Two years in a row (1885 and 1886) Señora Teresa, a native and resident of Oaxaca de Juárez, pleaded with the court to prosecute her daughter's suitors. The first time, after seeing Primitiva chatting with Juan in the street and finding his love letter in her home, she grew apprehensive. She hurried to court when Primitiva disappeared that evening to accuse the young man of seducing and abducting her 13 year old daughter. Police officers apprehended the young couple and the judge listened to their testimonies. Primitiva swore that she was 16 years old and had run away to her aunt's home because she feared her mother's wrath at discovering the love missive. She further stated that she had in fact broken up with Juan some weeks earlier and that they had never engaged in sexual relations. The following year, Primitiva eloped with a different suitor and her mother surfaced in the historical record once more. This time she indicated that she saw her daughter conversing with Francisco in her home's doorway and after he spirited her naïve daughter away, he returned the next day to taunt her husband, boasting that “he took Primitiva because he was a man.” In both cases, Primitiva's mother demanded swift justice. She asked the judge to prosecute her daughter's seducers to the full extent of the law, arguing that Primitiva lacked the maturity to choose her mate wisely. Assenting to the indignant mother's wishes, judges ordered police officers to pick up both young men to face charges ofrapto(abduction by seduction) in municipal court. In the first case, the judge dropped the suit for lack of merit. In the latter case, the judge sided with Señora Teresa's minor daughter, in effect emancipating her from parental authority by allowing her to begin family life with her second suitor, Francisco.

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Chapter 4 examines medical and forensic approaches to self-murder. Some Mexican scientists believed the causes of self-murder to be biological and environmental. Others followed Emile Durkheim's arguments and placed its roots squarely in the urban environment. The environment was the modern city—, its rapid work paces, its changing technology, and the increasing alienation of the individual from family, community, and religion. Newspapers advertised a myriad of tonics and medicines to cure neurasthenia and other causes of excessive nervousness. Class and gender played significant parts in the interpretation and judgments of suicides, and these narratives were acted out in the media and in, judicial, and medical discourse. The documentary base of this chapter includes contemporary the journals ofmedical schools journals, insane asylumthe intake questionnaires of insane asylums, case files of patients incarcerated in the asylums, and forensic-medicine publications.

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Chapter 6 dissects how Mexicans processed and came to terms with death, especially tragic deaths of youth. It examines the moral panic that arose regarding youth and their perceived propensity for self-destruction and other violent behaviors. The documentary base of this chapter draws mostly from editorials and media coverage that bemoaned the self-destructive impulses of adolescent Mexicans. Secondly, the chapter contrasts competing attitudes toward death and how death ought to be commemorated in official and popular practice and discourse. Drawing from the approaches of anthropologists and historians of emotions, the incidences of vernacular mourning and memorialization at "stains of blood" ([suicide sites)] are read for their political messages of marking untimely violent death and personalizing public issues like youth suicide.