Chronicling Women's Containment in Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela's History of Potosí

Abstract

Chronicling Women's Containment in Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela's History of Potosí Margaret E. Boyle (bio) It is easy to observe the influence of humanist thought in eighteenth-century Latin America when chronicles of the period are dominated by women at two extremes: the dutiful and obedient wife, nun, or daughter and the stubbornly wicked adulteress, sorceress, or prostitute. As Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives aptly proclaimed, "there is nothing more fragile or more vulnerable than the reputation and the good name of women; it may well seem to hang by a cobweb."1 This certainly appears to be the case in Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela's Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí (History of the Imperial City of Potosí), a three-volume chronicle written between the years 1705-1736, which generated remarkable reader interest even during its initial composition.2 This monumental text documents nearly 200 years of Peru's viceroyal capital and its legendary silver mines, focusing on topics as broad ranging as health, race, gossip, geography, art, cooking, government, class, miracles, death, virtue, sin, and especially women. While to date there is little research on Arzáns or his work, the most significant scholarship on Arzáns can be found in Lewis Hanke and Gunnar Mendoza's 1965 groundbreaking publication of the Historia, supplemented by their in-depth introduction and annotations. Although Arzáns' passionate focus on women is difficult to explain, it is clear that his characterizations of women are reflective of a society obsessed with [End Page 279] questions of honor and reputation, in which women were frequently the repository of these anxieties.3 As Hanke and Mendoza explain, the women of Potosí existed: "en la frontera del bien y del mal, en trance siempre peligroso, provocando las acechanzas del mundo, el demonio y la carne, o sufriendo, a veces sin culpa, las penas de esas acechanzas."4 Arzáns' chronicle demonstrates that the challenge of maintaining honor or reputation produced a virtual tightrope for women, where deviation from this perilous norm was not only a risk, but also a frequent reality. Because Arzáns' chronicle offers the reader a focused concentration on women and their precarious status, the Historia not only provides the reader with a nuanced depiction of seventeenth-century women's lives from the vantage point of an eighteenth-century chronicler, but also reveals the steady impact of so-called wayward or "bad" women on the history of Potosí. With this context in mind, this essay will ask the question: how does Arzáns separate the "good" women from the "bad" throughout the chronicle, and what do these binary categorizations tell us about the representation of women's lived experiences throughout the colonial period? It is important to make clear that the figure of the "bad" woman was not a unique invention of Arzáns, but rather a character with a deep-rooted legacy in both Spain and Spanish America. According to the prescriptive literature of the time, as well as legal and medical discourse, women without adequate moral and behavioral guidance were constructed as threatening to the social order. Counter-Reformation in Spain was mobilized and implemented in no small part by means of royal decrees designed to cleanse and order urban spaces with particular attention to the containment of "bad" women. In 1598, the arbiter Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera published his Discurso del amparo de los legítimos pobres y reducción de los fingidos, in which he petitioned Philip III to create workhouses to punish wayward women. Following his advice, in 1608 the nun Magdalena de San Gerónimo proposed the creation of a prison (galera) for women defined by a regimen of reclusion and hardship, thus initiating a critical discussion on how to define and conceal female deviance within early modern Spain.5 On the other side of the Atlantic, repression of African, indigenous, and mixed-race populations in colonial Spanish America produced a drastic increase in the control of women and their sexuality; not surprisingly at the end of the seventeenth century, female residents in non-penal institutions reached its peak. In Lima, for example...