Widows' rights questioned: Indians, the state, and fluctuating gender ideas in central highland Ecuador, 1870-1900

Americas

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 87-106

  O'Connor, Erin ^a  

^a WEST CHESTER UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AMERICAN INDIAN; ECONOMICS; ECUADOR; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; FAMILY; FEMALE; GENDER IDENTITY; GOVERNMENT; HISTORY; HUMAN; JURISPRUDENCE; LEGAL ASPECT; ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT; PATERNALISM; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; REVIEW; SOCIAL STATUS; WIDOW; WOMEN'S HEALTH; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

ECUADOR; FAMILY; GENDER IDENTITY; GOVERNMENT; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; INDIANS, SOUTH AMERICAN; JURISPRUDENCE; OWNERSHIP; PATERNALISM; SOCIAL CONDITIONS; WIDOWHOOD; WOMEN; WOMEN'S HEALTH; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

EID: 36749095359     PISSN: 00031615     EISSN: 15336247     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tam.2002.0081     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. Carmen Ramos Escandón, "Reading Gender in History," in Elizabeth Dore, ed., Gender Politics in Latin America: Debates in Theory and Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), pp. 152-153, 155
2. See, for example, Fiona Wilson, "Marriage, Property, and the Position of Women in the Peruvian Central Andes," in Raymond T. Smith, ed., Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 310-311, 314, 323
3. Francie Chassen-López, "Cheaper than Machines: Women and Agriculture in Porfirian Oaxaca, 1880-1911," in Heather Fowler-Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughan, eds. Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850-1990 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), p. 44
4. Carmen Ramos Escandón, "The Social Construction of Wife and Mother: Women in Porfirian Mexico, 1880-1917," in Mary Jo Maynes, Ann Waltner, Birgitte Soland and Ulrike Strasser, eds., Gender, Kinship, and Power: A Comparative Interdisciplinary History (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 279-280
5. Elizabeth Dore, "The Holy Family: Imagined Households in Latin American History," in Dore, ed., Gender Politics, pp. 109-110
6. Elizabeth Dore, "Property, Households, and Public Regulation of Domestic Life: Diriomo, Nicaragua, 1840-1900," Journal of Latin American Studies 29:3 (October 1997), pp. 597-604
7. Archivo Nacional de la Historia, Riobamba: Juicios Civiles, February 11, 1875. Subsequent citations of documents from this archive will be cited as: ANH/R:Civ for civil cases, and ANH/R:Cr for criminal cases
8. Among the important works on this problem in the past decade are: Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
9. Mark Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial Nationmaking in Andean Peru (Durham, Duke University Press, 1997)
10. Heraclio Bonilla, ed., Los Andes en la encrucijada: Indios, comunidades y estado en el siglo XIX (Quito: Ediciones Libri Mundi/FLACSO, 1991)
11. A. Kim Clark, "Indians, the State, and Law: Public Works and the Struggle to Control Labor in Liberal Ecuador," Journal of Historical Sociology 7:1 (March 1994), pp. 49-72
12. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994)
13. Many of the works published in the 1990s developed out of critical studies of Indians and national governments in the 1980s. For examples of some of the most important of these, see: Tristan Piatt, Estado Boliviano y ayllu Andino (Lima: Institute de Estudios Peruanos, 1983)
14. Steve J. Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), particularly the debate over Indians and Nationalism by Florencia Mallon and Heraclio Bonilla, pp. 213-231
15. Andrés Guerrero, "Curagas y tenientes políticos: La ley de la costumbre y la ley del estado (Otavalo, 1830-1875)," Revista Andina 7:2 (September 1989), pp. 321-365
16. Also see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)
17. Andrés Guerrero, "The Construction of a Ventriloquist's Image: Liberal Discourse and the 'Miserable Indian Race' in Late 19th-century Ecuador," Journal of Latin American Studies 29:3 (October 1997), p. 558
18. Código Civil de la República del Ecuador (Quito: Imprenta de los huérfanos de Valencia, 1860), Art. 1734, p. 250
19. Código Civil, 1860, Arts. 126-136, p. 20. It was stated here that a husband could also require his wife to move with him any time he saw fit, again reinforcing his control over her life
20. For an excellent discussion of images of women in late nineteenth-century literature, see Gladys Moscoso, "Las imágenes de la literatura," in Martha Moscoso, ed. Y el amor no era todo...Mujeres, imágenes y conflictos (Quito: DGIS/Abya Yala, 1996), especially pp. 95-96. In this same volume, also see Ana María Goetschel, "Educación e imágenes de la Mujer," p. 62, in which she discusses the 1865 Minister of the Interior's similar stance on women's roles in the home and their connection to public morality and the socio-political wellbeing of the nation
21. The centrality of gender complementarity as an organizing principle for Andean peasant communities-both past and present-is now generally recognized. This is thanks to groundbreaking works by many scholars. One pioneering historical examination of gender and community is Irene Silverblatt's book, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)
22. see also Ann Zulawski, "Social Differentiation, Gender, and Ethnicity: Urban Indian Women in Colonial Bolivia, 1640-1725," Latin American Research Review 25:2 (1990), pp. 93-113
23. Examinations for the nineteenth century have been few thus far, but Martha Moscoso does explore complementarity to some extent within her essay "Mujer Indígena y sociedad republicana: Relaciones étnicas y de género en el Ecuador, siglo XIX" in A. C. Defossez, D. Fassin, and M. Viveros, eds. Mujeres de los Andes: Condiciones de vida y salud (Bogotá: IFEA/Universidad Exgternado de Colombia, 1992), pp. 223-243
24. For contemporary gender relations in Ecuador, see: Mary Weismantel, Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988)
25. Regina Harrison, Signs, Songs, and Memory in the Andes: Translating Quechua Language and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), particularly chapter 5
26. For the Potosí region, see Olivia Harris, "Complementarity and Conflict: An Andean View of Women and Men," in J. S. La Fontaine, ed., Sex and Age as Principles of Social Differentiation (New York: Academic Press, 1978), pp. 21-40
27. and "Condor and Bull: The Ambiguities of Masculinity in Northern Potosí," in Penelope Harvey and Peter Gow, eds., Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation and Experience (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 40-65
28. For the Peruvian highlands, see Catherine J. Allen, The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1988)
29. For examples of women selling chicha, see ANH/R:Cr: October 14, 1870; ANH/R:Cr: October 31, 1870; ANH/R:Cr: January 30, 1908. For references to women selling goods in local markets, see ANH/R:Cr: August 28, 1914; ANH/R:Cr: June 23, 1920
30. When Indian men and women who took part in criminal cases were asked to identify their profession, men almost always answered that they were farmers, whereas women were likely to refer to doing "women's work," even though they were active in agriculture. Given the centrality of land to both family survival and community social structures, this discrepancy gave men advantages over women. For a case with especially striking references to gender-distinct labeling like this, see ANH/R:Cr: February 26, 1874
31. For a discussion of these relations in contemporary Chimborazo, see Luis Fernando Botero, Chimborazo de los indios (Quito: Abya Yala, 1990), pp. 138, 143, 144
32. Código Civil, 1860, Arts. 967, 970, 973, and 974, pp. 138-9
33. Allen, The Hold Life Has, p. 78
34. Also see Weismantel, Food, Gender, and Poverty, pp. 183-184; these two sources also more generally offer excellent discussions of daily and seasonal rituals and the ways they reflect social status in Andean communities
35. Allen, on page 33 of The Hold Life Has, notes that "Through routine activities, habitually carried out, a cultural identity takes shape: the sense of the self as Runa."
36. See, for example, ANH/R:Civ: December 15, 1866, and Archivo Nacional de la Historia, Quito, Serie Indígenas, March 12, 1873. Subsequent citations from this archive will be referred to as ANH/Q:I for Indígenas and ANH/Q:Cr for Criminales
37. Some examples here are ANH/R:Civ: December 4, 1909, ANH/R:Civ: November 17, 1919
38. ANH/R:Civ: May 27, 1882
39. Other scholars have noted that a very high percentage of Andean women in the colonial period used their wills in order to express their right to make independent decisions about the control of land. It is not clear to me if the pattern was as strong in nineteenth-century Ecuador. For patterns in the colonial period, see Zulawski, "Social Differentiation." Also see Frank Salomon, "Indian Women of Early Colonial Quito as Seen Through Their Testaments," The Americas 44:3 (January 1988), pp. 325-341
40. A few examples where this might have been the case are: ANH/R:Civ: March 23, 1876; ANH/R:Civ: September 6, 1905; ANH/R:Civ: October 20, 1906; ANH/R:Civ: December 5, 1908. Being able to fight on her own behalf would certainly not guarantee a widow her land rights, as some of these cases show, but it at least gave her a chance to hold onto some aspect of her economic independence even when dealing with the court system
41. ANH/R: May 8, 1878, folio 40. As with the case involving Rosa Castro, no mention was made in this case about the specific nature of the problem that led Vinlasaca to initiate legal proceedings. Nor was it clear whether the grievance between the two parties began before or after Soledad Lazo's death. It could be that part of the conflict over land ownership related to distinct categories of "ownership" - rights to the land versus rights to its products - discussed on page 9
42. ANH/R: Civ: June 21, 1883, folio 1. Not all of the plaintiffs named carried the surname of Cabay, but the men who did not were married to members of the Cabay family
43. This was true of local officials in general, but it was especially true in late nineteenth-century Ecuador, as the central state-by its refusal to recognize any "Indian problem" in the nation - handed over a great deal of power to local authorities to administer Indian matters. For an excellent discussion of this, see Guerrero, "The Construction of a Ventriloquist's Image," pp. 558, 568-570
44. Galo Ramón Valarezo, "La visión andina sobre el estado colonial," Ecuador Debate (Quito) No. 12 (1986), pp. 82,88,91
45. Yves Saint-Geours, "La sierra centro y norte, 1830-1925," in Juan Maiguashca, ed., Historia y región en el Ecuador, 1830-1925 (Quito: FLACSO/CERLAC, 1994), pp. 155-156
46. Martha Moscoso, "La tierra: Espacio de conflicto y relación con el Estado y la comunidad en el siglo XIX," in Heraclio Bonilla, ed., Los Andes en la encrucijada, pp. 367-369, 375 - though Moscoso's essay is on the southern sierra, the laws and basis patterns she points to in these pages were relevant to Chimborazo province also
47. Gerardo Fuentealba, "La sociedad indigena en las primeras décadas de la República: Continuidades coloniales y cambios republicanos," in Enrique Ayala Mora, ed., Nueva Historia del Ecuador, Vol. 8 (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1983), pp. 56-73
48. For examples of court disputes over abuses of these requirements, see: ANH/Q: Cr: August 30, 1867; ANH/Q: Cr: January 5, 1869; ANH/Q:Cr: December 22, 1869; ANH/Q:Cr: October 29, 1871
49. For discussions of hacienda expansion, see Manuel Chiriboga, Jornaleros y gran propietarios en 135 años de exportación cacaotera (1790-1925) (Quito: Consejo Provincial de Pichincha, 1980)
50. and Yves Saint-Geours, "La sierra centro y norte" in Historia y región, pp. 143-188
51. ANH/Q: I: March 12, 1873, folio 1
52. See, for example, ANH/R: Civ: July 2, 1869 when widow Juana Roldán worked to protect communal lands; ANH/R: Cr: July 24, 1872 where a combination of Indian men and women (likely widows) complained of arbitrary arrest for not paying church tithes. Women were also key witnesses in cases against state officials in the late nineteenth century, as is evident in ANH/R: Cr: August 16, 1870, ANH/R: Cr: June 3, 1871; and ANH/R: Cr: September 11, 1871
53. For an excellent discussion of Indians' manipulation of these redundant systems, see Guerrero, "Curagas y tenientes políticos;" also see Aleeze Sattar, "An Unresolved Inheritance: Postcolonial State Formation and Indigenous Communities in Chimborazo, Ecuador, 1820-1875" (Ph.D. Diss., The New School, 2001)
54. The Liberal period from 1895-1925 would more clearly and consistently mark a relative decline in indigenous women's ability to defend community interests or interact with state officials. This was based on both intensified intraethnic gender divisions and on the patriarchal predisposition of the Liberal states; see Erin O'Connor, "Dueling Patriarchies: Gender, Indians, and State Formation in the Ecuadorian Sierra, 1860-1925" (Ph.D. Diss., Boston College, 1997), particularly chapters 3 and 7