Cacicas: The Indigenous Women Leaders of Spanish America, 1492–1825 ed. by Margarita R. Ochoa and Sara Vicuña Guengerich (review)

Over the past few decades, generations of scholars exploring Latin America's past have been attempting to restore the subjectivity of groups subordinated in the task of nation-building. The conceptual framework of the subalterns was developed first by the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, enriched by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's theories, and followed by the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. Along with the proponents of Herstory, they endeavored to recover the silenced voices of women from the historical records. The subalternists paid particular attention to the top-down practices of the elite, which kept subaltern women doubly marginalized, and they faced several theoretical and methodological challenges as they focused on the female experience in patriarchal societies in order to make women's voices heard.

Cacicas: The Indigenous Women Leaders of Spanish America, 1492–1825 is not a story about vulnerable, submissive, or oppressed women, nor is it a narrative about women being victims of the colonial system or gender exploitation. Cacicas's editors, Margarita R. Ochoa and Sara Vicuña Guengerich, declare that "the microhistorical studies herein describe the everyday lives and struggles of colonial women who negotiated the extent of Spanish domination in their communities" (26). Its authors have made major efforts to collect fragmentary sources proving Indigenous female leadership from various chronicles, numerous litigations and lawsuit records, testaments, and account books collected in dozens of archives and libraries located across Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Spain. The editors have set the ambitious goals of uncovering the titular cacicas in different parts of the Spanish Empire during the colonial period, trying to explain how these women's relations with Indigenous communities and colonial power were shaped, and placing these interactions in the broader context of the ongoing changes in the Hispanic colonies from the Habsburg period through Bourbon rule.

The volume consists of a prologue, an introduction, a main text divided into two parts (part 1, "North and Central America," and part 2, "South America"), a conclusion, an appendix, and a bibliography. In the prologue, we are introduced to the study of the first Indigenous female leaders in the early Spanish Caribbean. The introduction provides a historiographical background of colonial caciques and cacicazgos from anthropological and archaeological angles across central and southern Mexico, New Spain, Central America, and Peru's northern coast, focusing on legal pluralism of the Spanish Empire. Parts 1 and 2, although they discuss two separate geographic and cultural areas of Hispanic America, offer complementary insights into the role of cacicas under Spanish domination. The conclusion was written not by the editors themselves but by another scholar, Mónica Díaz, who did not just summarize the book but also encouraged the reader to explore more dimensions of the Indigenous world. In the appendix, we find the index of male and female Native leaders from early modern Nicaragua that Patrick S. Werner extracted from the Colección Samoza.

In the first section, covering North and Central America, Bradley Benton (chapter 1), Peter B. Villella (chapter 2), Margarita R. Ochoa (chapter 3), and Catherine Komisaruk (chapter 4) uncover the stories of Native female leaders living in both the central and peripheral borderlands of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The chapters, structured chronologically, reveal the gradual loss of privilege by local women and the narrowing of the differences between nobility and commoners over the period 1492–1825. The story of the female leaders is set in Mexico City and eastern Teotihuacan, as well as in central Mexico in Querétaro and Bajío, and the Kingdom of Guatemala, and it considers the cultural and regional differences of the discussed regions. In the early stages of colonization, the title of cacica was given to Native elite women descended from the pre-Colombian traditional Indigenous families or to the "upstarts"—autochthones who became powerful due to their alliances established with the Spanish colonizers. Over time, those female leaders lost much of the authority in their communities to male gobernadores, which is why they abandoned their traditional roles and settled in urban areas. Although urban cacicas commanded respect, their rule was limited to resolving domestic conflicts. In the long...