Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire by Allyson M. Poska (review)

Allyson Poska's Gendered Crossings is a monograph that reads like the script for an historical drama: families with babies, on boats, and at the borders of Spanish empire. Set in the age of waning colonial rule, this masterly work takes readers from northwestern Iberia across the high seas of the Atlantic to the barren reaches of Patagonia before ending in the Buenos Aires-Montevideo region. These varied locations constituted a plan by Minister of the Indies José Gálvez to bolster Spanish presence in the viceroyalty of Río de la Plata and alleviate overcrowding in Galicia, Spain, by enlisting 200 peasant families to settle the Patagonian coast.

Like many deliberate colonial schemes, Gálvez's initial 1778 proposal read one way while the rich documents produced during the twenty-three years between the scheme's initiation and closure offered quite another narrative. Using these documents, Poska crafts a rich history of this settlement project: its design, politics, finances, and implementation. In many ways, the project succeeded. More than 200 families left northwestern Spain for Río de la Plata and only a handful ever returned. Despite sickness and death, the overall mortality rates associated with the group were low. Yet the project can also be interpreted as a failure. The first Patagonian outpost, San José, met a disastrous fate, challenged by lack of fresh water as well as rampant disease and desertion; and of the four Patagonia settlements, only one, Floridablanca, survived. Most colonists were eventually settled on the frontier outside of Buenos Aires or Montevideo. From a macro-perspective, the project's long-term goal of protecting the empire was cut short as the region moved briskly toward independence after 1810.

Poska's aim in the book goes far beyond a success-or-failure dichotomy. With a nod to Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper, Poska asks what this project, articulated explicitly around the participation of non-elite women, reveals about the gendering of empire. Notably, her work shows that empire looks quite different through historians' detailed analysis of women's roles. Since of the 1,900 peasants signed up to migrate, 875 were women, Poska's study uncovers the largest single migration of Spanish women before the nineteenth century. This historical event presents a singular opportunity to bring gender analysis to the history of Bourbon-era imperial projects. Moreover, Poska is one of the few historians uniquely qualified for writing this history due to her previous studies of Iberian women, including Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: The Peasants of Galicia (2005). She provides insights about the behaviors of the Spanish women negotiating their new context in Río de la Plata, as well as the transformation of the port at La Coruña, data less familiar to the colonial Latin American historian. With attention to marriage, sexuality, and family patterns, Poska argues that the complexities of transatlantic migration signified a continual contestation and rewriting of Mediterranean honor codes. These contestations challenge Minister Gálvez's image of the ideal female recruit and her behavior.

Gendered Crossings presents convincing evidence of how peasant woman shaped the grand colonization endeavor. Because Gálvez's plan needed women of childbearing age for its success, women, individually and in groups, could leverage authority. At the outset, Galician women affected the project by simply not volunteering. This, Poska argues, was because male migration had a longstanding history in Galicia, while family migration did not and, furthermore, because most Galicians, while poor, owned at least some land for subsistence. When Galician women opted not to migrate, Gálvez was forced to advertise the project in Asturias and northern Castile, regions where poverty was even more dire and male migration uncommon. The women volunteers further challenged Gálvez's plan by demanding that the Crown meet their daily needs during the months...