Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru

Introduction: Constructing Casta on Peru's Northern Coast

1 HOW DID AFRICANS BECOME “BLACKS” and Andeans become “Indians” during the “long” seventeenth century that spilled from the 1600s into the 1700s?1 Named as “Indians,” indigenous people were considered by the crown as vassals and therefore corporate members of colonial society. In this capacity coastal Andeans were expected to pay tribute, serve labor obligations , practice Catholicism, and (in some cases) function as rural authorities . Similar obligations and protections were not uniformly extended to Africans and their descendants, who, even if considered Catholic, were afforded a much more limited corporate location.2 Africans and their descendants in rural areas were far from ecclesiastical courts and had limited clerical contact. As a result, they were often excluded from protections articulated by Catholic authorities and left to negotiate with slaveholders and, in a few instances, colonial authorities.3 As a result, enslaved men and women sold from West and West Central Africa to Peru created kinships and their own sense of justice within slavery, in addition to what they could introduCtion ConstruCting CAstA on peru’s northern CoAst 2 introduCtion gain judicially. Simultaneously, on the northern Peruvian coast, Africans and Andeans developed trading and kinship relations apart from their assigned casta locations of black or Indian. The goal of Bound Lives is to understand these processes of exclusion and exchange in order to illuminate how coastal Andeans and enslaved Africans with their descendants understood their legal casta in their everyday lives. As recorded in colonial trial records, Africans and Andeans could act from within their juridical locations of “black” and “Indian,” or their castas of “black” and “Indian.” One of the main contributions of this book, therefore , is to understand how casta terms communicated legal locations—not solely race and class, or how historians have previously glossed these categories .4 Demonstrating how allegedly separate groups—Africans and Andeans —interacted from their assigned colonial positions of black and Indian, illustrates lived definitions of casta. In addition, inhabiting or using casta terminologies implies an undoing. More recently, scholars have emphasized how lineage formed the basis for a racial hierarchy or a “caste system,” however instable or socially constructed.5 This book continues to destabilize fixed notions of casta. By understanding which components within casta categories bound Africans and Andeans to colonizers’ or slaveholders’ demands and which elements could be negotiated, the aim is to explore the construction of casta from the bottom up. In addition, focusing on multiplying differences within the categories of “Indian” and “black” (including transatlantic and Diaspora terms such as bran or mina) reveals the instability of casta categories as employed by powerful landholders, threatened indigenous villagers, and protesting enslaved laborers. Irregularity, however, did not mean a lack of consequences. Crown obligations and labor demands were rooted in the inequities of casta between Africans and Andeans. Shifting the focus away from identity categories to legal locations that Africans, Andeans, or their descendants could claim, or were denied, reveals how casta took its meaning in the interplay between colonial law and daily practice. Most important, by examining Africans and Andeans simultaneously, I argue that indigenous people—as Indians —were awarded more legal access than enslaved people. This is not to say that enslaved men and women did not struggle to gain legal recognition. My point is that Africans and Andeans shared legal agency but were not considered as equals within all permutations of colonial law. Bound Lives adds to a scholarship that challenges an image of the rural Andes as solely an indigenous society colonized by the Spanish. Historians of Peru’s coastal valleys have discussed the significant populations of Africans and their descendants but focused on the rise of landholders and the sys- introduCtion 3 tem of slavery rather than the perspectives and actions of enslaved men and women.6 Although there were glimpses into the daily lives of rural slaves and the strategies of fugitives in the countryside, historians focused on urban areas—especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—to reveal how enslaved people resisted, manumitted themselves and their families, and eventually brought about emancipation.7 As for the highlands, Africandescent populations are beginning to be documented.8 Still, most historians of the colonial Andes have extensively discussed indigenous communities in the rural sierra, but not explored their contact with Africans and their descendants.9 With few exceptions, accounts of the Andean past remain divided between histories of indigenous people and histories of enslaved Africans and...