Women of the Iberian Atlantic

4 Indigenous Women as Mothers in Conquest-Era Peru

4 Indigenous Women as Mothers in Conquest-Era Peru JanE E. Mangan The lives of indigenous women in the Andes changed immeasurably when Spanish conquistadores stirred a battle that would cripple the Inca empire and enmesh Andean systems of rule with Spanish ones. The indigenous Leonor, a native of Cuzco, lived in Peru during this hectic time that saw the gradual emergence of colonial society with the increased arrival of men and women from Spain and Africa.1 In 1561, she gave birth to a daughter, María de Herrera, from a relationship with a Spaniard named Luis Villareal. Her union with Villareal may have taken her from her native Cuzco to the city of Guamanga some 150 miles away. After María’s birth, Leonor, assisted by a dowry from Villareal, married the tailor Francisco de Aguilera. The dowry consisted of a plot of land with a house in the city of Guamanga as well as a bar of silver. Leonor and her new husband relocated to Lima, where Leonor was a member of the cofradía (lay religious organization) of Nuestra Señora de Candelaria at the Monasterio of San Francisco. Her daughter, María, lived in the home and care of Juan de Hinojosa, an arrangement likely made by Villareal at the time Leonor married, as Spanish fathers (living in urban households) often took over the care of their mestiza daughters in the sixteenth-century Andes. At some point in the interim, Villareal died in Guamanga. In 1579, when Leonor was ill in the Hospital of Santa Ana, she made a last will and testament in which she named her daughter, María, by then an eighteen-year-old, as her sole heir with the specific hope that her estate could be used as the young woman’s dowry. The sketch of Leonor’s life that stands in relief through her will and testament highlights two 82 Indigenous Women as Mothers in Conquest-Era Peru 83 elements of sixteenth-century life that are the focus of this chapter: the relationship of indigenous mothers to mestizo children and the economic status of indigenous women who bore the children of Spaniards in the early colonial period. Historians have shown that indigenous women were active agents who shaped colonial Andean society in the 1500s.2 In this chapter, I emphasize indigenous women as mothers and look in particular at those who bore children to Spanish men. Andean history establishes mothers as historical actors in many treatments of colonial society. Yet, if we study in more detail about these indigenous women’s experiences with their sons and daughters as well as their social and economic partnerships after bearing children to Spaniards, we begin to build a basis to analyze women as mothers in a comparative framework across the Iberian Atlantic. Admittedly , the historical record yields less on these women than it does, say, on elite families with coats of arms. Many indigenous women bore children and raised them without ever appearing in the historical record. Yet cases do emerge in detail, largely in notarial records, and I have analyzed those for the cities of Potosí, Lima, and Arequipa, all major urban centers of the Viceroyalty of Peru. This focus reveals very specific ways in which the expansion of Spanish rule and culture into the Andes (that is, the Iberian elements that crossed the Atlantic) affected indigenous women as mothers. Iberian legal codes shaped the processes by which indigenous mothers made bequests that influenced their children’s lives. The laws required women to name their children as heirs. The emerging markets of colonial cities created opportunities whereby these women could earn property or other goods for their children. Further, Spanish men’s financial or material donations to mothers and mestizo children constituted an economic advantage that created something of a colonial family economy . This subject adds to the overall volume an emphasis on indigenous women, economy, and family roles. Leonor of Cuzco is representative of the many indigenous women who gave birth to a child of the first colonial generation in Peru, and whose lives as mothers emerged as colonial society expanded and solidified. Instead of assuming a universality of mothers ’ experiences, I argue here that as women lived in a world that simultaneously included traditional Andean family structures, a declining Inca empire, and an emerging Spanish colonial system, they found their role as mothers challenged. Women who bore children to Spaniards, especially elite women, might lose physical control of their children...