(Re)Fashionable Market: 18th-Century Zapotec Brides as Transatlantic Consumers

As a result of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1715), communities in Spanish America grew dramatically more integrated into wider trade networks of the Atlantic World. Although French and English purveyors of luxury goods served as intermediaries in this process, recent scholarship on transatlantic consumerism of this period credits colonial Creoles and Africans as highly influential agents in the emergence of this “modern” globalized marketplace. Still, the similar role played by Indigenous consumers remains largely ignored. Zapotec women of Oaxaca in Southern Mexico actively engaged in these same types of global commercial activities as evidenced by Native-language documents such as dowry records and testaments. These documents demonstrate that Zapotec brides were at the forefront of market innovations, particularly as part of gift exchange–known as guelaguetza–which cemented newly married couples to their local community and society. Cosmopolitan consumers long before the colonial period, these eighteenth-century Indigenous women not only embraced the sudden flood of fine French and English textiles into Mexico, but also refashioned such items to serve traditional marriage customs despite laws that prevented their use. What objects did Zapotec brides selectively introduce to their communities? What power dynamics do these objects reflect? What can we learn about the Zapotec women and their chosen luxury goods? This paper seeks to move conversations about transatlantic consumerism forward by offering examples of the ways in which Indigenous women transformed global trade in a colonial Mexican periphery.