América colonial: Denominaciones, clasificaciones e identidades

Abstract

This interesting volume examines the production of knowledge about colonial subjects, primarily those of the Chilean Andes. Taking inspiration from Michel Foucault, Ángel Rama, and Pierre Bourdieu, the authors treat categories that recur insistently in colonial records — for example, indio rebelde — as points of departure. What was at stake for those so identified? Who had the power to name or classify whom, and how did putative identities and processes of classification change over time? The volume as a whole emphasizes the mutability and political expediency of such classifications, and it urges scholars not to assume a straightforward relationship between colonial social practice and the ways it was represented on the archival page. It’s a rewarding study for those interested in historiography, borderlands, and the dynamics of domination, slavery, and ethnogenesis.Several authors examine the terms Spaniards used to brand those whom they wanted to dominate, enslave, or move out of the way. Christophe Giudicelli, for example, traces the genealogy of the calchaquíes, whose name Spaniards derived in the 1560s from that of a specific cacique, Juan Calchaquí, and thereafter applied to the inhabitants of two separate places — one a valley in Tucumán, the other to the north of Santa Fe. Ethnically diverse, these peoples had one thing in common from a Spanish perspective: they were rebels. Hence the staying power of calchaquí, which Giudicelli aptly depicts as a rebel identity: “calchaquí es el nombre del enemigo y el Valle de Calchaquí es sinónimo de enclave rebelde” (p. 147).Jimena Paz Obregón Iturra and José Manuel Zavala Cepeda also focus on the shifting distinctions Spaniards drew between “friendly Indians” and “enemy Indians.” To be designated aucae or indio rebelde in the charged context of the centuries- long Araucanian wars meant that one might be enslaved. Such slaving, despite late seventeenth- century prohibitions, continued well into the eighteenth century, as Zavala Cepeda makes clear. A different but related process is evident in Hugo Contreras Cruces’s study of the alleg edly weak, submissive indios of central Chile, “los llamados picunches” (p. 51). According to Spaniards, these Indians were so poor that only labor (servicio personal) could be expected of them in tribute. Contreras Cruces argues that this long- lived representation served the desire of Spaniards to secure a labor supply for placer gold mining.Spanish slaving — especially the capture and sale of indigenous people — shaped many of the categories discussed here (calchaquíes, aucaes, rebeldes, cautivos). But indigenous perspectives are not neglected in the collection. José Luis Martínez Cereceda examines the telling contrast between the way Spaniards thought indigenous people saw them — as deities, viracochas — and the representations of the Spanish found in indigenous sources such as cave and rock paintings, which tended to associate Spaniards closely with horsemanship, swords, and violence. Martínez Cereceda draws on this artistic tradition and the reported speech of Titu Cusi Yupanqui’s father, Manco Inca, to suggest a very different perspective: that Spaniards may have appeared to indigenous eyes as demons or devils (supay) rather than deities.Jaime Valenzuela Márquez studies a fascinating case of indigenous self- fashioning: that of the indios del cuzco (or simply indios cuzcos), who appear in the notarial records of Santiago de Chile by the late sixteenth century. There were good reasons for indigenous residents of Santiago to claim a connection to the Inca capital. People from Cuzco had assisted the Spanish conquest and thus held certain privileges. They were indisputably free and exempt from tribute. Yet indios cuzcos of later times were clearly neither born in Cuzco nor of Inca descent. Gradually, the author argues, cuzcos had created their own sense of group identity in a process of ethnogenesis that gained new referents as it lost all connotation of Peruvian origins. As late as 1772, “encontramos a un zapatero que tes-tifica en un juicio reclamando ser cuzco, pese a su evidente condición de mestizo” (p. 93).The volume’s contributors also investigate the changing use of don and doña (and the emergence of caballero as a category of distinction); the sometimes blurry boundaries between slavery and freedom; apocryphal African saints investigated by the Lima Inquisition in 1816; the status of donadas, cloistered women who were neither servants nor nuns but something of both; the Cronista Mayor de Indias, a key figure after 1571 in the production of knowledge about Spanish America; and the influence of Lima’s enlightened criollos on Alessandro Malaspina’s scientific expedition. Terms the authors do not specifically study — like pieza (piece) — crop up in interesting ways. It’s a testament to the richness of this collection that the reader begins to see connections between and beyond individual contributions. These thought- provoking essays deserve a wide audience.