Uses of the Will: Textual Agency of Andean and Mapuche Women in Colonial Santiago

Abstract

Abstract Indigenous Andean and Mapuche women who converged in Santiago de Chile during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries enacted varied social and religious practices to navigate the complexities of this colonial urban space. The act of writing or dictating a legal document, such as a last will or testament, represents an early form of the uses and adaptations of hegemonic means by subaltern subjects. By focusing on the cases of Andean and Mapuche women who migrated to the city of Santiago, I argue that the urban production of testaments was modified by both gender and ethnicity, and Indigenous women's agency.