Spanish-Indigenous Household Formation in the Wake of Conquest

Between 1492 and 1550, Spanish and non-elite indigenous household formation was a norm, not an aberration. Many of the women who became the partners of Spanish men had been doled out as war booty, taken in village raids, or illegally branded as slaves. To unravel the Gordian knot of violence, bondage, and intimacy inherent in early colonial conjugal relations, my talk will privilege those historical subjects who still remained kinless, silenced, and dispossessed. Analyses of notarial and parish records show that for the deracinated servants and slaves who formed temporary or long-lasting partnerships with their masters, the development of family ties served as a source of rootedness, connectedness, power, and prestige. Time and again indigenous women held in bondage proved that kinship relations could transcend their categorization as slaves, naborķas, yanaconas, and criadas. This work adds a fresh perspective to debates on early colonial family formation by exposing the historiographic gender gap between the “invasion” (part one) and “early colonial settlement” (part two) periods. It also questions the usefulness of definitions of “family” based largely on Spanish genealogical models which emphasize male lineage, legitimate unions, and inheritance laws to explain Spanish and non-elite-indigenous household formation. Research reveals that these temporary and long-lasting unions not only reproduced blood and fictive kinship ties but they also reinforced local and regional social and economic networks.