Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233 Tamara J. Walker, ‘‘Blanconas Sucias’ and ‘Putas Putonas’: White Women, Cross-Caste Conflict and the Power of Words in Late-Colonial Lima, Peru’ Gender & History, Vol.27 No.1 April 2015, pp. 131–150.
‘Blanconas Sucias’ and ‘Putas Putonas’: White Women, Cross-Caste Conflict and the Power of Words in Late-Colonial Lima, Peru Tamara J. Walker
In 1816, in Lima, a woman named do˜na Mariana Saenz initiated criminal proceedings against Juan Barboza, an African-descent soldier she accused of stealing a poncho from the general store she owned along with her husband, don Lorenzo Osorio. On the day of the incident in question, Barboza had been dispatched with several colleagues on behalf of Lima’s police force in order to collect a tax levied on individuals operating caf´es and liquor stores. In her testimony, Saenz reported having told Barboza that, although the store had once been a caf´e, it no longer operated in that capacity and was therefore exempt from the tax. Upon hearing this news, Barboza refused to leave empty-handed and decided to take a poncho as payment instead. For this, Saenz called him a ‘zambo ladr´on osado’ (or, an ‘audacious zambo thief’, with the term zambo referring to a person of mixed African and indigenous ancestry) and insisted that he and the other soldiers leave immediately. In response, Barboza unleashed a barrage of insults, beginning with calling her a ‘puta’ (‘prostitute’, or ‘whore’).1 In her statement, Saenz condemned the incident as an affront to her privacy, her dignity as a married woman as well as to her and her husband’s reputations. As she put it, Barboza’s greatest offence was that, ‘as a zambo, [he] did not contain himself within the limits of his base sphere’.2 In other words, Saenz’s problem was not just with how Barboza treated and spoke to her, but also with Barboza himself. He was too inferior to have disrespected her. From a historian’s perspective, the episode stands out for how rarely such an encounter is discussed in scholarship on insults. Generally speaking, this work has tended to focus on two categories of verbal insults. The first involves members of similar social milieus (or ‘almost-equals’, as Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers and Lara Putnam have described them), for whom insults formed part of a broader tendency to hurl accusations, question reputations and otherwise enhance personal standing at one another’s expense.3 The second category involves men and women who sought to degrade the racial and social status of presumed subordinates. In her analysis of an insult case from eighteenth-century Mexico, for example, Sonya LipsettRivera shows how an elite Spanish woman used the epithet ‘black whore’ to assert © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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the hierarchy that encouraged such an utterance in the first place.4 Similarly, in unpacking the sexually explicit terms that plantation managers in Jamaica used against female slaves in the early nineteenth century, Diana Paton has signalled how language ‘played a role in justifying, in the eyes of these managers, the sexual victimisation of enslaved women’.5 Less discussed in the literature, however, are the times when insults travelled in other directions. If insults between social equals resulted in minor – but, to those involved, tremendously meaningful – status distinctions, and if insults that were hurled from on high to lower social orders served to entrench racial hierarchy, what was the impact of insults from presumed racial subordinates to superiors? Could they challenge racial hierarchy? To answer these questions, the present article examines three insult claims from the early nineteenth century: the 1816 case against Juan Barboza, along with two others in which people of African and Indian ancestry (who were collectively known as castas) stood accused of hurling offensive terms across status gulfs. While the incidents detailed within the cases were not necessarily specific to the period, they nonetheless provide a compelling insight into the ways in which colonial subjects negotiated and asserted their status during a time of profound socioeconomic change in Lima. Moreover, in addition to their content and context, the cases stand out due to the fact that castas were rarely named as claimants or alleged perpetrators in insult cases. In fact, for the period between 1800 and 1821, they appeared in just five such cases tried before Lima’s Real Audiencia (Superior Court); in every instance, they were among the accused.6 And while precise figures for Lima’s cabildo (city council) and ecclesiastical courts are unavailable, insult cases featuring castas appear to follow similar trends.7 That being said, the relative paucity of extant claims should not be understood to mean that castas only rarely received or hurled insults. For one thing, this survey only includes claims in which verbal insults were cited as the primary or secondary offences for which the petitioners sought redress. It does not include other court proceedings that may have featured testimony referring to, or containing, verbal insults, nor does it include sources from the print culture of the period. In other words, the historical record is filled with evidence that castas were abused by, and abused others with, offensive language.8 But those episodes hardly ever became the primary basis of lawsuits, making the ones that did especially deserving of attention. The cases at the centre of my analysis provide a representative sample of the extant documentation in that most insult claims against castas were filed by, or on behalf of, women. In each instance, the women were identified with the honorific title do˜na. Along with the masculine don, the title served – in Lima as well as throughout Spanish America – as a kind of lexical marker of social status, although precisely what kind of status it marked could be somewhat nebulous. Generally speaking, the title was reserved for elite Spaniards and their legitimate children, but it also found wider usage among Spaniards of lower socio-economic status and illegitimate birth, as well as among free castas. As Ann Twinam has shown, for the last half of the eighteenth century, whether it was because of their social connections, wealth, professional status or some combination of factors, members of these groups considered themselves deserving of using and being publicly addressed by the titles. Some even made appeals to the Crown through a process known as gracias al sacar, for dispensation that for all practical and © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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social purposes erased their origins and granted them a privileged, honourable status.9 This context often makes it difficult for scholars to determine just who among the historical actors we study was ‘truly’ elite, or even ‘truly’ Spanish. In other words, the title do˜na does not tell us very much about the status of the women in these cases. But when taken into consideration alongside the testimony they provide about their living and working conditions, it is clear that all of them claimed, and wished to maintain, identities as respectable Spaniards. For their part, the alleged perpetrators in these cases represented a wider spectrum of types, including a male soldier, a female slave owner as well as individuals of more humble circumstances. None of them appeared on record with the honorifics don or do˜na, but they nonetheless laid claim in various ways to their own sense of status. In examining the words and deeds of the diverse women and men who appeared in these records, my goal is to add new dimensions to our understanding of how class and gender shaped colonial subjects’ understanding of racial hierarchy and privilege in Latin America.
Urban life and social interaction
On the eve of the nineteenth century, Lima was home to a total of 52,627 inhabitants. According to one calculation, that number included 19,986 Spaniards (including both Spanish-born peninsulares and native-born criollos, or creoles); 12,479 slaves; 10,023 pardos (of mixed Spanish and African descent); 4,807 mestizos (of mixed Spanish and indigenous descent); and 4,332 Indians.10 Though heterogeneous, Lima was also highly stratified. A letter published in the 10 February 1791 issue of Lima’s Mercurio Peruano (one of the city’s two major eighteenth-century newspapers) provides a compelling view of how the city’s elite navigated this landscape. In it, a husband detailed his wife’s numerous ‘excessive expenditures’. In addition to her penchant for elegant dress and beautiful surroundings, his wife – a ‘gracious girl’ and an immensely social creature – wished to host and attend as many dances, celebrations and spectacles as she possibly could. According to the author – a self-described ‘honourable man with good customs’ – this meant having a home large enough to accommodate large groups of friends, purchasing a horse-drawn carriage in which to navigate city streets and paying to sit in balcony seats at bullfights and theatre performances. For all these and other indulgences, the husband explained, ‘I wish I had millions of pesos’. Instead, he said, he found himself heavily in debt, sleepless with worry and in need of advice.11 Given its somewhat hyperbolic and derisive tone, its plea to men in similar positions to commiserate and offer counsel, as well as its postscript invitation to ‘intelligent women of the city’ to write in with justifications of their own habits, the letter may well have been a piece of satire intended to take playful aim at materialistic consumption and to stimulate reader responses (indeed, satire was a commonly deployed tactic among the writers of the Mercurio Peruano). At the same time, however, it also captured in keen detail the variety of ways in which elite Spaniards in late colonial Lima sought to enjoy the trappings of urban life while operating at as much of a remove from the rest of colonial society as possible. In part, this desire stemmed from the reality of living in a city that was home to mundane nuisances like trash-littered streets, noisy commercial thoroughfares and pungent odours, as well as to disease outbreaks and public health crises.12 For elite © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Spaniards, their homes, carriages and balcony seats provided a measure of protection against these myriad and unpleasant sights, sounds, smells and contagions. This view was also deeply gendered, and as such had more stringent prescriptions for elite Spanish women. As the wives, daughters and relatives of elite Spanish men, they were responsible for leading ‘honest and sheltered’ lives.13 Because their duties consisted of maintaining their own virtue and, by extension, preserving their husbands’ and families’ honourable status, they were generally confined to the safety of the domestic realm. Consequently, when elite women travelled outside the private space of their homes, they routinely did so in ways – from riding through city streets in curtained carriages to taking balcony seats at bullfights – that largely extended the protections of the domestic sphere.14 Still, they could never attain complete physical distance, for Lima was a densely populated and growing metropolis where residents came into close proximity on a daily basis. This was a fact of life with which middling- and lower-status Spaniards were especially familiar. As demographic data from the period shows, these groups, as well as slaves and free castas (who could not afford the costs associated with living in private homes or in the upper stories of grand residences, unless, in the case of slaves, they worked inside them) resided in multi-family or multi-unit dwellings, where they shared space with roommates, tenants and other urban dwellers.15 Daily life for most lime˜nos, then, meant coming into contact with intimates and strangers of all colours and classes. Thus, for assurance that even with physical nearness came a degree of social distance, particularly from presumed racial subordinates, Spaniards in Lima relied on a hierarchical system that linked ancestry and skin colour to status. Within this system, ‘Old Christian’ Spaniards notionally occupied the highest positions, followed by middling- and lower-status whites, individuals of mixed ancestry and, finally, Africans and Indians in the lowest estates. This system further divided the latter groups into tiers, with attendant privileges or legal restrictions based on such factors as bloodline and birth status. A young mestiza with a Spanish father and an Indian mother might gain entry into an exclusive convent, for instance, while a mulata with a Spanish father and an African mother would be confined to slavery within those same hallowed halls.16 In applying different (and constantly-evolving) standards to people with Indian as opposed to African ancestry, elite Spaniards sought to control access to their own higher ranks while also curbing the potential of afro-indigenous alliances. Despite these controls, however, there were always elite Spaniards who tumbled down the social hierarchy through destitution or dissolution, and castas who climbed their way up through ingenuity or opportunism.17 The latter trend was particularly visible by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when free persons of African, Indian and mixed-racial ancestry were growing in number and enjoying significant upward mobility, thanks to the merchants, artisans, shopkeepers, lawyers, militiamen and other professionals among them, whose economic success and effective use of the courts to legitimise status claims helped to signal the limits of racial domination. Yet even beyond socio-economic manoeuvring lay additional challenges to Spaniards’ sense of status: many castas had their own ideas about where they ranked in the region’s hierarchy. They, too, felt inclined to assert themselves in public and demand the respect they saw as their right, even from presumed superiors. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Words of insult in the public sphere
In 1813, for example, a widow identified as do˜na Juana Lino Montes initiated criminal proceedings against a woman named Magdalena Guzm´an and two alleged accomplices. Lino Montes claimed that she had arrived in town from the city of Santa on what she vaguely described as ‘family business’ (negocios interesantes de familia). While there, she was staying with her twenty-year-old son named don Jos´e Valdez, at whose home she almost immediately found herself embroiled in conflict. During the night of her arrival, Lino Montes was awakened by the sound of men fighting in the street. When she went outside to check on the source of the commotion, she encountered Guzm´an, whereupon, according to Lino Montes, the woman ‘provoked me with the darkest of insults, the least of which was that I was a whore’. In response, Lino Montes claimed to have tried to ignore the attack, but said that Guzm´an ‘responded by yelling for her brother Manuel and the zamba Tomasa; together the three of them came to the door of my home and began to cruelly attack me, destroying all of my clothing and leaving me naked’.18 What led Guzm´an and her consorts to behave this way? According to a witness named don Faustino Fern´andez (a cigarette vendor who described himself as a neighbour and acquaintance of Jos´e Valdez), the attack was hardly unprovoked. On the night of the incident, he said, Lino Montes had not only tried to deny Guzm´an entry to her son’s home, but she had also urged her son to end what Fern´andez called an ‘illicit friendship’ with the woman. Lino Montes confirmed this, somewhat, in her own testimony, stating that earlier on the night in question she told her son not to allow Guzm´an inside.19 Some details in the record help to explain why Lino Montes was so concerned with keeping the pair apart. In her testimony, Lino Montes described herself as the widow of a militia lieutenant, and both she and her son appear elsewhere in the record free of colour classifications as well as with the honorific titles do˜na and don. For her part, Guzm´an was described at several points throughout the case as an india, or Indian, and was not referred to as having any sort of honorific title. Given the demographics of Lino Montes’s hometown of Santa, this was remarkable. According to the 1813 census, Santa was home to a majority-Indian and mestizo population and was, unfortunately, ‘among the poorest in Peru’. 20 That Lino Montes managed – by birth, marriage or through her deceased husband’s military service – to avoid being labelled as mestizo or Indian in a city like Santa also suggests that her concern over her son’s relationship with Guzm´an was not arbitrary maternal meddling but instead shaped by her own experience living in an ethnically diverse and economically depressed region. Was the relationship – between a man who apparently was socially free of any colour stigma and his Indian lover – the ‘family business’ that occasioned Lino Montes’s visit to Lima? Certainly, Lino Montes’s repeated insistence on separating her son from his lover makes clear that the woman had a clear sense of purpose when it came to keeping the pair apart. Indeed, it is easy to imagine the questions and concerns swirling through Lino Montes’s mind at the time: where was this relationship heading? And, what would happen to her family’s status if her son married or had a child with the Indian woman? Whatever her exact thought process, Lino Montes’s gatekeeping at her son’s threshold shows that she considered the relationship to be a serious problem in need of a mother’s intervention. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Yet Magdalena Guzm´an would not go away quietly. The last page of the case file includes a request for Guzm´an’s testimony, which was never recorded, leaving her version of the incident untold. This means that her self-perception, actions and motivations are visible only through Lino Montes’s testimony. But while the limitations of Lino Montes’s perspective are obvious, when read alongside other sources from the era, it nonetheless offers small windows through which to imagine Guzm´an’s reason for confronting her accuser. According to the petitioner’s recounting of the events, Guzm´an was a slaveholder. To put this detail into context, a bit of demographic sketching is helpful. In 1813, Lima’s enslaved population totalled 5,803 – or, just shy of 10 per cent of the city’s total population. The figure represented a significant drop from earlier years: in 1790, for instance, slaves represented nearly one-quarter of the city’s population.21 With these figures in mind, it is worth noting that as a slaveholder during a period when the institution was on the decline, Guzm´an was in rare company among her contemporaries. In other words, Guzm´an would not necessarily have seen herself as the social liability Lino Montes had apparently presumed her to be. Indeed, Guzm´an’s ability to call upon (or to coerce) her brother and her own slave in her defence signalled that the woman wielded enough influence in her own social sphere that she had good reason to take offence to the notion that she was undeserving of Valdez’s affections and his mother’s respect. Thus, despite the fact that the record of this case came to an abrupt end before all sides presented their stories and explained their motivations (and before a verdict could be reached), the case provides insight into some of the competing – and even contentious – ideas about colour and status that shaped everyday life in late colonial Lima. While the nature of Lino Montes’s complaint reveals a mother’s profound preoccupation with the company her son kept (as though his relationship with an Indian woman would undermine his status as a man heretofore unmarked by colour classifications), Guzm´an’s actions show that she very clearly had her own ideas about who she was and what kind of relationship and treatment she did and did not deserve. Indeed, by labelling Lino Montes a ‘whore’ and therefore calling the mother’s sexual behaviour and social status into question (along with inflicting the violence that apparently accompanied those words), Guzm´an had found a way to undercut Lino Montes’s assertion that her son was too good for Guzm´an’s company. Epithets and slurs at the intersection of colour and gender
In her complaint, do˜na Lino Montes made no direct mention of the impact of the incident on her social standing or reputation. Instead, she focused on all that made her undeserving of what happened in the first place. But the way in which she framed her complaint did not preclude the possibility that she suffered a blow to her reputation in the wake of being publicly assaulted and insulted. To be sure, even insults from presumed inferiors could have devastating repercussions. The 1816 case that opened this article provides a particularly illustrative example. In it, do˜na Mariana Saenz accused Juan Barboza of entering her home and stealing a poncho when she refused to pay a business tax. When Saenz confronted Barboza and the other soldiers who were with him on the day of the incident in question, calling Barboza an ‘audacious zambo thief’ and insisting that they leave the premises, she claimed that Barboza called her a ‘whore’ as well as an ‘unmannerly Chilean daughter of a great whore’.22 © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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In her statement in reference to Barboza’s ‘depraved insolences’, Saenz claimed that Barboza’s offences consisted of his ‘having dared to violate the interior of a private room belonging to a married woman and her family, who do not belong to the abominable casta and condition of which Barboza is a part . . . but are instead decent and honourable vecinos [property-owning residents] of pure blood, the knowledge of which is public and notorious’.23 Several elements of her testimony stand out. The first is Saenz’s anger over what she described as Barboza’s violation of a private space. To be sure, in Lima as elsewhere, the home’s associations with safety and, in particular, femininity, made Saenz’s anger understandable. As Sonya Lipsett-Rivera has observed in the case of eighteenth-century Mexico City, so strong was this sentiment that ‘an attack on the actual building was often interpreted as a slur on the morality of those who inhabited it’.24 But recall that Saenz had previously described the confrontation with Barboza as having taken place in a general store. What made her refer to it as private, then? It is possible that, like numerous other owners and operators of commercial establishments in Lima, Saenz and her husband navigated a porous boundary between work and home life. Taverns, workshops and general stores occupied the ground floors of buildings throughout the city, with living quarters being upstairs, next-door or even part of the same space. 25 The particulars varied according to the nature of a given building’s architecture, as well as the status of the people involved: slaves, for instance, frequently lived in the same taverns, workshops and stores where they worked, as did some free castas and lower-status Spaniards.26 For some this meant sleeping on pallets on the same floors they hustled across during business hours; for others it meant retiring to back rooms at the end of the day. Still others were fortunate enough to leave their work a bit further behind, by heading to upstairs apartments or adjacent buildings. These myriad arrangements often rendered the divide between public and private space more conceptual than physical, such that certain residents needed to protect and police spatial boundaries more forcefully than others. Perhaps they did so by insisting that customers who entered their spaces observe certain limits, like staying on one side of the counter or avoiding the back of the store. They may even have tried to prevent certain persons – including presumed racial subordinates whom they would never have invited as guests into their homes – from entering these types of spaces in the first place. These realities and responses functioned alongside other conditions of urban life in Lima, where residents generally lived in close quarters and shared entrances, exits, courtyards and passageways. Consequently, urban dwellers had many useful vantage points from which to observe and report. Moreover, their living conditions had a profound impact on their ideas about public and private space, as well as between personal matters and communal concerns. For them, whatever transpired in building doorways, halls and courtyards – interstitial zones that belonged to no one in particular and to everyone at once – merited attention and scrutiny. 27 This helps explain the frequent appearance of neighbours’ witness testimony in civil and criminal cases from the period, since they found justification for being in the right places at the right times to note each other’s comings, goings and movements.28 Further (and more relevant to our discussion), it also signals the possibility of gossip that accompanied every coming and going. In short, it is possible that Saenz genuinely thought of her store as a private space, and that she was keenly sensitive to Barboza’s entry into it. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Indeed, another component of Saenz’s testimony that calls for attention is her reference to her and her family’s public status. Unlike Barboza, neither she nor her husband is marked by colour terms in the case file. Indeed, both the woman’s preoccupation with her family’s honour, decency and ‘pure blood’, as well as her insistence that she and her family did not belong to the same casta or condition as Barboza, help to signal just how much she wished to assert the differences between them. Saenz said as much when, after revealing that her husband filed for legal separation because of the incident, she argued that: The distance between the injurer [Barboza] and the injured parties; the injurer’s perverse reputation on one hand and the high esteem in which the injured are held on the other . . . [and] the continued danger in which I find myself, having been perpetually dishonoured and abandoned by my husband . . . oblige me to appear before this tribunal.29
According to Saenz, ‘as a zambo, [Barboza] did not contain himself within the limits of his base sphere’ by interacting with her in such an insulting manner. Moreover, she continued, ‘he lives without fear of God or of earthly justice . . . with depraved intentions towards honourable families that, without having to resort to theft, have created a capital from the sweat of their brows’. Saenz positioned herself in the complaint as a productive member of society with a legitimate enterprise, a married woman of pure blood and unimpeachable honour and a citizen. In contrast, she cast Barboza – to whom she repeatedly referred as a zambo and (more pejoratively) a zambaigo – as a malintentioned social outsider, a man with open disregard for social boundaries and a thief.30 For his part, Barboza defended his actions by arguing that Saenz had needlessly insulted him. He confirmed that on the day of the incident, he had been dispatched as part of the city’s auxiliary troops to collect the tax. In his testimony, he went on to note that while he had initially used ‘kind words and proper manners’ in his encounter with Saenz, the woman was not only combative and unyielding but also called Barboza an ‘insolent zambo thief’ who was trying to rob her of her money. 31 According to Barboza, he then told Saenz that if she did not pay the tax he would take an item of clothing from the store as payment. When she did not offer any words of protest, Barboza took a poncho, for which Saenz again called him a ‘zambo thief’. For Barboza, the insults only served to escalate the already stressed encounter: Because Saenz called me a zambo, and because of other denigrating insults, I was obliged to respond, but only by calling her the daughter of a whore, an expression in my defence, and one of a different meaning than the one she has described. 32
A lexical tension in the record provides one clue as to why he took so much offence to Saenz’s words: according to the scribe in the case, Barboza was a pardo libre, or a free person of mixed African and European ancestry. Although Barboza did not refer to himself as pardo (or with any other colour term), considering that he belonged to a pardo militia regiment, it is clear that the zambo label was, at best, inaccurate. But in light of the context in which it was uttered, as well as the status of zambos in Peru, it also seemed intentionally disparaging. To be sure, both ‘Indo-Africans’ (such as zambos) and ‘Euro-Africans’ (such as pardos and mulatos) faced profound limitations in colonial Peruvian society. Principally, by virtue of their African ancestry, both groups could be enslaved. Additionally, because the Spanish Crown treated both © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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groups as physical, economic and behavioural threats to indigenous communities, it tried to separate them physically as often as possible.33 But while Indo-Africans and Euro-Africans both faced penalties related to their African ancestry, Indo-Africans faced additional burdens based on their indigenous heritage. As early as 1572, the Spanish Crown began obligating Indo-Africans, by virtue of their Indian ancestry, to pay tribute (an obligation which formed part of an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to discourage sexual relationships between Indians and Africans).34 Indo-Africans were also subjected to the same stereotypes (propagated by secular and church officials alike) that hounded Indians, such as their propensity towards laziness and drunkenness, as well as their perceived inability to embrace Spanish cultural and behavioural norms.35 So pervasive were negative stereotypes about zambos that even foreign visitors to Lima were aware of them. Upon his visit to the region in 1812 (just a few years before the encounter between Sanez and Barboza took place), British traveller William Bennett Stevenson made the following observation: The zambos are more robust than the mulattos, they are morose and stubborn, partaking very much of the character of the African negro, but prone to more vices. A greater number of robberies and murders are committed by this caste than by all the rest, except the chino, the worst mixed breed in existence: he is cruel, revengeful, and unforgiving; very ugly, as if his soul were expressed in his features; lazy, stupid, and provoking.36
Barboza would likewise have been aware of these exceedingly racist views about zambos. We cannot know, however, whether he shared them. In fact, one of the enduring challenges for colonial officials (in Lima, other parts of Peru and elsewhere in Spanish America) was enforcing divisions between Africans and Indians, who did not accede to admonitions that they should maintain their distance from one another.37 This is not to romanticise the dynamic between the two groups, but rather to underscore the obvious fact that Africans and Indians did not always follow the orders officials gave them.38 In any case, regardless of Barboza’s personal attitude towards zambos, he certainly would have been aware of Saenz’s pejorative intent in describing him as one. Of course, in addition to calling Barboza a zambo, Saenz had also called him a thief. Like the label ‘whore’, the word ‘thief’ was a common insult, but where the former was directed at women, the latter was mostly reserved for men. As Sarah C. Chambers has argued in the case of nineteenth-century Arequipa, Peru, the term was among the most common insults directed at men, second only to racial slurs.39 The gendered usage of the word could also have gendered consequences. In the same way that disparaging a woman’s sexuality could harm her social standing, so too could insulting a man’s ability to honestly earn money and provide for himself and his dependents.40 Thus, it is easy to imagine why being called a thief would have been so insulting to a man who was trying to do his job. Moreover, at the same time that Saenz viewed the word ‘whore’ as an affront to the sense of gendered honour she derived from her status as a married woman and business operator, Barboza would have seen the word ‘thief’ as an attack on the sense of gendered honour that derived from his military service. Indeed, his enlistment in a pardo militia provided Barboza with a degree of self-regard he was not willing to cede to Saenz, no matter how many ways she had found to insult him. As Monica Ricketts has shown in her analysis of Bourbon military reforms in Peru, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries marked a period during which the Spanish Crown sought © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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to improve both the organisation and effectiveness of its colonial armed forces, which resulted in the elevation of military service to an honourable profession.41 In addition to rising prestige, servicemen also enjoyed a fair amount of privilege relative to civilians, thanks to their freedom from Crown-imposed tribute obligations and access to the fuero militar, or military legal exemption. The fuero privilege granted soldiers around the empire the right to have their (and sometimes even their family members’) cases tried in separate courts from civilians. And even though the exemption could not save them from guilty verdicts when they stood accused of crimes, it generally spared them the kinds of harsh punishments they would have encountered in the civilian system.42 The combination of prestige and privilege meant that military service instilled a significant amount of pride in soldiers of all backgrounds, but most especially among men of African descent. Indeed, as Ben Vinson has shown in the case of colonial Mexico, the fuero privilege provided ‘a crown-sanctioned spin to bold free-coloured claims of privilege for militiamen and civilians alike’. 43 Further, whereas civilian life was filled with instances in which ancestry was a liability, the Crown sought to ensure that different rules would apply in the military. According to one regulation, military chiefs were to treat pardo and mulato soldiers with the same estimaci´on, or esteem, as their Spanish counterparts.44 While such a regulation coexisted alongside segregation in the military, it nonetheless served as an additional key to African-descent soldiers’ sense of belonging and status. Put another way, Barboza had plenty of reasons to think himself entitled to respect and deference. Perhaps this sense of entitlement even played a role in the escalation of the conflict with Saenz. With this in mind, it is worth asking whether Barboza was telling the full truth when he testified to having used ‘kind words and proper manners’ when he first arrived to collect the tax from Saenz. He certainly had good reason to say so, given that he was trying to defend himself against the woman’s charges, but it is possible that he approached the situation from the beginning with a certain amount of arrogance and combativeness. Of course, we cannot know for certain, but asking the question means making room for a consideration of Barboza’s own sense of hierarchy and etiquette. Another facet of the encounter offers similar interpretive possibilities. Recall that in addition to calling Saenz a ‘whore’, Barboza also called her ‘una chilena mal criada hija de una gran puta’ (which roughly translates to mean, ‘an unmannerly Chilean daughter of a great whore’). Given that Barboza owed much of his status to the Spanish Crown, he was likely to be both aware of, and sympathetic to, the royalist cause during the independence struggles that were taking root around the empire and particularly in neighbouring Chile, where supporters of total independence had gained a powerful foothold.45 By calling Saenz a Chilean, then, Barboza could have been calling her allegiance to the Crown into question and positioning himself as the more loyal subject. That Barboza’s case was tried in Lima’s Superior Gobierno (a court which, among other things, handled military cases) helps to further underscore some of the reasons for his sense of status relative to Saenz. In short, Barboza’s testimony and profession show us that he was doing more than simply expressing unruly behaviour. Instead, he was behaving as a man whose civic duties shaped his sense of self-respect, and whose professional responsibilities and personal dignity did not permit him to yield to Saenz’s sense of racial hierarchy. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Barboza’s account was substantiated by the testimony of a fellow soldier named Jos´e Alejandro Vera. A corporal in the same pardo militia, Vera had joined Barboza on the tax-collecting assignment on the day of the incident in question. Vera’s presence and subsequent testimony helps bring into focus an important aspect of the encounter detailed in the case: not only was Saenz outnumbered that day, but she was the only woman there as well. I signal this, not to cast the soldiers in a particularly menacing role and the woman in an especially vulnerable one, but rather to point out how the presence of the other soldiers lent the incident an even more complicated – and, possibly, contentious – dynamic. To begin, the term ‘zambo thief’ could possibly have been offensive to all of the soldiers with whom Barboza was on assignment. As Ben Vinson has noted, soldiers of African descent were bound together by both institutional and racial ties; consequently, military service facilitated the creation of a profound sense of loyalty among conscripts. Thus, even if Vera and the other soldiers were not personally offended by Saenz’s words, they might have taken sincere umbrage on Barboza’s behalf. Perhaps they even encouraged Barboza to hurl his own insult in response. Both Barboza and Vera acknowledged that Barboza responded to Saenz calling him a ‘zambo thief’ by calling her ‘an unmannerly Chilean daughter of a great whore’. But they emphasised that Barboza was calling Saenz’s mother a whore, and not calling Saenz one herself (even though it was the latter insult that had, according to Saenz, contributed to the dissolution of her marriage). Did his exact words matter? If he had called Saenz a whore (as the claimant insisted in her own testimony), Barboza would have impugned her sexual propriety as a married woman. Moreover, by calling her a whore, Barboza indirectly linked Saenz’s business practices to her sexual practices, implying that in addition to food and sundries she was also selling sex. It was not uncommon for women working in commercial enterprises in Latin America to encounter such presumptions, regardless of their specific actions. For example, in her analysis of insult cases in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean Costa Rica, Lara Putnam has shown how women who earned their livings in the liquor and entertainment sectors faced frequent gossip about their sexual practices and honour.46 Similarly, Laura Gotkowitz has noted that in the case of nineteenth-century Bolivia, the insult ‘whore’ served to impugn a woman’s ability to support herself through any means other than paid sex.47 The word ‘whore’ would have taken on an even deeper and troubling meaning given the composition of the assembled parties, since the presence of a group of men in what Saenz had described as a ‘private room’ during her testimony only compounded the scandalous implication of the incident. Had someone been passing by at just the right moment to see the group of men and hear the word ‘whore’, it might even have registered as a fight between a prostitute and her customers. Together, these myriad perspectives help us understand why Barboza’s insult could affect not only Saenz and her husband’s commercial reputation, but their marriage as well. Even if Barboza had simply called Saenz’s mother a whore (as he and Vera argued), he still managed to undercut Saenz’s self-proclaimed status as a woman of ‘pure blood’. The accusation contained the suggestion that since her mother could have been with any number of men, of any number of colours and classes, Saenz’s parentage and ancestry (the very things she wielded in her argument against Barboza) were up for debate. In the end, regardless of whether Barboza had called Saenz or just her mother a whore, © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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the effect was the same: it undercut Saenz’s claims to status as an honourable woman who was undeserving of public slander. Whatever the precise nature of the insults Barboza hurled against her, the encounter had a profoundly deleterious effect: in the aftermath of the incident, Saenz’s husband – perhaps doubly concerned about his wife’s reputation as well as the pair’s commercial interests – abandoned her and sought to dissolve their union legally. By her own account, Saenz ‘had never, in more than twenty years of marriage, given her husband reason to question her fidelity’, and argued that her husband’s actions were ‘without merit’. The court ultimately agreed with the woman’s argument, and the last page of the case file includes a decision in favour of Saenz in her complaint against Barboza so that her husband would not ‘question her fidelity, and so that she can be reintegrated into his good opinion of her’.48 (The record does not tell us, however, whether the court’s decision led to Saenz reconciling with her husband.) Yet, even though the courts ultimately sided with Saenz in her complaint against Barboza, the case is still about more than its outcome. It is also about how vulnerable a married Spanish woman could be to public utterances – even those of a man of African descent. In short, the case reveals just how quickly a Spanish woman’s colour-based privilege could give way under the weight of patriarchal expectations of feminine sexual purity. Colour, status and social distance
Given his status as a soldier, it is not altogether surprising that Barboza pushed back against Saenz’s expectation of deference. But he was hardly alone in refusing to yield in the course of a conflict purely on the basis of colour or casta. The third and final case at the centre of this analysis is from 1817, when a man named don Santiago Barrios filed a criminal complaint against a woman named Teresa, her mother Juana Medina (both of whom were described in the case file as negras or black), and a little boy named Mariano Palomares (who was referred to as a sambito, which was a diminutive form of the label sambo/zambo). Barrios alleged that Teresa, whose last name went unrecorded in the record, had come to the door of his home to demand payment for some fish she accused his dog of eating. According to his testimony, Barrios was not home at the time, but his wife Mar´ıa and his mother do˜na Petronila Lozano were. Barrio further claimed that when the women refused to pay her, Teresa sprang into action by physically attacking Mar´ıa with a knife and verbally insulting her. Though Barrios seemed uncomfortable detailing the precise words Teresa uttered, neighbours filled in the rest of the details: according to Gregorio Pajuelo, Teresa (who by then had been joined by her own mother and Palomares) called the women of the house ‘putas putonas’. Pajuelo also testified that Teresa ‘removed her clothing and exposed her indecent parts to do˜na Mar´ıa’, using ‘many offensive words’. Another witness, a neighbour named Francisca Quiroz, noted that in addition to the prior epithet, Teresa had called the women ‘unas blanconas sucias y unas putas putonas’.49 Teresa’s verbal insults are difficult to translate. Although the Diccionario de la lengua espa˜nola defines sucia to mean ‘impure’, or ‘dirty’, and puta as ‘prostitute’, it offers no definition of blanconas or putonas. Consequently, we can only approximate the meanings of those words in light of their structure and usage. To begin, both use the feminine and plural version of the suffix –´on, which is usually appended to place emphasis on size (such as in the case of cabez´on, a word that describes an © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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exceptionally large head). Of course, to literally translate blanconas as ‘large white women’ and putonas as ‘large whores’ is not especially illuminating, but it does get us closer to understanding the contempt behind Teresa’s utterances. Indeed, the expressions – and perhaps blanconas sucias especially – provides tantalising evidence that people of African ancestry were not just on the receiving end of origin-based epithets – they had their own arsenal of pejorative terms for Spaniards (and possibly other groups) as well. Whether the women on the receiving end of Teresa’s insults fully understood them, they certainly knew enough to take offence. In her testimony, do˜na Mar´ıa Lozano (the claimant’s mother, who testified that she was married to a man named don Jos´e Mar´ıa Morales) argued that ‘the seriousness of this crime and the injuries levelled at my person and honour hardly need explanation’. For, ‘as a woman of quality, who is married, and who lives in a tranquil and peaceful marriage’, she claimed: . . . there is nothing more serious than the distance between the offended persons and the injurers. The injurers, it is well known, belong to the plebeian class . . . while I live within the order prescribed by religion and the law; for that reason it is of the utmost necessity to correct their behaviour.50
Despite the social distance she perceived to exist between herself (the offended person) and the accused, Lozano still thought it necessary to refute the content of Teresa’s insults – at least indirectly, by emphasising her status as a married woman who adhered to religious and legal custom. But if Lozano’s status were so clearly unimpeachable, why did the words of a ‘plebeian’ (as Lozano had derisively called Teresa) matter? For her part, Teresa did not record her testimony in the case. As was typical of criminal cases from the colonial period, whether due to a petitioner’s disinterest, an alleged perpetrator’s disappearance, the court’s own procedural mismanagement (or for a host of other reasons), the record came to an abrupt halt before all parties could make their statements and before a judgment could be reached.51 Nonetheless, Teresa’s reported actions suggest that the ability to lay claim to certain, somewhat broadly legible status markers (such as Magdalena Guzman’s position as a slaveholder during a period of declining ownership, or Juan Barboza’s membership within a pardo militia) was not the only motivation for using words of insult against higher-status women. In her case, perhaps it was the threat the missing fish likely posed to her livelihood, more than an attack on her status, that emboldened her to attack her neighbours. If Teresa’s words are hard to parse, her actions are even more confounding. What was the logic behind undressing herself and exposing her body to her female neighbours? It is obvious that she intended to cause offence, but what about that act was more injurious to their sensibilities and dignity than to her own? In the absence of Teresa’s own testimony (which, even had it been recorded, might not have answered the question anyway) we can only imagine what she must have been thinking. It is possible that, in the same way that she drew upon a culturally specific repertoire of verbal insults, she may also have had a similar arsenal of physical insults as well. Perhaps Teresa saw the act of exposing her body as an extension of the verbal insults she hurled at the other women, akin to a using a lewd hand gesture. Of course, we must also view Teresa’s actions in the context of a hierarchical slaveholding society in which black female bodies were sources of physical, sexual and reproductive labour. At times, those bodies also served to underscore Spanish women’s femininity, particularly when © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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they were tasked with escorting their mistresses in public. Their very presence helped to deflect untoward assumptions about the mistresses’ activities, since the women were not travelling around the city alone.52 In this way, African-descent women’s bodies provided yet another type of labour, though perhaps more symbolic, in service to Spanish womanhood. Seen through this perspective, Teresa’s actions might be read as a desire to pierce the protective shield surrounding Spanish womanhood. The public nature of Teresa’s actions also parallels, somewhat, the behaviours of other subordinated groups whose bodies were targets of criticism and derogation. As Pamela Voekel has shown in the case of Mexico City, the latter part of the eighteenth century was a period during which elite reformers enacted several measures to control the behaviours and bodies of the poor, by imposing curfews, reconfiguring social spaces, discouraging gambling, initiating cleanliness campaigns and restricting where, and how, they relieved their bowels.53 In response to the changes and scrutiny imposed upon them, some began using the very bodies that officials considered so indecorous in order to make statements of their own. According to Voekel, ‘they took their protest right to the doors, and walls – of the viceregal palace, the most visible symbol of Bourbon authority’, and urinated on them.54 Because of the palace’s symbolic importance, the act of publicly defacing the building sent a message to all within view that the building did not deserve their respect. In a similar fashion, Teresa’s public display of nudity in front of Mar´ıa Barrios and Petronila Lozano made clear – to the women and all their neighbours – that they did not deserve her deference. Thus, it was to both Teresa’s attitude and the public nature of her display, that the women took offence. When thinking comparatively about the above cases, it is worth noting that in the two cases involving married women – the 1816 case against Barboza and the 1817 case against Teresa – one woman filed a claim on her own behalf, while the other’s husband was named as the claimant. Recall that do˜na Mariana Saenz testified in her claim that her husband, don Lorenzo Osorio, had abandoned her in the immediate aftermath of Barboza entering her home and calling her a ‘whore’. Meanwhile, it was don Santiago Barrios who filed the claim against Teresa for insulting his wife and mother. Why did one incident result in a woman’s husband stepping out of the picture, while the other moved a husband front and centre? The answer most likely lies in the sex of the women’s antagonists. In a highly honorific culture such as that of colonial Lima, it is hardly surprising that a group of men surrounding a woman inside of her home and impugning her sexuality could cause a woman’s husband to question her morality. This is not to suggest that Teresa’s insults did not sting her neighbours – after all, the case would not have made it to the courts if her words had no impact. But a woman yelling a string of obscenities did not – and probably could not, at least not without substantive proof – lead a husband to question his wife’s fidelity. Of course, given that Teresa was also insulting don Santiago Barrios’s mother, it is possible that filial duty (not only to his mother but also to his father, who goes unmentioned in the case) trumped whatever doubts he had about his wife’s fidelity, leaving him no choice but to intervene. Conclusions
Elite Spanish men in Lima had diverse forums in which to engage the social, economic, political and legal issues of their day. They made use of sermons, newspapers and other © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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print media to express, debate and spread their ideas in ways that give historians ample materials with which to reconstruct their world views. In contrast, other members of colonial society, in particular Spanish women and – especially – people of African, Indian and mixed racial ancestry, were largely relegated to roles as subjects rather than as authors of such writings. But this fact did not mean they had nothing to say. For the men and women who found themselves excluded from more formal discursive spaces, both the public sphere and the court record could function in their own ways as rhetorical platforms.55 For them, the language of insult was a weapon – whether in the form of origin-based epithets, gendered insults or a stinging combination the two. As evinced by the cases in this study, many castas knew that wielding the term ‘whore’ in arguments and disputes with Spanish women could cause personal offence and even social harm, regardless of whether there was any real basis for invoking the term. Indeed, in at least one instance, it tore a marital union asunder. In addition to ‘whore’, castas used other words as well. Indeed, in detailing the forms and features of the above-discussed conflicts, this article uncovered new terms. While racial descriptors coined by Spaniards are generally more familiar to historians, men and women like Barboza and Teresa used expressions like ‘chilena mal criada’, ‘blanconas sucias’ and ‘putas putonas’ to insult the Spanish women with whom they were embroiled in conflict. To modern readers, their utterances prove difficult to translate or parse, given that they usually only appeared in print when they were part of witness testimony in insult cases or other court proceedings. Put another way, they were not the kinds of terms that were preserved for posterity in dictionaries or other media. But it is clear that such terms were well understood, and seen to have undeniable power, by those who used them. But the terms discussed in this article only scratch the surface. If we are fully to understand how castas not only understood but also contested ideas about the relationship between colour and status, we must pay closer attention to how they expressed themselves, particularly during moments of conflict. My focus on a specific kind of conflict during a relatively small window of time notwithstanding, I have sought in this article to signal some broader issues. First is the way in which castas developed sophisticated – and at times even inscrutable – ways of locating themselves in relation to other colonial subjects. This positioning can be seen not only in the rising status of African-descent men like Juan Barboza, a soldier whose military service entitled him to certain legal privileges and – from his perspective – public respect and deference, but also in the sense of self that was conveyed by women like Magdalena Guzman (an indigenous woman) and Teresa (a negra whose last name went unrecorded). While not all of the individuals described herein had easily legible justifications for their claims to public respect, they insisted upon it anyway. Again, while these conflicts were not necessarily specific to the time period in which they unfolded, they nonetheless offer insight into the ways in which the socioeconomic advancement experienced by castas during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries created a sense of identity crisis among Spaniards – particularly those of middling and lower socioeconomic status. Indeed, a second key issue this article has sought to signal is that, in each of the lawsuits described in this study, the claimants expressed a profound desire to stake out and preserve their racial privilege on the record. Often, it was on a single word – distancia – that claimants sought to rest their cases. As do˜na Juana Lino Montes put it in the wake of being slapped with a stinging epithet, ‘the greatest crime in these circumstances concerns the distance © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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between the offenders and the offended; where the incident took place; and worst of all, the questioning of my character’.56 The term distancia was particularly interesting in light of the close physical proximity they shared with their alleged perpetrators. Their use of the term suggests that the women were aware of their spatial realities (which differed from those of their elite counterparts, who operated at a physical remove from the rest of colonial society) but nonetheless wanted to assert a different type of boundary that separated them from their presumed subordinates. Its power also rested in the fact that it was a (perhaps intentionally) vague signifier that alluded to both a hierarchy and gulf, depending on the situation. In the case of do˜na Juana Lino Montes, it allowed a meddlesome mother whose claim of superiority over her son’s lover was frail, to imply that she was correct to intervene in the couple’s relationship and undeserving of pushback. For do˜na Mariana Saenz, it enabled her to insist that, regardless of tax collector’s military service and claims to public respect, her own status as a married Spanish woman was more important. Finally, for do˜na Petronila Lozano, invoking the term allowed her to claim (physical proximity to her neighbour and alleged aggressor notwithstanding) that the two women were worlds apart. And for all three women, insisting upon the distance between themselves and their alleged aggressors provided a way to silence – or at least to weaken – claims against their own sexual propriety. Thus, for claimants to assert the distancia between themselves and their aggressors was, in many ways, to assert the belief that whiteness still mattered. Notes
This article has had a long journey, beginning as a set of fragmented stories within my dissertation, which I completed under the direction of Rebecca J. Scott, Sueann Caulfield, Michele Mitchell, Ifeoma Nwankwo, Rachel O’Toole and Richard Turits at the University of Michigan. The stories continued to preoccupy me in the intervening years, coming together in drafts for which I owe thanks to Charles Beatty-Medina, Aisha Finch, Jessica Johnson, Rachel O’Toole, Rebecca Scott and Ben Vinson for their insightful comments. Finally the stories have come together and into their own, and I want to express my profound gratitude to the two anonymous readers of this article, as well as to the editors of Gender & History, for their tremendously careful, constructive and animating critiques. 1. Archivo General de la Naci´on, Lima (hereafter AGN), Real Audiencia (RA), Causas Criminales (CCR), Legajo (L) 133, Caja (C) 1624, 1816. ‘Autos criminales seguidos por injurias contra Juan Barboza por Do˜na Mariana Saenz, en el Superior Gobierno’. 2. AGN, RA, CCR, L 133, C 1624, 1816. 3. Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers and Lara Putnam (eds), Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 2. See also: Mary Beth Norton, ‘Gender and Defamation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland’, William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987), pp. 3–39; Lyman L. Johnson, ‘Dangerous Words, Provocative Gestures, and Violent Acts’, in Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (eds), The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), pp. 127–51; Laura Gotkowitz, ‘Trading Insults: Honor, Violence, and the Gendered Culture of Commerce in Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1870s–1950s’, in Caulfield, Chambers and Putnam (eds), Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America, pp. 131–54; Christine H¨unefeldt, ‘A Day in the Life: Lima’, Common-Place 3 (July 2003), <http://www.commonplace.org/vol-03/no-04/lima/>, which describes an incident in the 1760s in which a Spanish woman named do˜na Josefa got into an argument with a neighbour, also a Spanish woman, during which the phrases ‘wrecked dark-skinned witch’ and ‘lover of Black men and a prostitute’ were exchanged. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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4. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, ‘Scandal at the Church: Jos´e de Alfaro Accuses Dona Theresa Bravo and Others of Insulting and Beating His Castiza Wife, Josefa Cadena (Mexico, 1782)’, in Richard Boyer and Jeffrey Spurling (eds), Colonial Lives: Documents on Latin American History, 1550–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 216–23. 5. Diana Paton, ‘Gender, Language, Violence and Slavery: Insult in Jamaica, 1800–1838’, Gender & History 18 (2006), pp. 246–65. 6. In addition to the Saenz case they include: AGN, RA, CCR, L 111, C 1346, 1807, ‘Autos criminales seguidos por oficio, contra el negro Antonio Navarro, por excesos y faltamiento de respeto al Alcalde de Barrio don Francisco Zieza y por haberse puesto muy insult´ativo al momento que lo aprehend´ıan’ (in which a neighbourhood commissioner accused a negro of insulting him during an arrest); AGN, RA, CCR, L118, C1439, 1810, ‘Autos criminales seguidos por do˜na Mauricia Calder´on, contra los esclavos, negros del Doctor don Ferm´ın Gonzales, Racionero de esta Santa Iglesia Catedral, por los insultos y atropello cometidos por los esclavos en su agravio en los dias de pascua’ (in which a woman accused the slaves belonging to a local cleric of insulting her during Easter festivities while in front of their owners’ home); AGN, RA, CCR, L 130, C 1579, 1815, ‘Autos criminales seguidos por Do˜na Juana Lino Montes Viuda del Teniente de Milicias de la Villa de Santa, contra la ind´ıgena nombrada Magdalena Guzm´an, su hermano Manuel y una zamba, su esclava, nombrada Tomasa, por las injurias verbales y personales inferidas en su agravio’ (in which the claimaint accused an indigenous woman of insulting and physically attacking her, and which will receive attention in thisarticle); RA, CCR, L 132, C 1613, 1816, ‘Autos criminales seguidos por don Santiago Alfaro contra don Basilio Ordonez, por los graves excesos cometidos con sus propios esclavos de su suegra do˜na Petronila Andrade’ (in which the claimaint accused another man of insulting him with the help of a group of slaves). 7. To gather a sampling of cabildo records, I used the search terms injurias verbales (verbal injuries), excesos verbales (verbal excesses) and variations on the term insultos (insults). 8. For example, court records pertaining to fistfights and tavern brawls provide particularly rich examples of the myriad and menacing terms used by and against castas. For a discussion of the slurs used in these kinds of episodes, as well as those used in divorce proceedings and popular poems, see Alberto Flores Galindo, La ciudad sumergida: Aristocracia y plebe en Lima, 1760–1830 (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1991), pp. 136–7. For an analysis of the use of newspapers as a platform for the denigration of enslaved and free people of African descent, see Mariselle Mel´endez, ‘Patria, Criollos and Blacks: Imagining the Nation in the Mercurio Peruano, 1791–1795’, Colonial Latin American Review 15 (2006), pp. 207–27. 9. Ann Twinam: Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 10. Biblioteca del Palacio Royal, Madrid, Spain (hereafter BPR), II, 2861, ‘Plan demonstrativo de la poblaci´on comprehendida en el recinto de la ciudad de Lima, con distinci´on de clases, y estados instruido sobre los datos de la enumeracion total de sus individuos, mandada ejecutar por el Exmo Sr. Fr. Dn. Francisco Gil Taboada y Lemos, Virrey de aquellos Reynos; bajo la direcci´on del teniente de Policia don Joseph Maria de Ega˜na en el a˜no de 1790’. 11. P. Fixiog´amio, ‘Carta escrita a la Sociedad sobre los gastos excesivos de una tapada’, Mercurio Peruano 1, 10 February 1791, pp. 111–14. 12. For a first-hand account of the city’s notoriously filthy streets in the mid-eighteenth century, see Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relaci´on hist´orica del viaje a` la Am´erica Meridional (Madrid: Antonio Mar´ın, 1748), p. 30. For more on elite Spaniards’ desire to live removed from the chaos of the city, see Charles Walker, Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), in which he argues, in part, that elite Spaniards held so strongly to the ideal of living apart from their fellow urban-dwellers that at times it even threatened to compromise their safety. For an analysis of the public health crises plaguing Lima, see Adam Warren, Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). 13. See, e.g., Susan Migden Socolow, ‘Iberian Women in Old World and New’, in Susan Migden Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 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). Recently, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, in Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750–1856 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), has drawn attention to the role of Spanish moralists’ writings in adding to the prescriptive dictates guiding Spanish women’s lives. 14. In many ways, elite whites in Lima shared similar desires with counterparts in other capital cities around Latin America. See, e.g., Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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15.
16.
17.
18.
19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
26.
27.
28.
Gender & History and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), which shows how elite whites in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, drew clear lines between house and street, defining the former as a space of safety, order and dominion and the latter as the realm of danger, lawlessness and seduction; Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, which signals the degree to which moralists in eighteenth-century Mexico City spread messages of containment among elite whites. See, e.g., AGN, Colecci´on Francisco Moreyra y Matute, Documento (D) 1. 9–255, ‘Padr´on General de 1771’. The document was the product of the first in-depth population survey in city history, crafted after Lima officials travelled from door to door, block to block, and from parish to parish, gathering information on the age, sex, occupation, marital state, casta and legal status of every man, woman and child in every type of household. Although its primary purpose was to help officials identify which colonial subjects would pay tribute, fulfil labour quotas and support militia operations, the census also revealed, in rich and varied detail, that the vast majority of the city’s inhabitants lived in households and communities that were home to the enslaved and free, to people of African, Indian, European and mixed-racial ancestry, to men, women and children of all ages, as well as to both the lower and middle classes. For additional descriptions of the ways in which Lima’s residential architecture combined public and private spaces, see Jorge Bernales Ballesteros, Lima: La ciudad y sus monumentos (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1972). For a discussion of the disparate experiences of mestiza and African-descent women in colonial convent life, see Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Rachel O’Toole, ‘Danger in the Convent: Colonial Demons, Idolatrous Indias, and Bewitching Negras in Santa Clara (Trujillo del Per´u)’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 7 (2006), <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and _colonial_history/v007/7.1otoole.html>. Mar´ıa-Elena Mart´ınez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008), offers a particularly rich analysis of the sistema de castas in Mexico from its inception in the sixteenth century to its demise in the eighteenth century. AGN, RA, CCR, L 130, C 1579, 1815. ‘Autos criminales seguidos por do˜na Juana Lino Montes Viuda del Teniente de Milicias de la Villa de Santa, contra la ind´ıgena nombrada Magdalena Guzm´an, su hermano Manuel y una zamba, su esclava, nombrada Tomasa, por las injurias verbales y personales inferidas en su agravio’. AGN, RA, CCR, L 130, C 1579, 1815. AGN, Colleci´on Santa Mar´ıa (CSM), L 45 C 1335, 1813, ‘Censo general de la poblaci´on de Lima’. BPR, II, 2861, ‘Plan demonstrativo de la poblaci´on comprehendida en el recinto de la ciudad de Lima’. AGN, RA, CCR, L 133, C 1624, 1816. ‘Autos criminales seguidos por injurias contra Juan Barboza por Do˜na Mariana Saenz, en el Superior Gobierno’. AGN, RA, CCR, L 133, C 1624, 1816. Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, p. 40. See, e.g., AGN, Colecci´on Francisco Moreyra y Matute, D1. 9–255, ‘Padr´on General de 1771’; Charles Walker, ‘The Upper Classes and their Upper Stories: Architecture and the Aftermath of the Lima Earthquake of 1746’, Hispanic American Historical Review 3 (2003), pp. 53–82. See, e.g., AGN, Colecci´on Francisco Moreyra y Matute, D1. 9–255, ‘Padr´on General de 1771’. ‘Calle derecha desde la esquina de Santa Ana, hasta la muralla mano izquierda . . . Casa no.16’. The owner of the home was a twenty-nine-year-old quarter´on libre named Joseph Romano, who worked as a carpenter and owned the two stores that flanked his house: a cigarette-vendor named Francisco Nieto lived and worked in one, and a mestizo cobbler named Joseph Aguirre lived and worked in the other. For a discussion of the different meanings public and private spaces contained for masters and servants in Brazil, see Graham, House and Street. Graham argues that between 1860 and 1910, the house was a place of safety and security for masters; a setting both literally and figuratively removed from the dangers, contagions, threats, and temptations of the street. For domestic workers, especially water carriers and laundresses, the street provided a certain degree of autonomy, especially when the nature and duration of their tasks placed them at a healthy remove from the watchful eye of their masters. Graham argues that, given their reliance on domestic labour, however, masters were forced to bring the world of the streets into the perceived sanctity of their homes. An especially compelling example can be found in AGN, RA, CCR, L 28, C 339, 1767, which describes an episode in which an enslaved woman named Clementina del Carmen found herself entangled in a criminal theft investigation when neighbours recalled seeing her in the company of the man her owner, widow do˜na Josepha de Salaverde, accused of stealing several household items. According to neighbours, Clementina
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29.
30.
31. 32. 33. 34.
35.
36.
37. 38.
39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.
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and Manuel shared a so-called ‘illicit friendship’, and were often spotted speaking to one another at night in the doorway of the ground-level room Clementina occupied with her owner. AGN, RA, CCR, L 133, C 1624, 1816. For an example of a parallel occurrence in Mexico, see LipsettRivera, ‘Scandal at the Church’, in which a woman named Theresa Bravo, the wife of a colonial official, stood accused of insulting Josefa Cadena with the epithet, ‘black whore’. Cadena’s husband Jos´e de Alfaro responded to the incident by suing Bravo and her husband Diego Ferd´andez for violating his and his wife’s honour. Alfaro asserted that to ‘a married woman, no insult is greater than to call her a black whore, since this offends her fidelity and her calidad’, claiming that his wife’s ‘honor is publicly known, and she is not a black but rather a castiza’. According to Lipsett-Rivera, ‘Castizo is often defined as the child of a Spaniard and a mestizo [the child of a Spaniard and an Indian] but more generally could be applied simply to someone of mixed ancestry’ (p. 222). While both the alleged victims in these cases were labelled ‘whores’ by the named offenders, what sets the Peruvian case apart are the actions of the offended woman’s husband, who chose to distance himself from his wife, rather than support her in her claim against the alleged offender. AGN, RA, CCR, L 133, C 1624, 1816. For more on the pejorative use of the term zambaigo, see Berta Ares Queija, ‘Mestizos, mulatos y zambaigos (Virrenato del Per´u, siglo XVI)’, in Berta Ares Queija and Alessandro Stella (eds), Negros, mulatos, zambaigos: Derroteros africanos en los mundos ib´ericos (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 2000), pp. 75–88. AGN, RA, CCR, L 133, C 1624, 1816. AGN, RA, CCR, L 133, C 1624, 1816. See, e.g., Rachel O’Toole, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), pp. 17–34. On the tribute obligations imposed upon Indo-Africans, see Frederick Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru: 1524–1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 303; Berta Ares Queija, ‘Mestizos, mulatos y zambaigos’, pp. 75–88. For a discussion of the intimate and sexual relationships that continued to produce Indo-Africans, see Jesus Cosamal´on Aguilar, Indios detr´as de la muralla: Matrimonios ind´ıgenas y convivencia interacial en Santa Ana (Lima, 1795–1820) (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, 1999). Finally, for a more comprehensive treatment of the relative status of Africans and Indians in Peru, see Jean-Pierre Tardieu, Noirs et Indiens au P´erou: Histoire d’une politique s´egr´egationniste, XVI–XVII ´ si`ecles (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1990). For more on colonial discourses on Africans, Indians and their descendants, see David Cahill, ‘Colour by Numbers: Racial and Ethnic Categories in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1532–1824’, Journal of Latin American Studies 26 (1994), pp. 325–46; Kathryn Burns, ‘Unfixing Race’, in Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo and Maureen Quilligan (eds), Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 188–202. W. B. Stevenson, Historical and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years’ Residence in South America: Containing Travels in Arauco, Chile, Peru, and Colombia, with an Account of the Revolution, its Rise, Progress, and Results (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1819) vol. 1, p. 319. O’Toole, Bound Lives. Indeed, according to Emilio Harth-Terr´e, ‘El esclavo negro en la sociedad indoperuano’, Journal of InterAmerican Studies 3 (1961), pp. 297–340, at the same time that the Crown positioned people of African descent as threats to Indians, Indians were using slave-ownership as a tool of socio-economic mobility. Sarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 172. Caulfield, Chambers and Putnam (eds), Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America, p. 4. Monica Ricketts, ‘The Rise of the Bourbon Military in Peru, 1768–1820’, Colonial Latin American Review 21 (2012), pp. 413–39. Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 198. Vinson, Bearing Arms for His Majesty, p. 198. Ricketts, ‘The Rise of the Bourbon Military in Peru, 1768–1820’, pp. 421–2. An overview of the causes and process of Chilean independence can be found in Jaime E. Rodr´ıguez Osorio, The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 136–44. Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 154. Laura Gotkowitz, ‘Trading Insults’, pp. 140–41. [AGN?,] RA, CCR, L 133, C 1624, 1816. AGN, Cabildo, Justicia Ordinaria, Causas Criminales, L 18, C 32, 1817. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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50. AGN, Cabildo, Justicia Ordinaria, Causas Criminales, L 18, C 32, 1817. 51. A particularly enticing example can be found in: AGN, Poder Judicial, Corte Superior de Justicia, Causas Criminales, L1, E26, 1824. ‘Autos Criminales que siguen contra el negro Eugenio Morales, y sus socios por el robo hecho a Ministro Tom´as Kinston (ingl´es, cirujano m´edico)’. Beyond the initial allegation, which was that Morales stole clothing from Kinston, the file contains scant details and comes to an end before offering any insight into whether and how the theft took place. 52. See, e.g., Juan and Ulloa, Relaci´on hist´orica del viaje a` la Am´erica Meridional, p. 72. 53. Pamela Voekel, ‘Peeing on the Palace: Bodily Resistance to Bourbon Reforms in Mexico City’, Journal of Historical Sociology 5 (1992), pp. 183–208. 54. Voekel, ‘Peeing on the Palace’, p. 201. 55. For more on the public sphere in Latin America, see Victor M. Uribe-Uran, ‘The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin America During the Age of Revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (2000), pp. 425–57. Additionally, Arlette Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France, tr. Rosemary Morris (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), has shown that words, even during a period when ‘popular opinion was notoriously considered to be formless and vulgar’, had the power to gain authority and legitimacy through the course of their travels from the public sphere on high, from newspapers to private homes, and back and forth between those spaces. 56. AGN, RA, CCR, L 130, C 1579, 1813.
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