This ambitious and wide-ranging study is a history of indigenous gender relations from the Spanish conquest to approximately 1750, focusing on four of the most populous and historically significant groups of sedentary indigenous peoples in central Mexico. The book rests on a solid if eclectic evidentiary base that demonstrates Sousa's mastery and long study of a wide variety of Spanish- and indigenous-language sources. The book argues, largely convincingly, that the changes brought by Spanish colonialism had their greatest effects at the corporate level, leaving the indigenous household, its social relations, and gendered divisions of labor relatively unaffected over much of the colonial period.
Like many other scholars, Sousa stresses the importance of complementarity and reciprocity in Mesoamerican social organization in general and in gender relations in particular. However, she also notes that these concepts often acted as a mask for gender hierarchy and difference (14). Sousa thus acknowledges gendered power while also parsing Mesoamerican beliefs, customs, and institutions that limited inequality. For example, patrilocality, so often associated with male dominance, seems not to have operated in the same way in the groups Sousa examines, principally because of cultural norms that prescribed strong affective ties between husbands’ families (particularly their mothers) and wives. Sousa is able to locate these norms in prescriptive sources, but she also uses criminal records to demonstrate that mothers-in-law actually did treat their daughters-in-law with care and concern, for example by intervening to protect them against spousal violence. Sousa is also one of few scholars to analyze the implications of indigenous marriage-age norms rather than merely mentioning them. Marrying young and with spouses of similar age may well have produced a more egalitarian system of marital relations.
Many of Sousa's findings are exciting and theoretically rich. For example, she discusses how the concept of body instability or mutability (particularly as regards the Mesoamerican belief in transformation across the species boundary) might have produced a less rigid binary notion of gender among Mesoamericans. In her discussion of the gendering of colonial religious change, Sousa details how in some communities the Christian church became designated as women's space (41), with men charged with conducting indigenous ritual in other locations.
Perhaps the strongest sections of the book are those dedicated to sexuality and work. Sousa not only identifies consonance between indigenous and Spanish sexual mores (virginity, fidelity, the double standard, and a harsh attitude toward adultery), but she also uses criminal records to trace regional variations in indigenous adoption of Spanish practices (palabra de casamiento and compensation for loss of virginity).
Even thou she recognizes that colonialism increased the value of female virginity (and even monetized it) in indigenous communities, Sousa demonstrates how the severity of punishment for adultery was lessened by colonial influence. Where death had been prescribed previously (and, at least to judge from the limited evidence, actually enacted) for adulterers, whipping became the most typical punishment in the colonial period. Still, numerous murders studied by Sousa and others suggest that men in particular continued to “uphold the death penalty” as appropriate punishment for their adulterous wives, even when they themselves had engaged in liaisons outside marriage.
Sousa's treatment of women's labor is similarly strong, demonstrating the framing of women's work in terms of community obligation, a conception that endured through the colonial period. Not surprisingly then, women's contribution to tribute obligation was substantial. This has been demonstrated in other smaller-scale studies, but Sousa demonstrates the importance of these activities to community, colonial, and the broader Atlantic economies. She also deftly interweaves both continuity and change into her discussion. For example, while colonialism brought men into textile production for the market, both the practice and meaning of female weaving remained consistent with preconquest norms. Sousa notes continuity in women's participation in trade, which resisted the gender specialization found in the Spanish colonial world. Despite recognizing the persistence of feminine skills in areas such as weaving, trade, and midwifery, Sousa documents a general decline in women's roles and identities as workers—and their preconquest status as artisans—emblematic of a gradual erosion of women's status.
Sousa's mastery of her sources and nuanced analysis are impressive. There are, however, several points at which her arguments falter. First, the undeniable distinctions between early modern European and indigenous cultures are sometimes overdrawn, and parallels sometimes ignored, as in discussion of beliefs about pregnant women and the mutability of sex. Sousa's gendered analyses are also sometimes overly timid, particularly where the implications might contradict gender complementarity. For example, Sousa acknowledges the denigration of enemies and war captives as women, but does not extend this fact to what it could mean for women's status.
Similarly, Sousa asserts on one hand that third genders were unproblematically accepted as men or women according to their dress, but on the other that they were equated with nahualli (shape-shifters) as deceivers; the apparent contradiction between these positions is ignored. Discussing sixteenth-century noblewomen's responses to polygyny, Sousa argues that they reveal an indigenous moral economy in which noblewomen accept polygyny as long as they are respected, but the same evidence could be read as suggesting that women used Christian institutions to fight against polygyny—or even that the Church's stance against polygyny may have made Christianity more attractive to women than to men. All of these are instances in which Sousa's nuanced approach to gender hierarchy, gender complementarity, and their interaction with colonialism might have been usefully extended.
Perhaps a few missed opportunities are inevitable in a work of such ambitious breadth. Sousa has produced a cohesive and uniquely comprehensive portrayal of the roles, responsibilities, and day-to-day lives of colonial Mesoamerican women. Readable, engaging, and replete with textual and visual evidence, this book will be required reading for historians of gender in colonial Latin America, and should quickly find its way into undergraduate and graduate syllabi.
