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

There is a large literature on the efforts to achieve justice for the native population in colonial Spanish America, but this excellent book focuses attention instead on attempts to free enslaved indios within Spain itself. Based on an impressive amount of documentation from the Archive of the Indies in Seville, it details the legal status of indio slaves by examining over one hundred lawsuits in which they argued for their freedom. Decrees outlawing indio slavery in Spain had left loopholes to exploit, and the term indio was so ambiguous—it could include South and East Asian menials, as well as those from Mexico and South America—that the first task of the lawyers was to define the word and then prove that their clients belonged to the category. Van Deusen concentrates her attention on the microcosm of a village society in the area of Seville and on the part played in it by indios imported from America, but she also gives consideration to the indio menials of the New World and to the Asian context from which some slaves were drawn. The evidence throws light mainly on the southern part of Castile, but the book’s perspective is global, sophisticated, admirable, and pathbreaking.