Bound Lives offers readers, via criminal court records, a penetrating and thoughtful analysis of the distinct legal statuses of indigenous and Afro-descended Andeans, as well as the interrelations between these two groups in colonial discourse and the life experiences that emerge from below. Rachel Sarah O'Toole ably contextualises her themes within the fluctuations of global and local market forces at work in the Andes. While nationalist myths and to a degree historiography have erased Afro-Andeans, their presence was critical to Spanish labour needs, the rhetoric of casta in colonial courts and official observations, decrees and pronouncements, and the performance of Indian identity in a judicial context.
Before she turns to an analysis of criminal cases and other kinds of archival sources, O'Toole presents intriguing ideas regarding the official viceregal casta discourse. She argues that colonial elite writings discussing differences between Africans and indigenous people, as well as the varying assessments based on slaves’ presumed places of origin in Africa, are best understood as extensions of economic imperatives. To give one example, when officials working in slave markets such as Cartagena spoke of indigenous weakness in relation to hard labour by contrast to African physical strength and fitness, they may have been seeking ways to promote the slave trade for their own profit. The marketing of certain African ethnicities, nationalities or cultural-linguistic groups as particularly suitable for slave labour reflected the availability of captives from any given provenance. Therefore these opinions regarding casta could change frequently. A key reason why we should view this discourse of casta as highly mutable is the fact that it depended on fluctuating Andean labour needs. Colonists also had to adapt to global forces, including access to African slaves and/or demographic change in the Andes. When colonists were desperate for labour of any kind, and Andeans in many cases left their ancestral villages, the subtleties of casta distinctions mattered far less.
O'Toole argues that casta labels bear little resemblance to more recent ideas of race based on a fixed identity or phenotype; instead, these terms were tools that could be deployed effectively in various official and judicial settings. While the crown and its bureaucrats created the terminology, Andeans and Afro-Andeans shaped its on-the-ground use. This is also a useful way to understand honour: viceregal subjects knew their status and knew where they ranked within their society, but did their best to manipulate this position and its complexities through the vocabulary of honour when they came face-to-face with authority figures.
Absolutely essential reading in this book is O'Toole's reassessment of the familiar shibboleth of the aggressive and abused African or Afro-descended individual who took advantage of colonial Indian weakness as an intermediary for Spanish overlords. She graphically illustrates how indigenous Andeans themselves heavily invested in and deployed this vision of relations between colonial subjects with Guaman Poma de Ayala's depictions of slaves flogging Indians (pp. 158–9). In their petitions to colonial courts and viceregal authorities, Andeans positioned themselves in line with Guaman Poma's drawings: innocent, suffering, loyal vassals, a self-depiction that worked very well with the crown's self-promotion as paternalistic protector and Christianiser in the face of blatant exploitation of Andeans for labour and tribute. Along with the devil, Protestants, pirates and mestizos, individuals of African descent allegedly preyed on hapless Indians, who required the protection of the entire judicial, ecclesiastical and crown bureaucracy to stay safe from these predators. In narrating her criminal case studies, O'Toole also highlights how indigenous people might de-emphasise the lasting, daily cooperation they had with Afro-Andeans in an effort to stress moments of violence. The most familiar example would be a complaint against an abusive black overseer disguising a deeper problem with the master himself.
O'Toole argues that Indian colonial subjects enjoyed a much greater degree of rhetorical legal protection under Spanish rule than did African slaves and their descendants. Because the term indio could achieve more than the terms negro or mulato or other labels indicating African ancestry for litigants in court, Afro-Andeans had to call on extralegal methods to negotiate their day-to-day experience. These mundane tools included manipulating their ‘market value, kinship connections, and labour negotiations’ (p. 160). O'Toole clearly does not believe that viceregal courts offered consistent or effective protection from owners’ abuse to slaves and their descendants. At the same time, she rejects some historians’ overemphasis on Hapsburg effectiveness in controlling colonial subjects, correctly observing that the crown's decrees were both diffuse and sporadically enforced in the Andean setting. During the long seventeenth century, landowners held greater power than Spanish viceregal officials.
This book is full of innovative analysis, well supported by archival evidence and a strong infrastructure of references to previous scholarship. O'Toole could probably expand each one of her longer criminal cases into chapters of their own so that readers, especially undergraduates, could more easily follow the complex events and individual conflicts. The speed with which extremely dense judicial material is presented makes it difficult to fully grasp some of the more personal stories and individual motivations present, which is especially noteworthy in the case of a suicidal slave woman named María (pp. 48–51) and several other examples of slave and indigenous interaction with judicial authorities (pp. 135–44). Some historians might disagree with O'Toole's emphasis on Afro-Andeans’ lack of judicial protections, arguing that slaves and viceregal subjects of African descent were more effective in court. While she generally provides extensive context for most of her criminal cases, in a few places this contextualisation is not as strong for examples of abuse of African slaves (p. 42). The fact that a slave had the ability to complain to authorities about abuse might go against the assumption that Afro-Andeans had less judicial protection than indigenous people, especially if the outcome of the case under examination was not clear. Throughout the book, O'Toole introduces readers to archival material that certainly offers a variety of interpretations. Overall, historians and other scholars of Latin America and colonialism in general would do well to take on her ideas regarding the utility of casta designations in the long seventeenth century, instead of continuing to believe viceregal rhetoric, repeated by petitioners in court, regarding Andean victimisation by Africans and their descendants.
