Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America available in Paperback, eBook
Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America
- ISBN-10:
- 0822344203
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822344209
- Pub. Date:
- 04/22/2009
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0822344203
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822344209
- Pub. Date:
- 04/22/2009
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America
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Overview
Whether analyzing cases in which the Inquisition found that the individuals before it were "legally" Indians and thus exempt from prosecution, or considering late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century petitions for declarations of whiteness that entitled the mixed-race recipients to the legal and social benefits enjoyed by whites, the book's contributors approach the question of identity by examining interactions between imperial subjects and colonial institutions. Colonial mandates, rulings, and legislation worked in conjunction with the exercise and negotiation of power between individual officials and an array of social actors engaged in countless brief interactions. Identities emerged out of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group association and externalized social norms and categories.
Contributors. Karen D. Caplan, R. Douglas Cope, Mariana L. R. Dantas, María Elena Díaz, Andrew B. Fisher, Jane Mangan, Jeremy Ravi Mumford, Matthew D. O'Hara, Cynthia Radding, Sergio Serulnikov, Irene Silverblatt, David Tavárez, Ann Twinam
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822344209 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/22/2009 |
| Series: | Latin America Otherwise Series |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Matthew D. O’Hara is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Read an Excerpt
Imperial Subjects
RACE AND IDENTITY IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICADuke University Press
Copyright © 2009 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4420-9
Chapter One
JEREMY MUMFORDAristocracy on the Auction Block
Race, Lords, and the Perpetuity Controversy of Sixteenth-Century Peru
Early in 1565, Don Antonio de Ribera rode into the valley of Jauja with a group of Spanish horsemen to confront the valley's indigenous lords. One of those lords, Don Felipe Guacrapaucar, had recently visited the royal court in Castile as a noble vassal of the king and had returned with a coat of arms and other signs of the king's favor. Ribera himself had made a similar visit to court not long before. The honorific "don" which the two men shared, an aristocratic marker jealously guarded within Hispanic society, seemed to place them in the same class. However, on instructions from the colony's governor, Don Antonio confiscated Don Felipe's and the other lords' Spanish weapons and horses, implements of power which were also marks of noble identity within the Spanish idiom. Henceforth, as "Indians," they would no longer have the right to own or use them.
This chapter examines the events that led to this confrontation in Jauja and those that followed it, an episode from the very beginning of race formation in Spanish Peru. In the 1530s, some four decades after Columbus's first landfall in the Caribbean, Spaniards invaded the Andes, overthrew the Inca empire, and established the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru. They meant what they said when they called America a New World, new for both colonists and colonized: a Spaniard crossed the Atlantic precisely in order to become a new person, while indigenous people had no choice but to become different from whom they had been-they became "Indians." People of all backgrounds struggled to shape their own identities in this chaotic environment. But neither Spaniards nor Andeans knew just what the word "Indian" was going to mean.
Its meaning was important for both the landscape of identities and the institutions of power. Spanish officials exercised direct authority over Spanish colonists but governed indigenous Andeans through the already-existing power structure: the Andean lords whom they had found governing the provinces when they arrived. These lords-called kurakakuna, kurakas, or caciques, depending on the context-had ruled their people under the authority of the Inca kings, and expected to continue to do so under the authority of the Castilian king. For them, "Indian" was less significant than "lord" in defining who they were. The evolving relationship between these two kinds of identity would help shape colonial rule.
Meanwhile, a class of Spaniards-the encomenderos-tried to define their own identities as lords in colonized Peru. In gratitude for their service to the king, especially military service during and after the conquest, the Crown had granted them encomiendas (trusts), a limited and temporary overlordship over specific Andean kurakas, which the encomenderos wanted to improve and extend. They differed from the kurakas in background: most kurakas were born lords, but most of the early encomenderos came from far less exalted families within their own culture. What raised them above the kurakas was the fact of conquest-one of the empirical realities that would, over time, make possible the imagined reality of "race."
Two themes linking the chapters in this volume are race and identity. Both are familiar concepts, used and often misused by generations of historians to make sense of people and the past. Both are today the subject of epistemological debate, which is part of the motivation of this volume. Juxtaposing the identity of race with that of lordship shows how indeterminate both were at the dawn of the colonial era and brings to light the contingent series of events that helped define both.
Kurakas and encomenderos wanted the same thing: to rule the Andes on behalf of the Spanish king. To obtain what they wanted the two groups engaged in an extraordinary bidding war, known to historians as the perpetuity controversy, in which each tried to buy the status and privilege of aristocracy from the king. He sent a commission to investigate the competing offers. But in the end he disappointed both sides. Instead of ruling through hereditary lords, whether Spanish or indigenous, the Crown created new officials whose power derived from appointed political office, not lordly status. It was in this context that the king's governor banned kurakas from owning arms and horses, markers of nobility, and sent the encomendero Don Antonio de Ribera to disarm his indigenous counterparts. While repudiating both groups' aspirations, the Crown further stigmatized the kurakas as racially barred from the status of Spanish nobility.
Yet this was not the end of the story. While the Crown stripped encomenderos of virtually all aristocratic power, it could not marginalize the kurakas: it needed their cooperation to control their indigenous subjects. Ironically, the conquered kurakas fared better than the conquering encomenderos in retaining their identity as lords. In spite of everything, the kurakas succeeded in converting themselves into a hybrid aristocracy within the Spanish empire.
Encomenderos
The valley of Jauja, in central Peru, was home to the Wankas, one of the many different ethnic groups the Incas had ruled, whose labor and fertile lands made their kurakas and encomenderos rich. In the struggle between native and Spanish lords, Jauja produced a leader for each of the two camps: the encomendero Don Antonio de Ribera and the kuraka Don Gerónimo Guacrapaucar, Don Felipe's father. In the year 1554, the two men fought side by side against the enemies of their king. They fought to defeat a rebellion by certain encomenderos against royal attempts to limit the power of their class, the last of a series of civil wars which had roiled the viceroyalty since its founding. Other encomenderos, however, remained loyal to the king. Ribera was one of the loyalist captains, leading men on horse and foot against the rebel leader, Francisco Hernández Girón. As the wet summer gave way to fall and winter the two sides skirmished and maneuvered. The king's knights-for so they saw themselves, living out a medieval dream of glory at the ends of the earth-wore down the rebels month by month. At last a loyalist band including Guacrapaucar's Wanka fighters defeated Girón in Jauja.
Don Antonio de Ribera had fought at the beginning but was not present for the victory. His fellow loyalist encomenderos had sent him as their representative to the Spanish court, to ask the king, ironically, for the same thing for which Girón had rebelled: more power for encomenderos. They had originally had the right to Indian labor but were now limited (at least theoretically) to collecting tribute; the typical encomienda, furthermore, was limited to two lifetimes, those of the original recipient and his heir. On behalf of his peers, Ribera asked for two things. First, for perpetuity: the right to pass their titles to their descendants indefinitely; and second, for jurisdiction: the authority to appoint judges over their Indian subjects, as Spanish lords did. These two rights, together, would make the encomenderos' office tantamount to aristocracy.
Encomenderos argued that enlarging their powers would be good for the viceroyalty, by giving its natural leaders a stake in peace. The current situation was a vicious cycle in which Spaniards rebelled against the king, then switched sides at the last minute to help the king defeat the rebellion, receiving new or larger encomiendas as a reward. With no standing army except the encomenderos themselves, the Crown could not break the cycle. Don Antonio de Ribera was well qualified to discuss Peru's troubles: he himself had sided with the rebels in an earlier civil war, before proclaiming his loyalty and taking up arms against the king's enemies.
More important than Ribera's arguments, however, was the offer that accompanied them: to purchase perpetuity and jurisdiction from the king. There was nothing corrupt about the proposed transaction. In the social thought of the era, it reflected the complementary roles of subject and king: the subject offered a servicio, or service (possibly in the form of money), and the king gave a merced, a gift or reward. Ribera caught the king's attention with an extravagant offer. In exchange for perpetuity and jurisdiction, the encomenderos of Peru would collectively pay the Crown 7.6 million pesos-twice the national debt of the chronically cash-strapped monarchy. The offer came at an opportune time. Charles V, who was both king of Spain (1516-55) and Holy Roman Emperor in Germany, was worn down by failed wars with France and other European rivals. He was preparing to abdicate the Spanish throne, passing it to his son Philip II (1555-98) under the shadow of bankruptcy.
Were the encomenderos' hopes realistic? It seems incongruous to imagine them as seigneurial lords over Andean vassals, since historians have emphasized the limitations on an authority which was only temporary and included no rights over Indians' land or labor. The encomendero, however, was much more a lord than this description implies. It is not just that he could demand labor and land from his subjects illegally (although he often could). More significantly, the status of Castile's territorial lords was close enough to his own to make the transition seem feasible.
Castilian lords, like colonial encomenderos, had little direct control over their subjects' lands and labor, compared to lords elsewhere in Europe. In underpopulated Castile, where true feudalism never evolved, land was less valuable to a lord than subjects were; he acquired the former as a means of getting the latter, going to great lengths to induce peasants to settle on his land. But once they were there he could neither force them to leave nor to stay against their will. Castilian peasants were subject to few of the demeaning forms of personal service common in other countries and lived in tight-knit, self-governing communities that controlled their lands in exchange for annual payments to the lord. In their organization and autonomy they resembled Andean peasant communities, and Castilian lords' rent was structurally equivalent to encomenderos' tribute; the two forms of limited lordship were remarkably similar, although historians have downplayed the resemblance. Besides collecting rent, Spanish lords' one form of authority was the right to judge crimes and disputes, which provided both fees and influence over their subjects; this was what the encomenderos sought in 1554. Finally, with respect to encomiendas' early expiration date, encomenderos had an encouraging precedent. In the past, Castilian kings had granted most seigneurial titles for a single lifetime only, like encomiendas in the New World. But during the fifteenth century, they changed this system, rewarding their supporters with new titles that they could pass on to their descendants-what one historian has called "one of the most radical social revolutions of Castilian history." In bargaining for perpetuity, the Peruvian encomenderos sought to recapitulate what the Castilian aristocracy had achieved not long before.
The institution of the New World encomienda seemed designed to encourage such hopes. Based on a Castilian feudal grant, it required the encomendero to serve the king in arms. Frequent rebellions meant that encomenderos such as Ribera pulled on their chain mail regularly in the king's service (if not, as in the case of Girón and other rebels, against him). The life they led, along with the chivalric romances they read, confirmed their self-image as medieval knights. To encourage settlement, the Crown had even offered to make common-born settlers hidalgos-minor nobles-and to raise those already noble up a rank. The medieval frontier of the reconquista had offered such opportunities; why should the new frontier promise anything less?
The 1550s, in fact, were an unusually propitious moment for the encomenderos' hopes at the Spanish court. Although Charles V saw his hopes in Europe dashed by military defeats, it seemed still possible to rescue the situation-to redeem lives and treasure already sacrificed-with new cash. Both the abdicating emperor and his son Philip wanted to keep fighting. Philip immediately placed the Peruvian proposal at the top of his agenda. Following debate among his advisors about the dangers of alienating so much power, Philip decided to sell the encomenderos half of what they wanted: perpetuity, but not legal jurisdiction. He appointed a commission to go to Peru to negotiate a sale on these terms. But he ordered them to proceed cautiously and keep all options open: he had heard that the kurakas were considering a counteroffer.
Kurakas
In that same year, 1559-five years after Don Antonio de Ribera departed for Spain, and as the king was preparing to send commissioners to Peru-a group of kurakas met to formulate a response. The kurakas, representing seventeen encomiendas in the region of Lima, appointed two Spanish friars to represent them at the Spanish court, Bartolomé de las Casas and Domingo de Santo Tomás. Speaking in the kurakas' name, the friars offered the king one hundred thousand pesos more than whatever the encomenderos might bid, and a minimum of two million pesos if the encomenderos could not muster a bid for what the king was prepared to sell (perpetuity without jurisdiction). In exchange, the king would not appoint new encomenderos when the current ones died off but (under his own overlordship) would restore "the old political order they had in the time of the Inca kings, because in this consists their entire conservation."
Although the kurakas had served the Inca empire, as they did the Spanish, their authority was independent of it. The Andes were a patchwork of local ethnic groups with their own histories and customs, and most had lived under Inca rule for less than a century before the Spanish arrived. The Incas depended on the local lords for the same reason the Spanish did later: to control their subjects and deliver tribute and labor. With the Spanish conquest the kurakas exchanged one empire for another, and the difference, at least initially, may not have seemed very great to them.
Each encomendero received tribute from one or more kurakas. As overlord, the encomendero depended on the kuraka for his power, but the kuraka did not depend on the encomendero for his own. The historian Karen Spalding called kurakas the "cutting edge" of colonialism, since their local knowledge and authority made Spanish rule possible. This cutting edge could be a double-edged sword for the conquerors: the kurakas' knowledge of both worlds could also help them thwart the Spanish. Many colonists despised and feared the kurakas, but the viceroyalty could not function without them.
The kurakas' identity was therefore enigmatic. They were subject to abuse from even low-ranking Spaniards. Yet colonists accepted them as the Andeans' "natural lords" (señores naturales)-in the words of a kurakas' petition in 1581, "like the dukes and counts and marquises in Spain." Militarily, politically, and economically, almost any encomendero was superior to almost any kuraka, yet kurakas had the greater right to be called "lords."
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Foreword / Irene Silverblatt ixAcknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Racial Identities and Their Interpreters in Colonial Latin America / Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O'Hara 1
1. Aristocracy on the Auction Block: Race, Lords, and the Perpetuity Controversy of Sixteenth-Century Peru / Jeremy Mumford 39
2. A Market of Identities: Women, Trade, and Ethnic Labels in Colonial Potosí / Jane E. Mangan 61
3. Legally Indian: Inquisitorial Readings of Indigenous Identity in New Spain / David Tavárez 81
4. The Many Faces of Colonialism in Two Iberoamerican Borderlands: Northern New Spain and the Eastern Lowlands of Charcas / Cynthia Radding 101
5. Humble Slaves and Loyal Vassals: Free Africans and Their Descendents in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil / Mariana L. R. Dantas 115
6. Purchasing Whiteness: Conversations of the Essence of Parso-ness and Mulatto-ness at the End of Empire / Ann Twinam 141
7. Patricians and Plebians in Late Colonial Charcas: Identity, Representation, and Colonialism / Sergio Serulnikov 167
8. Conjuring Identities: Race, Nativeness, Local Citizenship, and Royal Slavery on an Imperial Frontier (Revisiting El Cobre, Cuba) / María Elena Díaz 197
9. Indigenous Citizenship: Liberalism, Political Participation, and Ethic Identity in Post-Independence Oaxaca and Yucatán / Karen D. Caplan 225
Conclusion / R. Douglas Cope 249
Bibliography 263
Contributors 291
Index 293