Global Indios: The Indigenous struggle for justice in sixteenth-century Spain by Nancy E. van Deusen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Global Indios: The Indigenous struggle for justice in sixteenth-century Spain by Nancy E. van Deusen Lisa Voigt Global Indios: The Indigenous struggle for justice in sixteenth-century Spain. By Nancy E. van Deusen. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015. Nancy van Deusen's Global Indios: The Indigenous struggle for justice in sixteenth-century Spain sheds light on a little-discussed form of slavery that emerged as a result of European expansion in the New World—that of Indigenous Americans—and on a site of their enslavement that is even less frequently studied, Spain. Using judicial and other archival records, van Deusen reconstructs not only the local milieus of Indigenous slaves in Spanish villages but also the transimperial, global contexts through which they moved and in which their identities as "indios" and as slaves were imagined, claimed, and contested. The story of the prohibition of Indigenous slavery usually centers on the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas and his involvement in the passage of the New Laws of 1542, which officially outlawed it. Van Deusen's title plays on that of a seminal work on this topic, Lewis Hanke's The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949), to signal her shift in focus from the Spanish to the Indigenous protagonists in this struggle. The unevenly implemented New Laws, as van Deusen writes, were not in fact a "defining moment for indigenous people" (224). In the years following 1542, many of the Indigenous slaves forcibly taken to Spain were obliged to pursue their struggle for freedom in court. Van Deusen draws on 127 court cases involving some 184 Indigenous litigants to listen to their voices and tell their stories for the first time. The first chapter, "All the World in a Village: Carmona," functions as an "overture" (32) to the work as a whole by presenting as case studies the lawsuits of two Indigenous women and their descendants in mid-sixteenth-century Carmona, Andalucía. The chapter introduces many of the issues explored in the rest of the book, including the Spanish village's connections to Atlantic and global networks, the variable, self-interested interpretations of the label indio, and the significance of place of origin and imperial status. An indio from Portuguese dominions was not protected by the New Laws and could legally be held as a slave, and thus "histories of bondage and displacement from 'Portuguese' or 'Spanish' geographic sites became central to arguments made about them in the courtroom" (47). In one case, for example, witnesses testified that an Indigenous woman claiming Mexican origins was actually from Calicut, India—and thus "Portuguese" and enslaveable—because of her language, knowledge, and association with other natives of Calicut in Carmona (49–50). Here and throughout the book, van Deusen carefully mines legal transcripts to reveal the ways in which Indigenous people were portrayed as well as how they portrayed themselves (62). The second chapter, "Crossing the Atlantic and Entering Households," turns to other sources beyond court records (such as travel documents and passenger lists) to describe the enslavement, forced transatlantic journey, and household life and work that preceded indios' decisions to litigate for their freedom. Chapters Three through Five then follow the indios "into the courtroom," as Chapter Four is entitled. In Chapter Three, "Small Victories? Gregorio López and the Reforms of the 1540s," van Deusen describes the inspections of 1543 and 1549 that were intended to free unlawfully enslaved indios. While the 1543 inspection managed to liberate some 100 indios, the need for another one in 1549, and the blurring of distinctions between slave and free status through such in-between categories as naboría and miserable (120–21), indicate that full emancipation was far from a reality. The next two chapters focus on the means used in court to defend and challenge enslavement. While Chapter Four focuses on the legal "forms" of identification, such as witness depositions, documents, and scarred or branded skin, Chapter Five, "Narratives of Territorial Belonging, Just War, and Ransom" centers on the "stories" told by and about litigants, illuminating the legal vocabulary and practices used to justify slavery, such as rescate (ransom) and guerra justa (just...