Transatlantic Obligations Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain by Jane E. Mangan (review)

Transatlantic families have been studied in colonial Latin America since the days of German historian Richard Konetzke in the 1940s and the rich Spanish-language bibliography on pasajeros a Indias throughout the twentieth century. In 1989 and 2000, Ida Altman's pivotal studies of the multilayered connections between rural Iberian communities and the Spanish colonial possessions redefined the way in which historians carried out research on social, economic, and cultural transatlantic ties. A new frontier for Atlantic World studies was wide open in the 1990s and 2000s. It is in this context that a new wave of studies analyzed the making of transatlantic and transpacific communities in the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires.

Based on a sample of more than five hundred sixteenth century wills from Lima and Arequipa—located in the National Archive in Lima, the Archive of Indies in Seville, the Archive of Protocolos in Seville, and the regional historical archive in Arequipa—Transatlantic Obligations aims to frame the connections between Andean families and the Spanish empire in the creation of colonial society from the 1530s on. In the author's own words, the book "maps family onto empire, not in the interest of tracking lineage, status, and prestige, but to understand what actions cemented ties of blood and, to a lesser extent, fictive kin, and considers the place of emotion therein. Actions and words make up the analysis in these pages; actions through which individuals experienced family connections, as well as the words and phrases people used to speak about family" (3).

Chapter 1 focuses on the initial interactions between Spanish men and indigenous women between the 1530s and 1550s, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which Andean self-representations of family and kinship navigated the bureaucratic layers of the emerging colonial empire. Using the well-known examples of Francisca Pizarro and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the chapter discusses the central role that family ties played in the way native elites portrayed their image before the colonial rulers. Chapter 2 discusses the role of Spanish colonizers as fathers of mestizo children, especially their drive to raise them in Spanish institutions in the Iberian Peninsula. Chapter 3 jumps to the last decade of the sixteenth century and analyzes the interactions between married couples separated by the Atlantic Ocean, presenting a case in which a Spanish woman successfully petitioned the courts to order her bound-for-the Indies husband to return home, while chapter 4 focuses on the legal, commercial, and personal documentation that emanated from the spatial separation between relatives in Castile and the Andes.

Chapter 5 returns to Peru and examines the marriage customs for indigenous women in the second half of the sixteenth century in connection to dowry practices as established by the native tradition and the new realities of the colonial order. This section pays particular attention to indigenous women receiving dowries from Spanish employers and/or natural-but-not-legal fathers. Chapter 6 recounts the Spanish colonial practice of recognizing children out-of-wedlock and setting aside bequests to them in the context of the transatlantic world.

While the manuscript is presented as a conquest-era study, in reality most of the cases presented in the book date from the second half of the sixteenth century and Phillip II's kingship (1556–1598) and therefore barely provide new historical research pertaining to families and individuals whose lives were affected by the process of conquest and colonization of the Inca empire in the 1530s and 1540s. Even the introductory story with the inheritance of Isabel Tocto, an indigenous woman whose testament allocated 823 pesos for her two daughters in Spain, dates from 1590, quite a stretch from the generations involved in conquest-era Peru.

While Transatlantic Obligations provides a close examination of Spanish-Andean families facing the hurdles of the legal system with regard to inheritances, family bonds, and transoceanic...