Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain by Jane E. Mangan (review)

Transatlantic Obligations makes important contributions to the history of gender and the family, the history of emotions, and the history of the interconnected Atlantic World. It also sheds light on the formation and negotiation of ethnic and racial categories, and assesses the extent to which Spanish imperial policies affected everyday interactions and lived experiences during the decades immediately after the conquest. By focusing on how the language of obligation operated in documents produced for colonial families, Mangan challenges the idea that the boundaries of class and caste were rigid. Her sources reveal that legitimacy and illegitimacy were fluid in practice, and she uncovers evidence, not only of obligation, but also of affection connecting families in Peru and Spain.

Meticulously researched, Mangan's book draws from dozens of wills, dowries, and donations drafted for members of multiethnic families in Peru and Spain, in addition to legislation and court cases pertaining to inheritance. Careful attention to the "language of familial responsibility and legal obligation and affective ties" (11) allows Mangan to demonstrate the complexity of colonial families in practice, in contrast to the prescriptive models laid out in royal decrees and legal codes. She considers mestizos "as members of a family rather than as a category of unrelated people of mixed ancestry" (8). In doing so, she highlights the voices of indigenous, mestizo, Afro-Peruvian, and Spanish women and men, while noting the tensions and contradictions within royal policies that sought to promote Spanish Catholic identities for children across the empire.

While the Crown decreed that Spanish men living in Peru must marry Spanish women or bring their wives to the Americas from Spain, and also promoted the fostering of mestizo children in Spanish rather than indigenous households, lived realities proved more complicated. Drawing on numerous examples of Spanish wives who refused to make the treacherous journey to join their husbands in Peru, and indigenous mothers who used the Spanish legal system to support their mestizo children, Transatlantic Obligations describes the vibrant world of the early colonial period in which bonds were formed and broken, and families struggled to maintain connections in a rapidly changing environment.

Each of the six chapters engages a different aspect of the experiences and challenges facing transatlantic families. The first chapter focuses on the interaction between Andean and Spanish assumptions about family structures and relationships, and the ways in which their prior experiences and attitudes shaped the transformation of families in Peru during the 1530s and 1540s. Inca elites had a long history of incorporating foreigners into the empire through strategic marriages, and Mangan shows that they continued this practice in their first encounters with Spaniards by allying elite Inca women with leaders of Spanish expeditions. Marriages between members of the Inca nobility, including between siblings, also persisted to maintain royal bloodlines. Beyond the elites, the "intertwined relationship of family and ayllu" (kin unit) continued to be a "critical underpinning to the concept of family" (20). Other Andean practices continued and affected early colonial understandings of family, such as trial marriages allowing couples to cohabit and determine their compatibility. These practices contrasted with newly introduced Catholic institutions that defined marriage as a sacrament and viewed cohabitation as a sin that resulted in the birth of children labeled illegitimate. How families negotiated these divergences forms the subject of the rest of the book.

Mangan reconstructs the challenges that transatlantic families faced in maintaining close ties with relatives along the route that connected Spain and Peru. Surrogates could be used to represent a family member's interests on distant shores, or to step into the role of parent when a child's mother or father traveled overseas. We also glimpse the diversity of couples' experiences in cases where "distance became the norm" (87). Some men and women exchanged affectionate letters, many more acted from a sense of obligation...