Bureaucratic Ambitions and Indigenous Defendants in Nineteenth-Century Huajuapan.

This article analyzes the rise in judicial prosecutions for reproductive crimes, particularly infanticide, in the Mixtec communities of Huajuapan, Oaxaca, during the late nineteenth century. It argues that local municipal officials, empowered by republican government structures, increasingly policed Indigenous women’s sexual and reproductive behaviors to demonstrate their moral rectitude and administrative competence to higher state authorities. The study highlights that these local bureaucrats often initiated investigations based on suspicion rather than direct evidence, exhibiting greater zeal in prosecution than more distant judicial officers, who sometimes showed more leniency toward Indigenous defendants. The article situates these developments within broader political and legal changes in post-independence Mexico, including the establishment of the Civil Registry and new penal codes, and explores how Indigenous communities negotiated these pressures amid liberal state modernization efforts.