Gender, Ethnicity, and Agency in Latin American History

Abstract

Ranging across huge swaths of time and place in Latin America, these works share a commitment to revealing the historical agency of subalterns, whether women or colonized ethnic groups. They also highlight the cultural complexity of a region where identities and gender roles have evolved in a constant tension with ethnicity. The books, all by historians or ethnohistorians, vary in nature, intent, and theoretical underpinnings. Susan Kellogg’s excellent comprehensive synthesis of the history of indigenous women covers the pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern periods in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Latin America (including the Caribbean and South American lowlands) although the emphasis is on Mesoamerican (Nahua, Nudzahui, Maya) and Andean areas. I begin with her book not only because of its range, but also because it provides a template to accommodate comparisons with the other works under review here. The broad sweep she has undertaken defies synthesis in its complexity (making the reading require close attention to details and exceptions), but the author meets the challenge of producing well-founded general conclusions without homogenizing indigenous cultures. Drawing on a massive database of archaeology, history, ethnohistory, and ethnography (as well as primary resources in her own fields of precontact and colonial Mesoamerica), Kellogg paints a panorama that centers gender in a history of tradition and change