Flirting with Capital: Sexual Mores, the Discourse of Equality, and Seduction in the Nineteenth-Century California Newspaper "El Clamor Publico"

• In Event: Sexuality, Conflict, Community: Towards a Latine History of the Present

Abstract

On the afternoon of March 15, 1881, Lastania Abarta shot and killed Francisco “Chico” Forester, the popular forty-two-year-old son of John Forester, a wealthy rancher married to the sister of Pio Pico, the last governor of Alta California under Mexican rule. The night before the killing, Abarta slept with Forester in the Hotel Moiso on the premise that she was a virgin, and he was going to marry her the next day. When he skipped out on her to go gamble, Abarta realized Forester’s marriage proposal was a ploy to get the virgin to sleep with him. The next day, she bought a pistol, found Forester, and shot him in the head on the sidewalk of Commercial Street in Los Angeles. Immediately, she walked to the sheriff’s office to give herself up.

While all these events were happening, Abarta was already engaged to Francisco P. Ramírez, a brilliant seventeen-year-old who published his Spanish-language Los Angeles journal El Clamor Publico (the Public Outcry) as a champion of the Mexican people between 1855 and 1859. What becomes even more startling is Abrata’s exoneration for the murder of Forester under the pretense that she was “hysterical.”

This paper brings together these disparate parts of the borderlands to interrogate sexual capitalism within the discourse of equality in the first Spanish-language newspaper in California after American occupation. While Abarta was engaged to the “progressive” Ramírez, she was also breaking sexual mores of the time by having an affair with the son of a wealthy ranch family that was related to Pio Pico. Simultaneously, Ramírez was publishing scathing journalism related to “bloomers and prostitution; Know-Nothingism and anti-Catholicism; prison reform and death penalties; medical quakery and Mormonism; Manifest Destiny and filibusterism.” What can we gather from Ramírez’s publication on the role of sex and sexuality in the nineteenth-century borderlands? And how can we read his own relationship with Abarta, who was literally flirting with capitalism, in relation to his writings? Through the archive, this paper is concerned with how sexual capitalism infiltrates the literary sphere while simultaneously linking that discourse with the trial of Lastania Abarta.

Author

• Bernadine Hernandez, University of New Mexico-Main Campus