teresa so pointedly stated. She had never experienced the brutal poverty of the landless laboring classes, nor had she performed the kinds of domestic labor expected of her by her plebeian lover. In fact, she may well have been accustomed to enjoying the fruits of servants' domestic labor herself. Being served, rather than having to serve others, was important to her understanding of what it meant to be a respectable woman.

Finally, Teresa's case shows that women did not passively reproduce patriarchal social codes. Rather, they struggled with the men in their lives over the precise definitions of acceptable gendered labor and sexual conduct. Even while accepting the dominant tenets of honor and gender obligations, women often attempted to manipulate them to their own advantage. And like Teresa, who took up with a man of African heritage and then...