Dead Giveaways

This collection offers readers a persuasive testimony of the value for historians of the last will and testament through which people attempted to provide for their souls and their descendants after death. Although the last will and testament were part of European culture, many Spanish American wills were prepared for members of indigenous societies, thereby offering an opportunity to learn more about the patterns of the colonial cultures that emerged from the interaction of European, Native American, and African in the Americas.Reflecting the editors’ own background in Mesoamerica, the majority of the articles in the collection focus on central and southern Mesoamerica; the final three pieces deal with the Andes. The collection is introduced by an article by Sarah Cline in which she analyzes the instructions that priests were to give notaries who recorded indigenous wills, which were included by Alonso de Molina in his confessional manual published in Nahuatl and Spanish in 1569. The author suggests that the differences between Molina’s instructions and the model accompanying them, and the patterns of actual native wills and bequests, offer clues to Nahua social practices maintained in the face of Spanish efforts to impose a more European model. The next three articles focus on central Mexico. Susan Kellogg examines the wills left by both men and women belonging to a single family line during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concluding that gender patterns and family relationships shifted in favor of men, and women’s status in their communities declined. This conclusion is based on these as well as other Nahua wills, but I cannot but wonder if a database of 64 wills is sufficient to argue for a major shift in gender relations during this period from a pattern of parallel spheres for men and women to a more hierarchically ranked system of growing male dominance.Both Rebecca Horn and Stephanie Wood use testaments to examine topics that may not initially seem accessible in sources that usually focus on property and personal possessions. Horn examines Nahua testaments, together with other sources, as a window into the active petty trade that was usually absent from standard notarial records. Wood looks at the testaments embedded in community claims to land. Both articles are exciting examples of the value of wills, especially when they are analyzed in conjunction with other kinds of sources. Kevin Terraciano and Matthew Restall stick to more conventional uses of testaments. Terraciano focuses on popular religious concepts revealed by differences in the concepts expressed in the religious preambles of Mixtec-language wills and those written in Spanish. Restall analyzes the growing incorporation of European goods and institutions in Maya communities recorded by wills written in Maya during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering the result of his analysis as evidence that Maya communities neither resisted Spanish culture nor adopted it wholeheartedly, but incorporated Hispanic elements into their own lives without thereby becoming “hispanized.”Only one of the three studies focusing on the Andes looks at wills for evidence of changing patterns of material wealth. Susan Ramírez compares three wills left by members of the native elite in the area of Trujillo during the second half of the sixteenth century to illustrate her contention that the growing involvement of members of the Andean elite in the monetary economy signified not only changing strategies but also the elite’s definition of wealth as material goods rather than people. Thomas Abercrombie compares the wills left by Spaniards and Andean elites in Charcas in the latter part of the sixteenth century. The content of the wills varied, but the variance cannot be explained by ethnicity. Some members of both Spanish and Andean elites provided bequests for the poor Indians under their authority, while others attempted to cheat God’s justice as well as man’s. As Abercrombie points out, wills were Spanish documents, and the Andean testees were written in Spanish terms. Because of that, Andean wills cannot throw light on questions that have long vexed researchers, such as the complex relations between status and land in Andean societies. Answers to questions about Andean tradition must be sought in the records of situations, such as litigation between communities, in which members of Andean society argued with one another over the meaning of their own custom and practice.Karen Powers uses testamentary data to examine the strategies deployed by a local elite lineage whose members used their links to Spanish society to create themselves as the caciques of the “Kingdom of Quito.” Alliance with the Spaniards gave the founder of the lineage recognition from the new rulers, and the enterprising new cacique obtained the material wealth that made it possible for him and his descendants to main tain and reinforce their position with both the Spanish authorities and the members of their community by marrying his wealthy mestiza mistress. This article, the most exciting contribution in the collection, is a brilliant reconstruction of the complex and creative strategies used by ambitious people seeking to build their fortunes by using whatever tactics were available to them, without concern for whether or not they were following “Andean” tradition.This collection is an example of both the great potential of testaments for social historians, and their limitations. Some of the pieces in the collection, in particular the articles by Kellogg, Hill, and Ramírez, offer valuable new evidence on changes in indigenous material culture in the wake of the European invasion. But a testament is no more transparent than any other written source; wills were usually drawn up by people who had reason to fear that their wishes might not be followed after their death, and their testaments often reflect their efforts to use the conventions of Spanish society to gain objectives of their own. In addition, a testament reflects European values and practices, whatever the culture of the testee. The form of this source, like that of most others, both defines and distorts the information that can be extracted from it. For that reason, I found the most exciting and important pieces in this collection to be those that did not restrict their analysis to wills, but used them together with other sources to offer answers to questions that are not defined by the character of a single source, even one as rich as the wills that permitted “dead giveaways.”

Ancient history · Archaeology · Biology · Colonialism · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Mesoamerica · Early Modern Women Writers · Ecology · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture

• Los hacendados y rancheros mayas de Yucatán en el siglo XIX

  Open Access•Laura Machuca Gallegos•Estudios de Cultura Maya•2011

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• Heirs to the Hieroglyphs

  Open Access•Matthew Restall•The Americas A Quarterly Review…•1997

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