Global Indios

Reviews of serious books should not begin by noting their covers. In this case there is something deeply poignant about the portrayal of three indigenous people. The image is from Juan Cordero’s Cristóbal Colón en la corte de los reyes católicos, a canvas executed in 1850 as the myth of Columbus-as-culture-hero was being invented. The larger tableau from which the image was cropped shows Columbus in April 1493 standing before Ferdinand and Isabella, who are surrounded by soldiers in armor, a couple of pages, three ladies in waiting, and a Dominican friar. Columbus looks at his patrons and gestures toward the indigenous people, two men and one woman, who crouch or bow their heads. The incident depicted here is well known; Columbus had returned from his first voyage with captive “Indians,” proof positive that he had reached “India beyond the Ganges” by sailing west.In most historical narratives about the aftermath of the 1492 encounter between worlds, this moment has been forgotten, or acknowledged and put aside. Where Europeans came to be understood as moving about a wider world at will, and Africans were moved against their will, Indios, in most historical tellings, became quintessentially local people who lived out their lives in the small pueblos of their birth or perhaps in emerging cities across the vast expanse that came to be known as the New World or America. Now comes Nancy E. van Deusen to remind us of a lost history of the movement, suffering, and agency of Indios in the rapidly globalizing world of the early sixteenth century.Van Deusen’s story begins with the stark observation that hundreds of thousands of Indios were enslaved and forcibly relocated to foreign lands in both the New and Old Worlds between roughly 1500 and 1600. Whatever the exact figure, the historiography leaves no doubt that huge numbers of indigenous people were put into motion by merchants’ efforts to create a transatlantic indigenous slave trade during the long period of uncertainty about whether “Indians” could legally be enslaved. This broader history, an early parallel to the subsequent mass enslavement of Africans, is still being framed out by scholars. Van Deusen inserts herself into this project by seeking to understand the trajectories of the 2,000 or so Indios who traveled across the Atlantic from various points in the Spanish Empire to end up in Castile. Most arrived at Seville, then a global entrepôt, as slaves and took up lives there or in towns scattered across the countryside. Some of these people, nearly 10 percent (184), entered the historical record by challenging their enslaved status in the House of Trade in Seville or before the Council of the Indies in Madrid. Van Deusen’s chief evidentiary base consists of 127 lawsuits filed between 1530 and 1585.With a deep bow to Carlo Ginzberg, Van Deusen enters into rich and detailed records. Her approach—a gradual widening of focus, as though she were beginning with the cropped images of Cordero’s Indians and slowly opening out to the canvas as a whole—serves well in capturing the experiences and understandings of people who had little choice in living “transimperial” lives. Two early chapters show how displaced people cobbled together identities from the “routedness” of enslavement and deracination and learned to challenge their fate. Chapters 3 and 4 reveal how Indio litigants navigated the apparatus of legality. They were attentive to official “inspections” launched in 1543 and 1549 to address the worst excesses of their enslavement and knew how to bring grievances before a judge. Van Deusen does a masterful job of mining the cases for personal detail while treating legal and procedural issues with precision. In chapters 5 and 6 she brings her granular approach to bear on issues of territoriality, just war, and rescue, concepts that activated broader imperial ideas and were critical in litigants’ efforts to identify themselves in ways that would advance the cause of their freedom. And yet, she never loses focus on the up-close, as when she discusses the lost archive of horror etched into indigenous skins—the brands they bore on faces, thighs, and backs—and how litigants might dodge their implications. In all, these chapters paint an elegant canvas, carefully foregrounding the meticulousness of her records against a well-rendered background of imperial structure and ideology.Chapter 7 is perhaps the most tantalizing, for it seems like a picture within the picture—a canvas full of possibility but necessarily implied rather than shown. The idea that, at least in the context of litigation in Spain, the term Indio could refer to natives from Mexico, Brazil, the Moluccas, Burma, or Calicut is a fascinating revelation. The move to engage such “cosmopolitan subjects” is understandable, even if only hinted at here. Indeed, the chapter makes me wonder whether there is a whole other book begging to be written, if sources permit.The subtitle of the book refers to Lewis Hanke’s classic The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949). Van Deusen does a great service in reminding us that the struggle, which is ongoing, was not just a matter of the declarations of kings and councillors, but also of the acts and wills of ordinary litigants who in very concrete ways were among the first to insist on the moral costs of globalization

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