'Two pairs of pink satin shoes!!' Race, clothing and identity in the Americas (17th-19th centuries)

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 52, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 175-195

  Earle, Rebecca ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34247729925     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/2001.52.175     Document Type: Review

References (121)

1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark [1601?], Act I, Sc.III.
2. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Routledge, New York, 1992, p. 16.
3. For a splendid historically-based argument that cross dressing has not always prompted a 'category crisis', see Dror Wahrman, 'How the English Wrote their Juvenal, 1644-1815', Representations 64, 1998.
4. For emblematic examples, see Garber, Vested Interests;
5. and also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 1990.
6. For a recent analysis that, although historically-based, focuses largely on clothing's subversive potential, see Jessica Munns and Penny Richards (eds), The Clothes that Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth-Century Culture, University of Delaware Press, Newark, 1999.
7. For an excellent introduction to the traveller's gaze, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Routledge, London, 1992.
8. Juan de Viera, 'Breve Compendiosa, Narración de la ciudad de México, corte y cabeza de toda la América Meridional' (1778), in Agustín de Vetancurt, Juan Manuel de San Vicente and Juan de Viera, La ciudad de México en el siglo XVIII (1690-1780): Tres crónicas, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Mexico, 1990, p. 256.
9. For two watches worn simultaneously, see the eighteenth-century Mexican portraits reproduced in Artes de México: El retrato novohispano 25, 1994, pp. 10-1, 22, 42, 48.
10. Brantz Mayer, Mexico, As It Was and As It Is, G. B. Zieber, Philadelphia, 1847, p. 152.
11. A lépero is a beggar. I am grateful to Guy Thomson for this source. Or see the remarks by the German traveller Carl Sartorius, Mexico about 1850 (1858), F. A. Brockhaus, Stuttgart, 1961: in Veracruz he notes 'on the one side Paris fashion, on the other the lightest possible clothing ... The fair sex exhibits the same contrast: on the one hand the greatest luxury, on the other half naked' (p. 2, or see p. 81).
12. Thomas Gage, Travels in the New World (1648), University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1958, p. 68, or see p. 73.
13. John Colthurst, The Colthurst Journal: Journal of a Special Magistrate in the Islands of Barbados and St. Vincent July 1835-September 1838, Woodville Marshall (ed.), kto Press, Millwood, 1977, pp. 121-2. I am grateful to Sheen Boa for this reference.
14. Gage notes that 'many of these are or had been slaves, though love has set them loose, at liberty to enslave souls to sin and Satan': Travels in the New World, p. 69.
15. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, transl. John Adams (1806), Knopf, New York, 1964, pp. 196-7.
16. Capt. G.F. Lyon, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the Republic of Mexico in the Year 1826 (1828), 2 vols, Kennicat Press, 1971, vol. 2, p. 194.
17. Juan and Ulloa, Voyage to South America, p. 196
18. Ilona Katzew, who has written a suggestive study of colonial casta paintings, regards 'the uniform assignment of luxurious garb to the different castas' in these early series as their most outstanding feature. See Ilona Katzew, 'Casta Painting: Identity and Social Stratification in Colonial Mexico', New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America, Ilona Katzew (ed.), Americas Society, New York, 1996, p. 19.
19. For further discussion of casta painting, see the issue of Artes de México devoted to the genre: Arles de México: La pintura de castas 8, 1990;
20. and María Concepción García Sáiz, Las castas mexicanas. Un génera pintórico americano, Olivetti, Milan, 1989.
21. William Betagh, A Voyage Round the World, being an Account of a Remarkable Enterprise begun in the Year 1719, London, 1728, p. 266.
22. Juan and Ulloa, Voyage to South America, p. 137.
23. Juan and Ulloa here refer to Quito. The French traveller Amédée Frézier similarly lamented that the ladies of Lima had 'an insatiable appetite for pearls and jewels, for bracelets, earrings and other paraphernalia, which saps the wealth of husbands and lovers. We have seen ladies who wear sixty thousand pesos worth of jewels on their person'. Amadeo Frézier, Relación del viaje por el mar del sur (1716), Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas, 1982, p. 191;
24. see also pp. 219-22. See also the comments of the Abbé Courte de la Blanchardière, Nouveau voyage fait au Pérou (1751), cited in Jean-Paul Duvoils, L'Amérique espagnole vue et rêvée. Les livres de voyages de Christophe Colomb a Bougainville, Editions Promodis, Paris, 1985, p. 305.
25. Gage, Travels in the New World, p. 68.
26. Juan and Ulloa, Voyage to South America, pp. 195-6.
27. Juan de Viera, 'Breve Compendiosa', p. 256.
28. Hans West (1791), cited in Neville Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies: St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix, B. W. Higman (ed.), Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1992, p. 151.
29. am grateful to Steiner Saether for this reference. Captain John Stedman likewise praised the 'neatness and elegance' of coloured dress in 1770s Surinam: John Stedman, Expedition to Surinam, being a Narrative of a Five Year Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam in Guiana on the Wild Coast of South America from the Year 1772 to 1777 (1796), The Folio Society, London, 1963, p. 115. See also Stedman's descriptions of his mulata slave/mistress Joanna, esp. pp. 33-4.
30. John Byron, Byron's Narrative, containing an Account of the Great Distresses Suffered by Himself, and his Companions on the Coasts of Patagonia from the Year 1740 till their Arrival in England, 1746, Belfast, 1844, pp. 105-6.
31. Or see Juan and Ulloa, Voyage to South America, pp. 71, 84, 138, 197-8.
32. Silvia Hunold Lara, 'The Signs of Color: Women's Dress and Racial Relations in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, ca 1750-1815', Colonial Latin American Review 6: 2, 1997, pp. 219-20.
33. Or see Byron, Byron's Narrative, p. 107.
34. Lara, 'Signs of Color', p. 214. Lara notes that the term peças implicitly refers to both the ornaments, and to the slaves themselves.
35. Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l'isle Saint-Domingue (1797), Socíeté de l'Histoire des Colonies Françaises, Paris, 1958, pp. 76-7, and 39, respectively.
36. Moreau de Saint-Méry was less impressed by the ladies of Spanish Santo Domingo. See his Descripción de la parte española de Santo Domingo (1796), Editora Montalvo, Ciudad Trujillo, 1944, pp. 85-7.
37. Agustín de Vetancurt, 'Tratado de la Ciudad de México y las Grandezas que la ilustran despues que la fundaron españoles' (1698), in Agustín de Vetancurt, Juan Manuel de San Vicente and Juan de Viera, La ciudad de México en el siglo XVIII (1690-1780): Tres crónicas, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Mexico, 1990, pp. 46-7.
38. have modified the translation given in Katzew, 'Casta Paintings', p. 18.
39. Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey, The West Indies in 1837 (1838), Philip Wright (ed.), Dawsons of Pall Mall, London, 1968, p. 52 (italics as in the original). I am grateful to Sheena Boa for this reference.
40. Cochrane, Journal, vol. 2, pp. 88-9.
41. Or see Lyon, Journal of a Residence, vol. 1, pp. 106, 202,
42. Journal of a Residence, vol. 2, pp. 235-6;
43. and Anon., Cartas escritas desde Colombia durante un viaje de Caracas a Bogotá y desde allí a Santa Marta en 1823, Banco de la República, Bogotá, 1975, pp. 95-6 (probably plagiarized from Cochrane).
44. Lyon, Journal of a Residence, vol. 2, p. 235.
45. Or see John Luccock, Rio de Janeiro and the Southern Parts of Brazil taken during a Residence of Ten Years in that Country from 1808 to 1818, Samuel Leigh, London, 1820, p. 190
46. for descriptions of the dress of Brazilian 'females of the second class'; and for two comments on wedding dress, see Pierre Dessalles, Sugar and Slavery, Family and Race: the Letters and Diary of Pierre Dessalles, Planter in Martinique, 1808-1856, Elborg Forster and Robert Forster (eds), Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1996, p. 168;
47. and Isaac Holton, New Granada: Twenty Months in the Andes (1856), Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1967, pp. 192-3.
48. E. A. Hastings, A Glimpse of the Tropics (1900),
49. cited in Steeve Buckridge, 'Dress as Resistance and Accommodation among Jamaican Colonized Women, 1760-1890', unpublished conference paper, Surinam, 1998, p. 11. The remark is ascribed to a traveller in the 1850s.
50. Jas. A. Thome and J. Horace Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies. A Six Months Tour in Antigua, Barbados and Jamaica in the Year 1837, The American Anti-Slavery Society, New York, 1838, p. 8.
51. Or see Mrs A. C. Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Conditions of the White, Coloured and Negro Population of the West Indies (1833), Negro Universities Press, New York, 1969, vol. 1, p. 10.
52. am grateful to Sheena Boa for these references. In his study of the Eurasian community in India, C. J. Hawes notes similar anxiety over attempts by colonials to 'follow the example set them by the white aristocracy': 'Since Western dress was the mark of the ruling race, the Eurasian variation upon it seemed to be an unwelcome, if unconscious, parody which might invite ridicule and so diminish British standing in Indian eyes'. See C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: the Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773-1833, Curzon Press, 1996, p. 79.1 am grateful to Lizzie Collingham for this source.
53. Henry Bradshaw Fearon, Sketches of America: a Journey of five Thousand Miles through the Eastern and Western States of America, London, 1819, p. 9.
54. See also Shane White and Graham White, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1998, pp. 91-3.
55. Cirilio Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés o la loma del angel (1882), Caracas, 1981, p. 32.
56. use Vera Kutzinski's translation from Sugar's Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, 1993, p. 57.
57. Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets, pp. 57-8.
58. Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1834), Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 49-50.
59. See Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon, 'Variétés dans l'Espèce Humaine', Oeuvres Complètes (1749+), Paris, 1859, vol. 3, pp. 268-325.
60. For comments on eighteenth and nineteenth-century racial theories, see Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, Penguin, 1973;
61. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, Penguin, London, 1981;
62. Londa Schiebinger, Nature's Body: Sexual Politics and the Making of Modem Science, Pandora, 1993;
63. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, Routledge, New York, 1995;
64. and Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society, Macmillan, London, 1996.
65. Sir Charles Linné, A General System of Nature through the Three Grand Kingdoms of Animals, Vegetables and Minerals, 7 vols, Lackington, Allen and Co., London, 1806, vol. 1, p. 9. Linnaeus developed and revised his Systema Naturae from 1735 until his death in 1778.
66. Peter Wade (Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, Pluto Press, London, 1997) discusses the meaning of race in Latin America.
67. Martin Minchom, The People of Quito: 1690-1810: Change and Unrest in the Underclass, Westview Press, Boulder, 1994, p. 158. See also p. 190.
68. For very clear examples, see Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, Ensayos sobre historia social colombiana, Biblioteca Universitaria de Cultura Colombiana, Bogotá, 1969, pp. 195, 211.
69. For gracias al sacar and autos sobre declaratoria de mestizo, see Minchom, The People of Quito, pp. 158-70;
70. and Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999.
71. For discussion of sumptuary laws in Europe, see Francis Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1926;
72. James Laver, The Concise History of Costume and Fashion, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1969, p. 72;
73. Michael and Ariane Batterberry, Mirror Mirror: a Social History of Fashion, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1977, pp. 49-50;
74. Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: a History of Sumptuary Law, Macmillan, London, 1996;
75. and Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the 'Ancien Régime', Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. Sumptuary laws were retained in Spain and Portugal well into the eighteenth century, far longer than elsewhere in Europe. See
76. Martin A. S. Hume, 'A Fight against Finery (A History of the Sumptuary Laws in Spain)', in Ten Years after the Armada and Other Historical Studies, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1896;
77. Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modem Spain, Princeton NJ, 1990, p. 48;
78. Cecelia Salinas, Las Chilenas de la Colonia: virtud sumisa, amor rebelde, LOM Ediciones, Santiago, 1994;
79. and Lara, 'Signs of Color'.
80. Sumptuary legislation moreover played a disproportionate role in the Spanish equivalent of the eighteenth-century 'luxury debates', as a consequence of its prolonged retention in the Iberian world. Juan Rico ('Criptoburgesía y cambio económico en la Ilustración española', Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 408, 1984) provides an excellent overview of the Spanish luxury debates; while José Cadalso's 1789 imitation of the Lettres Persanes, his Cartas Marruecas, Espasa, Madrid, 1950,
81. and Juan Sempere y Guarinos, Historia del luxo y de las leyes suntuarias de España, 2 vols, Madrid, 1788, give a flavour of the Spanish debate about sumptuary legislation.
82. Julia Tuñón Pablos, Women in Mexico. A Past Unveiled, transl. Alan Hynds, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1999, p. 26-8.
83. Gonzalo Aquirre Beltrán ('The Integration of the Negro into the National Society of Mexico', in Magnus Mörner (ed.), Race and Class in Latin America, Columbia University Press, New York, 1970) also refers to laws in colonial Mexico that 'forbade the Negro to wear jewellery or other decorations, to carry arms, or use other status symbols reserved for the hidalgo' (p. 24).
84. Josephe and Francisco Mugaburu, Chronicle of Colonial Lima. The Diary of Josephe and Francisco Mugaburu, 1640-1697, transl. Robert Miller, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1975, pp. 32, 59, 82-3, 124, 217.
85. R. C. aprobando un bando del Virrey del Peru para moderar el exceso en los trajes que vestían los negros, mulatos, indios y mestizos, San Ildefonso, 7 Sept. 1725, in Richard Konetzke (ed.), Colección de Documentos para la Historia de la Formación Social de Hispanoamérica, 1493-1810, vol. 3: 1, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, 1962, p. 187.
86. See also R. C. al presidente de la Audiencia de Guadalajara sobre que observe las ordenes y leyes que prohiben traer armas los indios, mestizos, negros y mulatos, Madrid, 30 Dec. 1692; and Pragmática contra el abuso de trajes y otros gastos superfluos, Madrid, 10 Feb. 1716; in Konetzke (ed.), Colección de Documentos, vol. 3: 1, p. 27, pp. 124-34, respectively.
87. Lara, 'Signs of Colour';
88. and Réglement provisoire des Administrateurs, concernant le Luxe des Gens de couleur, 9 Feb. 1779, in Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et Constitutions des Colonies Françoises de l'Amérique sous le vent, 6 vols, Paris, 1784-90, vol. 5, pp. 855-6.
89. Extracto del Código Negro Carolino, Santo Domingo, 14 March 1785, in Konetzke (ed.), Colección de Documentos, vol. 3: 2, p. 562.
90. See also Moreau de Saint-Méry, Descripción de la parte española de Santo Domingo, p. 93.
91. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies, pp. 116, 148-9.
92. For comment on this, see Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, p. 38.
93. Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1996, p. 89.
94. Note that this contradicts statements by Mary Beth Norton that Virginia never issued sumptuary legislation. (See Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society, Vintage, 1997, p. 190.)
95. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs, p. 89.
96. Gary North, 'The Puritan Experiment with Sumptuary Legislation', The Freeman 24, 1974, pp. 345-6, 351.
97. The quotation is from a 1648 appeal by the Audiencia of Chile. See Salinas, Las Chilenas de la Colonia, p. 114.
98. Salinas, Las Chilenas de la Colonia, p. 115. See also pp. 125-6.
99. Alcide D'Orbigny, L'Homme Américain (de l'Amérique méridionale), considéré sous ses rapports physiologiques et moraux, Paris, 1839, 2 vols, vol. 1, pp. 245-9.
100. Douglas Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Leicester University Press, Bristol, 1978, provides an interesting discussion of this process in England itself. Although he argues that in England this hardening of attitudes occurred in the 1860s, my view is that in the Americas this process began earlier, by the 1820s.
101. J. B. Moreton, West India: Customs and Manners, Containing Structures on the Soil, Cultivation, Produce, Trade, Officers and Inhabitants, London, 1793, p. 105.
102. See also Erin Skye Mackie, 'Cultural Cross-Dressing: the Colorful Case of the Caribbean Creole', in The Clothes that Wear Us, ed. Munns and Richards, p. 259 for 'overfondness for showy dress'.
103. For representative examples see Charles Stuart Cochrane, Journal of a Residence and Travels in Colombia during the Years 1823 and 1824 (1825), AMS Press, New York, 1971, vol. 2, pp. 88-9, 119;
104. Joel Roberts Poinsett, Notes on Mexico Made in the Autumn of 1822, Praeger, New York, 1969, pp. 48, 52, 77;
105. Edward Thornton Tayloe, Mexico, 1825-1828. The Journals and Correspondence of Edward Thornton Tayloe, C. Harvey Gardiner (ed.), University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1959, p. 40;
106. and Lyon, Journal of a Residence, vol. 2, p. 235.
107. Cochrane, Journal, vol. 2, p. 89.
108. For immoderate displays of wealth, see Fanny Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico During a Residence of Two Years in that Country (1842), E. P. Dutton, New York, 1931, pp. 11, 13, 14, 16, 32, 53, 80-1, 84-5, 88-9, 106-7, 130-1, 136, 140-1, 155, 178-9;
109. Capt. Basil Hall, Extracts from a Journal written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru and Mexico in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822 (1824), 2 vols, Gregg Press, Upper Saddle River, 1968, vol. 1, pp. 47-8;
110. Extracts from a Journal written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru and Mexico in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822 (vol. 2, pp. 198-9;
111. and Mayer, Mexico, pp.149, 151, 153.
112. One distinctive Ibero-American form of dress did attract consistently favourable comment. This was the saya and manto worn by Limeñas. See for example, Hall, Extracts from a Journal, vol. 1, pp. 109, 111.
113. For a celebratory Peruvian description, see Flora Tristán, Les Pérégrinations d'une Paria, 1833-1834 (1838), Maspero, Paris, 1979, pp. 329-35.
114. The distinctive dress of the women of Bogotá, although often remarked upon, was rarely viewed as attractive. See for example, Cochrane, Journal of a Residence, vol. 2, p. 35. (Or see the very similar account in Cartas escritas desde Colombia, pp. 95-6, probably plagiarized from Cochrane.)
115. For nineteenth-century illustrations of the saya and manto, see Deborah Poole, Vision, Race and Modernity: a Visual Economy of the Andean Image World, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1997.
116. Cabinet des Modes (1785), quoted in Jennifer Jones, 'Repackaging Rousseau: Femininity and Fashion in Old Regime France', French Historical Studies 18: 4, 1994, p. 959.
117. Karin Calvert makes analogous claims for eighteenth-century North America, while Alan Hunt argues that in the eighteenth century what he calls the 'sumptuary impulse' becomes transformed, or evolved, into the concepts of taste and distinction. See Karin Calvert, 'The Function of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America', in Of Consuming Interests: the Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1994;
118. and Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, pp. 375-6.
119. Jones, 'Repackaging Rousseau', p. 960.
120. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Routledge, London, 1986.
121. This was true for those who attempted to dress 'down' as well as those who dressed 'up'. Calderón de la Barca provides an intriguing account of her intention of wearing to a ball the costume of a working-class Poblana, which, she later learned, was considered the garb of prostitutes by the Mexican elite. See Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, pp. 45-6. Or see p. 137.