Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Narrating Native Histories) - Softcover

Van Deusen, Nancy E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822358581 ISBN 13: 9780822358589

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2015

Synopsis

In the sixteenth century hundreds of thousands of indios—indigenous peoples from the territories of the Spanish empire—were enslaved and relocated throughout the Iberian world. Although various laws and decrees outlawed indio enslavement, several loopholes allowed the practice to continue. In Global Indios Nancy E. van Deusen documents the more than one hundred lawsuits between 1530 and 1585 that indio slaves living in Castile brought to the Spanish courts to secure their freedom. Because plaintiffs had to prove their indio-ness in a Spanish imperial context, these lawsuits reveal the difficulties of determining who was an indio and who was not—especially since it was an all-encompassing construct connoting subservience and political personhood and at times could refer to people from Mexico, Peru, or South or East Asia. Van Deusen demonstrates that the categories of free and slave were often not easily defined, and she forces a rethinking of the meaning of indio in ways that emphasize the need to situate colonial Spanish American indigenous subjects in a global context.
 

About this title

About the Author

Nancy E. van Deusen is Professor of History at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial Lima and The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesús.
 

Review

"Global Indios makes very important contributions to literatures of slavery, the history of indigenous peoples, and transatlantic and global history. Nancy E. van Deusen contributes to our understanding of the emergence of a key colonial category, indio/india, and its repercussions. She helps us see how the legal struggles of those held in slavery contributed to the winding down of decades of unchecked enslavement of hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples in the Americas. This is slavery as many readers won't have imagined it."
  -- Kathryn Burns, author of, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0822358581
• ISBN 13: 9780822358589
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352