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Widows’ Rights Questioned: Indians, the State, and Fluctuating Gender Ideas in Central Highland Ecuador, 1870-1900*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Erin O'Connor
Erin O'Connor*
Affiliation:
West Chester University, West Chester, Pennsylvania
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Extract

This essay uses court disputes over indigenous widows’ land rights to examine the impact of an expanding national state on indigenous peasant interpersonal relations in late nineteenth-century Ecuador. In doing so, it offers a response to historian Carmen Ramos Escandón's recent call for historical studies of changing family life in order “to know how this domestic web is related to social processes in a broader sense and how the organization of the family contradicts or reflects society's structures.” Specifically, the confrontations under scrutiny reveal the extent to which indigenous peasants’ notions of marriage and widowhood rights adhered to, diverged from, or were influenced by state views of gender relations. Most court cases from the central highland province of Chimborazo in this period uncover parallels between indigenous and state views of marriage and widowhood; yet the three focal cases here, in which widows’ privileges came under question, highlight differences between indigenous and state understandings of gender relations. In the first case, an Indian woman's father-in-law recognized her right as a widow to inherit a portion of her former mother-in-law's lands; court officials, however, decided to uphold patriarchal legal standards when they granted the land in question to the woman's second husband rather than to her. In two other cases, widows’ claims were undermined not by state authorities themselves, but by Indian men in their own communities. Calling upon patriarchal notions that were at the center of the state's marriage laws, these men wrested control of property from women whose customary claims to it were stronger than theirs. Though cases like these rarely appeared in the court data from Chimborazo, they are illuminating because they promote an exploration of the relevance of ethnically distinct gender ideologies.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , July 2002 , pp. 87 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2002

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Footnotes

*

Research on which this article is based was funded by a dissertation fellowship from Boston College, and by new faculty funding from West Chester University. Several colleagues provided useful insights on previous drafts of this work; I would especially like to thank Kim Clark, Susan Gans, Leo Garofalo, Karin Gedge, Lisa Kirschenbaum, Loretta Rieser-Danner, Jaime Rodríguez O., Debbie Truhan, and Maria Van Liew. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for The Americas whose comments helped me to make final revisions.

References

1 Escandón, Carmen Ramos, “Reading Gender in History,” in Dore, Elizabeth, ed., Gender Politics in Latin America: Debates in Theory and Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), pp. 152–153, 155.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Wilson, Fiona, “Marriage, Property, and the Position of Women in the Peruvian Central Andes,” in Smith, Raymond T., ed., Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 310–311, 314, 323;Google Scholar Chassen-López, Francie, “Cheaper than Machines: Women and Agriculture in Porfirian Oaxaca, 1880–1911,” in Fowler-Salamini, Heather and Vaughan, Mary Kay, eds. Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850–1990 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), p. 44;Google Scholar Escandón, Carmen Ramos, “The Social Construction of Wife and Mother: Women in Porfirian Mexico, 1880–1917,” in Maynes, Mary Jo, Waltner, Ann, Soland, Birgitte and Strasser, Ulrike, eds., Gender, Kinship, and Power: A Comparative Interdisciplinary History (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 279–280;Google Scholar Dore, Elizabeth, “The Holy Family: Imagined Households in Latin American History,” in Dore, , ed., Gender Politics, pp. 109–110;Google Scholar Dore, Elizabeth, “Property, Households, and Public Regulation of Domestic Life: Diriomo, Nicaragua, 1840–1900,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29:3 (October 1997), pp. 597–604.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Archivo Nacional de la Historia, Riobamba: Juicios Civiles, February 11, 1875. Subsequent citations of documents from this archive will be cited as: ANH/R:Civ for civil cases, and ANH/R:Cr for criminal cases.

4 For examples, see ANH/R: Cr: August 14, 1871, and ANH/R: Cr: April 9, 1918.

5 Among the important works on this problem in the past decade are: Mallon, Florencia, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);Google Scholar Thurner, Mark, From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial Nationmaking in Andean Peru (Durham, Duke University Press, 1997);Google Scholar Bonilla, Heraclio, ed., Los Andes en la encrucijada: Indios, comunidades y estado en el siglo XIX (Quito: Ediciones Libri Mundi/FLACSO, 1991);Google Scholar Kim Clark, A., “Indians, the State, and Law: Public Works and the Struggle to Control Labor in Liberal Ecuador,” Journal of Historical Sociology 7:1 (March 1994), pp. 49–72;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Joseph, Gilbert M. and Nugent, Daniel, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).Google Scholar Many of the works published in the 1990s developed out of critical studies of Indians and national governments in the 1980s. For examples of some of the most important of these, see: Piatt, Tristan, Estado Boliviano y ayllu Andino (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1983);Google Scholar Stern, Steve J., ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987),Google Scholar particularly the debate over Indians and Nationalism by Florencia Mallon and Heraclio Bonilla, pp. 213–231 ; Guerrero, Andrés, “Curagas y tenientes políticos: La ley de la costumbre y la ley del estado (Otavalo, 1830–1875),” Revista Andina 7:2 (September 1989), pp. 321–365.Google Scholar Also see Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

6 Guerrero, Andrés, “The Construction of a Ventriloquist's Image: Liberal Discourse and the ‘Miserable Indian Race’ in Late 19th-century Ecuador,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29:3 (October 1997), p. 558.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Though it is impossible to know for certain, I suspect that some particular crisis or family argument led Cavadiana to request this inventory of his deceased wife's lands, especially since five years had elapsed between the time of his wife's death and the beginning of the court case.

8 ANH/R: Civ: January 23, 1890, folio 2. Tomás Cavadiana and Vicenta Carguaitongo also had a son named Gaspar who died, leaving behind a daughter named Carmen. Juan was named to represent Carmen's interests, as he had married Gaspar's widow.

9 Ibid. Examples appear on folios 13 and 17.

10 Ibid., folio 5.

11 Ibid. The folios on which references to Castro sowing land are 6v and 9; the inventory of all eleven parcels of land ranges from folios 6 to 11 v. There was one property, shared by Tomás and Juan Cavadiana, that was about five times the size of the other parcels, as shown on folio 8.

12 Ibid., folio 19v.

13 Ibid. Examples can be found on folios 21v, 22v, 31v.

14 For communications where Tomás and Juan Cavadiana did mention Castro, see folios 21 and 22; for the shift in their references, see folios 30 and 32v.

15 Ibid., folio 48v; another piece of land was awarded, with the same kind of wording, on folio 49.

16 Código Civil de la República del Ecuador (Quito: Imprenta de los huérfanos de Valencia, 1860), Art. 1734, p. 250. Later civil codes upheld this stance, as seen in the Código Civil de la República del Ecuador. Edición hecha por la Corte Suprema de Justicia en virtud del Decreto Legislativo sancionado (New York: Imprenta de “Los Novedades,” 1889). The law only changed in the Liberal period when, in 1911, congress passed a law allowing married women to maintain control over any goods they brought into marriage, identifying this as the “emancipation of the married woman.”

17 Código Civil, 1860, Arts. 126-136, p. 20. It was stated here that a husband could also require his wife to move with him any time he saw fit, again reinforcing his control over her life.

18 Ibid., Arts. 132 and 140, respectively.

19 To obtain a separation of goods from civil courts, or a separation from ecclesiastical courts, a wife had to indicate that her husband was mistreating her and/or misusing her money in some way. See Código Civil, 1860, Art. 149, p. 22.

20 Ibid., Arts. 153–172, pp. 23–25.

21 The law allowing wives to freely buy furniture and goods for the house, though it supported women's independent activity in public, was consistent with the overall patriarchal sensibilities of Ecuadorian law because these were instances in which public actions were linked to women's “natural” duties in the domestic sphere.

22 For an excellent discussion of images of women in late nineteenth-century literature, see Moscoso, Gladys, “Las imágenes de la literatura,” in Moscoso, Martha, ed. Y el amor no era todo&Mujeres, imágenes y conflictos (Quito: DGIS/Abya Yala, 1996), especially pp. 95–96.Google Scholar In this same volume, also see Goetschel, Ana María, “Educación e imágenes de la Mujer,” p. 62,Google Scholar in which she discusses the 1865 Minister of the Interior's similar stance on women's roles in the home and their connection to public morality and the socio-political wellbeing of the nation.

23 ANH/R: Civ: January 23, 1890. Folio 6v mentions that Castro was tilling land adjacent to family member María Cavadiana, and folio 9 discusses that another parcel associated with Castro was adjacent to land owned by Juan Cavadiana.

24 The centrality of gender complementarity as an organizing principle for Andean peasant communities—both past and present—is now generally recognized. This is thanks to groundbreaking works by many scholars. One pioneering historical examination of gender and community is Silverblatt's, Irene book, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Glass in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987);Google Scholar see also Zulawski, Ann, “Social Differentiation, Gender, and Ethnicity: Urban Indian Women in Colonial Bolivia, 1640–1725,” Latin American Research Review 25:2 (1990), pp. 93–113.Google Scholar Examinations for the nineteenth century have been few thus far, but Martha Moscoso does explore complementarity to some extent within her essay “Mujer Indígena y sociedad republicana: Relaciones étnicas y de género en el Ecuador, siglo XIX” in Defossez, A.C., Fassin, D., and Viveros, M., eds. Mujeres de los Andes: Condiciones de vida y salud (Bogotá: IFEA/Universidad Exgternado de Colombia, 1992), pp. 223–243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For contemporary gender relations in Ecuador, see: Weismantel, Mary, Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988);Google Scholar Harrison, Regina, Signs, Songs, and Memory in the Andes: Translating Quechua Language and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989),Google Scholar particularly chapter 5. For the Potosí region, see Harris, Olivia, “Complementarity and Conflict: An Andean View of Women and Men,” in La Fontaine, J.S., ed.. Sex and Age as Principles of Social Differentiation (New York: Academic Press, 1978), pp. 21–40,Google Scholar and “Condor and Bull: The Ambiguities of Masculinity in Northern Potosí,” in Harvey, Penelope and Gow, Peter, eds., Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation and Experience (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 40–65.Google Scholar For the Peruvian highlands, see Allen, Catherine J., The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1988).Google Scholar

25 Information on patterns of land ownership come through a review of civil cases among indigenous peasants in Ecuador's central highland province of Chimborazo from 1860–1925 (ANH/R:Civ). in which references to women's association with land were frequent and show that female inheritance rights were critical to family subsistence.

26 Criminal cases from Chimborazo (ANH/R:Cr) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offer the most information on these tasks, since female witnesses to crimes often mentioned the tasks they were carrying out when they observed or heard about an unusual event in their communities.

27 For examples of women selling chicha, see ANH/R:Cr: October 14, 1870; ANH/R:Cr: October 31, 1870; ANH/R:Cr: January 30, 1908. For references to women selling goods in local markets, see ANH/R:Cr: August 28, 1914; ANH/R:Cr: June 23, 1920.

28 When Indian men and women who took part in criminal cases were asked to identify their profession, men almost always answered that they were farmers, whereas women were likely to refer to doing “women's work,” even though they were active in agriculture. Given the centrality of land to both family survival and community social structures, this discrepancy gave men advantages over women. For a case with especially striking references to gender-distinct labeling like this, see ANH/R:Cr: February 26, 1874.

29 For a discussion of these relations in contemporary Chimborazo, see Botero, Luis Fernando, Chimborazo de los indios (Quito: Abya Yala, 1990), pp. 138, 143, 144.Google Scholar

30 Código Civil, 1860, Arts. 967, 970, 973, and 974, pp. 138–9.

31 Allen, , The Hold Life Has, p. 78.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 85. Also see Weismantel, , Food, Gender, and Poverty, pp. 183–184 Google Scholar; these two sources also more generally offer excellent discussions of daily and seasonal rituals and the ways they reflect social status in Andean communities.

33 Allen, on page 33 of The Hold Life Has, notes that “Through routine activities, habitually carried out, a cultural identity takes shape; the sense of the self as Runa.”

34 See, for example, ANH/R:Civ: December 15, 1866, and Archivo Nacional de la Historia, Quito, Serie Indígenas, March 12, 1873. Subsequent citations from this archive will be referred to as ANH/Q:I for Indígenas and ANH/Q:Cr for Criminales.

35 Some examples here are ANH/R:Civ: December 4, 1909, ANH/R:Civ: November 17, 1919.

36 ANH/R:Civ: May 27, 1882.

37 Other scholars have noted that a very high percentage of Andean women in the colonial period used their wills in order to express their right to make independent decisions about the control of land. It is not clear to me if the pattern was as strong in nineteenth-century Ecuador. For patterns in the colonial period, see Zulawski, “Social Differentiation.” Also see Salomon, Frank, “Indian Women of Early Colonial Quito as Seen Through Their Testaments,” The Americas 44:3 (January 1988), pp. 325–341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 A few examples where this might have been the case are: ANH/R:Civ: March 23, 1876; ANH/R:Civ: September 6, 1905; ANH/R:Civ: October 20, 1906; ANH/R:Civ: December 5, 1908. Being able to fight on her own behalf would certainly not guarantee a widow her land rights, as some of these cases show, but it at least gave her a chance to hold onto some aspect of her economic independence even when dealing with the court system.

39 ANH/R: May 8, 1878, folio 40. As with the case involving Rosa Castro, no mention was made in this case about the specific nature of the problem that led Vinlasaca to initiate legal proceedings. Nor was it clear whether the grievance between the two parties began before or after Soledad Lazo's death. It could be that part of the conflict over land ownership related to distinct categories of “ownership”— rights to the land versus rights to its products—discussed on page 9.

40 Ibid. See folio 38 for Cuenca's assertions, and folios 39-40v for confirmation of her claims from witnesses Fernando Caranqui, Cornelio Sinchi, and Tomás Aucansala. It is unlikely that Cuenca herself was the primary tiller of the land, as that was a male domain, but she probably worked it during peak times during the agricultural cycle.

41 Ibid., folios 47–47v; unfortunately, documentation to which he refers on folios 13 and 15 are not part of the surviving court record.

42 Ibid., folios 49–50.

43 Ibid., folio not numbered. The role of the tinterillos in this case is fascinating but unclear, as is the state position on these rural lawyers. Later, in the Liberal period, the state (and at times private elites) often identified tinterillos as meddlesome individuals who manipulated ignorant indigenous peoples. I have not, however, found evidence of such discussions for the nineteenth century.

44 ANH/R: Civ: June 21, 1883, folio 1. Not all of the plaintiffs named carried the surname of Cabay, but the men who did not were married to members of the Cabay family.

45 Ibid., folio 3 for the quote above, and folio 5 for del Pino's demand that Quisnancela supply Rosa Guillcasunta's will for the court.

46 Ibid. For the exchanges over whether or not the will was submitted, see folios 6-8; for the civil Judge of Calpi's reference to the will when he granted formal title of the land to Quisnancela, see folio 22v.

47 Ibid., folio 27v for the court decision and folios 39-40 for del Pino's final plea before the court.

48 Ibid., folios 45–59.

49 This was true of local officials in general, but it was especially true in late nineteenth-century Ecuador, as the central state—by its refusal to recognize any “Indian problem” in the nation—handed over a great deal of power to local authorities to administer Indian matters. For an excellent discussion of this, see Guerrero, “The Construction of a Ventriloquist's Image,” pp. 558, 568–570.

50 Valarezo, Galo Ramón, “La visión andina sobre el estado colonial,” Ecuador Debate (Quito) No. 12(1986), pp. 82,88,91.Google Scholar

51 Saint-Geours, Yves, “La sierra centro y norte, 1830–1925,” in Maiguashca, Juan, ed., Historia y región en el Ecuador, 1830–1925 (Quito: FLACSO/CERLAC, 1994), pp. 155–156;Google Scholar Moscoso, Martha, “La tierra: Espacio de conflicto y relación con el Estado y la comunidad en el siglo XIX,” in Bonilla, Heraclio, ed., Los Andes en la encrucijada, pp. 367–369,Google Scholar 375—though Moscoso's essay is on the southern sierra, the laws and basis patterns she points to in these pages were relevant to Chimborazo province also; Fuentealba, Gerardo, “La sociedad indígena en las primeras décadas de la República: Continuidades coloniales y cambios republicanos,” in Mora, Enrique Ayala, ed., Nueva Historia del Ecuador, Vol. 8 (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1983), pp. 56–73.Google Scholar

52 For examples of court disputes over abuses of these requirements, see: ANH/Q: Cr: August 30, 1867; ANH/Q: Cr: January 5, 1869; ANH/Q:Cr: December 22, 1869; ANH/Q:Cr: October 29, 1871.

53 For discussions of hacienda expansion, see Chiriboga, Manuel, Jornaleros y gran propietarios en 135 años de exportación cacaotero (1790–1925) (Quito: Consejo Provincial de Pichincha, 1980);Google Scholar and Saint-Geours, Yves, “La sierra centro y norte” in Historia y región, pp. 143–188.Google Scholar

54 ANH/R:Cr: October 31, 1870, folio 1.

55 Ibid., folios 3–5.

56 ANH/Q: I: March 12, 1873, folio 1.

57 See, for example, ANH/R: Civ: July 2, 1869 when widow Juana Roldán worked to protect communal lands; ANH/R: Cr: July 24, 1872 where a combination of Indian men and women (likely widows) complained of arbitrary arrest for not paying church tithes. Women were also key witnesses in cases against state officials in the late nineteenth century, as is evident in ANH/R: Cr: August 16, 1870, ANH/R: Cr: June 3, 1871; and ANH/R: Cr: September 11, 1871.

58 For an excellent discussion of Indians’ manipulation of these redundant systems, see Guerrero, “Curagas y tenientes políticos;” also see Sattar, Aleeze, “An Unresolved Inheritance: Postcolonial State Formation and Indigenous Communities in Chimborazo, Ecuador, 1820–1875” (Ph.D. Diss., The New School, 2001).Google Scholar

59 The Liberal period from 1895–1925 would more clearly and consistently mark a relative decline in indigenous women's ability to defend community interests or interact with state officials. This was based on both intensified intraethnic gender divisions and on the patriarchal predisposition of the Liberal states; see O'Connor, Erin, “Dueling Patriarchies: Gender, Indians, and State Formation in the Ecuadorian Sierra, 1860–1925” (Ph.D. Diss., Boston College, 1997), particularly chapters 3 and 7.Google Scholar