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

Abstract

Since James Lockhart published in 1968 the pioneering Spanish Peru, 1532–1560, various scholars have successfully contributed to a better understanding of sixteenth-century Andean society. Jane Mangan offers in Transatlantic Obligations one of the most comprehensive attempts to study social dynamics in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the first century of colonization. Her focus is on the family, an institution that she understands as having played a central role in the colonial world due to its flexibility. Mangan shows how families established actions (via networks and obligations) and words (in a legal context) through which individuals were connected in different ways, such as dowries, bequests, legal powers, and letters. As these ties frequently linked spouses and children in several commitments from Peru to Spain and vice versa, Mangan's focus on the family assumes a transatlantic perspective, which gives this book its considerable value.The book is well grounded in an updated historiography from interdisciplinary fields such as family history, women's history, and migration history, though there are minor omissions. It would have been helpful for Mangan to take into account James Casey's 1987 research on the Mediterranean family and, more recently, Francisco Chacón and Joan Bestard's 2011 edited collection on the Spanish family; there is also considerable scholarship from Spanish scholars on migration history that could have been helpful in fleshing out these transatlantic connections discussed by Mangan. Her research is also based on a great deal of primary sources, a remarkable quality given how documentation for the sixteenth century in Latin America is often incomplete or has not been well preserved. Mangan faced this obstacle with thorough research in Andean and Spanish archives. The records come mostly from notaries, court cases, and bienes de difuntos (goods from Spaniards and foreigners deceased in the Spanish American territories whose transfer to inheritors was handled in Spain by the Casa de Contratación)—a considerable amount of primary sources that provide a firm foundation for the research.The book makes two main contributions. First, the author has been able to break the dichotomy between legal and other types of unions established by previous scholars who had studied the family in a transatlantic context, focusing primarily on legitimate structures. Mangan understands that in a society where illegitimacy was commonplace one must use an “expansive definition” of the family that follows how people in the sixteenth century understood their relationships to one another (p. 4). Hence the study gives attention to blood relations both legitimate and illegitimate. Most mestizo children lived with their indigenous mothers because Spanish fathers had abandoned them; but also, following Iberian patterns, Spanish families agreed to address economic and other demands from women who were not spouses and children who were not legitimate. Mangan describes, using numerous different examples, how many mestizo children in sixteenth-century Peru were moved from the home of their mothers to a Spanish household in order to give them a Spanish education; some even moved from Peru to Spain and never came back.The other remarkable achievement of this book is its taking into account of a wide range of historical actors, not only the elites and Spaniards who have been the focus of earlier historiography. Mangan focuses on fathers who neglected family duties or assumed them, such as the many conquistadores who actively fulfilled obligations to their children regardless of birth status or race. Legal powers and wills confirm these fathers' plans to ensure for their natural sons and daughters an Iberian and Christian upbringing, to such a degree that, remarkably, these children were named heirs in the later colonial period (pp. 174–77). As for indigenous women, the study makes clear the important roles that they performed as wives, companions, daughters, and, mainly, mothers active on behalf of their children, not always in accordance with the fathers (pp. 174–75). Spanish women—those wives left in the homeland, those who followed their husbands to Peru, or those required to raise the mestizo offspring of their own husbands or of other men in Peru and Spain—were principal characters in these stories of transatlantic ties. Finally, the picture is completed with an analysis of the emerging generation of mestizo children on both sides of the Atlantic.The book's documentary background and methodological perspectives allow Mangan to approach this colonial society via three variables: law, family, and race mixture. The final result is the first systematic study to show how the legal and cultural constructions of the family changed as a result of the conquest of Peru. This is a fascinating text that gives a panoramic view of blended families from both sides of the Atlantic. Mangan's book is undoubtedly an essential contribution to the social history of colonial Spanish America.