Maids, Breadwinners, Insurgents: Colonial-Era Maya Women in Native Polities and Abroad

Drawing on data from territory now encompassed in Mexico and Guatemala, this paper identifies multiple paradoxes in the roles of late colonial-era Maya women.  For example, while both native and Spanish understandings emphasized the centrality of heterosexual couples in defining households, censuses and tribute rolls for many native communities show large proportions of households headed by women only.  A second paradox takes us to colonial cities, where legions of indigenous women worked as domestic servants under patriarchal (colonial) authority in their employers’ homes; yet these same women were often key breadwinners whose wage remittances supported native families and communities.  And though women in indigenous communities were subject to patriarchal village (if not household) authorities, women appear among the insurgents and even leadership in the records of a number of late colonial Indian uprisings.  Thus the paper suggests a refocusing of the scholarly lens that has tended to view native women in terms of their subjection to patriarchal authorities in households, native communities, and the colonial state.