Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain by Nancy Van Deusen (review)

Using court records generated after the implantation of the New Laws (1542) prohibiting the enslavement of America's native people, Nancy van Deusen's new work Global Indios paints a vivid picture of the lives of some of the more than 2,000 Indios brought from the Americas to Spain during the early sixteenth century. Though the work focuses primarily on Spain, the last chapter examines "transimperial indios" and the slave trade in the Moluccas, Burma, and Brazil, highlighting the multivalent meanings attached to the term "indio" and the centrality of slaving in European expansion. Using the stories of the plaintiffs, Global Indios explores many aspects of Indian slavery from the juridical, to the "geohumoral," to the lived experience of both master and enslaved.

While historians have long acknowledged the fact of Indian slavery, it has also gone understudied. Global Indios joins Andrés Reséndez's impressive new work The Other Slavery to illustrate both the scope and longevity of the trade. Reséndez's work follows the trade along the frontiers of Spanish expansion well into the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries, using these cases as a chapter.¹ Van Deusen sticks to the sixteenth century, focusing on the juridical process, loopholes, and legalese of the cases themselves. She argues that discourse changed drastically between the juridical visits of 1543 and 1549 as the language of the courts began to reflect the polemics taking place in Salamanca over the nature of the Indios. Suddenly court petitions argued that Indios were free based on their naturaleza (the land from which they came was free), nacimiento (they were free at birth), and ingenio (they had the capacity to reason—as dictated by the papal bull Sublimus Deus of 1537), but that they were legal minors, miserables, who needed Spanish patronage (p. 119).

As the sub-title suggests, van Deusen is also interested in trying to understand the lived experience of these enslaved Indians, and her work highlights the slim divide between the lives of slaves and free criados, or servants, and the tenuous meaning of "freedom." Throughout Global Indios we meet many litigants who argued that they had always considered themselves and been considered by others to be free people until their masters tried to brand or sell them. In one case a master had branded the word libre "free" on the arm of his servant but later added, "as long as she serves her master," another had the face of his servant Barbola branded "slave of the jurado Diego López of Sevilla" when he heard that Bartolomé de Las Casas was in Seville agitating for the freedom of Indian slaves (p. 263n54, p. 139). Barbola argued that this brand was illegal as she was a free woman. Her testimony illuminates the fine line between the free and unfree. Slaves and free servants seem to have occupied nearly equivalent lives, living and working as extensions of the "household" of the master. Many of the freed indios continued to live and serve the same masters, and yet as the testimony of another freed woman clarifies, the designation of "free" impacted her down to the most fundamental aspects of life; though Beatriz continued to work for Maria Ochoa, she ate her bread "like a free woman" (pp. 163–164).

This focus on language and identity is the strongest part of the book, and while we can see the Indian petitioners "struggling" to gain their independence, and even cherishing it, van Deusen's real contribution is her deconstruction of "indio" as both an identity and identifier. Many court cases depended on constructions of identity based on a geography of licit slavery whereby Portuguese "indios" from places like Brazil or Calcutta, as well as some "rebellious" Spanish indios de guerra, branded with a G, were exempt from the New Laws' liberation. A "geohumoral map" overlie this political map...