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  • The Woman Who Turned into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico by Lisa Sousa
  • Jacqueline Holler
The Woman Who Turned into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico. By Lisa Sousa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Pp. xv, 404. $65.00.

This ambitious and wide-ranging study is a history of indigenous gender relations from the Spanish conquest to approximately 1750, focusing on four of the most populous and historically significant groups of sedentary indigenous peoples in central Mexico. [End Page 684]

The book rests on a solid if eclectic evidentiary base that demonstrates Sousa's mastery and long study of a wide variety of Spanish- and indigenous-language sources. The book argues, largely convincingly, that the changes brought by Spanish colonialism had their greatest effects at the corporate level, leaving the indigenous household, its social relations, and gendered divisions of labor relatively unaffected over much of the colonial period.

Like many other scholars, Sousa stresses the importance of complementarity and reciprocity in Mesoamerican social organization in general and in gender relations in particular. However, she also notes that these concepts often acted as a mask for gender hierarchy and difference (14). Sousa thus acknowledges gendered power while also parsing Mesoamerican beliefs, customs, and institutions that limited inequality. For example, patrilocality, so often associated with male dominance, seems not to have operated in the same way in the groups Sousa examines, principally because of cultural norms that prescribed strong affective ties between husbands' families (particularly their mothers) and wives. Sousa is able to locate these norms in prescriptive sources, but she also uses criminal records to demonstrate that mothers-in-law actually did treat their daughters-in-law with care and concern, for example by intervening to protect them against spousal violence. Sousa is also one of few scholars to analyze the implications of indigenous marriage-age norms rather than merely mentioning them. Marrying young and with spouses of similar age may well have produced a more egalitarian system of marital relations.

Many of Sousa's findings are exciting and theoretically rich. For example, she discusses how the concept of body instability or mutability (particularly as regards the Mesoamerican belief in transformation across the species boundary) might have produced a less rigid binary notion of gender among Mesoamericans. In her discussion of the gendering of colonial religious change, Sousa details how in some communities the Christian church became designated as women's space (41), with men charged with conducting indigenous ritual in other locations.

Perhaps the strongest sections of the book are those dedicated to sexuality and work. Sousa not only identifies consonance between indigenous and Spanish sexual mores (virginity, fidelity, the double standard, and a harsh attitude toward adultery), but she also uses criminal records to trace regional variations in indigenous adoption of Spanish practices (palabra de casamiento and compensation for loss of virginity).

Even thou she recognizes that colonialism increased the value of female virginity (and even monetized it) in indigenous communities, Sousa demonstrates how the severity of punishment for adultery was lessened by colonial influence. Where death had been prescribed previously (and, at least to judge from the limited evidence, actually enacted) for adulterers, whipping became the most typical punishment in the colonial period. Still, numerous murders studied by Sousa and others suggest that men in particular [End Page 685] continued to "uphold the death penalty" as appropriate punishment for their adulterous wives, even when they themselves had engaged in liaisons outside marriage.

Sousa's treatment of women's labor is similarly strong, demonstrating the framing of women's work in terms of community obligation, a conception that endured through the colonial period. Not surprisingly then, women's contribution to tribute obligation was substantial. This has been demonstrated in other smaller-scale studies, but Sousa demonstrates the importance of these activities to community, colonial, and the broader Atlantic economies. She also deftly interweaves both continuity and change into her discussion. For example, while colonialism brought men into textile production for the market, both the practice and meaning of female weaving remained consistent with preconquest norms. Sousa notes continuity in women's participation...

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