We missed
this one back in 2015. Nancy E. van
Deusen, Queen’s University, published Global Indios: The Indigenous
Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain. From the press:
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.
Praise for
the book:
"Weaving
names and fragments of lives into a richly textured narrative, van Deusen does
justice to their stories, placing the reader in the heart of the empire, facing
its darkest moment." -Kathryn Lehman
"This
book offers many interesting insights into the experiences of indio slaves and
servants who ended up in Castile." - Ida Altman
"Van
Deusen concentrates her attention on the microcosm of a village society in the
area of Seville and on the part played in it by indios imported from America,
but she also gives consideration to the indio menials of the New World and to
the Asian context from which some slaves were drawn. The evidence throws light
mainly on the southern part of Castile, but the book’s perspective is global,
sophisticated, admirable, and pathbreaking." - Henry Kamen
"Nancy
van Deusen has written a masterpiece of early modern ethnohistory that brings
to light a veritable diaspora of indigenous slaves in Spain, while expanding
the meaning of indio as a global and changing identifier constructed outside the
colonial confines of America." - Alcira Dueñas
Further
information is available here.
