With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550-1700 (review)

Karen Graubart sets herself apart from other gender and ethnic studies by analyzing the interaction of indigenous women with men and women of other ethnic groups. She selects the provincial city of Trujillo and the viceregal capital, Lima, as the venue to argue that "ethnic ambiguity and social mobility" (p. 8) became evident in the central district (the traza) of the colonial cities by the 1560s, a century or so earlier than historians previously theorized. The imposed, colonizing economy induced such a social transformation and gave rise to "creolized," transculturated indigenous women (and men). Prompting the process of transculturation was cloth production. In contrast to the gender-neutral and specialized production of fine cloth and clothing made by individual households in prehispanic times, the colonial period ushered in large-scale, gender-specific (female) production. With the growth of pan-regional markets built upon the backs of coerced labor, Trujillo's economy thrived. Indigenous women, just as much as their menfolk, became incorporated into the colonial economy as producers of marketable commodities and did not shirk from demanding a wage.

The heart of the book is based on a sample of wills, 55 and 147 respectively from Trujillo and Lima, testated mainly by indigenous women from 1565 to 1698. Many migrated to these cities as domestic servants and acquired their taste for European fashion, learned Spanish, networked for loans or made loans themselves, and basically mingled with the gamut of people of color. Some benefited from their relationships with white elite families. Their experience differed from the men who relied on their profession as the sole source of income, while upwardly mobile women or even those just surviving, drew on multiple sources of income: food vending, chicha (corn beer)-making, weaving or sowing, real estate. In so doing, some achieved financial independence and utilized legal instruments and institutions (e.g., the cofradia) to protect their property and their children's testamentary rights.

From early on, neighborhoods around the plaza, once reserved for the white and well-born population, became less so as reflected in the wills: 65 percent of the testators in Trujillo and 43 percent in Lima owned a solar or plot of land within the traza or nearby. Few of Trujillo's testators listed rural properties, while Lima's had different kinds of property and their acquisition of it varied. But a substantial proportion—24 percent in Trujillo and 33 percent in Lima—listed no properties, which suggests differences in wealth. And one in Trujillo and 26 in Lima owned slaves. This wealth gap does raise the unanswered question of whether social and economic differences existed between married and widowed women (almost a third of all testators), as well as between migrants and those born and raised in the two cities. While the much-studied 1613 census of Lima's Indian population indicates the vast majority to be recent migrants, it is only a snapshot and excluded, in fact, the Indian barrio of El Cercado that a number of Indians claimed as their birthplace. To be sure, Graubart does acknowledge Indians born in the cities, the "criollos," at the turn of the century, but there is no systematic and aggregate analysis that clearly distinguishes one from the other. And, what of the new migrants coming to Lima or Trujillo and testating their wills in the later part of the 1600s?

By the early seventeenth century, nonelites and elites created their own ethnically ambiguous, creolized urban culture. They were especially enticed to European-style clothing that overlapped Andean wear, since in the urban setting they were not likely to make their own. Women chiefs (cacica) of northern Peru (the author ignored Lima's cacicas; see this reviewer's own work, Indian Society in the Valley of Lima, Peru, 1532-1824 [2001]) also facilitated this creolization process because of their...