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Social Differentiation, Gender, and Ethnicity: Urban Indian Women in Colonial Bolivia, 1640-1725

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Ann Zulawski
Ann Zulawski*
Affiliation:
Smith College
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Recently, a number of scholars have begun to piece together the economic and social history of Indian women in the Andes during the colonial period. It has not been an easy task: too often quantitative materials, such as tributary censuses, mention women only as wives and mothers and then may not provide even minimal demographic data on them. Moreover, although court and notarial records can be rich sources of information about Indian women, they generally deal with those who lived in cities or who were familiar enough with them to know how to use the colonial legal system. Consequently, it is no accident that most research has concentrated on native women in urban settings, certainly a small minority of the female indigenous population.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , 1990 , pp. 93 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

Research for this article was made possible by a faculty grant from the University of New Hampshire. I would like to thank Brooke Larson for her helpful suggestions on an earlier draft. I, however, am solely responsible for the final results.

References

Notes

1. An important exception to the urban orientation of the work on Andean women is that of Irene Silverblatt. She used colonial chronicles, especially Guarnan Poma's Nueva coránica y buen gobierno, and seventeenth-century records of campaigns against native idolatry to illuminate the situation of peasant women under Spanish domination. See Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987).

2. Elinor C. Burkett, “Indian Women and White Society: The Case of Sixteenth-Century Peru,” in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives, edited by Asunción Lavrin (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978), 117, 119.

3. Ibid., 121.

4. Frank Salomon, “Indian Women of Early Colonial Quito as Seen through Their Testaments,” The Americas 44, no. 3 (Jan. 1988):326-29.

5. Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches.

6. Luis Miguel Glave, “Mujer indígena, trabajo doméstico y cambio social en el virreinato peruano del siglo XVII: la ciudad de La Paz y el sur andino en 1684,” Bulletin de L'Institut Français D'Etudes Andines 16, nos. 3–4:47, 50–52, 55.

7. Salomon, “Indian Women,” 326.

8. Brooke Larson has also discussed this point in “La producción doméstica y trabajo femenino indígena en la formación de una economía mercantil colonial,” Historia Boliviana 3, no. 2 (1983): 173–85.

9. Used in this study are: “Padrón de Oruro, 1683,” Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires (hereafter, AGN), XIII-17-1-4; “Alto Perú, Padrones 1645–1686,” AGN, XI, 17-1-4; and “Padrones de La Plata, 1725–1754,” AGN, XIII, 18-5-1. Although some variation occurs in the information provided in different censuses, they usually include the name and age of the adult male Indian, his marital status, ayllu or province of origin or both, birthplace, occupation, number of children and their age and sex, and whether or not the man paid tribute and served in the mita in Potosí.

10. On the parallel division of the universe, see Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches, chap. 2. On bilaterality in Andean kinship, see Bernd Lambert, “Bilaterality in the Andes,” in Andean Kinship and Marriage, edited by Ralph Bolton and Enrique Mayer (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1977), 1–27. In the same volume, see Billie Jean Isbell, “‘Those Who Love Me’: An Analysis of Andean Kinship and Reciprocity within a Ritual Context,” 81–105; and Jim Belote and Linda Belote, “The Limitation of Obligation in Saraguro Kinship,” 106–16.

11. Ayllus were clan-type kin groups that held land in common and generally traced their origins to a common mythical ancestor. A number of articles dealing with the nature of the ayllu can be found in Etnohistoria y antropología andina, compiled by Amalia Castelli, Marcia Koth de Paredes, and Mariana Mould de Pease (Lima: Museo Nacional de Historia, 1981).

12. Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches, 9–14.

13. Olivia Harris, “Complementarity and Conflict: An Andean View of Women and Men,” in Sex and Age as Principles of Social Differentiation, edited by J. LaFontaine (London: Academic Press, 1978), especially 32–34.

14. See Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches, 59–66. According to Silverblatt, equal control of the economy by men and women under the Incas was undermined by the empire's heavy reliance on soldiers (who were men) to fill important administrative posts. Control of the government meant more control over material resources as well as the possibility of receiving gifts from the state. See Silverblatt's discussion, 14–19.

15. Silvia Marina Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790-1857 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985), 77.

16. Ibid., 58. Arrom mentions a few instances of women inheriting their husbands' public offices in the early colonial period.

17. The rule on emancipation also applied to single men. See ibid., 61.

18. Ibid., 67.

19. Ibid., 70.

20. Asunción Lavrin, “Women in Spanish American Colonial Society,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, edited by Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2:327, 330. Also see Asunción Lavrin, “In Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Lavrin, Latin American Women. No comparable work has been published on Spanish women in the Viceroyalty of Peru, although Elinor Burkett makes some comparisons between Spanish elite women and other women in Peru during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in “In Dubious Sisterhood: Class and Sex in Spanish Colonial South America,” Latin American Perspectives 4, no. 4 (1977): 18–26.

21. Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester, 1977), 67–70.

22. María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Etnia y sociedad: costa peruana prehispánica (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1977), 211–17; and Terence D'Altroy and Tin$⊗hy K. Earle, “Staple Finance, Wealth Finance, and Storage in the Inka Political Economy,” Current Anthropology 26, no. 2 (Apr. 1985): 187–206.

23. John V. Murra, “El control vertical de un máximo de pisos ecológicos en la economía de las sociedades andinas,” in Murra, Formaciones económicas y políticas del mundo andino (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1975), 59–115; Alfred Metraux, The History of the Incas (New York: Schocken, 1970), 94; and Wachtel, Vision of the Vanquished, 70–72.

24. The most extensive and best-known form of forced labor in the Andes was the mita draft, which brought thousands of Indian men from sixteen provinces to serve in the Potosí silver mines. See Jeffrey A. Cole, The Potosí Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985).

25. John V. Murra, “La correspondencia entre un ‘capitán de la mita’ y su apoderado en Potosí,” Historia y Cultura 3 (1978):45-58; Roberto Choque, “Pedro Chipana: cacique comerciante de Cajamarca,” Avances 1 (Feb. 1978):28-32; Robert Choque Canqui, “Los caciques aymaras y el comercio en el Alto Perú,” in La participación indígena en los mercados surandinos: estrategias y reproducción social, siglos XVI–XX, edited by Olivia Harris, Brooke Larson, and Enrique Tandeter (La Paz: Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Económica y Social, 1987), 357–77; and Silvia Rivera, “El Mallku y la sociedad colonial en el siglo XVII: el caso de Jesús de Machaca,” Avances, no. 1 (Feb. 1978):9-12.

26. On yanaconas, see John V. Murra, “Nueva información sobre las poblaciones yana,” in Murra, Formaciones económicas y políticas, 225–42; Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, Indios y tributos en el Alto Perú (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1978); and Ann Zulawski, “Wages, Ore Sharing, and Peasant Agriculture: Labor in Oruro's Silver Mines, 1607–1720,” Hispanic American Historical Review 67, no. 3 (Aug. 1987):405-30.

27. Thierry Saignes, “Políticas étnicas en Bolivia colonial, siglos XVI–XIX,” Historia Boliviana 3, no. 1:1-30; Saignes, “De la filiation à la residence: les ethnies dans les vallées de Larecaja,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 33, nos. 5–6 (1978):1160-81; and Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, “Migración rural en los Andes: Sipesipe (Cochabamba), 1645,” Revista de Historia Económica 1, no. 1 (1983):30-36.

28. “Padrón de Oruro, 1683,” AGN, XII-17-1-4; and “Padrones de La Plata, 1725–1754,” AGN, XIII, 18-5-1.

29. Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, “Migraciones internas en el Alto Perú: el saldo acumulado en 1645,” Historia Boliviana 3, no. 1 (1983):15–16.

30. Sánchez-Albornoz, Indios y tributos, 28–31; and Nathan Wachtel, “Hommes d'eau: le problème uru (XVI–XVII siècle),” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 33, nos. 5–6 (Sept.-Dec. 1978): 1154–55.

31. “Autos sobre el despacho de la mita de Potosí… Villa de Concepción, 24 Oct. 1669,” Biblioteca Nacional del Perú (hereafter BNP), B575; and “Despacho de la mita de Potosí … Puno, 2 Nov. 1673,” BNP, B585.

32. In 1596 Father Antonio de Ayans estimated that it cost the average mitayo twenty-six pesos a month to feed himself, although he only received ten pesos a month for his labor. See “Breve relación de los agravios que reciben los indios que ay desde cerca del Cuzco hasta Potosí,” in Pareceres jurídicos en asuntos de indios, edited by Rubén Vargas Ugarte (Lima: n.p., 1951), 38.

33. “Don Gabriel Fernández Guarache, cacique principal del pueblo de Jesús de Machaca … con los diputados del gremio de azogueros de la villa de Potosí, sobre puntos tocantes a la mita, Potosí, 1663,” Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Escribanía de Cámara, 868A.

34. For a discussion of how this subsidy functioned in the late colonial period, see Enrique Tandeter, “La Rente comme rapport de production et comme rapport de distribution: le cas de l'industrie miniére de Potosí, 1750–1826,” Thèse de 3e cycle, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1980.

35. On the possibility that yanaconas maintained community ties and functioned in a manner similar to agricultural colonists in the pre-Columbian period, see note 27 above.

36. “Padrón de Oruro, 1683,” AGN, XIII–17–1–4; and “Alto Perú, Padrones 1645–1686,” AGN, XIII, 17-1-4.

37. Ibid. An interesting finding is that a 1725 census of yanaconas living on haciendas in the southern wine-producing province of Pilaya y Paspaya includes a sizable number of single women listed as heads of families. This pattern may be partly the result of an epidemic that decimated the area a few years before but might also reflect the preference for female servants to do certain tasks on these agricultural estates. The census is available in “Padrones de La Plata, 1725–1754,” AGN, XIII, 18-5-1. For a discussion of labor and migration in Pilaya y Paspaya, see Ann Zulawski, “Wine Production and Indian Migrant Workers: A Bolivian Agrarian Frontier in the Eighteenth Century,” Migration in Colonial Spanish America, edited by David Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

38. The provinces were Omasuyos, Larecaja, Sicasica, Pacajes, Cochabamba, Yamparaes, Paria, Carangas, Porco, Chayanta, and Tarija. The cities were La Paz, Potosí, and Oruro. The total number of tributaries (men between eighteen and fifty years of age) in the study reached 55,946. See Brian M. Evans, “Census Enumeration in Late-Seventeenth-Century Alto Peru: The Numeración General of 1683–1684,” in Studies in Spanish American Population History, edited by David J. Robinson (Boulder, Colo: Westview, 1981), 25–44.

39. Personal communication from Karen Powers, who is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on migration in the Audiencia of Quito.

40. “Autos de oficio contra Bartolomé Quispe por la muerta que dió a una india llamada Ana,” Archivo Nacional de Bolivia (hereafter ANB), Tierra e Indios (hereafter TI), 1714.60. The possibility that the coca land may have traditionally belonged to Chapaca is supported by the fact that in the 1570s, the community's tribute was assessed in coca. See Tasa de la visita general de Francisco de Toledo, edited by Noble David Cook (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1975), 63.

41. Burkett, “Indian Women in White Society,” 120.

42. “Autos seguidos por María Fajardo, india, con los nietos de Juan Gaitán, sobre una tienda de pulpería en Potosí,” ANB, TI, 1702.48.

43. “Expedientes sobre la averiguación de la memoria hecha por la india Lucia Ursula Sisa y de los bienes que quedaron a su muerte,” ANB, TI, 1698.16.

44. Arrom, Women of Mexico City, 69.

45. “Venta de sitio y aposentos de Ana Sissa a Don Joseph Becerra,” Archivo Histórico de La Paz (hereafter, ALP), C36-EC4, 1692.

46. “Lorenzo Camita Limanche y Lorenzo Camita, caciques, indios principales de ayllu chinchaisuio, solicitan el solar de Juana Sisa, difunta, por ser del común de ayllu,” ALP, C34–EC2, 1689.

47. “Autos seguidos por Petrona González, india, con Pedro Nina, sobre unas casas ubicadas en Oruro,” ANB, TI 1702.24.

48. “Lucrecia Fernández Guarache manifiesta que el capitán Baltazar de Llano y Astorga le es deudor de dos escrituras en su favor con la suma de 3200 pesos,” ALP, C30-EC1, 1685.

49. Roberto Choque Canqui, “Los caciques aymaras,” 371–72.

50. Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva coránica y buen gobierno (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1980), vol. 2, “De corregidores, escribanos, tenientes, jueces …” and “De padres, fiscales, cantores …,” 454–664.

51. “Juicio criminal contra Lázaro Gutiérrez por azotes y otros maltratamientos inferidos a la india María Santos,” ANB, TI, 1706.14.

52. “María Sisa, india, pide al corregidor y justicia mayor para que Doña Polonia Maldonado le pague por sus servicios,” ALP, C34-EC6, 1689.

53. “Doña María Sánchez de Doria, con el protector de naturales, sobre el derecho a una esclava llamada María,” ANB, TI, 1698.13; “La india Juana Feliciana con Doña Petronilla Medellín solicitando su libertad por haber sido libre,” ANB, TI, 1705.35.

54. Burkett, “Indian Women and White Society,” 111.

55. Frank Salomon discusses the case of Francisca Vilcacabra of Quito, who although describing herself as a servant, ran a chichería and left large sums of money in her 1596 will. See Salomon, “Indian Women,” 337–38.

56. Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches, 154.

57. Glave, “Mujer indígena,” 55.

58. “Ursula Guampa denuncia … el robo de una lliclla y un par de medias que le había dado para vender y que no puede pagar por ser muy pobre,” ALP, C54-EC17, 1722; “El protector de naturales solicita … que la india Esperanza Choque, vendedora de pan en la plaza pública, pague cada seis meses a 50 pesos,” ALP, C36-EC3, 1694; “Declaraciones de testigos sobre malos tratos a Josepha Arce por parte de su marido Dionicio Mellares,” ALP, C44-EC10, 1705 (including direct quote); “Pedro Coaquira, contra la india Bárbara de la Cruz sobre maltratamientos con palo y piedra en compañía de muchos,” ANB, TI, 1713.12; and “Pascuala de Carrillo contra Juan de Leiseca atribuyéndole la muerte de su hija Petrona Carrillo,” ANB, TI, 169721.

59. “Bartola Sisa, india, pidiéndose le ampare en la posesión de la mina que tiene registrada en el cerro del Espíritu Santo, provincia de Carangas, la cual pretende usurparle Cristóbal de Cotes, 1644. VI. 23–28,” ANB, Minas, T 96, 2.

60. “Real cédula que los indios pueden tener y labrar minas de oro y plata como los españoles,” Madrid, 17 Dec. 1551, in Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493-1810, edited by Richard Konetzke (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1950), 1:294. Bartolomé Arzans de Orsua y Vela mentions a few Indian miners in Potosí who became rich. See his Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1965), 2:118.

61. While doing the research for a study of mine labor in Oruro in the seventeenth century, I never encountered references to Indian mine owners, although some mestizos owned mines. Neither Peter Bakewell nor Jeffrey Cole writing on Potosí refers to Indians owning mines. See Cole, The Potosí Mita, and Peter Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545-1650 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984).

62. Although census and court records frequently describe male viajeros who brought supplies to urban areas, this is the only reference I have found to a woman doing this kind of work.

63. “María Esperanza, india de Hayu-Hayu, Caracollo, sobre un cacique de Urinsaya por despojo y otros atentados,” ANB, TI, 1708.33.

64. The indigenous population of the Viceroyalty of Peru declined drastically after the Spanish invasion, primarily due to European epidemic diseases to which the population previously had not been exposed. Although exactly how much the population dropped is impossible to calculate, Sánchez-Albornoz has estimated a 60 percent decline between 1532 and 1683 for the Upper Peruvian area. See Sánchez-Albornoz, Indios y tributos, 22–23, 34. On the region that now comprises modern Peru, see Noble David Cook, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520-1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

65. Lesley Gill, “Painted Faces: Conflict and Ambiguity in Domestic Servant-Employer Relations in La Paz, 1930–1988,” LAR 25, no. 1 (1990):119-36.

66. Glave, “Mujer indígena,” 46.