The Woman Who Turned into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico by Lisa Sousa (review)

Lisa Sousa's The Woman Who Turned into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico is an impressive study that skillfully synthesizes archival sources and established scholarship through a robust critical methodology to produce an encyclopedic resource. The Woman Who Turned into a Jaguar is a vital contribution to the field, directly addressing a significant chronological gap in the study of indigenous women in highland Mexico from 1520 to the mid-eighteenth century. The text is a foundational research tool and displays the breadth and depth of a scholar many years immersed in the field.

A practitioner of the New Philology approach to early indigenous Latin American studies, Sousa draws from a variety of conquest-era pictographic codices—instructively reproduced throughout the book—as well as select colonial works, giving clear primacy to the former. Sousa herself best explains her accomplished reading of these materials: "I liken my methodology of integrating fragments of information from different perspectives to a woman's work of spinning thread and weaving cloth. The sources are the raw materials, which I sort and spin into threads of evidence, and then weave into patterns that tell a coherent, complex story of indigenous women's lives" (8).

The book is divided into eight subject chapters, each of which focuses on a different organizing principle that defined four colocated highland Mexican native groups: the Nahua of central Mexico, the Nudzahui (Mix-tec), the Bènizàa (Zapotec), and the Ayuuk (Mixe). Within the eight chapters, Sousa consistently develops several concepts that provide the book with theoretical cohesion and critical weight: exploring native women's historical roles across social classes and in rural areas (in contrast to previous studies focused on urban contexts and elites); examining gender identity (specifically gender complementarity and its societal ramifications); centering the household as the basic unit of analysis (as opposed to male-dominated colonial hierarchies); delineating the pervasive effect of Spanish attitudes, organizing structures, and practices on gender roles and women's status; and, finally, focusing on the significant and underconsidered economic contributions by indigenous women and men to the early modern Atlantic world.

These principles are established in the introduction as the book's analytical base, and Sousa elaborates the concept of gender complementary and gender roles in chapter 2's "Gender and the Body," which explains how gender was constructed or understood in terms of labor, ritual, dress, speech, and cross-gendering, as well as the transmutable concept of "body" manifested through nahualism (a person's spirit or essence embodied by an animal), tonalism, and the native calendar. Sousa's insightful conclusion that the groups studied "developed a binary gender system to establish order in a world in which bodily instability and uncertain gender difference could threaten civilized existence" provides a stable footing for the rest of the book's treatment of gender in relationship pairs, and in highland Mexican society at large (20).

In chapter 3, "Marriage Encounters," Sousa compares pre- and postconquest marriage practices, in particular how Spanish colonizers persistently sought to eradicate the accepted practices of divorce and remarriage. Sousa shows how the Christian paradigm of marriage created a hierarchy of men over women that did not exist under preconquest marriage structures, and which undermined elder knowledge in favor of church authority. She simultaneously elucidates varied marriage practices among native groups, in which "every gesture, every gift, every speech, and even every silence, conveyed symbolic meaning" (75).

Sousa's interpretation of "Marriage Relations," chapter 4, defines the societal norms pertaining to marriage that existed among highland Mexican groups by examining archival records describing such norms, in particular their economic and political aspects, and by expertly interpreting informal unions (amancebados) that referenced accepted marriage practice and court cases in which wife abuse or uxoricide violated local law or, later, Spanish rules. Sousa analyzes "Sexual...