Review of Baerga, Negociaciones de sangre

Hispanic American Historical Review

Book Reviews / Colonial Period

167

seemingly unstoppable imperial decline, New Spain was not in crisis (even as wars and trade disruptions created challenges) before the Napoleonic incursion of 1808. Only then did the powers and trades that sustained New Spain’s wealth begin to fall apart. In the conflicts unleashed in 1808, the primary interest of powerful officials and merchants in Mexico City and Veracruz, Ca´diz, Seville, and Madrid was to keep silver flowing. In the same crisis, commodity exporters in Cuba, Caracas, and Buenos Aires aimed for free trade beyond imperial channels. As challenges escalated, there was no general Spanish American interest. The Ca´diz merchants pivotal to so much from 1808 to 1814 aimed to keep New Spain’s silver arriving to sustain their profits and the fight against Napoleon, who also aimed to claim New Spain’s silver. Could the silver monopoly live while others across the empire demanded free trade? Should the silver monopoly break, could the empire live? Without the revenues of silver, could Spain fight off Napoleon? Diverging New World interests in a time of European war underlay the imperial breakdown that began in 1808. The Steins illuminate that crucible of conflict through deeply researched and detailed analyses. They repeatedly show that the soaring visions that focused imperial debates were always political fronts constructed to promote some interests, mask others, and debate still others. The great contribution of this final volume is its documentation of the complex and contradictory interests—commercial, political, and imperial—at play in the Iberian crisis of the spring of 1808, the Mexico City debates that led to the September coup that ousted Viceroy Jose´ de Iturrigaray, and the conflicts that carried on until September 1810—when the Cortes of Ca´diz convened to write a constitution that aimed to hold New Spain loyal to Spain just as Miguel Hidalgo sparked the Bajı´o insurgency that assaulted silver production and the social order in New Spain. In the analysis, Manuel Godoy, Fernando VII, Napoleon, Iturrigaray, and Gabriel de Yermo cease to be caricatures; they emerge as powerful men struggling in times of unprecedented conflict to promote interests, open possibilities, and block foes. Others in Madrid, Seville, Ca´diz, and Mexico City (too many to note) emerge as equally important participants—taking our understanding of the fall of the Spanish empire out of the imagined domain of heroes and villains and into the center of a complex history of global resonance. If we seek such history, the Steins must be read, digested, debated, and incorporated in a new generation of integrated historical studies.

john tutino, Georgetown University doi 10.1215/00182168-3424060

Negociaciones de sangre: Dina´micas racializantes en el Puerto Rico decimono´nico. By marı´a del carmen baerga. Tiempo Emulado: Historia de Ame´rica y Espan˜a. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2015. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 317 pp. Paper, e36.00. Marı´a del Carmen Baerga has produced a magnificent new history of race, gender, sexuality, and marriage in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. The book is based on a

Published by Duke University Press

Hispanic American Historical Review

168

HAHR / February

meticulous and theoretically informed reading of the legal cases generated by the Royal Pragmatic on Marriage, a law designed to prevent marriages between persons of unequal social standing. After revision in 1803, the law required all Spanish subjects under the age of majority to obtain parental permission to marry. When parents refused to grant permission, children could appeal to the political authorities. Officials then investigated the claims of all parties, collected testimony from neighbors and townspeople, and decided whether to permit the match. Baerga brings these cases to life in lucid prose, comparing them with other instances in which the same authorities collected testimony about social status: petitions of legitimation and investigations into purity of blood. She expertly draws out what she calls the “juicy details” to create complex portraits of individuals and authorities who, working with a shared vocabulary structured by the law, attempted to negotiate their place within the system of social inequality (p. 17). She puts these close textual readings in dialogue with the extensive scholarship on race, marriage, and sexuality in colonial Latin America, offering a new interpretation of sources that are familiar from other contexts but largely unexamined for Puerto Rico. The result is a book that will be interesting to a much broader audience than simply scholars of Puerto Rico. Baerga shows that parents and officials in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, with its large free population of African descent, used the framework of the Royal Pragmatic primarily to prevent interracial marriage. Yet, she argues, nineteenth-century Puerto Rico had neither a stable system of racial classification nor a consistent apparatus for assigning and recording racial identities. Marriage cases therefore provided participants opportunities to intervene in the production of their own racial status, “al fragor de la interaccio´n social” (p. 32). The cases also reveal that marriages themselves served as “racializing mechanisms,” with the capacity to confirm and reinforce—but also to reframe and transform—the racial status of bride and groom and their extended families. This, of course, was the reason why some families sought to prevent what they saw as unequal marriages. They sought to defend and consolidate their racial status against the stain of mixture, which could contaminate the lineage on which the status of a broad network of family members depended. However, the reverse was also true. An advantageous marriage, creating links to a family of high status, could help to strengthen claims to honorability and whiteness for families whose status was in question. As the mayor of Loı´za, Antonio Cordero, wrote in 1826, “en algunas familias, ya sea por los enlaces, o por otras causas, como se ve muy a menudo, han pasado a blancos unos y otros permanecen en su primitiva esfera de morenos, o pardos libres” (quoted on p. 18). Note that for Cordero this was not a matter of “passing for white,” in the Anglo-American sense of passing: pretending to be something that they believed they were not and that they could never actually be. For Cordero and many other Puerto Ricans of his time, it was possible for people with African ancestry to “pass to white”—to become white. The possibility of passing to white, furthermore, seems not to have been dependent on a person’s phenotype, at least not for the subset of Puerto Ricans who were subject to official investigation. Indeed, participants in these investigations almost never relied on (or even mentioned) physical examination of the persons in question. This supports

Published by Duke University Press

Hispanic American Historical Review

Book Reviews / National Period

169

Baerga’s conclusion that nineteenth-century Puerto Ricans did not embrace modern notions of biology and heredity and therefore did not see racial difference as located primarily in the body. That is not to say, however, that everyone had equal access to whiteness. Baerga shows, for instance, that inequalities of gender and sexuality deeply conditioned the negotiation of racial status. Routes to whiteness depended on masculine privilege, and descent into the “castas ´ınfimas” was inseparable from female sexual dishonor. Baerga does not propose to build a single, unified theory of racial formation in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico but rather, drawing on Michel Foucault, seeks to “identificar rupturas y divergencias respecto a las formas de pensar lo racial en la actualidad” (p. 40). She notes that “aunque pueden existir ‘encabalgamientos, interacciones o ecos’ entre las nociones raciales modernas y las que estoy tratando de resaltar, mi intere´s primordial es enfocar en la alteridad de estas” (p. 40). Some readers may wish for a messier account that brings into view, and helps explain, the interactions and continuities between early modern and modern concepts of race in Puerto Rico. But all will agree that Negociaciones de sangre brilliantly changes the debate and sets a new standard for the incorporation of gender and sexuality into historical analysis of race in Puerto Rico.

jesse hoffnung-garskof, University of Michigan doi 10.1215/00182168-3424072

National Period Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador. By christa j. olson. Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Photographs. Maps. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxiii, 238 pp. Cloth, $64.95. ¿De quie´n es la patria? (To whom does the fatherland belong?) is a question that has always underlain nation-building projects, and it is the core issue that rhetorician Christa Olson interrogates in her study of indigeneity and the creation of national identities in postindependence Ecuador. Olson maintains that all national identities and all nationalisms are at their base rhetorical. Rhetorical statements emerge not only through the political and intellectual creations of government officials and the dominant culture but also through common actions and interactions in daily life. In order to understand the creation of national identities, Olson examines both the official and private realms and both mundane and extraordinary discourses. In analyzing the rhetoric of these discourses, Olson challenges an assumption that “everyday” and “elite” are opposing concepts, “as if elites did not have an everyday and subalterns never stepped outside of the ordinary” (p. 13). That seemingly logical but little-recognized observation is representative of the powerfully compelling arguments that Olson forwards in this innovative and fascinating monograph.

Published by Duke University Press