Global Indios

The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7535807
AutoresCamilla Townsend (0000-0002-8000-8576, Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, autor de correspondencia)
Año2016
Páginasshw004-shw004
Fecha de publicación2016-02-21
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Social History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0022-4529 • E-ISSN: 1527-1897
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jsh/shw004
OpenAlexW2610162152
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6

Though Nancy Van Deusen gave her book a title to parallel that of Lewis Hanke's classic work and though she opens with a vignette featuring fray Bartolomé de las Casas, she is quite clear from the outset that she has not attempted simply to update Hanke's Spanish Struggle for Justice (1965) to reflect the moral and intellectual sensibilities of the twenty-first century. Instead, she has shifted the focus entirely away from Las Casas and centers it instead upon a small but important subgroup of the 650,000 Native Americans who were seized and transported as slaves during the process of conquest (2). She has written a work about the meaning and significance of 184 cases presented by litigants in sixteenth-century Spain who styled themselves indios and, using the New Laws of 1542, fought to free themselves from slavery. From the first moments of the book, wherein an enslaved twenty-year-old woman named Catalina meets with fray Bartolomé de las Casas in the monastery of San Pablo and pleads for his help in her case, Van Deusen as author walks a fine line: she does not want to lose sight of the real human beings whose lives were blighted by slavery, but at the same time, she wishes to maintain a high level of theoretical sophistication transcending the experiences of individuals. For the most part, she succeeds in accomplishing both tasks simultaneously. “By exploring the microcosmic and international dimensions of the fragmented lives of slaves, most of them from Spanish America and Brazil but several from Africa or South and East Asia—their interactions with others, and how others saw them—I strive in this volume to expand our understandings of the multiple and contextual definitions of indioness in the heart of the Spanish empire” (13). And at times she goes further, emphasizing “how some of the most peripheral individuals of empire—people in bondage—actively forged large-scale changes on a local level” by bringing to court their protests against and manipulations of the shifting term “indio” decade after decade (30

Ancient history · CONQUEST · Economic Justice · Indigenous · Meaning (existential · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Sophistication · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy