Jane E. Mangan rewrites family history in early colonial Peru with an approach that seeks to establish the importance of conquest and links across distance between family members. These links across the ocean allow her to detect affective relationships where indifference and domination have been largely thought of as the main characteristics in formal and informal families between conquerors and indigenous women and their mestizo children. However, Professor Mangan finds solid evidence that things happened in a different way, at least to some extent.
The sample of evidence used is small in relation to the universe of possible cases, but it is representative to rethink in part one of the central themes of the social changes that occurred in the Andes in the sixteenth century. The author has done a wonderful job with the notarial information in Lima and Arequipa, as well as in Seville, to capture human intentions behind legal forms. She uses documentation that relates fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, legitimate husbands and wives, concubines, and authorities to give a view of family ties based on commitments that go beyond formal obligations. The analysis of letters exchanged by spouses, dowries for mestizo daughters, contracts for learning trades and for domestic bonded labor, license applications for travel between Spain and Peru, cartas-poder to take guardianship of children, remittances to cover the needs of children and spouses, and other evidence all show the existence of affective sentiments and family and social demands alongside legal mandates that regulated aspects of family life at that time.
From this rich and suggestive book and its new themes and approaches, I want to highlight two aspects that I find particularly interesting. The author shows that in many cases Spanish parents honored their commitments by taking care of their mestizo children and educating them so that they lived within the principles of Spanish culture and Christianity. Therefore, they preferred that their mestizo sons and daughters live with them or with their Spanish relatives and acquaintances in Peru or Spain, entrusting them to master craftsmen or Spanish houses to secure their futures both economically and culturally. They also provided resources for marriage (dowries and sweeps). However, we must consider the seignorial attitudes of the Spanish parents. To welcome their natural or illegitimate children was a manifestation of social power, especially considering that the entenados and criados were often in a subordinate situation in the family.
I also want to highlight the Spanish family that was divided by conquest: wives abandoned on the peninsula while their husbands initiated new families in the Andes. From the royal cédula on “maridable life” of 1528, Mangan emphasizes the imperial policy of colonization at the early stages after the conquest. I think it is necessary to continue studying this subject to establish the extent to which Spanish colonization in the Andes reflects the model of a colony settled by entire Spanish families voluntarily. The result of the changes studied in the book is a new family, different from the Spanish and the Andean: enlarged, mixed, and mestizo. This is one of the conclusions and one of the main contributions of this book, which is easy to read despite its ample and rich information.
This is a social history of colonization, and this new research must be taken into account to enrich the historical picture of Peru after the conquest. Therefore, I am convinced that the book deserves to be translated and published in Spanish.
