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‘He outfitted his family in notable decency’: Slavery, Honour and Dress in Eighteenth-Century Lima, Peru

2009; Frank Cass & Co.; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01440390903098011

1743-9523

Tamara J. Walker,

Latin American history and culture

Abstract For elite Spaniards in eighteenth-century Lima, elegant clothing provided a language for expressing their wealth, status and honour. They frequently made their way around town in the company of elegantly dressed slave attendants, whose presence underscored their owners' privilege. Yet many slaves found opportunities to function as more than mere canvasses for the expression of their owners' identities. Indeed, for a surprising number of slaves, elegant clothing was a key tool with which they negotiated their status and laid claim to their own definitions of honour. By mapping the study of material culture onto the study of slavery, this paper brings into relief the social meanings that clothing contained for slaves, and highlights the possibilities that urban life contained for the creation of social identities that fell outside the social and colour lines drawn by the colonial state.1 Notes This study evolved from my dissertation, Tamara J. Walker, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Slaves and Citizens: Dressing the Part in Lima, Peru, 1723–1845’, (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2007), an analysis of the relationship between clothing and status in a slaveholding society, with particular attention to the meanings given to dress and deportment both by subordinate members of the society and by those who presumed to control them. This project benefited tremendously from a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship that funded my most extensive research in Peru. The Ford Foundation provided financial support during the dissertation writing process, and the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Department of History at the University of Michigan funded all other dissertation-related expenses. I am thankful to my dissertation chair, Rebecca J. Scott, for her example, patience, encouragement and eye for all manner of contextual, linguistic, logical and mechanical detail. I owe profound thanks to Sueann Caulfield, Michele Mitchell, Ifeoma Nwankwo and Richard Turits, who helped me formulate the project's questions from conception to completion; and to Rachel O'Toole, whose arrival in Ann Arbor during the final stages of my dissertation proved immeasurably fortuitous. I also thank several readers and colleagues, including Carlos Aguirre, Aisha Finch, Jean Hebrárd, Silvia Lara, Karen Spalding, Stephanie McNulty, Brandy Jones, Jessica Johnson, Johonna McCants, Jeremy Mumford, Vincent Peloso, Sophie White and the students of History 691 at the University of Michigan for their attention to various incarnations of the present article. Finally, thanks to the staff at the Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, the Archivo General de la Nación, the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, and the Insituto Riva-Agüero, including Yolanda Auquí in particular, for their knowledge of the rich collections and their thoughtful guidance as I worked through them. AGN, RA, CCR, L 17, C 192, 1755, ‘Autos seguidos por D. Juan Bautista Angel contra Francisco Calvo, negro criollo [esclavo], por hurto’. Frederick Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974): 104. Diario de Lima, ‘Venta’, 4 Oct. 1790. The publication, founded by Jaime Bausate y Mesa, was the first daily newspaper in Peru, and ran between 1 Oct. 1790 and 26 Sept. 1793. It is not clear whether the name Quiteño was an actual surname or whether it referred to Bernardo having arrived in Peru from Quito. For a discussion of the economics of the practice of hiring out slaves for day labour in Lima, see: Frederick Bowser, ‘The African and the Peruvian Economy: A General Survey’, in The African Slave in Colonial Peru, who traces the early years and development of the enterprise; Carlos Aguirre, Agentes de su propia libertad: Los esclavos de Lima y la desintegración de la esclavitud, 1821–1854 (Lima: Pontificía Universidad Catolica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, 1995): 135–149, who presents an overview of some of the consequences faced by slaves unable to meet the financial demands imposed upon them; and Christine Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima's Slaves, 1800–1854 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994): 106–117, who examines the opportunities for mobility and manumission for Lima's day-labour class. For a discussion of how highly-skilled artisan slaves in the sixteenth century who received training through apprenticeship with Spanish artisans managed to achieve ‘much of the substance of freedom without its forms’, see James Lockhart, Spanish Peru: 1534–1560 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994): 207. ‘Men of this type’, Lockhart asserts, ‘sometimes reduced their slavery to the level of an obligation to share their profits’. AGN, RA, CCR, L 17, C 192, 1755. Magnus Mörner, European Travelogues as Sources to Latin American History from the Late Eighteenth Century until 1870 (Stockholm, 1981). Frederick Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, viii. Amedée Frezier, Relation du voyage de la mer du sud aux côtes du Chili, du Pérou, et du Brésil, fait pendant les années 1712, 1713, & 1714 (Amsterdam: Chez Pierre Hubert, 1717): 381. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relación histórica del viage à la América Meridional (Madrid: Antonio Marín, 1748): 72. Also cited in Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, translated by John Adams (Boston: Milford House, 1807): 53. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relación histórica del viage à la América Meridional: 72. For a discussion of the key years in Peru's development as a Spanish society in the New World, see James Lockhart, Spanish Peru: 1532–1560 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). A 1579 Spanish cédula had authorised Chinese–Philippine trade with Mexico, Guatemala and Peru, and the first ship to sail between Manila and the port of Callao set out in 1581, with another following in the next year. The two voyages were so successful that Seville merchants (who operated the Terra Firme galleons between Spain and South America and the flotas between Spain and Veracruz) complained to the Spanish crown of the competition posed by the Manila fleets, which tended to arrive at their destinations more quickly than the Spanish ones. Since it relied heavily on the Seville merchants for the so-called quinto real, or the royal fifth of silver output, the Spanish crown ordered traffic between the Philippines and Peru to a halt in 1582. It would not grant permission to trade between Manila and Callao again until 1779, and in the two intervening centuries, ‘Lima Ships’ met the so-called ‘China Ships’ in Acapulco for illicit transactions. The Lima Ships, always filled with silver upon arrival in Acapulco, would return to Peru stocked with porcelain, silk, spices, iron, wax, and other precious merchandise from the east. For more on Lima's role in the silver export economy, see Gwendolin B. Cobb, ‘Supply and Transportation for the Potosí Mines, 1545–1640’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 29, no. 1 (Feb. 1949): 25–45. For a more comprehensive analysis of the early American trade with the Far East, see William Lytle Schurz, ‘Mexico, Peru, and the Manila Galleon’, Hispanic American Historical Review 1, no. 4 (Nov. 1918): 389–402; and William Lytle Schurz, The Manila Galleon (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1939). A severe depression pattern took hold of Potosí in the seventeenth century, with production falling at a rate of 1.7 per cent per year until 1715, which allowed New Spain (with its higher ore grades and lower operational costs, since the crown taxed more heavily in Peru) to surpass it in production and output. A strong revival took shape from 1724 to 1783, thanks to the horizontal tunnels that were dug into the mountain to reach lower deposits of ore, and to the continuation of the mita, which kept operating costs low. Although Potosí never returned to its former pre-eminence, the eighteenth-century recovery helped it to remain one of the world's most important mining centres and a crucial source of Peru's wealth. For a discussion of Peru and Mexico's silver production and output curves, see Richard L. Garner, ‘Long Term Silver Mining Trends in Spanish America: A Comparative Analysis of Peru and Mexico’, American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (1988): 898–935'. Mercurio Peruano, ‘Reflexiones históricas y políticas sobre estado de la población de esta Capital’, 3 Feb. 1791. ‘Que no tiene que envidiar las glorias de otras Tierras, pues cuanto en ellas se reparte, lo tiene epilogado en sí; y lo que le falta no es menester que lo busque, que ello mismo se le entra por sus puertos. La China le envía las sedas, y la losa; la India sus drogas y especerías; la España sus paños y terciopelos; Milán y Nápoles sus lamas y brocados; Roma sus laminas; Venecia sus vidrios; y el Turco sus alfombras; sin que quede parte en el Orbe, que no le convide á sus ferias, por la plata y oro que produce para España, y liberal ó pródiga reparte á todo el mundo, quedándose tan rica como siempre’. See, for example, Susan Migden Socolow, ‘Iberian Women in Old World and New’, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 5–15; Steve J. Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late-Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). AGN, PN, Notario Orencio de Ascarrunz, Protocolo 74, 1 Feb. 1741. Mercurio Peruano, ‘Reflexiones históricas y políticas sobre estado de la población de esta Capital’, 3 Feb. 1791. Alberto Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe: Lima, 1760 – 1830 (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1984): 6. Mercurio Peruano, ‘Reflexiones históricas y políticas sobre estado de la población de esta Capital’, 3 Feb. 1791. According to Alberto Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe, 25; prior to the 1746 disaster, Lima experienced several significant earthquakes in 1582, 1586, 1604, 1619, 1650, 1655, 1664, 1687, 1690, 1699, 1716, 1725, 1732, 1734 and in 1743. Alberto Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe, 101. By 1795, according to John Fisher, El Perú borbónico, 1750–1824 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2000): 147, the city's population totalled 63,000: 28,000 blacks (10,000 free and 18,000 slaves of various castes), 20,000 whites (including peninsulares and creoles) and 15,000 Indians and mestizos. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relación histórica del viage à la América Meridional, 72. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relación histórica del viage à la América Meridional, 81. Rebecca Earle, ‘“Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!!”: Clothing, Race and Identity in the Americas, 17th–19th Centuries’, History Workshop Journal 52 (2001). AAL, Testamentos, E 2, L 175, 1766, ‘Testamento de Gabriel de Quiroz’. AAL, Testamentos, E 2, L 175, 1766. ‘Dos casaquitas viejas de hechura antigua ambas azules la una de paño y la otra de medio carro; dos chupas la una de castor aplomado con su franja de oro y la otra de lana rosada con franja también de oro; un cheleque de lustrina amarilla con su botonadura ordinaria; dos pares de calzones de terciopelo muy viejos; un capote musgo de medio carro con sus vueltas de terciopelo carmesí; cuatro sayas viejas la una de damasco celeste y las tres de brillante; un sombrerito negro con su franja de plata; un paño de pesquesa viejo; y otro cinco envoltorios de papeles … cinco esclavos una nombrada [Maria] Rita de casta Popó, otra Maria Santos; otra Maria Josefa; un negrito nombrado Joseph de edad de ocho meses … un negro nombrado Miguel de casta Lucumí’. The term Pinchbeck refers to a copper and zinc alloy used to imitate gold in jewelry. AGN, PN, Teodoro Ayllon Salazar, Protocolo, March 24, 1792. ‘… declaro que tengo por mis bienes 5 cofradías de a real corrientes, cuyas adoraciones manifestaran las cartas que tengo en mi poder asi lo declaro; que tengo dos esclavas mis propias, nombradas Tomasa e Isabel, y un hijo de esta llamado Carlos, que hacen tres esclavos, cuyas boletas que están en mi poder, calificaran el titulo de dominio que sobre ellos tengo; tengo en dinero físico la cantidad de cuatrocientos pesos; tengo por mis bienes: un par de manillas de tumbaga con sus sobrepuestos de oro fabrica antigua; un par de ebillas de oro, de pies; un relicario grande de oro sin cadena; un rosario de cuentas grandes de Jerusalen llano de mano con su cruz de oro grande y masida echava s Alomonica, su santo christo de oro en un lado y al toro envuelto de la Purísima; un par de fandados grandes de oro con sus perlas grandes sin … y sus gotas de oro con unas chispas de Diamantes; un rosario de cuentas de oro, grandes, su cruz pequeña de oro, con 4 dijes de oro, en que entra una pajuela grande de lo mismo y a masa lo dicho un cristalito pequeño con su anculo de plata, y un choclito pequeño de perlas finas; un rosario de cuello de cuentas azueles y padres nuestros de oro con cuentecitas chiquitas de oros y en el extremo un choclo grandes de perlas finas y dos cuentas grandes de oro, con su cruz de lo mismo con once perlas finas en ella; un par de cabetes de oro con finas en ella; un par de cabetes de oro con su perla grande cada uno; un rosario de fuentas menudas; una gargantilla con 16 cuentas grandes; una pluma de oro con perlas finas en el extremo en figura de Asahar, y un Pajuelita de oro; una Basánica de plata, de nuda, y un platillo regular de lo mismo …’. Mariselle Meléndez, ‘Visualizing Difference: The Rhetoric of Clothing in Spanish America’, in The Latin American Fashion Reader, edited by Regina Root and Maxine Berg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Herman Bennett ‘Soiled Gods and the Creation of a Slave Society’, in Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003): 14–32. For a discussion of clothing as a social sign, see Webb Keane, ‘The Hazards of New Clothes: What Signs Make Possible’, in The Art of Clothing: a Pacific Experience, edited by Susanne Küchler and Graeme Were (London: UCL Press, 2005): 1–16. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relación histórica del viage à la América Meridional, 78. ‘Con el vestido de cola lucen más particularmente el Jueves Santo; porque para visitor los Sagrarios salen acompañadas de dos, o quarto Negras, o Mulatas, esclavas vestidas de uniforme a manera de lacayos; y como van fin embozo, no queda más en ver para admirar la suma riqueza, de que se componen sus trajes, y la ostentación, con que visten’. Another translation, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, translated by John Adams (Boston: Milford House, 1807): 60, reads ‘The long petticoat is particularly worn on Holy Thursday, as on that day they visit the churches, attended by two or three female negro or mulato slaves, dressed in a uniform like pages’. For a discussion of the significance of clothing practices among Spaniards and Indians in the region during this period, see Scarlett O'Phelan Godoy, “El vestido como identidad étnica e indicador social de una cultura material,” Ramón Mujica Pinilla et al. El Barroco Peruano (Lima: Banco de Crédito, 2002): 99–133. My argument here owes a great debt to Silvia Lara, ‘Customs and Costumes: Carlos Julião and the Image of Black Slaves in Late Eighteenth-Century Brazil’, Slavery & Abolition: a Journal of Slave and Post-slave Societies 23, no. 2 (2002): 125–146, who argues that Julião's watercolours were ‘the product of a political process that generalises about geographical particularities and social specificities, assigning places and people to subordinate positions’. AGN, PN, Notario Orencio de Ascarrunz, Protocolo 83, 6 March 1758. AGN, PN, Notario Orencio de Ascarrunz, Protocolo 82, ‘Testamento de Juana Garnica’. ‘Declaro que el Señor Don Miguel Gomendio Alcalde del Crimen de esta Real Audiencia … ya difunto me dejo un legado en su testamento de 500 pesos para mis servicios y asistencias ordenando me los entregase Don Manuel Saenz de Ayala Zoloaga su albacea y heredero’. AGN, PN, Notario Orencio de Ascarrunz, Protocolo 74, 3 Nov. 1744. ‘… mando que la ropa de mi uso y poner que tengo se parta y decida igualmente entra dicha samba Gregoria de Rivas y Doña María Theresa de Solís’. Amanda Vickery, ‘Women and the World of Goods: a Lancashire Consumer and her Possessions, 1751–1781’, in Consumption and The World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993): 274–301. AGN, RA, CCR, L 5, C 39, 1732, ‘Causa seguida contra Juan Ramos, esclavo de Doña Clara Manrique por hurto cometido en perjuicio del Hospital del Espíritu Santo’. AGN, RA, CCR, L 5, C 39, 1732. AGN, RA, CCR, L 8, C 69, 1740. ‘Autos seguidos por Pedro de Vargas Machuca contra José Alvarado, esclavo de Don Sebastián de Alvarado y Merino sobre la restitución de su esclava, María Dominga de Loayza y su complicidad en el hurto de especies varias’. Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004): 62. Similarly, in her recent study of slavery and reproduction in the Caribbean and US South, Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), argues that the study of ‘women's reproductive identity’ provides a framework for not only understanding the expectations slaveholders imposed upon black women's bodies, but also for appreciating the ways in which enslaved ‘men and women and children understood themselves to be members of a community in the process of reproducing itself’. The field owes a great debt to Marcel Mauss, The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by W.D. Halls (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). Originally published in 1925, this study argues that ‘prestations’ and ‘counter-prestations’ (including the exchange of ceremonies and feasts), particularly in societies and cultures without formal economic markets, formed complete social systems in their own right. Mark Osteen, ‘Introduction: Questions of the Gift’, in The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines, edited by Mark Osteen (New York: Routledge, 2002): 2–43. See, for example, Sophie White, ‘‘Wearing three or four handkerchiefs around his collar, and elsewhere about him’: Slaves' Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans', in Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality, and African Diasporas, edited by Sandra Gunning, Tera W. Hunter and Michele Mitchell (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004): 132–153. In this study (based on an analysis of eighteenth-century criminal cases), White argues that for male slaves in New Orleans, clothing theft provided access to desirable material goods as well as the opportunity to curry social favour among contemporaries, especially women. AGN, RA, CCR, L 27, C 322, 1766, ‘Autos seguidos por Juan Antonio Súarez contra Domingo Calderón esclavo del convento de Santo Domingo por robo’. For a discussion of the way in which castas could make use of specific taverns to signal their membership in certain social groups, see Rachel Sarah O'Toole, ‘Castas y representación en Trujillo Colonial’, in Más allá de la dominación y la resistencia: Estudios de historia peruana, siglos xvi–xx, edited by Paulo Driniot and Leo Garofalo (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005): 48–76. Diario de Lima, ‘Se vende un negro bozal por no pagar a su ama los jornales’, 4 Dec. 1790. Lyman L. Johnson, ‘Dangerous Words, Provocative Gestures, and Violent Acts: The Disputed Hierarchies of Plebeian Life in Colonial Buenos Aires’, in The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America, edited by Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1998). Silvia Marina Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985); Verena Martínez Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974). See also, Richard Boyer, ‘Married Life’, The Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family and Community in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away. Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Ann Twinam, ‘Honor, Sexuality and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America’, in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, edited by Asunción Lavrin (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 1989) Sherwin Bryant, ‘Enslaved Rebels, Fugitives, and Litigants: The Resistance Continuum in Colonial Quito’, Colonial Latin American Review 13, no. 1 (June 2004): 7–46 Sandra Lauderdale Graham, ‘Honor among Slaves’, in The Faces of Honor. Similarly, R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Pleibian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), shows that many castas derived their beliefs in their reputations from their peers, and took great care to offer mutual assistance and friendship to ensure their so-called ‘reputational’ standing. Kim Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998): 20–24. Rachel O'Toole, ‘From the Rivers of Guinea to the Valleys of Peru: Becoming a Bran Diaspora within Spanish Slavery’ Social Text 92, v.25, n.3 (Fall 2007): 19–36. Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, ‘Introduction’, in The Faces of Honor. AGN, PN, Notario Teodoro Ayllon Salazar, Protocolo 94, 13 March 1781, ‘Libertad Graciosa: La hermana Juana Foronda a un mulato nombrado Josef Foronda … para que desde hoy día de la fecha en adelante goce de su libertad sin con que ni gravamento alguno, y en su virtud pueda hacer su testamento, dar y donar sus bienes que tuviere y adquiere, trabajar y contratar, residir en las partes y lugares que por bien tuviere, y practicar todas las operaciones que pueden hacer y hacen las personas libres de su nacimiento’. This definition of freedom was not unique to Peru. For a discussion of the formalisation of the Spanish-American notary office, see: Kathryn Burns, ‘Notaries, Truth, and Consequences’, The American Historical Review 220, no. 2 (2005): 350–380; who describes the circulation of manuals that guided practitioners through American notarial forms. For a discussion of the role of notaries and the written texts they produced in bridging the worlds between slavery and juridical freedom, see Rebecca J. Scott and Michael Zeuske, ‘Le droit d'avoir des droits: l'oral et l'ecrit dans les revendications legales des ex-esclaves à Cuba, 1872–1909’, Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales 59, no. 3 (2004): 521–45. AGN, RA, CCR, L 17, C 192, 1755.