Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2077324

1527-1900

Karen B. Graubart,

Politics and Society in Latin America

Rachel O’Toole’s new book focuses upon the valleys of Chicama and Trujillo, on the north coast of Peru. It is an excellent vantage point to witness the interrelations of Andeans, Africans, and Spaniards. A city in Lima’s shadow, Trujillo was home to an entrenched old conquistador aristocracy but also to numerous indigenous communities and an African population comprised mostly of slaves on coastal estates. The region’s Spanish and indigenous populations have long been studied; O’Toole’s contribution is to reintroduce Africans to that scholarship. Her intention is to remind colonial historians of the integral relationship between Africans and Indians: nearly any description of an Indian had an often- unspoken African as its foil, and vice versa. In particular, she notes how the legal systems that Spaniards created to govern their new territories erected juridical identities for Indians that they refused to Africans, who were neither vassals nor citizens of the crown in any meaningful sense.Rather than use the anachronistic term race, O’Toole adopts casta to denote both the categories imposed upon non- Spaniards (such as negro or indio, but also terms like arara or congo that suggested a set of characteristics associated with African origins) and the ways that these subjects inhabited those terminologies. Hers is a performative understanding of casta, unstable and manipulable by both colonizers and colonized: it has no inherent content but is something that does “the work of race” (p. 161).She begins with the argument that what have commonly been considered casta stereotypes — the idea that blacks were unfit for work in cold highlands or that blacks and Indians were hostile to one another — were actually interchangeable relational concepts that masked economic demands on the part of colonial society. When the cost of shipping slaves to work in the mines of Potosí was prohibitive, officials pushed to expand the indigenous mita, arguing that Indians were better suited to the cold. But when African laborers were more common in the Lima valleys, officials undid that climatic argument and argued for the replacement of the mita with slave labor. Descriptions of blacks and Indians as laborers were interchangeable and were deployed strategically rather than referring to a fixed discourse about race.Castas themselves used this strategy. O’Toole rewrites the traumatic long passages between African and New World ports as means by which Africans gained experience and comradeship. Exploiting court testimony, she demonstrates that some enslaved Africans learned a great deal over multiple passages, telling their stories to prospective owners in such a way as to discourage purchase or to create expectations about labor. A chapter on Africans and justice argues that enslaved men and women contested their positions before their masters and the courts but concludes that the law offered them little protection, forcing them to contest their exploitation outside the law. Here fugitives, violence, drinking, and work evasion are analyzed as claims of justice and injustice.Indians, if they were skillful in manipulating the law, had more legal protections available to them than did Africans. Indians too played with the casta categories drawn against them: the community of Magdalena de Cao sued a Spanish landholder for overworking the mitayos assigned to protect his cattle and for forcing them to provide extra laborers at their own expense. In their suit, the laborers described the Spaniards’ cattle as not only numerous but inquieto, an adjective commonly used to describe rebellious Andeans; O’Toole deftly suggests that they chose this term to deflect any sense that they themselves were conflictive or litigious and to subtly insult the landholder to boot. Similarly, despite the ubiquity of close relations between Indians and blacks, Andeans made use of colonial stereotypes by depicting themselves in court as victims of black predators. Casta labels were an effective strategy before colonial authorities.During the seventeenth century, Indians on the north coast migrated in large numbers out of their communities, sometimes to other rural communities but often to the cities. Communities expanded Indian to encompass migrants, urban residents, and those who engaged in colonial markets, including the highly contested market for land following the Spanish crown’s land grabs in the 1640s. This story is well known, but by placing it in the context of casta performativity, O’Toole connects social- climbing caciques, Indian slaveholders, adopted migrants, and urban Andean marketeers to a new understanding of Indian privilege, and she shows that by embracing these “non- Indian” actions these groups were able to secure their position as legally recognized Indian communities.Bound Lives’s insistence on casta as performance allows O’Toole to locate agency in her subjects, who can be seen adopting and adapting strategies to their audiences. While her sources require a somewhat narrow construction of African and indigenous histories, as they are necessarily partial in both senses of that word, they do demonstrate how deeply colonial Andean society was predicated not only on the labor of Andeans and Africans (often together) but also on the legal and cultural opposition of each group against the other. While historians will continue to study Africans and Indians in isolation, O’Toole’s rich study suggests that they would do better not to.