Analysis of shifting forms of labour during the colonial period is central to the historiography of Spanish America. In this meticulously researched monograph, Catherine Komisaruk expands our understanding of these processes by demonstrating how gender and family relations contributed to the erosion of both draft indigenous labour and African slavery in late eighteenth-century Guatemala.
The book is a product of exhaustive research in Guatemalan archives. Notably, by cross-checking data on labour from diverse sources, including censuses, notarial records, civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions, Komisaruk is able to unearth hard-to-find data. Censuses, for example, generally undercount the paid work performed by women, but Komisaruk's method uncovers extensive details on occupations such as domestic service, teaching, and the production of food and alcohol. These sources also allow her to recreate richly textured portraits of daily life. Readers will encounter Guatemalans from diverse socio-economic and ethnic groups tending to the sick, nursing babies, moving between town and country, falling in and out of love, drinking, and fighting, as well as working.
The first half of the book builds the case for the decline of forced labour in the capital of Guatemala (Santiago until the 1773 earthquake, and Nueva Guatemala, or Guatemala City, thereafter) and its rural hinterland. Chapter 1 examines migrant labour patterns among indigenous Guatemalans. In addition to general trends, Komisaruk provides two in-depth case studies from the Cakchiquel community of Jocotenango that reveal gender differences and their implications. In 1765 indigenous authorities complained that the labour recruitment tactics of a sugar planter were depopulating the community. An investigation by colonial officials certainly revealed the heavy-handed enforcement of debt peonage and poor working conditions, but also that workers had voluntarily (to the degree possible in a colonial society) contracted their labour. Although some of these workers were accompanied by families, the majority were men. The women of Jocotenango were more likely to migrate to the city, where they could find jobs in domestic service. Some were pressured by the indigenous governor into working as wet nurses, in order to make up unpaid tribute or other debts. These women, who had no husbands in their households, were particularly vulnerable, but in other cases servants gradually saved up funds to invest in property or enterprises. Komisaruk argues that these gendered migration strategies reduced the pool available for draft labour as Indians left their communities, formed families elsewhere and, in some cases, adopted new ethnic identities.
The following chapter makes an important contribution to the small but growing historiography on African slavery in Central America. Komisaruk demonstrates that slaves in Guatemala were negotiating the terms of their labour, exercising mobility (with or without the permission of owners) and purchasing freedom to such an extent that the abolition of slavery by the newly independent government in 1824 simply made official a virtually completed process of gradual emancipation. Komisaruk uncovers two ways in which gender and family shaped attempts to claim freedom. Some female slaves filed charges of sexual violence with the hope of reparation in terms of either manumission or money that could be used to purchase freedom. Others sued for compensation for the reproductive labour and material support they had provided caring for other slaves, primarily relatives, on the grounds that the owners were responsible for such expenses. Once freed, Guatemalans of African descent were incorporated into the racially mixed population of ‘free’ labourers.
The second half of the book explores the lives of these diverse workers in the city. Chapter 3 provides information on numerous occupations and highlights the gender division of labour. Notably, a majority of the urban population was female. The author then analyses households, families and gender relations. Given the gender imbalance, it is not surprising that women headed many households; more noteworthy is Komisaruk's finding of the prevalence of informal separations among spouses who did not bother to pursue ecclesiastical divorces. Indeed, she asserts that plebeians lived and loved with less regard for Spanish norms of morality and honour than one might expect given the dominance of these themes in the historical literature on colonial society. High rates of racial mixing further reduced the population that might have been subject to enslavement or forced labour drafts.
Throughout the book, Komisaruk links the decline of forced labour to increased ‘hispanization’ as Guatemalans of indigenous and African descent, especially women and children, ‘learned Spanish and adopted Hispanic cultural practices and identities’ (p. 1). This reader would have liked to see a more thorough and nuanced conceptualisation of this process. Certainly the ability to speak Spanish allowed people to contract their labour directly with employers and facilitated success in the trades or commerce. But Komisaruk's finding that plebeians placed relatively little value on honour shows that they did not adopt all Spanish cultural practices and raises the question of whether acculturation might also have occurred in the other direction. She highlights, for example, the important role played by indigenous and mixed-race women in raising children in Hispanic households; what cultural values might these women have imparted to their charges? Similarly, what were the implications of native brewers bringing ‘pulque and chicha with them into the Hispanic fold’ (p. 163)? Although Komisaruk briefly introduces Mary Louise Pratt's concept of ‘contact zones’ into her discussion of domestic service, she misses the opportunity to complicate meanings of ‘hispanization’ on a larger level.
Komisaruk concludes that the actions of female and male workers had helped to dismantle colonial structures before political independence and that efforts to reinstate forms of coerced labour later in the nineteenth century should be seen not as ‘a legacy of Spanish rule’ but rather as ‘a product of modernity’ (p. 250). It seems equally important to her argument about the declining role of the state in regulating labour that a study encompassing the late colonial period includes no discussion of the Bourbon reforms. Scholars of labour, ethnicity, migration and gender will all find material of interest in this thorough case study.
