No se hace pueblo sin ellas

The historical narrative of the Spanish colonization of the Americas is generally framed by the notion that not enough peninsular women emigrated to the New World. White women were believed to be able to tame the violence of Spanish men, provide condoned outlets for their sexual desires, and produce and properly Hispanize successive generations of Spanish children. The supposed failure of European women to participate in colonization efforts left many colonies untenable and left native women vulnerable to Spanish male sexual aggression. In order to rethink peninsular women's roles in colonization, we must reconsider this judgment that there were not enough women, which scholars have assumed because there were never equal numbers of male and female emigrants. However, significant numbers of peninsular women did make the Atlantic crossing. In her new book, Amelia Almorza Hidalgo pieces together an array of quantitative and qualitative evidence to tell the story of peninsular women's emigration to Peru during the first century after the Spanish conquest.Almorza Hidalgo begins by examining the data on emigration to the Indies. Relying on the work of others, including Peter Boyd-Bowman and Magnus Mörner, she focuses on the period between 1560 and 1625, when women made up between one-quarter and one-third of emigrants. Between 1601 and 1625, women and men emigrated in nearly equal numbers, although the number of legal female migrants declined precipitously over the rest of the century. Both single and married women made the transatlantic crossing, and Almorza Hidalgo clearly details the legal migration process. She then uses both published letters and archival materials to explore the push-pull factors that led to women's migration. By necessity she relies on letters written by men, but she does a good job teasing out the llamadas that would influence women's decisions.She then follows her subjects to their destination and works to reconstruct their lives in colonial Lima. Using ecclesiastical records, she explores marriage patterns and makes some interesting discoveries, including the marriage strategies of colonists from different parts of the Iberian Peninsula. For instance, women from Andalusia generally married men from Old Castile, while those from Extremadura were more prone to endogamy (p. 174). She also analyzes the evolution of Lima's marriage market. While the initial settlers sent for peninsular women to marry, Spanish men increasingly turned to American-born Spanish women and eventually indigenous women for wives. These last two phases led to a collapse of the marriage market for Spanish women and affected the desirability of Lima as a destination for female migrants. Focusing on encomenderas, Almorza Hidalgo examines the ways that the Spanish legal system allowed women to inherit significant property and use it to attain some social mobility. The last chapter studies the social welfare institutions (both formal and informal) available to single women in Lima and how Spanish women maintained their connections on both sides of the Atlantic through their testamentary bequests.Although much of the information in this book will be familiar to scholars, Almorza Hidalgo has done an excellent job of bringing together the English- and Spanish-language scholarship. Moreover, she has combined the scholarship with new archival research to tell a story that very much needed to be told. Peninsular women emigrated to Peru for an array of reasons and under a variety of circumstances. Her emphasis on the role of the family in women's migration makes her work a nice complement to Jane Mangan's Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain (2016). Almorza Hidalgo's book also makes an important contribution to the scholarship that sees Atlantic migration as a two-way movement, with the peninsula and the Americas intensely connected by people, letters, money, and plans.There are significant parts of the narrative that do not include women, in part because not every moment of the journey was gendered and in part because the documentary record does not allow Almorza Hidalgo to see how women's experience might have differed from that of men. For instance, in her discussion of the passage through Panama, I wondered how that very difficult part of the journey might have been experienced differently by women.Almorza Hidalgo has constructed a clear, useful narrative of peninsular women's migration. Unfortunately, the book lacks a conclusion to tie it all together and to articulate any overarching conclusions. However, this book does much to reenvision peninsular women's engagement in the construction of the Spanish empire and allows us to begin to reconsider women's role in early colonization

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