Abstract

This dissertation delves into a neglected area of Latin American historiography: the emotional dynamics of violent crime in Yucatán, Mexico. It examines the effects of legal codification on homicide trials across the 19th century, revealing intersections between law, crime, race, and emotions. This transition is significant for two reasons. First, the modern Mexican penal code included something absent from earlier laws: emotions appeared for the first time in the law as potentially mitigating or aggravating factors. Second, in the colonial period, Indigenous people had special courts and procedural advantages. With independence, this explicit racial distinction was removed from republican legislation. By analyzing over 400 trials, this research seeks to clarify the implications of the inclusion of emotions in law and the removal of 'Indians' as a legal category. This dissertation explores how the law changed its approach to emotions and the everyday relationship between Indigenous people and legal institutions, advancing two main arguments. First, the incorporation of emotions into the law had an unintended consequence: a decline in emotional expression during trials—especially in cases of gender-based violence. Second, the erasure of the legal category of “Indio” did not end the widespread assumption that Indigenous people were intellectually and morally inferior. Liberals did not set out to reduce gender-based violence yet inadvertently contributed to its decline. In contrast, although they sought to eliminate racial distinctions from the law, their reforms ultimately deepened the legal exclusion of Indigenous peoples.