“Contra Su Voluntad”: Coercive Domestic Labor and Indigenous Slavery in 16th-Century Yucatán

Spanish settlers in Yucatan were not willing to perform the labor required to sustain their households if they could have others do it for them. This paper explores how elite, propertied Spaniards developed a system of compulsory domestic labor that brought Indigenous women and girls from Maya pueblos to work in colonial households. Spanish officials often referred to this labor system as personal service, lumping it together with other compulsory, unpaid labor demanded of the Maya. The idealized version of personal service as voluntary, short-term, and paid fell to the wayside as Spanish settlers disregarded the laws intended to protect Indigenous populations. The realities of the resulting domestic labor structure ranged from coerced, short-term stints serving in colonial household to de facto Indigenous slavery.

This paper analyzes instances in which Maya women and girls were detained for months or years on end, forced to labor under their mistress’ watchful eye. Some of these people remained in colonial settlements indefinitely, others returned to their pueblos, and still others fled into the brush and beyond the reach of colonial authority. Elite settlers developed several methods of keeping Indigenous domestic laborers within their households. Spaniards arranged relationships—both formal and informal—between Maya servant women and enslaved African men in order to add dependents to their households. Spanish masters and mistresses were also known to physically detain Maya laborers to prevent them from leaving the household during the course of their service. Some settlers used physical violence to scare their dependents into submission or to punish them for attempts to escape. The Maya women and girls who were detained in colonial households for extended periods of time and forced to labor under threat of violence experienced a form of enslavement.