ABSTRACT
The crime of infanticide, although viewed harshly by the letter of the law, was seldom denounced or prosecuted in colonial Mexico. Criminal records from central Mexico and the southern state of Oaxaca document the same pattern of scarce denunciation and prosecution persisted in the first five decades after Mexico’s 1821 revolution of independence, but then experienced a dramatic rise in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, at roughly the same period that Mexico adopted its first national penal code in 1871, one which dramatically reduced the legal penalty the crime incurred. This chapter examines the reasons behind both the low early prosecution of the crime of infanticide and its increasing judicial scrutiny over time and examines how the reasons for community and judicial condemnation for the crime in that context differed from our own. Mexicans condemned those who committed infanticide not because they had injured their babies or renounced their duties as mothers but because they had failed to uphold their obligations to their other family members, particularly their parents.
