The Women of Colonial Latin America
Abstract
This book presents an overview of the varied experiences of women in colonial Spanish and Portuguese America. Beginning with the cultures that would produce the Latin American world, the book traces the effects of conquest, colonization, and settlement on colonial women. The book also examines the expectations, responsibilities, and limitations facing women in their varied roles, stressing the ways in which race, social status, occupation, and space altered women's social and economic realities.
... A través de esta investigación se confirma la información de Roff (2010), Diez Jorge (2014) y Socolow (2015), quienes mencionan que las mujeres fueron sujetos activos en la historia, ya que se ha encontrado evidencia de su participación, directa o indirecta, en la construcción y en la economía local. Con los documentos obtenidos del AGI se comprueba la injerencia de diez mujeres en la construcción de las Casas Reales de la ciudad de Panamá entre 1582 y 1591. ...
A lo largo de la historia, las mujeres han desempeñado un papel crucial en la economía, especialmente en la construcción, aunque su contribución a menudo ha sido invisibilizada. Este artículo investiga la participación de mujeres en la construcción de las Casas Reales en la ciudad de Panamá utilizando documentos de los legajos de Contaduría del Archivo General de Indias en Sevilla, que abarcan de 1582 a 1591. Se incluye un estudio sobre la demografía femenina en Panamá, seguido de la historia y cronología de las Casas Reales, para comprender su relevancia arquitectónica. La investigación revela la complejidad y diversidad de la sociedad colonial panameña, destacando el impacto significativo de estas mujeres.
... Several decades of scholarship has elucidated many aspects of the childbirth experiences of indigenous women in pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin American societies (e.g., Bruhns and Stothert 2014;Kellogg 2005;Socolow 2015), including the Maya women of Yucatàn (Chuchiak 2007;Restall 1995;Vail and Stone 2002). However, given the patriarchal social conditions of the colonial epoch and the resulting lacunae in the documentary record, our knowledge of colonial Maya women's experiences is incomplete. ...
Pregnancy and childbirth were among indigenous Maya women’s most dangerous life experiences, with very high maternal and perinatal death rates from pre-Hispanic times through the first decades of the twentieth century. This article contributes to the knowledge of colonial Yucatec Maya women through the interpretation of documentary evidence of three indigenous rites meant to facilitate women’s perinatal health and successful childbirth. This evidence is contained in the eighteenth-century collection of healing chants known as the “ritual of the bacabs.” The chants include those for cooling the steam bath used in indigenous perinatal treatments, for difficulty in childbirth, and for rites surrounding the disposal of the afterbirth. Through an analysis that combines philological approaches with ethnographic interviews of contemporary Maya speakers, this article provides new insights into the intersection between ritual and culture-specific notions of the body among the colonial Maya.
Cet article prend en compte la question du genre à l’époque des
Indépendances dans l’Amérique hispanique à partir des recherches les
plus récentes sur les descendants d’Africains et les femmes, en raison
de la forte relation entre race et genre, souvent relevée à cette époque
par les contemporains eux-mêmes. À l’encontre de l’hypothèse qui
considère le statut juridique et social de « la » femme comme
immuable, on soulignera les ruptures entre la fin de l’époque coloniale
et la période des Indépendances quant aux droits des femmes et à leur
inclusion dans la citoyenneté.
I develop a model of the social construction of race. Racial categories emerge from labour conflict when elites privilege intrinsically irrelevant traits to divide workers against each other and extract workers’ surplus. I show that elites use colour to grant unequal rights and track these rights across generations because it is heritable, observable, and relatively immutable. Depending on the demographic conditions the elites face, the system of racialization manifests either as ‘ancestry-based’ or ‘colour-based’ categories. This approach to the social construction of race provides a unified explanation of skin tone inequality, racial homophily in marriage, the social status of mixed-race people, the ‘psychological wage’ of Jim Crow, and legal restrictions on manumission. I test for historical variations in racial boundaries using census data from the United States and Brazil and for differential patterns of skin tone inequality between ancestry-based and colour-based systems using survey data from across the Americas.
This article studies the role of the mujeres enamoradas, a category of prostitute during the Spanish conquest of the Rio de la Plata. A long judicial process found in the National Archives of Paraguay describes the attitude of the Spanish elites and their control over Spanish whores. This essay shows how these women were powerful agents in this region and aims to understand the daily life of these invisible actors and women in conquest era society. It examines the complex network between Spanish women and different colonial subjects to understand women’s spaces of power in early colonial Rio de la Plata.
Kadın cinayetlerinin, cinsel istismar ve tacizlerin konvansiyonel medyada görece genişçe yer bulması sosyal medyada hızlı yayılıma girmesi birçok yeni kavramı da beraberinde meydana getirmektedir. 1980’li yılların sonlarına doğru Raewyn Connel tarafından ilk kez kullanılan toksik erkeklik (toxic masculinity) de bu kavramlardan birisidir. Connel, toksik erkekliği işçi sınıfı erkeklerinin, eşcinsel erkeklerin baskılanma hallerini ve orta sınıf beyaz erkeklerin konumunu açıklamak için kullanmaktadır. Toksik erkekliğin bilinirlik kazanmasında aktivist Tarana Burke’nin ilk olarak 2006 yılında MySpace’te başlattığı #MeToo hareketi bu bağlamda önemli bir başlangıçtır. Ocak 2018’de ise yine cinsel istismar ve tacize karşı mücadele etmek için Hollywood oyuncularının başlattığı “Time’s Up” dikkat çeken hareketlerden birisidir. Erkekliğin popüler medyaya yansıyan yüzlerine yönelik çok sayıda çalışma literatürde yer almaktadır. Biz de çalışmamızda toksik erkekliğin Türkiye dizi endüstrisindeki görünürlüğünü popüler örnekleri “Sen Anlat Karadeniz” ve “Hercai” üzerinden ele alacağız. Bu diziler özelinde toksik erkekliğin çeşitli yansıma biçimleri söylem ve eleştirel söylem analizi yöntemleriyle incelenecektir. Dizilerdeki saldırgan ve baskın erkeklik formlarının aşikâr edilmesi izler kitle üzerinde şüphesiz etki bırakmaktadır. Toksik erkeklik sahnelerine sıkça yer verilmesi ve ilgili sahnelerin uzun tutulması ise şiddeti normalleştirip sıradanlaştırdığını söyleyebiliriz.
A History of Mexican Literature chronicles a story more than five hundred years in the making, looking at the development of literary culture in Mexico from its indigenous beginnings to the twenty-first century. Featuring a comprehensive introduction that charts the development of a complex canon, this History includes extensive essays that illuminate the cultural and political intricacies of Mexican literature. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse and fiction of such diverse writers as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mariano Azuela, Xavier Villaurrutia, and Octavio Paz. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of colonialism and multiculturalism in Mexican literature. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of Mexican writing and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.
We review demographic and sociological literature on family dynamics in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and systematize major trends in union formation and fertility in recent decades. We also highlight the singularities that distinguish family patterns and trends in LAC from those in other world regions and discuss the contextual factors underlying these singularities. Latin American families have undergone substantial changes in their configurations and dynamics. We highlight the persistence of an early pattern of family formation despite considerable educational expansion and emerging subreplacement fertility levels, the bottom-up diffusion of cohabitation from low- to high-education groups, the frequent coresidence of single mothers with extended family members, and the substantial divergence in family forms and trajectories across social classes. These family trends do not conform entirely to any of the major theoretical frameworks devised to explain family change in Western societies. Pervasive socioeconomic inequality, high levels of informality in the labor market, weak social protection systems, and slow progress toward gender equality are among the contextual factors that shape the diversity and singularities of Latin American families.
This paper discusses four dimensions of indigenous women and decolonization. The first one is the detrimental effects colonization had on indigenous women on various levels. Second, an exploration of why empire was so powerful in causing trauma to indigenous women is necessary to understand the importance of decoloniality. The third section is about resistance efforts and struggles by indigenous women to counter colonial attacks. Finally, the last section sums up the creative decolonization activities taking place today by indigenous women to redo indigeneity.
Drawing on the “new mobilities paradigm” and contemporary migration studies, this article offers an approximation to the experiences of mobility of María Juana Knepper y Trippel and her five daughters. Their staggered geographical trajectories from Flanders to the Pyrenees, Andalusia, the Spanish circum-Caribbean and back to the Iberian Peninsula are reconstructed through a longitudinal approach, revealing patterns that a focus on one woman or on movement between just two places would miss. Their physical movement is situated in the context of representations of relocation in the royal service as a burden and a sacrifice, before turning to an analysis of the networks and strategies constructed and obstructed by their mobility. Their movement was always intertwined with that of their male relations. Nonetheless, they played key roles in furthering their family’s political and economic interests, creating bonds that linked together distant parts of the Atlantic world, and articulating the Spanish empire.
For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness which bring the Fates upon men; for in misery men grow old quickly. But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered, all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men." (Hesiod, Works and Days, v. 90-95). ABSTRACT This article has the objective of discussing Gender Studies and its cultural construction in Brazil, alongside Heritage Studies. We have chosen to bring to the fore the women artisans of Jequitinhonha Valley because this case study brings essential elements about the construction of female and male local identities in a fluid point of view connected with social, cultural, historical heritage, space and craft issues. The ceramist women of the region let us notice the elastic element in identities that are not marked at all. The exchange of social and gender roles is constant, regardless of the much crystalized "community pater familias" that consolidates sex as a determinant of well-marked and sectorized functions. In the case of artisan ceramist women of Jequitinhonha region, there are breakings of paradigms,
For the first time, the Max Planck Society is publishing an anthology on gender research, "Fundamental Questions". Thanks to the broad spectrum of disciplines and cultures represented in the Research Association, the authors, who come from various institutes, present their findings in numerous fields of research: law, art history, history of science, neuroscience and computer science. The approaches, topics, issues and methodology of the collected contributions are equally diverse. This diversity shows in the best possible way that the integration of the gender perspective is beneficial not only for applied science and development, but also for basic research. With contributions by Dr. Laura A. Bechthold, Elifcan Celebi, Dr. Marina Chugunova, Dr. Luisa Stella de Oliveira Coutinho Silva, Svenja Friess, Ph.D. Giorgia Gastaldon, Dr. Lisa Hanstein, Dr. Philine Helas, Prof. Karin Hoisl, Ph.D. Michael E. Rose, Esra Sarioglu, Isabel Valera and Dr. Ulla Weber.
This essay analyzes two seventeenth-century unpublished letters of women's authorship sent to the Spanish monarchy. I argue in this essay that the letters of Doña Isabel de Salazar (1611) and Doña Ana de Nabarrete (1621) are two textual representations facilitated by their ability to utilize the bureaucracy and demonstrate the authors' exercise of power and inscribe them within a legal, bureaucratic, and hierarchical instrument—culturally, socially, and ultimately, economically. Salazar and Nabarrete perform a textual agency by means of transactions and negotiations within a specific power structure.
To what extend are poor single women today able to maintain an economically autonomous household? Scholars argue that current policy deliberately aims at re-establishing the family as the primary source of economic security and encourages a traditional model of gender relations where women have to depend on male breadwinners. In this article we suggest learning from the living arrangements of poor women in Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, namely the formation of sisterhood-housing arrangements that enabled these women to maintain autonomous households. By learning from history, this article offers insights that may enhance poor women’s economic and social conditions today.
Jews of Latin America, from the colonial period to the present, have been branded heretical, inauthentic, or treasonous and perceived as threats to the colonial domination of Spain’s Counter-Reformation and modern iterations of nationalism in the region. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s 'El divino Narciso' (1689) and Jorge Luis Borges’s “El milagro secreto” ([1944] 1993) indicate the salience and pervasiveness of the figure of the Jew, experientially and conceptually, in the region’s literary conversations about power, collectivity, and legitimacy vis-à-vis colonial and modern Europe. The two works reflect a transatlantic, multigenerational, and multigendered conversation that approaches the elimination of the Jew as a bargain that involved a simultaneous loss of American agency on a world stage. Sor Juana emerges not only as Latin America’s first female intellectual; she is Borges’s precursor in demanding an American regional identity and global agency apropos of the metropole’s exclusionary violence toward the Jew within.
On March 8, 1679, Polonia de Ribas entered her last will and testament into record at the offices of Alonso de Neira Claver, the royal notary public of Xalapa. The will included information about Polonia's family, possessions, debts to be collected, and how she wanted her estate distributed after her passing. She was well acquainted with the appropriate processes and venues to ensure that such matters were officially acknowledged. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Polonia demonstrated her legal acumen by documenting half a dozen transactions with the notary public in Xalapa.
Fashioning a Prince for All the World to See: Guaman Poma's Self-Portraits in the Nueva Corónica - Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank
Central America has a long history of family formation via consensual union instead of formal marriage. The historically high levels of cohabitation have persisted throughout the twentieth century up to the present day and can be traced in the remarkably high levels of nonmarital childbearing in the region. This chapter reviews past and recent trends in the prevalence of consensual unions in six Central American countries – Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama – in order to ascertain whether cohabitation has reached an upper ceiling in the region and whether the apparent stability at the aggregate level conceals significant changes in cohabiting patterns across social groups. The analyses reveal that the expansion of cohabitation has not come to an end so far, largely because of the recent increase in consensual unions among the higher educated strata. The historically negative educational gradient of cohabitation remains largely in place, but differentials in union patterns across countries and across social groups have narrowed considerably in the past two decades.
Extant research notes a tendency to propound the idea that female managers are secondary to men. Gender differences constitute an ethical issue and the discursive constructions of gender management are central to research in business ethics. Drawing on evidence gathered from a time–space intersection that has been widely neglected by research in this area, we address whether female business leaders develop gender-stereotypic management styles as well as their propensity to adopt masculine management patterns such as making risky decisions and implementing formal management systems (e.g. accounting reports). Our findings suggest that gender-stereotypic management styles are chosen strategically and target-driven, which implies a selective use of masculine and feminine management styles. Furthermore, as part of the masculine approach, female business owners adopt risk-taking decisions and implement formal management systems. Our results provide support for the argument that gender is context dependent and, hence, the findings of this study may be useful for contemporary jurisdictions featuring male-dominated societies and a strong intervention by the State in the economy.
This chapter will engage the insights of three U.S. Latina theologians on the question of what it means to be human. They include theologian, María Pilar Aquino; Christian ethicist, Ada María Isasi-Díaz; and philosopher and systematic theologian, Michelle Gonzalez. It will highlight alternative liberative theological and inclusive interpretations of Church proposed by these three theologians that include pluralism, interrelatedness, and embodiment. It will pay particular attention to U.S. Latina theologians’ critiques of the Church and metaphors of the divine these theologians find liberative—or not. I am interested in an ecclesiology that is not hierarchical, patriarchal, or, sexist. In the twenty-first century, I contend that U.S. Latina theologians elaborate theological principles necessary to create a liberative ecclesiology that is egalitarian and pluralistic not only for U.S. Latina bodies but also for a church at large and a global world in desperate need of life-giving paradigms for all of God-creation.1
Despite the ascent to power of several high-profile women throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, many indicators show that women still suffer from high levels of gender inequality. In Peru, women occupy 21.5 percent of parliamentary seats (United Nations Development Program 2013) and have been very visible, some in high-profile positions, within municipal, regional, and national government since the 1990s. A quota system obliges political parties to reserve 30 percent of their electoral lists for women, and since 1996, a women’s machinery within government addresses (some) issues related to women’s vulnerability (although gender equality receives less attention). Indeed, improvement in representation has not solved some of the major ills of gender inequality: violence against women, including rape, continues to be appallingly high, reproductive and sexual rights are still contested, and the labor market continues to favor men.1 How can we understand women’s increasing representation and visibility in politics at a time when women in Peru continue to suffer high levels of gender-based violence and face opposition to abortion?
Sometime in the late 1980s, somewhere in the Peruvian highlands, a group of soldiers detained two young women: one a juice seller, and the other a dentist. The women were “given” to the troops as war booty, and they were given the pichana, a metaphorical reference to gang rape.’ The juice seller was raped by all the soldiers in the group. “We were forty I tell you,” remembers one soldier, nicknamed Gitano. The dentist, meanwhile, was first given to the captain. After the captain was finished with her, according to Gitano, “he suggested I should go over her. I said no (…) more than anything because she deserved considerable respect I thought.” Afterward, according to Gitano, the dentist publicly accused the soldiers of rape, but the troops and the captain just denied it. The dentist lost the case. The juice seller, raped by at least 40 soldiers, did not report what had happened. Gitano actually fails to remember if she survived, emphasizing the perceived futility of her existence. Socioeconomic position, geographical origin, education, consumption patterns, dress, and language inform a person’s position on the ethnic ladder in a racially hierarchical society, and thereby the level of “respect” that one deserves. The soldier’s account suggests that, from his perspective, the dentist was worth more than the juice seller, who, as his account implies, did not deserve any respect.
The 1855 essay “La Costurera” in Mexicanos pintados por sí mismos highlights productive, symbolic, and material connections between sewing women and the consumers of the clothing that they make. The seamstress takes her place among other typical characters that animated Mexico City in the nineteenth century, such as water carriers, female boarding house managers, auctioneers, chambermaids, coachmen, and clerks who were also illustrated and feted in essays in the costumbrista volume. Author J. M. Rivera identifies costureras de cajón, or seamstresses employed in retail workshops in the city center, as the most typical of “these workers who sustain fashion.” He also identifies various costureras domesticas—those employed in private homes as live-in servants, those who visited the homes of regular customers, and those who sewed for others for pay out of their own homes (Perez Salas 1998)1.
The lives of the families in the calico trade offer an exceptional perspective from which to examine the ties between industry and empire. Families played a central role in the enormous migration of people who crossed the Atlantic after 1492 to conquer and settle the new colonies.1 In the next few centuries, families also featured prominently in the formation of political and economic elites in the Spanish empire.2 The importance of the family in the economic and political thought in the early modern Atlantic world is less known. Scholars have generally focused on the actions of individuals in the study of commercial relations across the Atlantic. From the perspective of the individual, the story of these commercial relations has often been the story of male entrepreneurs—merchants, shopkeepers, and brokers— working before the public eye, busy at La Lonja (La Llotja in Catalan), or the stock market, traveling to America and throughout Spain. Historians have thus studied this business world in opposition to the world of the “informal” economy—of the family, and of the work of women, children, and marginal men such as foreigners and the elderly. Yet the day-to-day lives of family members in the Spanish calico trade reveal that these divisions were far more fluid than is implied by the opposition of formal and informal.
In Havana in July 1794, Doña María Rosario Molina received the news that no military wife wants to hear: her husband, adjutant major Tomás García, had died on campaign on the neighbouring island of Santo Domingo.1 Case studies such as that of Rosario Molina offer rare glimpses into the personal life of military families in Cuba during a period punctuated by international conflicts with consequences throughout the Caribbean. This chapter examines the wartime experiences of Cuban women compared to and contrasted with those of women elsewhere in the Atlantic world. As a result of the demands that war—indeed, even the threat of war—placed on Cuba as a whole, women routinely took on roles traditionally assigned to men. Over time, these reversed roles became second nature to many military wives, widows and daughters, giving Cuban women a degree of agency that was unique in the Hispanic Caribbean.2
Gender relations in Latin America are based on long-standing, yet constantly- evolving cultural norms and social expectations. Those norms and expectations are unique to Latin America and do not always fit the concepts of feminism, individual rights, and marginalization that often dominate discussions of women’s issues, gender relations, and the notion of inclusive communities in other areas of the world (Guy, 1994; Abbassi & Lutjens, 2002). Women’s place within cultural gender expectations in Latin America is tied to centuries-old Iberian customs, a pervasive Catholic culture, and laws designed to preserve and protect those traditions. This chapter will historicize the role of culture, customs, religion and/or laws on inclusive communities through the lens of Latin American gender relations. Using examples primarily from Mexico and Argentina - two nations with a relatively well-developed scholarly literature on gender relations - I will trace colonial concepts of patriarchy and inclusivity within private and public communities through reforms to family laws in the nineteenth century. I will conclude by outlining new concepts of inclusivity in the public community through campaigns for suffrage and other political rights in the twentieth century.
This article looks at the construction and evolution of Latin America’s first “welfare state” through the lens of social assistance. What one sees in Uruguay during these years is a modernization of paternalism, whereby the state assumed some of the roles previously played by the elite and, to a lesser extent, the Catholic Church, protecting and assisting society’s “weak” without fundamentally challenging or altering class or gender inequalities or hierarchies. The article focuses on the Asociación La Bonne Garde, a state-subsidized, ostensibly private organization that housed pregnant juveniles and placed them as domestic servants in the homes of the more well-to-do. Exploring the relationships between the elite women who ran this organization, their poor juvenile wards, and state bureaucrats and other reformers illustrates the establishment and evolution of this state-sponsored paternalism as well as the ways in which the young female wards attempted to manipulate this system to their own ends.
Nationalist discourse concerning race in Puerto Rico generally states that residents are of the same racially mixed heritage—a combination of Spanish, West African, and indigenous ancestry of various degrees. However, literature and casual observations suggest that the population is characterized by greater variation in physical appearances than what is posited by “admixture” discourse. Moreover, and further complicating the understanding of race, 2010 U.S. Census data show that over 75 percent of Puerto Ricans self-identified as “White, alone,” and that only 3.3 percent of respondents indicated “Two or More Races.” Researchers, employers, and governmental agencies attempting to address issues of inequality, discrimination, and residential segregation have had to rely on existing U.S. Census data for analysis. Thus, the need for an alternative data collection process that can be used for various forms of socioeconomic analysis has become evident. The objective of this study was to develop two alternative instruments that emphasized a locally suited, culturally grounded, and standardizable conceptual foundation for the purpose of establishing more representative racial statistics in Puerto Rico. Methods included the administration of 248 copies of these alternative forms, in addition to a replica of the current U.S. Census form, to residents in Bayamón, a city located within the greater San Juan metropolitan area. Results showed that participants were less inclined to self-identify as “White, alone” when given these alternative instruments, and that fewer individuals resorted to the selection of “Other” for race. In addition, observer-reported data indicated that the sample was less white when compared to participant-reported results. The conclusion was that both alternative instruments were considerably more effective in gauging racial composition than the 2010 U.S. Census form.
The coming of peace in Central America after several decades of civil war and military dictatorships has not resulted in an end to violence. Murder rates have risen to such a degree that these countries are among the most violent in the world. One form of violence that has received a great deal of attention is the murder of women, but many argue that this is only one of many forms of violence that women face on a daily basis. The women's organizations that have emerged in Guatemala since the end of the civil war have focused on demanding greater political and economic rights for women and laws that recognize violence against women as a crime and improve the mechanisms for investigating and prosecuting it. Two recent laws redefine sex crimes in such a way as to suggest that they should be seen as heinous acts regardless of the woman's sexual history, character, or age. Though these discursive changes are a triumph, problems with the legal system and the persistence of sexist ideologies have so far limited the effectiveness of these new laws.
This article compares the fertility patterns of women in consensual union and marriage in 13 Latin American countries, using census microdata from the four most recent census rounds and a methodological approach that combines the own-children method and Poisson regression. Results show that in all these countries, fertility is slightly higher within consensual union than marriage and that the age pattern of fertility is very similar in marital and non-marital unions. Further analyses show that over the period considered, childbearing within a consensual union has changed from rare to increasingly common, although not yet mainstream, for highly educated women in most countries examined. Results show that in Latin America, at least since the 1980s, women's childbearing patterns depend on their age and on their being in a conjugal relationship, but not on the legal nature of this relationship. The similarities in reproductive behavior between marital and non-marital unions are not confined to the socially disadvantaged groups, but apply as well to the better off.
Over 80 percent of Spanish noblemen in the period between 1350 and 1750 chose their wives to be the guardians of their children and property, so women headed many of the most powerful noble families in Spain at regular intervals. To Spanish noblemen, the preservation of family, power, and lineage was more important than the prescriptive gender roles of their time, and they expected and trained their female relatives to take an active part in the economic and political affairs of the family. Drawing on noble wills, guardianship agreements, dowry contracts, and lawsuits, this study demonstrates that noblemen's dependence on their female relatives created an inheritance system that was almost bilateral in its flexibility and beautifully adapted to conquer the challenges the nobility faced daily.
This article examines the manner in which the caciques (noble Indians) and principales (Indian notables) from the Oaxaca region in New Spain adopted a ‘legal rhetoric’ in their quest to open a convent for noble Indian women during the eighteenth century. Through a close reading of the legal documentation produced in the petition for the convent for indigenous women in Antequera, I find that the caciques strategically used the same laws that had placed them in a subordinated place in the social hierarchy of the colony in order to negotiate certain rights and privileges. Aware of their belonging to the legally determined category of ‘Indians,’ indigenous peoples from the Valley of Oaxaca appealed specifically to the laws that had granted them a special judicial place in the colonial scheme. By referencing the Recopilación de las leyes de las Indias and several royal decrees (cédulas), the caciques appealed to colonial officials at a key historical moment, when Bourbon reforms sought to modernize all institutions, including the Catholic Church.
Scholarship on colonial Spanish American sexuality has focused on the literary discourse of honor, institutional regulation, and imperial control. Historians use sources such as marriage documentation and cases that came before criminal courts or inquisition tribunals, to make conclusions relating sexuality to conquest and colonial race and gender hierarchies. Only a few scholars have explored the Spanish American experience of sexual desire and pleasure.
LOS NEFANDOS PLACERES DE LA CARNE. LA IGLESIA Y EL ESTADO FRENTE A LA SODOMÍA EN LA NUEVA ESPANA 1721-1820. Jorge Bracamonte Allain. Debate Feminista, Vol. 18, Octubre 1998, 395-415.
BUTTERFLIES WILL BURN: PROSECUTING SODOMITES IN EARLY MODERN SPAIN AND MEXICO. Federico Garza-Carvajal. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003, 310 pp.
INFAMOUS DESIRES: MALE HOMOSEXUALITY IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA. Pete Sigal, ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003, 223 pp.
FROM MOON GODDESSES TO VIRGINS: THE COLONIZATION OF YUCATAN MAYA SEXUAL DESIRE. Pete Sigal, ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000, 320 pp.
HONOR, SEXUALITY, AND THE COLONIAL CHURCH: THE SINS OF DR. GONZALEZ, CATHEDRAL CANON. In The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America. Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, eds. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998, 45-67.
UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR THE ABOMINABLE SIN: DAMIÁN DE MORALES STANDS ACCUSED OF ATTEMPTING TO SEDUCE ANTÓN TIERRA DE CONGO (CHARCAS, 1611). In Colonial Lives: Documents on Latin American History, 1550-1850. Richard Boyer and Geoffrey Spurling, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 112-129.
SEX AND CONQUEST: GENDERED VIOLENCE, POLITICAL ORDER, ANDTHE EUROPEAN CONQUEST OF THE AMERICAS. Richard C. Trexler. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995, 304 pp.
This article serves as an introduction to the subject of the colonial Mexican convent for non-experts, while surveying recent historiographical trends. In the past ten years, historical scholarship on nuns and convents has taken three broad directions. First, historians have begun to study other female religious institutions and other kinds of religious women than cloistered convents and nuns, though the number of works that explicitly compare these institutions and experiences is still disappointingly small. Second, historians have focused on the understudied sixteenth- and late eighteenth-century convents, with the result that we are beginning to gain a textured understanding of how the convent changed over time and responded to changes in the world around it. Third, the older feminist scholarship that tended to characterize the convent as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women – that is, either less subject to patriarchal maneuverings than the outside world, or more so – is being complicated by more subtle approaches that take nuns’ spirituality and the dynamics of community seriously. We are beginning to build a picture of a complex institution that still tells us much about women's experience in the colonial period, but also tells us a great deal about the institutional church and about the religious values of the broader society.
This article will show that throughout the Audiencia of Quito enslaved rebels and fugitives consistently contributed to white fears and to white law making from the very earliest moments of the colonial enterprise. It highlights, moreover, slaves'long history of playing directly and indirectly upon those fears in their interactions with slaveholders; and, in the legal cases they brought before colonial courts, showing the continuities in slave resistance strategies over time. Not only did slaves use the courts in deeply political and radical ways from very early on, but existing documentary evidence from Quito's courts reveals a continuum, not a break, between earlier cases and those emanating from the late colonial era and early independence period. Although this continuum is sometimes difficult to document-principally because slaves' most successful tactic in the pre-Revolutionary era was in fact to claim to be divorced from politics and rebellion and to be seeking individual mercy-we can identify early legal precedents that are reflected in civil court cases heard by the audiencia (high court) of Quito over the entire course of the colonial era. In so doing, we gain a more in-depth understanding of the realities of bondage in colonial Quito, and the continuities and points of departure within slaves' resistance tactics, as well as the gendered challenges facing enslaved men and women in their courtroom performances.
The article explores the textual construction of gender categories in the political discourse of Simón Bolívar by means of a close critical reading of his seminal writings made public between 1812 and 1820. The historical and political processes known as Latin American independence constitute a moment of radical transformation. It was during this period that the questions of political rights, nationality and citizenship were most open to debate throughout the continent. The article shows how the category woman is constructed ambiguously in Independence/anti-colonial discourse, how gender is employed to create hierarchical systems of social organization to legitimate the exercise of power by an elite of white creole men and how myth is deployed in order to reinforce gender hegemonies. It will be shown that in Bolívar's writings colonial relations are recast as family relations and political independence from Spain legitimated in terms of sexual difference and masculine domination.Feminist Review (2005) 79, 5–19. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400207
This paper examines changing conceptions of honour and masculinity during the Colombian Wars of Independence in the early 19th century. It explores the position of the foreign women who accompanied British and Irish expeditions to join the war against Spanish rule, and shows how colonial, imperial and republican conceptions of masculinity were affected by the role that women played in these volunteer expeditions and in the wars in general. The paper considers women's experiences during war and peace, and examines their experiences in the light of changing conceptions of masculinity at home, in the British empire and in Hispanic America in the early nineteenth century. The social mobility of the Wars of Independence shifted the ground on which these concepts rested for all groups involved. The participation of foreign women alongside male adventurers was a further ingredient in this disorientating period.Feminist Review (2005) 79, 36–51. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400198
Culinary descriptions in Quechua oral narratives often emphasize the important role food plays in the construction and maintenance of vital kinship and community bonds. References to the culture's foodways signal important plot twists, establish the tone of a scene, foreshadow impending doom, or allude to the intentions and personality of a character. In Southern Peruvian Quechua narratives, food-related aberrations frequently emerge as a result of inappropriate or unsanctioned sexual relationships, and a character's blatant disrespect for the culture's food decorum signals the impending disintegration of family relationships. Supernatural cooks often adulterate meals in order to punish family members for these violations of food etiquette. Through an analysis of four Quechua narratives, this article demonstrates the ways in which narrators use food symbolism to instill and reinforce cultural mores.
The following is a historically informed review of Puerto Rican phenotype. Geared toward educating psychologists, this review discusses how various psychological issues associated with phenotype may have arisen as a result of historical legacies and policies associated with race and racial mixing. It discusses how these policies used various markers to demarcate an "authen- tic" Puerto Rican identity, and how we continue to reference these variables when defining Puerto Rican identity, despite the fact that identity is contex- tual and fluid. In reviewing the historical underpinnings and contextual nature of phenotype, it is hoped that the reader will gain a greater apprecia- tion of the role of phenotype in the lives of Puerto Ricans and understand how phenotype, and, most importantly, historical trauma can be related to a host of psychological concerns.
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