- Transatlantic Histories of Iberian Women and Families
As a region whose origins lie in imperialism, the Atlantic world appears on its surface to be essentially masculine. Certainly the majority of the explorers, conquerors, merchants, and colonizers who created the initial ties between Europe, Africa, and the Americas were men. Women, however, also shaped the early modern Atlantic world, including Juana Ortiz, an illegitimate mestiza girl whose Spanish uncle placed her in a household in Spain; Antonia, the Hindu servant of a Spanish physician in the Portuguese enclave of Goa; and Angela García, a peasant from northwest Spain who became a slave owner in Montevideo, and their experiences reveal the complexities of family, racial, and cultural identity in the Iberian colonial world. Their stories, albeit fragmented and incomplete, take center stage in three recent books on the Iberian Atlantic. These works emphasize that while Atlantic world scholarship continues to yield valuable results, much remains to be done to incorporate women's experiences and gender as a category of analysis. They also suggest that historians of the various geographical "sides" of the Atlantic are still not engaging with one another as profitably as they could be. These authors take important steps towards remedying that deficiency by recovering the experiences of a wide variety of women throughout the early modern Iberian Atlantic world and viewing their individual choices and actions against the backdrop of a colonial framework shaped (but not controlled) by Iberian law and custom. [End Page 170]
Jane Mangan's Transatlantic Obligations examines family as the central mechanism of the Spanish colonial enterprise during its first generations, from the 1530s through the 1590s. While Spanish officials made clear theoretical distinctions between the separate Indian and Spanish races and repúblicas, practical ties of family identity and obligation overrode caste, class, and geographic divisions. Her thematic chapters describe the choices Spanish and indigenous people made in creating marital and extramarital unions, raising their children, maintaining their legal and moral obligations to their family members, and blending (and bending) indigenous and European principles and customs to their best advantage.
The first chapter describes the principal elements of Andean and Iberian marriage and kinship customs. On the Andean side, kin structures helped the Inca incorporate foreign elements and subject them to Inca authority, although this advantage did not last long. Andeans also learned how to manipulate definitions of family to represent themselves in Iberian institutions. Spaniards, for their part, were willing to borrow Incan ideas of legitimacy to take advantage of their indigenous connections. This first generation of relationships was principally between Spanish men and indigenous women, and in the second chapter, Mangan explores how the first generation of mestizo children was raised. Most remained with their indigenous mothers and left little historical record of themselves, but many Spanish fathers tried to place their children in Spanish-run households and sometimes made provisions for them to be sent to Spain. Through notarial records, Mangan shows that these fathers, even when not physically present in their children's lives, felt a sense of paternal obligation that went beyond strictly legal requirements—although the children's mothers were not allowed the same connection.
The chapters on marriage and transatlantic journeys address the crown's priorities to keep Spanish couples together and use them as a "civilizing influence" in the Americas and the wide range of choices couples actually made in the face of transatlantic...