Research Paper on:
Review of Anne Twinam's Public Lives, Private Lives

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that question became more general than specific: Who is Man? In Ann Twinams book, Public Lives, Private Secrets, she profiles several colonial Spanish families in their quest for the answer  to both of these questions. Ann Twinam seeks to the social politics that were at subtle play during the time of the Spanish empire and of the importance of certain  social functions and titles to the people of that era. A good example of this is immediately given in the study of Gabriel Munoz of Medellin. Gabriel is the illegitimate  son of a very wealthy man in the area. Determined to force the man to acknowledge him and to have the people in the village address him with the title,  Don, wages his personal battle into the very court systems of the day. This is but one, Twinam states, which are representative of those who were desperately trying to change  the status of their birth, or the births of their children(**). Some, she states even go as far as trying to change the status of their relatives who have been  dead many years. It is through this emotional landscape that she draws the reader in order to plant the seed of argument about how character defines a persons identity. The  inter-relationships of family, sexuality, and social mobility, are discussed an illuminated as well as the history of Bourbon rule and the effect that they had on the people living in  the colonies. Twinam originally based her book on more than two hundred registered court cases in which all of these people were petitioning for legitimization and name changes(Twinam,146).  From what she could determine, most of these petitioners were white locals who had relational ties to those in the elite society of the day. They wanted a share of