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

A culmination of decades of work, Sousa's unparalleled study of native Mexican women restores a trend she helped establish as a contributor to the publication of Indian Women of Early Mexico (Susan Schroeder et al., 1997), part of the explosion of groundbreaking studies incorporating women as unequivocally central to inquiry across disciplines in the 1980s and 1990s. I remind readers that since the 1990s, women's research centers were closed or had to change their names. This legal and economic opposition to women's explicit presence in historical records and doctrinal narratives (those written within religious institutions) brought about a gap in the ethnohistorical literature evident in Sousa's bibliography. While recognizing ongoing, award-winning, and effective feminist scholarship, I defer to her article "Nail This To Your Door: A Disputation on the Power, Efficacy, and Indulgent Delusion of Western Scholarship that Neglects the Challenge of Gender and Women's History" (Pacific Historical Review, 79, no. 4 [Nov. 2010], 605–17) for its Wittenberg-style challenge to help situate the vacuum that Sousa's research enters not only for scholars of colonial Mexico and the greater West, but for all who continue to expect historians to represent women's demographic reality in early modern history (after all, they represented at least half of the population).

That is the gap that Sousa's new book fills. The Woman Who Turned into a Jaguar was much anticipated by ethnohistorians and could not come at a better political moment for readers interested in decolonizing indigenous women's history. Essentially, ethnohistories focus on local points of view, as opposed to traditional histories that prioritize institutional sources (from the church or government, that often obscured the central role of women in society). In other words, Sousa has accomplished an extremely challenging task. She analyzes a range of native extant sources that are generally not accessible nor easily interpreted to offer a view of indigenous women in the Mexican colonies. Requiring years in archives, transcribing and translating indigenous languages, Sousa's sources incorporate four different culture groups in central Mexico and Oaxaca: the Nahua (Aztec), the Ñudzahui (Mixtec), the Bènizàa (Zapotec), and the Ayuuk (Mixe). She combines the known literature with these new sources from archives in the Americas and comes up with novel arguments. Thus, Sousa's methods are important to the interdisciplinary scholar interested in the challenge of including the voice of indigenous women found in colonial archives (left behind by Spanish, French, and Portuguese notaries, as well as records by indigenous notaries who quickly adopted Roman script to their own languages). Integrating art historians' precolonial pictorial books, material culture, and textual documentation in native languages, she reveals a history close to the heart of indigenous women's daily lives.

The first chapters present especially intimate details about women's lives. Sousa begins with calendrical and textual evidence of identity. Mutable bodies contrast with a system of strongly gendered roles, laying the groundwork for evidence of gender complementarity (interdependent relationships, where one gender is not considered more valuable). Clothing, jewelry, ceremonial roles, speech patterns were not gender neutral—they were used to mark and order complex, alterable persons. In the two chapters about marriage patterns, Sousa uses quotations from early surveys called Relaciones to great effect, documenting people's ideas about the detrimental effects of a church-imposed monogamy, along with the prohibition on divorce. Sousa illustrates conflicts between popular attitudes about intimacy (like women's lifelong sexual needs) and marriage expectations of colonizers, arguing from court cases that domestic violence was not accepted in native communities. Marriage becomes a vehicle through which to analyze the social and economic standing of women, including traditional "formalized cooperative and reciprocal labor arrangements" that were threatened by infidelity (108). Sousa also analyzes adultery and rape cases...