AHA Session 10
Conference on Latin American History 1
Thursday, January 4, 2024: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Continental Ballroom 2 (Hilton Union Square, Ballroom)
Chair:
Sylvia Sellers-García, Boston College
Session Abstract
Taking as its point of departure the premise that early modern actors and communities often lived and worked by unstated and unwritten rules, this panel considers places and people who labored or produced at the margins of the Spanish Empire. With case studies from southern Mexico, the highlands of Guatemala, the hinterlands of Cartagena, and the contested borderlands of the Río de la Plata, the papers explore the intersections of law and lawlessness, free and coerced labor, liberalism and illiberalism, and the people and practices that sustained colonial governance. At issue are questions of production, productivity, and waste, along with the tensions between colonial officials’ expectations of work and colonial subjects’ ability or inability to labor in expected ways. Legal structures shaped what work could be and should be - enslaved labor, forced labor, labor for the state or for the benefit of the imprisoned - and who was expected to perform each type of labor, and yet local customs and implicit knowledge remade and occasionally undid such expectations. These tensions came to the fore in a variety of contexts. Gendered expectations were upended by women who fulfilled masculine ideals or by men who refused to work. Racialized conceptions of manual labor, manifested through compulsory work or criminal sentences, were challenged by claims to illness, pregnancy, old age, and disability. Methods of confinement meant to extract labor often proved inadequate for the task of actually producing work. And in marginal spaces, people found means of work and methods of profit that skirted both social norms and legal frameworks of extraction.
This panel examines these many contexts and the patterns of push and pull manifest in fugitive work to raise several questions: How was productivity imagined and reimagined? How did conceptions of waste shape corresponding conceptions of time, gender, and the laboring body? How were categories of deviance shaped or subverted by different kinds of labor? How were legal structures and social conceptions altered by challenges to the regime of productivity? In “Blasphemy and the Limits of Legality,” Díaz Burgos analyzes how blasphemy served as a tactic of resistance among enslaved subjects. Women whose labor was forcibly extracted through enslavement evaded further bodily punishment by compelling inquisitorial processing. In “Between Banishment and Cloister,” Erbig considers the gendered nature of penal deportation and the intersecting experiences of convicts and Indigenous captives in the Río de la Plata. In “Mining the Margins,” Ramírez examines the transformation of indigenous caciques into agents of an underground commerce in salt in southern Mexico. In “The Many Meanings of Vago,” Sellers-García examines how the crime of non-work (“vagancia”) was used by the state to generate forced labor and by women to convict abusive husbands. Collectively, these papers show how sanctioned legal arrangements derived from racialized expectations of labor and productivity. In doing so, they articulate unexpected spaces of struggle for those whose labor was targeted and the myriad ways in which they resisted or leveraged such expectations.
