Response to Graubart –Lamela
By Brais Lamela | Published on December 2, 2021
First of all, thank you for presenting your work and sharing your research with Iberian Connections. It’s really inspiring for me to be able to comment on this paper and I think I can say that we are all looking forward to your book Republics of Difference. For these brief remarks for Iberian Connections, I just want to draw out some of the things that resonated with me as I was reading the work and to conclude with a few questions that can serve as a springboard for the later discussion with the audience.
Your paper takes us to the rarefied environment of Santiago del Cercado, an urban reducción attached to the city of Lima. What makes Santiago del Cercado distinctive is that it was created as a site to host temporary mitayos and other urban workers, but later became also a town of homeowners associated to the city. Whereas often reducciones followed the patterns of old indigenous settlements, Santiago del Cercado was an experiment in fostering a new sense of collectivity for people from diverse origins under the imagined category of the “Indian,” under the watchful eye of the Crown and the Jesuit order. In that sense, el Cercado was perhaps a more radical experiment with colonial governance than the usual reducción, more similar perhaps to Vasco de Quiroga’s proposed hospitales in New Spain or to the Jesuit missions down in the Southern Cone: a bounded space, literally bounded in the case of the Cercado, to transform indigenous subjects into workers who would support the Empire and preserve the virtues of civility and the Christian faith. One of the most interesting aspects of el Cercado, which in many ways makes it distinctive, is that this experiment with colonial governance took place in an urban setting. It was meant to correct the perceived dangers of city living, the disorderly and vagabond-like existence of the urban poor. In that sense, it was a place that was meant to incentivize in indigenous peoples the pursuit of a civilized, settled life. However, its very own characteristics as a space based on imagined ideas of “Indianness” made it a contradictory project, since the perceived characteristics of indigenous peoples, their gullibility and proclivity to be misled, stood in the way of their acceptance as full subjects.
Despite the adobe wall surrounding it, the Cercado was not an isolated space. Instead, it irradiated. People moved between the city and the Cercado, and then back to their hometowns. It is for this reason that this very local study is important to understand the construction of Indianness across the viceroyalty, and beyond. In the end, what really transpires from the paper is that it would be inaccurate to imagine that what happened in el Cercado was the mere imposition of Spanish ideals into passive subjects: rather, we have a space of contestation, where different actors struggle to craft new ideas about what the public good meant, even if those debates take place in a heavily regulated context. There were overlapping layers of jurisdictions: indigenous people could resolve justice summarily, they could directly file a complaint with the Viceroy, or use a number of other strategies. Unlike with the Mexican cabildos, we have very few direct records about local justice. Instead, it is as if we can contemplate these issues only once they have left their local communities and become that subject of contention. I would be curious to hear more about what types of issues you think were most likely to be resolved within the community and what matters tended to be scaled up and how that might shape our own perceptions of local justice.
In that sense, I was very interested by your attention to that particularly crucial social institution: property. Indigenous relations to property, which, as you say in your paper, “even today are treated as inherent and essential and even mystical group characteristics,” are revealed to be “a product of the way indigenous people were legally marked across colonial Latin America.” (10). In the cause pitting the indigenous Yauyos against Domingo Francisco, we see different indigenous actors making arguments in favor of private ownership or communal property, with the Spanish judges finally siding in favor of the latter. Like other authors such as Allan Greer, José Carlos de la Puente Luna, or Tamar Herzog, your work shows that indigenous peoples could articulate a diverse range of arguments regarding property and were not trapped in essentialized visions of land. In that sense, I wonder if perhaps our enduring vision of indigenous communities as tied to communal property and social harmony is a legacy of their own dexterity and creativity trying to advocate as much independence as possible for themselves, benefiting from one of the few prerogatives conceded by the Spanish Crown: the protection of community lands.
With this in mind, I want to go back to an expression that you used at the end of your paper. You referred to the “Cercado intellectuals,” and I think it would be good for us to pause on this. In your work, indigenous litigants emerge as intellectuals, whether making arguments in favor of the common good or constructing rationales for ownership on the basis of their improvement of the land or the survival of their community. In that sense, though this might be seen as mainly a work of social history, I think it also challenges us to rethink cultural or intellectual history, though that might not be the central point of this present paper. In many ways, our historiographic tradition is still indebted to a Lockean narrative that associates modernity with the improvement of land via labor, a theory that first emerged precisely as an argument for indigenous dispossession. However, this work shows that similar arguments about improvement were in fact articulated by indigenous actors, even as they were balanced against communal needs. So maybe my first question concerns how to restore these voices and these intellectual arguments to the history of intellectual theory, not merely as tokens into individual experiences. I am asking this question with regards to the present paper but also with regards to some of your other work, where you have engaged with the articulation of political theories in petitions and court records, for instance in cases of what we could call anti-slavery thought in the archives. I think this is a very welcome move because, among other things, it diversifies the range of actors that we see as able to produce new theories and concepts. I would like you to expand a bit on this move, especially since I think it is a move that is gaining currency in current scholarship: what does it mean to take seriously the notion that the courts and these highly hierarchical and coercive environments could lead to the articulation of novel theories? How can the methods and sources of social history be enlisted for projects and questions that have sometimes been the domain intellectual or cultural history?
And then my final question has to do with one of the topics of the Race before Modernity project, which cosponsors the present event. I would like you to comment on how you see race operating in the Cercado, especially because the case of Santiago del Cercado reveals clearly how racial thinking could exist without necessarily having to cling to a strict vision of race: the Cercado was instituted according to very specific visions and prejudices about a particular group of people. What makes it so rich as a case study for race and prejudice, however, is that the Cercado was supposedly meant to transform indigenous inhabitants into productive Christians, while some longstanding prejudices about indigenous identity made that transformation impossible, or rather always ongoing. How do we understand early modern racialization from this particular case study? Which ideas or notions about race have you found useful for your research? And also, how do we grapple with the fact that indigenous peoples themselves were creatively deploying those very ideas of institutionalized inferiority to craft their own social worlds?
