Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America , and: A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749-1857 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, and: A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749-1857 Laura Matthew Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America Edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O'Hara, with a foreword by Irene Silverblatt . Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749-1857 By Matthew D. O'Hara . Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Historians of the caste system in colonial Latin America tend to avoid the term "identity." They see it as too ephemeral and vague, easily attached to almost any social category and smacking dangerously of essentialism. This reluctance is perhaps surprising, given that Latin Americanist scholars have also been unable to agree on how terms like race and ethnicity should be applied in the colonial context. In these two fine volumes, Matthew O'Hara and Andrew Fisher suggest that the indeterminateness of identity offers an advantageous way into the thicket of caste terms applied so variously throughout the region over time. More so than either race or ethnicity, they write, identity "connotes a multinodal approach to the construction of personhood that recognizes no primary factor." (Fisher & O'Hara, 9) Methodologically, Fisher's and O'Hara's edited volume and O'Hara's monograph seek out what the authors call "contact points" of identity formation: specific instances in which individual historical actors with all their agency or lack thereof, and structuring institutions with their rules and regulations, meet. In some cases, conflicts or negotiations at these contact points reveal a geological layering—or as María Elena Díaz would have it, a "quilting process" (Fisher & O'Hara, 208)—of identities built upon colonial terminologies and local memories. Some collective and personal identities are shown to coalesce or fall apart remarkably quickly. These two volumes do not resolve the issue of how scholars should deploy terms like race, ethnicity, or caste vis-à-vis the early modern period. What they do offer is some of the best recent scholarship on the complexities of identity construction in colonial Latin America, at both an individual and community level. Imperial Subjects gathers nine short case studies spanning the early colonial period to the mid-nineteenth century. The volume defines "subjects" broadly, to include such disparate groups as Yucatecan peasants, Inka nobility, freed royal slaves in Cuba, successful Andean market women in Cuzco, and even (in Sergio Serulnikov's fascinating chapter) Spanish American elites who aligned themselves with their plebeian neighbors against the affronts of recent peninsular arrivals. The institutional contact points also range widely across different types of documentation (marriage dispensations, market regulations, Inquisition records, etc.), bolstering Irene Silverblatt's opening observation that colonial bureaucrats "could determine the most profound of societal truths—membership in a human community." (Fisher & O'Hara, xi) Silverblatt emphasizes this bureaucratic power to "make race a calculable thing," a point borne out in the tremendous variety of social labels applied, manipulated, and challenged in following chapters. (Fisher & O'Hara, xi) Cynthia Radding agrees that in both colonial records and in contemporary scholarship, notions of cultural, social, or racial difference are "reified by the very terms of colonialism: indio, natural, pieza de rescate, bárbaro or negro." (Fisher & O'Hara, 112) But even while acknowledging colonialism's hegemonic power, the contributors to this volume seem more inclined, with Ben Vinson in his conclusion, towards exploring how subalterns "could not ignore the official classifications, but they could rework their content." (Fisher & O'Hara, 251) Indeed, as Jane Mangan shows in her chapter on Andean market women in Cuzco, Peru, colonial authorities sometimes found themselves scrambling to create new terminology that could only poorly categorize the people they wanted to control. In many of the case studies presented, subaltern acceptance of the social labels imposed on them by colonial bureaucracies seems not merely grudging or tactical, but enthusiastic and potentially transformative. Andean allies of the Spanish conquistadors eagerly attempted to bolster their elite status through Spanish bureaucratic formulae; Jeremy Mumford relates that "it was, in part, kurakas' pretensions to Castilian lordship that spurred colonial Spaniards to articulate ideas of Indian race." (Fisher & O'Hara, 56) In Venezuela, according...