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Slavery and Abolition Vol. 30, No. 3, September 2009, pp. 383 – 402
‘He outfitted his family in notable decency’: Slavery, Honour and Dress in Eighteenth-Century Lima, Peru
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Tamara J. Walker
For elite Spaniards in eighteenth-century Lima, elegant clothing provided a language for expressing their wealth, status and honour. They frequently made their way around town in the company of elegantly dressed slave attendants, whose presence underscored their owners’ privilege. Yet many slaves found opportunities to function as more than mere canvasses for the expression of their owners’ identities. Indeed, for a surprising number of slaves, elegant clothing was a key tool with which they negotiated their status and laid claim to their own definitions of honour. By mapping the study of material culture onto the study of slavery, this paper brings into relief the social meanings that clothing contained for slaves, and highlights the possibilities that urban life contained for the creation of social identities that fell outside the social and colour lines drawn by the colonial state.1 In 1755, a Spaniard named Juan Bautista Angel accused Francisco Calvo, the 40-year-old negro slave whom he had contracted to help build some houses on the north side of the Rimac River near Lima’s Plaza Mayor, of stealing 1000 pesos. For the duration of Calvo’s employment, Bautista had permitted the man – who ‘seemed trustworthy’ – to sleep in a small room near his own bedroom, which housed a trunk containing a large and ‘steadily increasing’ quantity of silver coins. Bautista and some of the witnesses called to testify in the ensuing criminal investigation alleged that after completing his work for Bautista, Calvo began to ‘play and laze about’ instead of looking for another job. They also claimed that despite being unemployed, Calvo made several payments and purchases in the weeks following the alleged robbery. Mateo Melı´s, the Spanish manager of a local tavern, testified to Calvo’s many visits to his establishment, where he bought food and drinks with the same kind of two-peso coins described as missing from Bautista’s trunk; and a woman named Manuela Bolan˜os, who lived in the house where the unmarried Calvo had moved into a room with his sister Margarita Tamara J. Walker, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania, 208 College Hall, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA. Email: wtamara@sas.upenn.edu ISSN 0144-039X print/1743-9523 online/09/030383– 20 DOI: 10.1080/01440390903098011 # 2009 Taylor & Francis
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and nieces Eusebia and Dominga after leaving Bautista’s construction site, claimed that Calvo came home one day with elegant new shawls and stockings for Margarita and Dominga to wear to a bullfight. Through it all, despite allegations of his numerous leisurely activities and expenditures, Calvo even continued to supply his owner (a woman named Isabel Peresbuelta, with whom he apparently did not reside) with a daily wage.2 This case illuminates several facts of life in eighteenth-century Lima. First, it references the city’s practice of hiring out slaves that dated back to the sixteenth century and functioned alongside the more traditional systems of plantation and domestic slavery. As the Indian population was increasingly drained to suit the demands of the highland silvermining industry, African slaves were targeted to work primarily in Lima’s agricultural valleys (producing fruit, wine, corn, wheat, barley, sugar and potatoes) and in the city centre, where their presence would be crucial to the maintenance and operation of homes, monasteries, churches, taverns and streets. There, in addition to purchasing slaves to perform direct labour, limen˜os invested in slaves they could hire out in order to live on the resulting income. This arrangement put slaveholding within reach of men and women of various classes, regardless of household size and labour needs, since owners could rely on their slaves to generate income on their behalf. In fact, as Frederick Bowser has shown, it held particular appeal to the ‘gentlewoman of little means’, or the single and widowed women for whom slave ownership was not an extravagance so much as an important ‘difference between a degree of comfort and ruin’.3 In order to meet the financial demands imposed upon them, jornaleros (as such daylabourers were known) were required to find employ outside their owners’ homes in a range of skilled and manual capacities. They generally laboured in gender-specific occupations: women were hired as laundresses, wet-nurses, and seamstresses, for example; while men worked as carpenters, tailors, blacksmiths, cobblers, tanners, candle makers, masons, bricklayers, builders, carriage drivers and water carriers, among other jobs. There was also considerable overlap in the kinds of tasks men and women performed, as both male and female slaves tended to work as cooks and servants in taverns and restaurants, and were also counted among the city’s street vendors, who sold items such as flowers, incense, produce from nearby farms, and the popular fermented-corn beverage known as chicha. Many jornaleros were also frequently adept at a combination of tasks, and publications such as the Diario de Lima provided a space for limen˜os to seek out and sell the kind of labour on which so much of their city relied: the 4 October 1790 issue of the paper, for example, included an advertisement for a male slave who was not only a cook but also a carriage driver and a mason.4 In exchange for their labour, jornaleros received small daily sums, the majority of which they surrendered to their owners. Any remaining portions went towards the purchase of such necessities as food and clothing, and in many cases, eventual freedom.5 Second, the case shows us that even when living outside of his owner’s home (a not unusual circumstance for jornaleros), Francisco Calvo was nonetheless subject to intense daily scrutiny, from neighbours, employers, shopkeepers and other casual observers. It was a reality faced by many slaves in urban Lima, who often found themselves with a certain freedom of mobility that was not without its share of attention and criticism. This was especially true when spending their money and time how,
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on and with whom they wished. Even free castas, as the offspring of Africans, Indians and Spaniards were known, were not entirely exempt from this kind of scrutiny. Whether they were enslaved or free, castas found that their behaviour and movements could attract significant notice. This attention was sometimes even directed between and among enslaved and free castas themselves. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Calvo’s story suggests that for all the limitations of his legal status and racial background, the man had nonetheless found ways to cultivate a dynamic social identity. It even contained elements that were quite familiar to many elite male heads-of-household. According to Juan Bautista, not only did the accused use stolen money to eat and drink in taverns, but Calvo – a man who ‘maintains a horrible family . . . administering to all of their needs’ – also used the occasion of the theft to begin ‘outfitting his family in notable decency’.6 In a highly honorific culture such as that of eighteenth-century Lima, Calvo’s alleged behaviour (and the perceptions thereof) is particularly significant. By acquiring elegant clothing and distributing it to the female members of his household, Calvo appeared to be behaving in accordance with the prescriptions of an elite paterfamilias. For their part, as the alleged recipients of these material gifts, Calvo’s sister and niece appeared to be adapting notions of colonial femininity to their own realities: in addition to outfitting themselves in the kind of finery worn by ladies of the upper classes, Eusebia and Dominga also attended a bullfight – exactly the kind of social event frequented by their presumed social superiors. The case provides a useful entry point for exploring the relationship between slavery, honour and dress in eighteenth-century Lima. By mapping the study of clothing onto the study of slavery, this essay brings into relief some of the social meanings that clothing contained for slaves, for those who sought to control them, as well as for individuals outside of the master–slave dynamic. It also considers the importance of self-fashioning and material distributions to individuals whose natal circumstances, skin colour, occupations and economic conditions could limit or outright negate claims to certain kinds of personal and familial honour. Indeed, for many slaves in late-colonial Lima, elegant clothing was a key tool with which they negotiated their status, displayed their attitudes about masculinity and femininity, and attended to conceptions of honour and status in ways that not only reflected, but could also in fact modify, the dominant norms. To set the stage for my discussion, I examine accounts written by Frenchman Amade´e Fre´zier and Spaniards Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, to provide a general sketch of the market for luxurious clothing in eighteenth-century Lima. As I move towards an analysis of the social meanings of elegant dress, I move away from sources produced by European visitors, which often reflected the biases and preconceptions of the individuals writing them. During a period when ‘the slave trade and slavery were the hottest issues in Western debate’, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury European travellers to South America, as Magnus Mo¨rner has argued, had already made up their mind for or against when setting out for Latin America. What was their frame of reference? Did the actual observation change or even
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How did their ideas about slavery shape their ideas about status and dress? To what extent, to ask Mo¨rner’s question in a different way, did visitors mould or shape what they saw – or did not see – of clothing practices and sartorial displays to suit their own world-views? Frederick Bowser’s study of slavery in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Peru has drawn many scholars’ attention to the wealth of documentation produced during the period of slavery in the region. Coastal Peru [he writes] was so dependent on black labor, and slavery became such a part of the fabric of life, that virtually every agency of civil and ecclesiastical government generated documents having to do with the Afro-Peruvians, from official correspondence, fiscal records, lawsuits, and censuses, to marriage licenses, bills of sale, contracts, bail bonds, wills, and letters of manumission.
Bowser’s words ring especially true for tracing such topics as African slaves’ ethnic origins, their numerical representation and geographic distribution, the range of skills and occupations they held, and their contribution to Peru’s economy. However, addressing the question of their material life and circumstances is less a matter of managing a ‘mound of documentation’ than an exercise in the creative reading of fragments.8 Criminal theft investigations are particularly useful to such an analysis, in that they illustrate some of the ways in which slaves and free castas gained access to elegant clothing. They also provide windows onto slaves and free castas’ dynamic social worlds and relationships. The rote questions posed by notaries to identify witnesses and spell out their relationship to the claimants and accused perpetrators, and to determine whether and how the alleged thieves obtained and distributed the goods or resources in question, help to give voice to slaves and free castas’ ideas about their friends, relatives, spouses, and rivals’ social behaviour, and provide details about their occupations, living situations, marital and family status and personal relationships. Criminal records do not tell us everything, of course, and using them as the sole window onto slaves’ material circumstances may implicitly reproduce accusers’ notions that slaves could gain access to elegant clothing and other valuable resources only through theft. For their part, wills and inventories – particularly those left by slave owners (including the free castas among them) – can illuminate the ways in which some slaves were able to benefit from their owners’ material bequests or from social ties to free castas. Together, these records yield insight into slaves’ economic practices, social networks and value systems, and highlight the possibilities that urban life contained to dress outside of the social and colour lines drawn by the colonial state.
The City of the Kings Eighteenth-century travellers to Lima always remarked upon the city’s opulence, and their references to impressive luxury in everything from architecture to personal attire
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were so frequent as to form a kind of visitors’ script. Upon his 1713 visit, for example, Amade´e Fre´zier wrote: Men and women are equally inclined toward magnificence in dress: the women, not content to just wear rich and beautiful fabrics, adorn themselves with a prodigious quantity of laces, and are insatiable in their desire for pearls, precious stones, bracelets, earrings, and other paraphernalia, the costs of which ruin many husbands and gentlemen.9
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Similarly, Spanish travellers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa noted in 1748 that the city’s inhabitants lived ‘in a manner becoming their rank, having estates equal to their generous dispositions’, and travelled through the city in gilded carriages and elegant costumes.10 ‘They all dress with great ostentation’, Juan and Ulloa observed: And it may be said without exaggeration, that the textiles made in countries where industry is always inventing something new, are more generally seen at Lima than in any other place; this being thanks to the numerous goods brought in by the flotas and galleons.11
As Juan and Ulloa’s remarks suggest, Lima was a rich market for the consumption of imported luxury goods. The opening of the silver mining centre at Potosı´ in the midsixteenth century had created a wealthy class of Lima-based mine-owners and silver merchants, who were joined by Spanish encomenderos, hacendados, nobles, colonial bureaucrats, clerics, doctors, skilled artisans and other professionals as part of the city’s elite.12 With silver flowing into the city and across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, Lima formed part of an expansive – and often illicit – trade network.13 Its port welcomed vessels carrying Asian and European goods, and according to one observer, the city’s inhabitants took great pride in the notion that they did not ‘have to envy the glories of other lands’, since they could find everything including Chinese silks, Turkish rugs and Venetian glasses in their own public squares and markets.14 Certainly, for elite Spaniards in Lima, luxurious material goods provided a language for expressing their wealth and status. Like their counterparts in other wealthy capitals around the world, they sought to embody ideals of cleanliness and good taste, taking cues from Europe and applying them in accordance with what they could purchase in their own markets; but their behaviour and attitudes were also decidedly IberoAmerican, shaped as much by their beliefs about personal and familial honour as by the reality of their ethnically diverse society. Thanks to the culture of honour, for example, which was rooted in customs and dictates dating back to the medieval Mediterranean and firmly entrenched in colonial society, elite men and women adhered to prescriptions that strictly delineated male and female comportment, particularly among those claiming ‘pure’ Spanish blood and Old Christian ancestry. Within this framework, married men were responsible for the administration and distribution of family property. By outfitting their wives and children in impressive finery, elite men showcased their patriarchal authority and control over all the goods and people in their households. For their part, as the wives and daughters of elite male heads of household, women were responsible for avoiding the frailties of the flesh
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and generally leading an ‘honest and sheltered life’ in order to preserve their and their families’ honourable status. To that end, they were obliged to behave and dress in accordance with ideals of sexual modesty, in order to avoid any appearance of impurity.15 In addition to their roles in their husbands and fathers’ status displays, elite women also had their own language of dress. This was especially true for unmarried and widowed women who ran their own households, but it also applied to those living under direct male authority as well, as evinced by the wills they left behind. While a common feature of colonial wills in general was a testator’s profession of fealty to Christianity (recognising ‘the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three distinct beings’, in addition to professing ‘to have lived and continue to live as a faithful Catholic’, were standard prefaces to last wills and testaments) women’s wills also reveal a different side of their relationship to material goods. No mere catalogues of possessions, their wills also allowed them to leave written records of their commitment to religiosity – even in consumption. The 1741 will of Don˜a Francisca Casal, for example, lists the following possessions, among others: 1 1 4 1 2 3 1 1 1
saya [skirt] with a train and two scapularies; saya for horseback riding, with a silver fringe; silver candelabra; large silver and glass vase; drawing room rugs, one large and the other small; silver engravings (one of the Holy Trinity); pyre with the image of San Juan de Dios, made of gold and diamonds; and blue rosary with pearl beads; gold cross
Casal’s possessions, while indicative of an affinity for elegant dress, also exemplified her piety. The two scapulars in her wardrobe, which were similar in design to monastic habits, served in addition to her trove of religious ornamentation to signal an attachment to material possessions that carried spiritual meanings.16 In addition to honour and religion, Lima’s ethnic diversity also profoundly influenced elite Spaniards’ attitudes about dress. While reliable statistical data from the eighteenth century is difficult to obtain, in 1700 the city’s population totalled approximately 37,000 souls, who lived in six parishes: Catedral, Santa Ana, San Marcelo, San Sebastia´n, San La´zaro and Santiago del Cercado.17 According to one estimate, the population was comprised of 18,000 Spaniards, 13,000 slaves and 6000 free castas, including pardos, Indians and mestizos.18 By 1746, Lima’s total population had climbed to 60,000.19 Following the 28 October 1746, earthquake that nearly leveled the city of Lima and triggered a tsunami that virtually destroyed the port of Callao, the population counted began to decline somewhat, to a total of 52,627 by 1791. That number was said to include 19,986 Spaniards (including both Spanish-born peninsulares and native-born criollos, or creoles), 12,479 slaves, 10,023 pardos, 4807 mestizos and 4332 Indians.20 Thanks to their attention to the degree and ubiquity of wealth in Lima, visitors’ accounts show that a number of the city’s castas engaged in their share of luxurious
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sartorial displays. In fact, according to Juan and Ulloa, it was ‘not uncommon to see a mulato’ wearing elegant costumes of the highest quality.21 Among women of the lower classes, ‘even negras’ sought to ‘imitate the example of the Sen˜oras, down to their very footwear’.22 The two travellers were not alone in their observations: European visitors to such capitals as Mexico City, Quito and Santiago de Chile frequently counted numerous enslaved and free castas (as the offspring of Africans, Indians and Spaniards were known) among those adorned in finery. As Rebecca Earle has shown in her study of the relationship between clothing and identity in colonial Latin America, ‘overall, the image presented in such seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts is one of luxury, wealth, and successful emulation’.23 Their careful detailing of the expansive possibilities for consumption and elegant selfpresentation notwithstanding, European visitors nonetheless upheld a specific vision of the colonial Latin American city. In this vision, Spaniards comprised the city’s elite, while castas were eager imitators of their superiors. By framing the dynamics they observed in this way, observers such as Fre´zier and Juan and Ulloa overlooked a matter of profound importance in eighteenth-century Lima: like many Spaniards, a number of the city’s free castas had also managed to attain impressive wealth and economic influence. Some were like Gabriel de Quiroz, who described himself as a free negro when he visited a notary named Juan Joseph Miranda to record his will in 1766.24 Quiroz listed the following among his extensive possessions: Two old blue jackets with antique design; Two waistcoats, one of plumed baize with gold ribbon, the other of pink wool with gold ribbon; Two pairs of very old velvet pants; A muslin cloak with red velvet stitching; Four old sayas, one of sky-blue damask, the other three of a shiny material; A little black hat with silver ribbon; A negro named Miguel, de casta Lucumı´; Four machetes; Two lamps; A negra named Maria Rita de casta Popo´; Another old negra named Maria de los Santos; A slave named Maria Josefa; and A negrito named Joseph, aged 8 months.25
Quiroz had been widowed twice: first by a woman named Maria de Soto (who is not marked in the record with any colour classification); and the second time by a negra libre named Rosa Mendoza, who named her husband the beneficiary of the abovenamed Maria Josefa. Others were like Agustina Balcazar, a parda (a generic term referring to Africandescent men and women, often with the connotation of mixed ancestry) who visited the notary Teodoro Ayllon Salazr to record her will in 1792. She listed the following items among her possessions: Two female slaves named Thomasa and Isabel, the latter having a son named Carlos, which makes three slaves in total;
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400 pesos in cash; A pair of Pinchbeck bracelets with antique gold finishes;26 A large gold reliquary; A rosary with large beads strung on handmade Jerusalem thread with a large gold cross; A rosary with large gold beads, a little gold cross, and four charms; A rosary with blue beads and a cross embedded with eleven fine pearls.27
While men and women such as Quiroz and Balcazar comprised only a small fraction of the total number of eighteenth-century testators (only two of the 79 testators who visited the notary Teodoro Ayllon Salazar between 1790 and 1795, for example, were marked by colour terms), their records suggest that castas had their own reasons to make their way about town in finery. This is not to say that they did not share elements of elite whites’ language of dress: like her counterpart Don˜a Francisca Casal, whose will listed numerous pieces of religious clothing, Agustina Balcazar’s inventory of goods represents a balancing act between piety and indulgence. The impressive amount of religious paraphernalia she described, coupled with her apparent penchant for (real and imitation) precious stones and metals, suggests that such a balancing act was resolved through an indulgence in sumptuous rosaries. However, even when they were engaging in the same practices as their white counterparts, they might also have had another set of reasons for doing so. For example, Balcazar’s indulgence in rosaries might also have been an attempt to sidestep legislation prohibiting her access, as a casta, to elegant secular material goods. Indeed, eighteenth-century colonial officials faced a formidable challenge: to grant the trappings of status to a select few while ensuring that those privileges – seductive as they were – were not exercised by those for whom they were not intended. 28 Ultimately, however, official zeal on the subject of clothing never quite managed to bend colonial reality to its will. Certainly, these legislative measures failed in part because castas continued to find ways to elude the law. For Agustina Balcazar, for instance, a trove of religious ornamentation, no matter how costly, could have exemplified piety rather than (illegal) materialism. While the display of wealth and status through clothing could not be contained to Lima’s Spanish elites largely because their city offered numerous possibilities for castas to gain access to those same goods for their own purposes, elite whites also bore some responsibility for the failure of colonial legislation. As Herman Bennett has shown in his study of early-colonial Mexico City, slaves’ roles as public escorts and pages formed a key part of wealthy owners’ ‘spectacles of ostentation’.29 Certainly, the practice of outfitting slaves in accordance with an owner’s high status was a common feature of daily and ceremonial life in many slaveholding societies around the world. In his essay on clothing as a social sign, for instance, Webb Keane notes how nobles in old Sumba (in the South Pacific), rather than themselves wearing what was known as ikatted cloth, dressed their slaves in it instead. Even when draped over slaves’ bodies, the cloth was nonetheless ‘indexical of being noble’, since ‘the displacement of that clothing from master’s body to slave is iconic of the nature of nobility, as a quality that expands and transcends any particular embodied form’.30
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This notion was not lost on wealthy slaveholders in Lima, who found no shortage of occasions for similar kinds of display. As they made their way through the routine stops of daily life, leaving their luxuriously appointed homes to traverse grand boulevards on their way to church, the theatre, and bullfights, they incorporated slaves and household servants into their public pageantry. For male owners, these dependants helped service the masculine ideals of their culture, while for female owners, the presence of elegantly dressed attendants helped underscore their own need for protection as well as their leisurely lifestyles. In 1748, for instance, Juan and Ulloa observed that among Spanish women in Lima (whose rich variety of costumes corresponded to particular occasions), ‘the long petticoat is particularly worn on Holy Thursday; as on that day they visit the churches, accompanied by two or four female negra or mulata slaves, dressed in a uniform like lackeys’.31 Such displays were not confined to the city’s elite. The sight of elegantly liveried slaves was often so remarkable that it caused reverberations among many lower-status slave-owners, who thirsted for similarly turned-out escorts. Together, these men and women treated slaves’ bodies as extensions of their own, projecting onto their chattel their beliefs and fantasies concerning who they were and where they belonged in the hierarchy of this wealthy viceregal capital.32 Yet many slaves found opportunities to function as more than mere canvasses for the expression of their owners’ identities.33 In fact, many slave-owners even helped carve out those possibilities. For example, while many eighteenth-century testaments list slaves as items to be bought, sold and bequeathed alongside other household goods, others include provisions for slaves to be freed upon their owners’ deaths. In many cases, owners promised more than just freedom: when a cleric named Don Francisco de la Sota recorded his will in 1758, he stipulated that his slave Maria Josefa de la Sota be given her freedom as well as 200 pesos.34 Likewise, when Don Miguel Gomendio recorded his will in 1762, he made provisions for Juana Garnı´ca to be given her freedom and the quantity of 500 pesos upon his death.35 These instances, mirrored in numerous colonial wills produced in cities around the world, highlight the extent to which some castas made the transition from slavery to freedom armed with resources to support them. Occasionally, newly freed slaves were bequeathed material gifts rather than cash. The 1744 will of Don˜a Juana de Rivas, for example, stipulated that upon her death, her slave named Gregoria de Rivas be given her freedom, and that the testator’s clothing ‘be divided equally between said Gregoria de Rivas and Don˜a Marı´a Theresa de Solı´s’.36 The bequest is interesting for several reasons. First, it sheds light on yet another set of meanings female slave-owners assigned to clothing. As Amanda Vickery has shown in her study of eighteenth-century northern England, material goods could play important roles in mistress–servant relationships, functioning as forms of payment and currency, of course, but also carrying profound emotional weight.37 Although Don˜a Juana de Rivas does not provide a reason for bequeathing the clothing, the fact that Rivas includes Gregoria alongside a bequest to another white woman suggests that it was intended to recognise her bond to the women. The bequest is also significant because, while the items might have held equal appeal to all of the women involved, they certainly offered each of the women different
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possibilities. For a woman like Gregoria making the transition from slavery to freedom, clothing could signal that change in literal and symbolic terms. Even the used – but perhaps still high-quality – castoffs of her former owner would have served an important purpose: Gregoria could literally dress like a white woman. Slaves did not always have to wait for freedom, or for their owners’ largesse, to experience the transformative power of material culture. Whether labouring in private homes, escorting owners through city streets, selling wares for daily wages, or performing work for hire, slaves operated at every point on Lima’s urban spectrum. Their travels throughout the city’s public and private spaces exposed them to all kinds of people, goods and attention, and while the bond between master and slave certainly determined many important parameters of slaves’ behaviour, their lives were also shaped by the ties that they forged and maintained in living quarters, work environments and everywhere in between. For the enslaved men and women who navigated the city’s terrain each day, social ties and material goods were thoroughly intertwined. Each offered or fortified access to the other, and together, they could yield new opportunities. Criminality and sociability In 1732, for example, a slave named Juan Ramos was accused of stealing chickens, clothing and several other items. The witnesses called to testify in the ensuing investigation remarked that in the days following the theft, Ramos was seen in the company of a young female slave named Margarita, wearing ‘the kind of shirt that a gentleman would put on’, and looking ‘very gallant’.38 Other witnesses testified to having seen Margarita in possession of a box given to her by Ramos, with whom she shared an ‘illicit friendship’. In her own testimony, Margarita admitted to having a romantic relationship with the man – despite appeals from friends and acquaintances to avoid getting involved with a known ‘thief with bad habits’ – and to reluctantly accepting the box from Ramos.39 While the record does not tell us the contents of the box, or whether Ramos gave it to Margarita for her pleasure or for her complicity (or for both), the case does help bring into relief the very social nature of theft. From his stylish self-fashioning to his public outings and material distributions, Ramos’ social behaviour in the days following the alleged theft suggests that the occasion of the crime could have served not only his own interests, but those of a woman he cared about as well. Similarly, in 1740, a man named Pedro de Vargas Machuca accused a slave named Jose´ Alvarado of absconding with his slave (and Alvarado’s wife) Maria Dominga de Loayza, and of colluding with her to extract goods from his home. Vargas and the other witnesses called to testify in the ensuing police investigation claimed that the stolen goods were then sold to finance Loayza’s new wardrobe, among other expenses. To justify his suspicions of Alvarado, Vargas remarked that ‘a poor slave could not afford such luxuries’, a perception that was substantiated by another witness, who testified that Loayza’s spending sprees ‘did not correspond to her status as a slave’.40 Whether such suspicions were accurate or not, the behaviours that provoked them shed light on the ways in which
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access to material goods enabled men like Ramos and Alvarado to romance, provide for, or to otherwise nurture relationships with the women in their lives. Indeed, although women rarely appear as accused thieves in criminal records, they are highly visible throughout the investigations into male theft as the wives, girlfriends, relatives, friends and acquaintances of the accused. They appear either by way of witness testimony linking them to the men in question, or through their own explanations of their relationship to them. Often, they appear as the – alleged or actual, reluctant or willing – recipients of stolen goods, or of goods purchased with stolen money. Their visibility in these records adds dimension to our understanding of the social lives and obligations of the accused men, who were husbands, boyfriends, brothers, and friends in their own right. For men like Jose´ Alvarado and Juan Ramos, outfitting themselves – as well as their wives and lovers – in elegance enabled them to act as heads of household, even if they did not reside in traditional households or head traditional family units; and while these men did not use the word honor to describe their actions, their social behaviour shows that, much like their elite male counterparts, they placed a high premium on such matters as self-presentation and the control and distribution of material resources. As the recipients of these material goods, female slaves – much like their own counterparts and presumed superiors – were able to make their way about town in the kind of finery that suggested a protected and privileged status. Moreover, for enslaved women, elegant clothing could also help them recover aspects of their femininity denied to them by the strenuous nature of the work they performed, their responsibility to enable their female owners to lead leisurely lifestyles, or by the kind of dress typically required for manual labour. In her analysis of the ways in which enslaved blacks in the US South evaded planters’ attempts to confine slave activity to specific spaces, Stephanie M.H. Camp shows how enslaved men and women went to great lengths – often risking their personal safety – to attend dances and other events that offered them opportunities to wear stylish clothing. Wearing full skirts with hoops fashioned out of grapevines or tree branches, and dresses with colourful and vibrant patterns, not only helped the women to highlight their feminine curves, but also to showcase their ingenuity and creativity in procuring and designing festive attire. In so doing, those men and women claimed their bodies as sites ‘not only of suffering but also (and therefore) of enjoyment and resistance’.41 The slaves named in criminal theft investigations hardly limited their material distributions to romantic partners. Cultural anthropologists and sociologists specialising in gift studies have long been interested in the socio-economic importance of practices of giving, receiving and reciprocating.42 Scholars in this field largely examine the motives and meanings behind money and material exchanges, and argue that they are the building blocks of social life and interaction.43 These activities call for particular attention from historians of slavery, as analyses of gift-giving and commodity exchanges can offer insight into the social, cultural and economic lives and influence of Africans and their descendants in the Americas. Indeed, many free and enslaved blacks in eighteenth-century Lima (as well as those in other societies throughout the Americas) actively participated in these rites, which were fundamental
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components of the building and maintenance of their social ties, and contributed in important ways to the stability of their communities.44 In 1766, for example, Juan Antonio Sua´rez accused Domingo Caldero´n, a 26-yearold black jornalero, of stealing 60 pesos from a safe in his room. Sua´rez – who had employed Caldero´n to sweep his tavern and the bedrooms upstairs in exchange for a jornal (daily wage) that Caldero´n would supply to his owner – claimed that since the day of the alleged crime, the accused, in addition to buying himself a new shirt, began ‘spending money excessively and immoderately on meals and gifts for others in his sphere, [and] idling about without working’. ‘The worst part’, Sua´rez added, ‘is that he tried to provoke his friends to join him in his indolence, by offering them money so that they could pay their respective jornales’.45 The disparaging and hyperbolic tone of Sua´rez’s complaint – he uses the term ‘porquerı´as’ (which roughly translates as ‘garbage’) to describe Caldero´n’s economic and social activities – offers a revealing glimpse of slaveholders’ conceptions of unacceptable uses of slaves’ time and money. It also suggests that slaves’ social ties could undermine those expectations by infringing on the privileges that many believed were reserved only for free people. For his part, Caldero´n might not have seen anything wasteful about his decision to invite friends (who apparently were also enslaved) to share food and drink, or about offering them the means to fulfil their financial obligations to their owners while enjoying some rest and leisure.46 In a city where a slave could be jailed, tortured and sold – or worse – for failing to supply an owner with a daily wage, Caldero´n’s behaviour also stands out among the possibilities for slaves to use the economic tools at their disposal to shield one another from potential physical harm or isolation from family and friends.47 Whether acting alone or with accomplices, slaves who stole clothing and money frequently acted in consideration of their social relationships. Whether they were stealing money to share with friends, stealing clothes to please a lover, or perhaps stealing some combination of money and goods for some combination of reasons, slaves were keenly aware of the currency and meaning that could be derived from their illicit activities. Indeed, as the case against Domingo Caldero´n shows, sharing resources among friends could serve the interests of larger social networks, enabling slaves to fulfill immediate obligations and perhaps return the favour at a later date. Honour among slaves These relationships and resources can be further illuminated by the scholarship on the role of honour in the lives of lower-class individuals in Latin America. Rather than viewing honour as a fixed quality belonging solely to elite whites, men and women of various colours and classes found ways to lay claim to social status, at times even in the face of ridicule or dispute from presumed social superiors. According to Lyman L. Johnson, few lower-class men and women used the word honor when referring to themselves and their families. This was especially true in such capitals as Lima, Buenos Aires and Mexico City, which were home to numerous families of immense wealth and prestige. Men and women who performed manual labour often found
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difficulty claiming personal and familial honour in their interactions with the upperclasses, yet they nonetheless viewed themselves as holders and defenders of meaningful social positions. When they perceived slights from presumed social superiors, they often sought redress through the courts, relating their concerns for their reputations, rather than their honour.48 Many castas were able to point to their marital status when defending their reputations. In their research on late-colonial Mexico and Cuba, respectively, Silvia Arrom and Verena Martı´nez Alier have traced the extent to which married castas laid claim to honour by invoking their civil status, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free.49 Similarly, Sherwin Bryant has found that married slaves in colonial Quito frequently presented themselves to the courts as ‘honorable, law-abiding’ subjects when claiming to be victims of unwarranted insult from other slaves, and even when engaged in disputes with their owners.50 Marriage, of course, did not fully ensure an unvarnished reputation. As Sandra Lauderdale Graham has shown, reputation and community standing were of keen importance to those whose livelihoods depended on the ability to garner respect and confidence among peers in order to secure credit, a fact that was as true for women as it was for men. In her analysis of the divorce proceedings between Henriqueta and Rufino, former slaves in 1850’s Brazil, Lauderdale Graham shows how an illiterate, African-born woman could dissolve an abusive union in which the male partner did not live up to his financial obligations. While many of Henriqueta’s attitudes about marriage adhered to the same logic and prescriptions that took root among women of other classes, they also applied to circumstances known only to former slaves: the purchase of freedom. Having earned her freedom before her husband, Henriqueta assumed debts on his behalf to satisfy his obligations to his owner and ultimately to secure his freedom. She then successfully persuaded the court to forgive her insurmountable debts and release her from the marriage because she was able to show that her husband had failed to assist her repayment schemes and consequently imperiled her fiscal reputation.51 Similarly, the circumstances detailed in Domingo Caldero´n’s story suggest that urban slaves’ culture of honour contained codes that were tailored to their specific realities; that is, while slaves may have generally followed models of colonial masculinity conveyed by elite whites, Calderon’s financial consideration of his friends shows that slaves could imbue those models with their own meanings. Elegant self-presentation and material distributions between men and women enabled slaves to conceive of themselves as ladies and gentlemen, but defining themselves as such also seemed to encompass acts of patronage within larger social networks. As Kim Butler has shown in the case of Brazil, patronage relationships between and among slaves and free blacks (through formal ties of god-parenthood and informal practices such as housing friends and extended kin) were often fundamentally different in scope and social impact from other patron –client dynamics. Where white patrons could exert authority over all aspects over the lives of their clients, black patrons generally lacked the coercive force of traditional patrons and, in any case, appeared to emphasise patronage as a means of mutual support.52
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Moreover, given their diverse African origins, slaves in Lima and elsewhere may also have drawn upon goals and gestures already familiar in other contexts, or inherited social practices from the elders and neighbours among whom they lived. In her research on seventeenth-century Trujillo, for example, Rachel O’Toole has used a transnational historical approach to tracing what she terms the ‘Guinea-Bissaun practices’ of a group of men born in the region and enslaved in Peru, thereby highlighting the profound possibilities of constructing ‘simultaneous narratives of West African and colonial Andean histories’ to interpret (African-born) slaves’ actions. By exploring the impact of shared African languages and regional origins – as well as even regional rivalries – on the ways slaves navigated the terrain of everyday life on the north coast of Peru, O’Toole provides a compelling framework for considering the relationship between slaves’ African origins and conceptions of honour.53
Conclusion Perhaps enslaved men and women even managed to subvert many of the dominant culture’s behavioural models as well. Long held by men and women in colonial societies to be a sign of dishonour, the act or accusation of theft could severely undermine an individual’s reputation and social status.54 This did not stop colonial subjects, of course, from engaging in thievery, and slaves in fact are vastly outnumbered in criminal theft investigations by men and women of other colours and classes. However, in a society that sought to exclude slave participation in the formal economy, what was the image of the informal economy and petty crime among slaves? Did they consider theft to be a crime, in principle? The 1755 case against Francisco Calvo (which opened this discussion) provides a useful framework for addressing these questions. In her testimony against him, neighbour Manuela Bolan˜os claimed that in the days following the alleged theft, she overheard Calvo say that he was ‘amazed to see that he was living like a free man, and to know that his sister and nieces enjoyed the same benefit’. What did it mean, in eighteenth-century Lima, for a slave to live like a free person? Manumission letters from the period are particularly helpful here, as they contain a generic definition of freedom as it was employed by notaries and endorsed by slave owners. ‘From today on’, reads one such letter signed by Juana Foronda for a mulato named Josef Foronda, he will enjoy his freedom without burden or obligation; be able to make and declare a last will and testament; give and donate any goods that he possesses and acquires; make deals and contracts; reside where he wishes; and undertake any operations that he can, as would any individual born into freedom.55
While the recognition of an individual’s legal and economic rights is a hallmark of freedom in its juridical sense, the investigation into Francisco Calvo’s alleged theft reveals how a slave – without a manumission letter of his own – could find ways to access many of the privileges reserved for free people. In his confession, Calvo denied stealing Juan Bautista’s money, but when asked how he was able to eat and drink in Mateo Melı´s’s tavern, he claimed that he had earned
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extra money by building a mule corral for patrons of the bullfight he attended with his relatives. As for his sister and niece’s new clothes – allegedly purchased by Calvo to wear on their outing – Calvo asserted that any clothing in the women’s possession would have been purchased with money from their own jobs. As a day-labourer, Calvo contracted himself out to several employers and put his carpentry skills to use not only in order to earn the daily wage he supplied to his owner, but to earn extra money he used at his discretion. The bullfight he attended with his sister and niece was at once a leisurely activity, an economic possibility, and an opportunity to live like free people. In fact, the scope of Calvo’s alleged and admitted activities matched the prevailing definition of freedom almost to the letter. Over the course of only a few weeks, Calvo apparently managed to give and donate goods, make deals and contracts, reside where he wished, and undertake any operations that he could, as would any individual born into freedom. However, it was precisely this degree of temporal, economic and social discretion and the sense of autonomy they engendered that was troubling to so many others in eighteenth-century Lima. In this case, the accuser appears to be as concerned with the social and economic behaviour that surrounds the original criminal act assigned to the accused, as with the crime itself. A close reading of Bautista’s claims – echoed by several witness statements – reveals a remarkable degree of disdain towards Calvo and his relatives, discomfort with his freedom of movement and economic practices, and distrust of the means by which he attained them. That Calvo’s behaviour in the weeks following the theft indicted him as the culprit sheds light on the extent to which slaves’ efforts to make use of the social and economic tools at their disposal could meet with suspicion and frustration. For Bautista, Calvo’s ‘elaborate spending’, coupled with his apparent ‘laziness’, in addition to his relatives’ newfound elegance, corresponded neither to Calvo’s station nor to theirs, and thus could only have been attained through illegal means.56 Furthermore, the fact that a man legally defined as property could consume and distribute property, while also finding ways to satisfy his obligations to his owner without always appearing to perform visible work, seemed to undermine the very logic of chattel slavery in Lima. Notes [1] This study evolved from my dissertation, Tamara J. Walker, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Slaves and Citizens: Dressing the Part in Lima, Peru, 1723– 1845’, (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2007), an analysis of the relationship between clothing and status in a slaveholding society, with particular attention to the meanings given to dress and deportment both by subordinate members of the society and by those who presumed to control them. This project benefited tremendously from a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship that funded my most extensive research in Peru. The Ford Foundation provided financial support during the dissertation writing process, and the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Department of History at the University of Michigan funded all other dissertation-related expenses. I am thankful to my dissertation chair, Rebecca J. Scott, for her example, patience, encouragement and eye for all manner of contextual, linguistic, logical and mechanical detail. I owe profound thanks to Sueann Caulfield, Michele Mitchell, Ifeoma Nwankwo and Richard Turits, who helped me formulate the project’s questions from
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[4]
[5]
[6] [7] [8] [9]
[10]
[11] [12]
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Tamara J. Walker conception to completion; and to Rachel O’Toole, whose arrival in Ann Arbor during the final stages of my dissertation proved immeasurably fortuitous. I also thank several readers and colleagues, including Carlos Aguirre, Aisha Finch, Jean Hebra´rd, Silvia Lara, Karen Spalding, Stephanie McNulty, Brandy Jones, Jessica Johnson, Johonna McCants, Jeremy Mumford, Vincent Peloso, Sophie White and the students of History 691 at the University of Michigan for their attention to various incarnations of the present article. Finally, thanks to the staff at the Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, the Archivo General de la Nacio´n, the Biblioteca Nacional del Peru´, and the Insituto Riva-Agu¨ero, including Yolanda Auquı´ in particular, for their knowledge of the rich collections and their thoughtful guidance as I worked through them. AGN, RA, CCR, L 17, C 192, 1755, ‘Autos seguidos por D. Juan Bautista Angel contra Francisco Calvo, negro criollo [esclavo], por hurto’. Frederick Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524– 1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974): 104. Diario de Lima, ‘Venta’, 4 Oct. 1790. The publication, founded by Jaime Bausate y Mesa, was the first daily newspaper in Peru, and ran between 1 Oct. 1790 and 26 Sept. 1793. It is not clear whether the name Quiten˜o was an actual surname or whether it referred to Bernardo having arrived in Peru from Quito. For a discussion of the economics of the practice of hiring out slaves for day labour in Lima, see: Frederick Bowser, ‘The African and the Peruvian Economy: A General Survey’, in The African Slave in Colonial Peru, who traces the early years and development of the enterprise; Carlos Aguirre, Agentes de su propia libertad: Los esclavos de Lima y la desintegracio´n de la esclavitud, 1821–1854 (Lima: Pontificı´a Universidad Catolica del Peru´, Fondo Editorial, 1995): 135–149, who presents an overview of some of the consequences faced by slaves unable to meet the financial demands imposed upon them; and Christine Hu¨nefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima’s Slaves, 1800–1854 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994): 106 –117, who examines the opportunities for mobility and manumission for Lima’s day-labour class. For a discussion of how highly-skilled artisan slaves in the sixteenth century who received training through apprenticeship with Spanish artisans managed to achieve ‘much of the substance of freedom without its forms’, see James Lockhart, Spanish Peru: 1534–1560 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994): 207. ‘Men of this type’, Lockhart asserts, ‘sometimes reduced their slavery to the level of an obligation to share their profits’. AGN, RA, CCR, L 17, C 192, 1755. Magnus Mo¨rner, European Travelogues as Sources to Latin American History from the Late Eighteenth Century until 1870 (Stockholm, 1981). Frederick Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, viii. Amede´e Frezier, Relation du voyage de la mer du sud aux coˆtes du Chili, du Pe´rou, et du Bre´sil, fait pendant les anne´es 1712, 1713, & 1714 (Amsterdam: Chez Pierre Hubert, 1717): 381. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relacio´n histo´rica del viage a` la Ame´rica Meridional (Madrid: Antonio Marı´n, 1748): 72. Also cited in Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, translated by John Adams (Boston: Milford House, 1807): 53. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relacio´n histo´rica del viage a` la Ame´rica Meridional: 72. For a discussion of the key years in Peru’s development as a Spanish society in the New World, see James Lockhart, Spanish Peru: 1532–1560 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). A 1579 Spanish ce´dula had authorised Chinese–Philippine trade with Mexico, Guatemala and Peru, and the first ship to sail between Manila and the port of Callao set out in 1581, with another following in the next year. The two voyages were so successful that Seville merchants (who operated the Terra Firme galleons between Spain and South America and the flotas between Spain and Veracruz) complained to the Spanish crown of the competition
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[15]
[16] [17] [18] [19]
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posed by the Manila fleets, which tended to arrive at their destinations more quickly than the Spanish ones. Since it relied heavily on the Seville merchants for the so-called quinto real, or the royal fifth of silver output, the Spanish crown ordered traffic between the Philippines and Peru to a halt in 1582. It would not grant permission to trade between Manila and Callao again until 1779, and in the two intervening centuries, ‘Lima Ships’ met the so-called ‘China Ships’ in Acapulco for illicit transactions. The Lima Ships, always filled with silver upon arrival in Acapulco, would return to Peru stocked with porcelain, silk, spices, iron, wax, and other precious merchandise from the east. For more on Lima’s role in the silver export economy, see Gwendolin B. Cobb, ‘Supply and Transportation for the Potosı´ Mines, 1545– 1640’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 29, no. 1 (Feb. 1949): 25 –45. For a more comprehensive analysis of the early American trade with the Far East, see William Lytle Schurz, ‘Mexico, Peru, and the Manila Galleon’, Hispanic American Historical Review 1, no. 4 (Nov. 1918): 389– 402; and William Lytle Schurz, The Manila Galleon (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1939). A severe depression pattern took hold of Potosı´ in the seventeenth century, with production falling at a rate of 1.7 per cent per year until 1715, which allowed New Spain (with its higher ore grades and lower operational costs, since the crown taxed more heavily in Peru) to surpass it in production and output. A strong revival took shape from 1724 to 1783, thanks to the horizontal tunnels that were dug into the mountain to reach lower deposits of ore, and to the continuation of the mita, which kept operating costs low. Although Potosı´ never returned to its former pre-eminence, the eighteenth-century recovery helped it to remain one of the world’s most important mining centres and a crucial source of Peru’s wealth. For a discussion of Peru and Mexico’s silver production and output curves, see Richard L. Garner, ‘Long Term Silver Mining Trends in Spanish America: A Comparative Analysis of Peru and Mexico’, American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (1988): 898 –935’. Mercurio Peruano, ‘Reflexiones histo´ricas y polı´ticas sobre estado de la poblacio´n de esta Capital’, 3 Feb. 1791. ‘Que no tiene que envidiar las glorias de otras Tierras, pues cuanto en ellas se reparte, lo tiene epilogado en sı´; y lo que le falta no es menester que lo busque, que ello mismo se le entra por sus puertos. La China le envı´a las sedas, y la losa; la India sus drogas y especerı´as; la Espan˜a sus pan˜os y terciopelos; Mila´n y Na´poles sus lamas y brocados; Roma sus laminas; Venecia sus vidrios; y el Turco sus alfombras; sin que quede parte en el Orbe, que no le convide a´ sus ferias, por la plata y oro que produce para Espan˜a, y liberal o´ pro´diga reparte a´ todo el mundo, queda´ndose tan rica como siempre’. See, for example, Susan Migden Socolow, ‘Iberian Women in Old World and New’, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 5 –15; Steve J. Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late-Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). AGN, PN, Notario Orencio de Ascarrunz, Protocolo 74, 1 Feb. 1741. Mercurio Peruano, ‘Reflexiones histo´ricas y polı´ticas sobre estado de la poblacio´n de esta Capital’, 3 Feb. 1791. Alberto Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe: Lima, 1760 – 1830 (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1984): 6. Mercurio Peruano, ‘Reflexiones histo´ricas y polı´ticas sobre estado de la poblacio´n de esta Capital’, 3 Feb. 1791. According to Alberto Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe, 25; prior to the 1746 disaster, Lima experienced several significant earthquakes in 1582, 1586, 1604, 1619, 1650, 1655, 1664, 1687, 1690, 1699, 1716, 1725, 1732, 1734 and in 1743. Alberto Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe, 101. By 1795, according to John Fisher, El Peru´ borbo´nico, 1750– 1824 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2000): 147, the city’s population totalled 63,000: 28,000 blacks (10,000 free and 18,000 slaves of various castes), 20,000 whites (including peninsulares and creoles) and 15,000 Indians and mestizos. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relacio´n histo´rica del viage a` la Ame´rica Meridional, 72. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relacio´n histo´rica del viage a` la Ame´rica Meridional, 81.
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[23] Rebecca Earle, ‘“Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!!”: Clothing, Race and Identity in the Americas, 17th –19th Centuries’, History Workshop Journal 52 (2001). [24] AAL, Testamentos, E 2, L 175, 1766, ‘Testamento de Gabriel de Quiroz’. [25] AAL, Testamentos, E 2, L 175, 1766. ‘Dos casaquitas viejas de hechura antigua ambas azules la una de pan˜o y la otra de medio carro; dos chupas la una de castor aplomado con su franja de oro y la otra de lana rosada con franja tambie´n de oro; un cheleque de lustrina amarilla con su botonadura ordinaria; dos pares de calzones de terciopelo muy viejos; un capote musgo de medio carro con sus vueltas de terciopelo carmesı´; cuatro sayas viejas la una de damasco celeste y las tres de brillante; un sombrerito negro con su franja de plata; un pan˜o de pesquesa viejo; y otro cinco envoltorios de papeles . . . cinco esclavos una nombrada [Maria] Rita de casta Popo´, otra Maria Santos; otra Maria Josefa; un negrito nombrado Joseph de edad de ocho meses . . . un negro nombrado Miguel de casta Lucumı´’. [26] The term Pinchbeck refers to a copper and zinc alloy used to imitate gold in jewelry. [27] AGN, PN, Teodoro Ayllon Salazar, Protocolo, March 24, 1792. ‘. . . declaro que tengo por mis bienes 5 cofradı´as de a real corrientes, cuyas adoraciones manifestaran las cartas que tengo en mi poder asi lo declaro; que tengo dos esclavas mis propias, nombradas Tomasa e Isabel, y un hijo de esta llamado Carlos, que hacen tres esclavos, cuyas boletas que esta´n en mi poder, calificaran el titulo de dominio que sobre ellos tengo; tengo en dinero fı´sico la cantidad de cuatrocientos pesos; tengo por mis bienes: un par de manillas de tumbaga con sus sobrepuestos de oro fabrica antigua; un par de ebillas de oro, de pies; un relicario grande de oro sin cadena; un rosario de cuentas grandes de Jerusalen llano de mano con su cruz de oro grande y masida echava s Alomonica, su santo christo de oro en un lado y al toro envuelto de la Purı´sima; un par de fandados grandes de oro con sus perlas grandes sin . . . y sus gotas de oro con unas chispas de Diamantes; un rosario de cuentas de oro, grandes, su cruz pequen˜a de oro, con 4 dijes de oro, en que entra una pajuela grande de lo mismo y a masa lo dicho un cristalito pequen˜o con su anculo de plata, y un choclito pequen˜o de perlas finas; un rosario de cuello de cuentas azueles y padres nuestros de oro con cuentecitas chiquitas de oros y en el extremo un choclo grandes de perlas finas y dos cuentas grandes de oro, con su cruz de lo mismo con once perlas finas en ella; un par de cabetes de oro con finas en ella; un par de cabetes de oro con su perla grande cada uno; un rosario de fuentas menudas; una gargantilla con 16 cuentas grandes; una pluma de oro con perlas finas en el extremo en figura de Asahar, y un Pajuelita de oro; una Basa´nica de plata, de nuda, y un platillo regular de lo mismo . . .’. [28] Mariselle Mele´ndez, ‘Visualizing Difference: The Rhetoric of Clothing in Spanish America’, in The Latin American Fashion Reader, edited by Regina Root and Maxine Berg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). [29] Herman Bennett ‘Soiled Gods and the Creation of a Slave Society’, in Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570– 1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003): 14 –32. [30] For a discussion of clothing as a social sign, see Webb Keane, ‘The Hazards of New Clothes: What Signs Make Possible’, in The Art of Clothing: a Pacific Experience, edited by Susanne Ku¨chler and Graeme Were (London: UCL Press, 2005): 1 –16. [31] Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relacio´n histo´rica del viage a` la Ame´rica Meridional, 78. ‘Con el vestido de cola lucen ma´s particularmente el Jueves Santo; porque para visitor los Sagrarios salen acompan˜adas de dos, o quarto Negras, o Mulatas, esclavas vestidas de uniforme a manera de lacayos; y como van fin embozo, no queda ma´s en ver para admirar la suma riqueza, de que se componen sus trajes, y la ostentacio´n, con que visten’. Another translation, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, translated by John Adams (Boston: Milford House, 1807): 60, reads ‘The long petticoat is particularly worn on Holy Thursday, as on that day they visit the churches, attended by two or three female negro or mulato slaves, dressed in a uniform like pages’.
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[32] For a discussion of the significance of clothing practices among Spaniards and Indians in the region during this period, see Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, “El vestido como identidad e´tnica e indicador social de una cultura material,” Ramo´n Mujica Pinilla et al. El Barroco Peruano (Lima: Banco de Cre´dito, 2002): 99 –133. [33] My argument here owes a great debt to Silvia Lara, ‘Customs and Costumes: Carlos Julia˜o and the Image of Black Slaves in Late Eighteenth-Century Brazil’, Slavery & Abolition: a Journal of Slave and Post-slave Societies 23, no. 2 (2002): 125–146, who argues that Julia˜o’s watercolours were ‘the product of a political process that generalises about geographical particularities and social specificities, assigning places and people to subordinate positions’. [34] AGN, PN, Notario Orencio de Ascarrunz, Protocolo 83, 6 March 1758. [35] AGN, PN, Notario Orencio de Ascarrunz, Protocolo 82, ‘Testamento de Juana Garnica’. ‘Declaro que el Sen˜or Don Miguel Gomendio Alcalde del Crimen de esta Real Audiencia . . . ya difunto me dejo un legado en su testamento de 500 pesos para mis servicios y asistencias ordenando me los entregase Don Manuel Saenz de Ayala Zoloaga su albacea y heredero’. [36] AGN, PN, Notario Orencio de Ascarrunz, Protocolo 74, 3 Nov. 1744. ‘. . . mando que la ropa de mi uso y poner que tengo se parta y decida igualmente entra dicha samba Gregoria de Rivas y Don˜a Marı´a Theresa de Solı´s’. [37] Amanda Vickery, ‘Women and the World of Goods: a Lancashire Consumer and her Possessions, 1751– 1781’, in Consumption and The World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993): 274–301. [38] AGN, RA, CCR, L 5, C 39, 1732, ‘Causa seguida contra Juan Ramos, esclavo de Don˜a Clara Manrique por hurto cometido en perjuicio del Hospital del Espı´ritu Santo’. [39] AGN, RA, CCR, L 5, C 39, 1732. [40] AGN, RA, CCR, L 8, C 69, 1740. ‘Autos seguidos por Pedro de Vargas Machuca contra Jose´ Alvarado, esclavo de Don Sebastia´n de Alvarado y Merino sobre la restitucio´n de su esclava, Marı´a Dominga de Loayza y su complicidad en el hurto de especies varias’. [41] Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004): 62. Similarly, in her recent study of slavery and reproduction in the Caribbean and US South, Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), argues that the study of ‘women’s reproductive identity’ provides a framework for not only understanding the expectations slaveholders imposed upon black women’s bodies, but also for appreciating the ways in which enslaved ‘men and women and children understood themselves to be members of a community in the process of reproducing itself ’. [42] The field owes a great debt to Marcel Mauss, The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by W.D. Halls (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). Originally published in 1925, this study argues that ‘prestations’ and ‘counter-prestations’ (including the exchange of ceremonies and feasts), particularly in societies and cultures without formal economic markets, formed complete social systems in their own right. [43] Mark Osteen, ‘Introduction: Questions of the Gift’, in The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines, edited by Mark Osteen (New York: Routledge, 2002): 2 –43. [44] See, for example, Sophie White, ‘‘Wearing three or four handkerchiefs around his collar, and elsewhere about him’: Slaves’ Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans’, in Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality, and African Diasporas, edited by Sandra Gunning, Tera W. Hunter and Michele Mitchell (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004): 132–153. In this study (based on an analysis of eighteenth-century criminal cases), White argues that for male slaves in New Orleans, clothing theft provided access to desirable material goods as well as the opportunity to curry social favour among contemporaries, especially women. [45] AGN, RA, CCR, L 27, C 322, 1766, ‘Autos seguidos por Juan Antonio Su´arez contra Domingo Caldero´n esclavo del convento de Santo Domingo por robo’.
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[46] For a discussion of the way in which castas could make use of specific taverns to signal their membership in certain social groups, see Rachel Sarah O’Toole, ‘Castas y representacio´n en Trujillo Colonial’, in Ma´s alla´ de la dominacio´n y la resistencia: Estudios de historia peruana, siglos xvi –xx, edited by Paulo Driniot and Leo Garofalo (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005): 48 –76. [47] Diario de Lima, ‘Se vende un negro bozal por no pagar a su ama los jornales’, 4 Dec. 1790. [48] Lyman L. Johnson, ‘Dangerous Words, Provocative Gestures, and Violent Acts: The Disputed Hierarchies of Plebeian Life in Colonial Buenos Aires’, in The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America, edited by Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1998). [49] Silvia Marina Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985); Verena Martı´nez Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974). See also, Richard Boyer, ‘Married Life’, The Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family and Community in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Ramo´n Gutie´rrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away. Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Ann Twinam, ‘Honor, Sexuality and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America’, in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, edited by Asuncio´n Lavrin (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 1989) [50] Sherwin Bryant, ‘Enslaved Rebels, Fugitives, and Litigants: The Resistance Continuum in Colonial Quito’, Colonial Latin American Review 13, no. 1 (June 2004): 7 –46 [51] Sandra Lauderdale Graham, ‘Honor among Slaves’, in The Faces of Honor. Similarly, R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Pleibian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), shows that many castas derived their beliefs in their reputations from their peers, and took great care to offer mutual assistance and friendship to ensure their so-called ‘reputational’ standing. [52] Kim Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition Sa˜o Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998): 20 –24. [53] Rachel O’Toole, ‘From the Rivers of Guinea to the Valleys of Peru: Becoming a Bran Diaspora within Spanish Slavery’ Social Text 92, v.25, n.3 (Fall 2007): 19 – 36. [54] Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, ‘Introduction’, in The Faces of Honor. [55] AGN, PN, Notario Teodoro Ayllon Salazar, Protocolo 94, 13 March 1781, ‘Libertad Graciosa: La hermana Juana Foronda a un mulato nombrado Josef Foronda . . . para que desde hoy dı´a de la fecha en adelante goce de su libertad sin con que ni gravamento alguno, y en su virtud pueda hacer su testamento, dar y donar sus bienes que tuviere y adquiere, trabajar y contratar, residir en las partes y lugares que por bien tuviere, y practicar todas las operaciones que pueden hacer y hacen las personas libres de su nacimiento’. This definition of freedom was not unique to Peru. For a discussion of the formalisation of the Spanish-American notary office, see: Kathryn Burns, ‘Notaries, Truth, and Consequences’, The American Historical Review 220, no. 2 (2005): 350 –380; who describes the circulation of manuals that guided practitioners through American notarial forms. For a discussion of the role of notaries and the written texts they produced in bridging the worlds between slavery and juridical freedom, see Rebecca J. Scott and Michael Zeuske, ‘Le droit d’avoir des droits: l’oral et l’ecrit dans les revendications legales des ex-esclaves a` Cuba, 1872–1909’, Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales 59, no. 3 (2004): 521 – 45. [56] AGN, RA, CCR, L 17, C 192, 1755.