Transatlantic Obligations: Creating Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain

Abstract

During the sixteenth century the journey from Seville to Lima took five months under the best of circumstances. Yet, as Jane Mangan so vividly demonstrates, blood was thicker than water, and the bonds of family that were fundamental to survival in early modern society transcended the obstacles of travel and distance.Transatlantic Obligations makes an important contribution to the current scholarship that emphasizes the connections between Spain and its American colonies. Focusing on the first decades immediately after the Spanish conquest, Mangan analyzes how the subjects of Spain’s new, racially complex empire in Peru negotiated the obligations that defined one’s place in colonial society—husbands to wives, parents to children, sibling to sibling. As much or more than before the conquest, these relationships articulated status and lineage, provided economic security, and demonstrated affection. In the immediate postconquest period, Spaniards and Indigenous people quickly came to understand that both Andean traditions and Castilian law facilitated the creation and maintenance of familial ties, especially through marriage and inheritance.To uncover these relationships Mangan has labored in the archives, doing the rich but often tedious work of combing through notarial records to find the dowries, wills, and licenses to travel in which people expressed their sense of obligation to family members. The payoff for her hard work is great, as she fills the Iberian Atlantic with fathers who love their children, husbands who miss their wives, and sisters who mourn the loss of siblings. Of course, not all of the relationships were positive. Spanish fathers wrested their mestizo children from the arms of indigenous mothers, husbands abandoned wives on the peninsula and mistresses in the Americas, and embittered and scared peninsular women refused to make the transatlantic journey. Yet, even interpersonal conflict was evidence that familial bonds were not broken when a member moved from Spain to the Americas or vice versa; rather, they were extended and accentuated.Although in most cases, Castilian law clearly defined the obligations among family members, Mangan has a keen eye for the ways that love, lineage, and necessity pushed men and women to circumvent, redefine, or even ignore legal norms. Most poignantly, Spanish men who fathered children with indigenous women under a variety of circumstances often expressed strong ties to those children and their mothers. Thus, when the law hindered their illegitimate children’s ability to inherit, many Spanish men invested considerable energy in finding ways to provide for their futures.One of Mangan’s most important revelations is how the Iberian Peninsula was transformed by the family ties that crossed the empire. Spanish fathers took their mixed-race children to Spain to be raised by wives and sisters. Madalena de la Paz, a free black woman, moved from Seville to Lima, but at her death designated her mulata sister in Seville as her heir (105). Enslaved indigenous men and women were brought to Spain by their owners, where they then used the Spanish legal system to sue for their freedom. After the conquest, Peru was deeply changed, but Spain was not the same place either.In this deeply researched book, Jane E. Mangan reminds us that in the wake of the violence of conquest the bonds of family were fundamental to the establishment and perpetuation of the Spanish Empire. It is critical reading for scholars of the Atlantic world.