Vanishing Woman: Female Migration and Ethnic Identity in Late-Colonial Mexico City

Abstract

Many Indian women left rural communities in search of work in Mexico City. This essay examines how migrants survived and adapted to urban life, with wage labor, tenement homes, and loss of community privilege. The unique demographic and domestic life of these women is explored with parish records. Proximity to the city's ethnically diverse population hastened the erosion of a distinct Indian identity in late-colonial Mexico City. This essay focuses on the experience of female migrants in Mexico City and the deterioration and eventual loss of their ethnic identity. Facing an increasingly precarious existence in their hometowns, many Indian women saw moving to the city as the only way to avoid falling from poverty into misery. Once there, they had to find employment and adapt to the communal life of vecindades, or tenements. Although their move to the capital was often but a short distance, it implied crossing borders of occupation, social class, and, most importantly, ethnic identity. Outside their villages, Indian women soon found that being Indian entitled them to little. During the late-colonial period especially, authorities launched a broad campaign to impose social uniformity within the lower classes. As a result, the rights and social status that Indians had enjoyed in their former communities were seldom recognized in the cities. With time, the ethnic identity of lower-class urban residents vanished altogether. In I794 Celidonia Martina, an Indian woman from San Pedro Tlanixco, a small village near Tenango del Valle, abandoned for the second time Jose Guillermo, her abusive husband, and her children. Saying she was going to bring water, she left the family hut and did not come back. Ethnohistory 42:4 (fall I995). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-i8oi/95/$I.50. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.168 on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 06:35:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 6i8 Juan Javier Pescador Celidonia's destination, like many women from her region and other rural areas surrounding the capital, was Mexico City.' Celidonia tried to make a new life for herself in Santa Catarina, a parish adjacent to the city's center. She found the streets and squares bustling with the activities of its predominately female residents. With the exception of one traditional Indian section, the parish was racially mixed. Mulattos, mestizos, humble Spaniards, and Indian migrants all called Santa