Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima by Tamara Walker (review)

Travelers to colonial Lima often commented on the elegant appearance of the city's residents. Chroniclers, administrators, and priests lambasted women for their vanity and fine clothing. Viceregal administrators enacted sumptuary laws to combat limeños' affinity for ostentatious dress. They were particularly keen on regulating the sartorial displays of the city's enslaved and casta populations. Enslaved and mulatto men were prohibited from bearing arms or riding horseback, as those demonstrations of virility and equestrian skill were reserved for Spaniards. Sumptuary laws forbade enslaved and casta women from wearing pearls or donning gold-brocaded accessories and Castilian silk dresses or gloves. Of course, the regular passage of sumptuary laws and the frustration that accompanied their repeated violation proves how important clothing was to Lima's population across all social sectors. The importance of self-fashioning, particularly among slaves and castas, is the subject of Walker's book.

The book explores how castas and enslaved peoples inhabited "the terrain of the city's social and sartorial landscape" (2). It "examines the relationship between clothing and status in an ethnically diverse, urban slaveholding society" by focusing on questions of differential access to finery and the "diversity and meanings of their fashions" (2). Walker incorporates the prolific scholarship on sumptuary laws, dress, and identity into interpretations of the multivalent meaning ascribed to fashion. She also traces the mode and acquisition of fabrics and attire, showing how imperial developments influenced people's choices in fashion. With their city one of the nodes in the Pacific luxury trade, Limeños could partake of rich silks from the Manila galleon, Dutch wools and fabric from the Iberian peninsula, and cheaper homespun cloths as they circulated across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Notwithstanding the fragmentary nature of the sources, Walker uses wills and inventories, criminal and civil cases, manumission letters and bills of sale, travelers' accounts, and paintings to portray "the multiple ways in which clothes took on meaning through … purchase, inheritance, and sale" (13). Walker focuses on the late colonial eighteenth century, when census data revealed a substantial and well-established peninsular, criollo, casta, and enslaved population.

The book is divided into six chapters, with each dedicated to a particular aspect of the "aesthetics of mastery" (21). Walker shows how both enslaved people and their owners defied sumptuary laws, in part because ostentation on the part of slaves reflected an owner's social position and beneficence. Those who hailed from elite households rivaled each other's livery and pageantry to showcase their wealth, and, interestingly, outfitted their slaves in clothing that mirrored their own (26). Walker asks why elite slaveowners established their aesthetics of mastery through mimesis (38). Even in contemporary Latin America, clothing among domestic workers continues to be an important marker of an employer's social position, although today's starched white uniforms and cheery aprons convey a distinct social hierarchy.

Other chapters delve into the acquisition of clothing by enslaved peoples. Using criminal cases in which enslaved peoples were accused of stealing clothes, Walker shows how they "used elegant clothing to lay claim to their bodies as sites of pride and pleasure" (44). Many enslaved people in Lima were day laborers (jornaleros); therefore, it was possible to fashion a sartorial identity outside of an owner's uniform. In her attention to the accusations under the sumptuary laws, Walker joins many slavery scholars who celebrate the ability of the enslaved to "claim their bodies as sites of pleasure, pride and self-expression" (48). She raises the question of why enslaved men (in particular) would privilege their appearance over prudent accumulation of money for their purchase price. She speculates that perhaps juridical freedom was not the only condition under which Afro-Peruvian men could exercise their liberty (72). There were certainly trade-offs: ostentation invited surveillance and heightened scrutiny, whereas demure or restrained clothing signaled thrift, virtue, and personal sacrifice.

Walker's chapters on the Peruvian...