Historians have long recognised that sexual relations between Iberian men and indigenous and African women occurred from early on. The first African slaves who were part of the conquest tended to be men, but significant numbers of African women were soon present in many areas of the Iberian colonies. As legal property of their masters, slave women were subject to extensive sexual abuse and enjoyed little practical protection from the courts or the Church. In 1580, one slave owner stated: “It is not a sin to have sex with my slave woman because she is my property” (Powers 2005:97). Municipal authorities “totally ignored the sexual exploitation and abuse that occurred within the master’s house” (Socolow, 2000: 134). Male slaves also suffered abuse:
“To rape a male slave was to feminise him – to conquer him both physically and psychologically” (Sweet 2003:74).
While the overall picture drawn by historians tends to be one of sex as domination and female slaves as victims, these women could sometimes use sexual relations with a white man to gain some influence over their own destinies in what was a highly constrained and unequal situation. In relation to colonial Jamaica, Bush has argued that: “White man created a black woman who essentially reflected their needs, economic or sexual” – this was a woman basically stereotyped as a sexual “Sable Venus” or a working ‘drudge’, but who could be a ‘she-devil’ if she stepped outside those roles. However, white men’s fascination with the Sable Venus meant that “paradoxically, women were able to ‘get on’ in slave societies through using their sexuality as the “wives of white men”; thus by the 1800s “concubinage had become an essential survival strategy for some younger slave women” (Bush 2000: 762, 69). In Latin American too, “sexual liaisons could benefit slave women” (Socolow 2000:135).
With relations between Iberian men and indigenous women, there has been more debate about coercion and consent. Some scholars have downplayed the role of sexual abuse in these relations. It was the membrus febrilis (the fevered member) of the Spaniards that conquered Mexico rather than the sword or the microbe; it was the ‘love making’ of these ‘donjuanistas’ that created a colonial society (R. C. Padden, cited in Wood 1998:9). Mörner is a little more balanced in his assessment that the “Spanish conquest of the Americas was a conquest of women” when he says that the Spaniards took the “the Indian girls by force and by peaceful means”; however, he goes on to say that the “element of rape should not be overemphasised” and that “probably the Indian women very often docilely complied with the conquistadores’ desires” (Moörner 1967: 22, 23).
Other scholars contest these views, even while admitting that some unions were consensual. For them, “sexual force was the primary relationship” between conquering men and conquered women, whether indigenous or African (Powers 2005:96). Contemporary accounts by European men make plain that they rhapsodised about native female charms and described seductions, or, quite possibly, rapes (Wood 1998). Around Quito, indigenous women were abducted in large numbers and forced into ‘service’ – economic but doubtless also sexual – in the homes of the city’s Spanish population; indigenous women servants might also be ‘gifted’ in exchange relationships that cemented political alliances: noble-born Aztec or Inca women might actually marry elite Spanish men, in unions that often gave such men access to land and indigenous labour, while also promising protection and advancement for indigenous communities. These unions were consensual in one sense, but not only were the women apparently marrying at the behest of indigenous men, but also records left by Náhuatal-speaking men in Mexico show that they thought that it was ‘prudent that we give ourselves to the men of Castile to see if that way they do not kill us’ (cited in Wood 1998:20). The famous case of ‘La Malinche’ probably fits into this category. A classic symbol in Mexican nationalist discourse of ‘betrayal’ by indigenous women when they consorted with the conquistadores, she was one of 20 women given to Cortés, the leader of the Spanish conquerors, in 1519. Doña Marina, as she is also known, became an interpreter and lover to Cortés and bore him a child, but it is also likely that her choices were highly constrained: “Her best hope for survival was to accept whatever situation was assigned to her and try to make herself useful and agreeable” (Frances Karttunen, cited in Wood 1998:18).
Sexual abuse by clergy was also a significant problem that indigenous and other women (and young men) complained about. It was prosecuted by the Church and courts – but not always with great rigour: in 1587 one Inquisition official was arraigned in Lima on 216 charges of sexual misconduct and found guilty on five counts; he was later promoted to the higher Church office (Powers 2005:99). Even in cases where the relationships were apparently consensual, the role of constraint and power differences is clear. Spurling documents the case of an elite cleric, accused of sodomy in 1595 and 1608. The first case concerned a young man who worked in an apothecary shop and with whom Dr González apparently took the active role; the younger man was executed, while the cleric was eventually released after a series of appeals to higher ecclesiastical authorities. In 1608, Dr González began a long relationship with a poor young man whom González looked after and indeed cohabited with over a long period an on whom he bestowed the titled of Don. This man was tortured, imprisoned, and exiled, while González again used successive appeals to higher courts to avoid punishment (Spurling 1998).
Spurling does not tell us whether Dr González’s lovers were white or not, but Mott, using Inquisition records on accusations of sodomy for Brazil between 1591 and 1620, argues that white men used their status to dominate non-White men (Mott 1985). White men were the majority of those accused (61 percent) and a majority of cases involved a relation between people of different colours. These small numbers do not indicate a clear trend: eight mulatto men were passive partners for whites, while four were the active partner; other dat show that white men could be passive partners (Nesvig 2001:706-07). Motto (1994) admits that “there are various examples of indigenous men and blacks who played the active role”. Lesbian relations do not seem to show a clear sexual-racial pattern.
Trexler (1995) also focuses strongly on the use of sex as a tool of domination, but he argues that sex was used to feminise subordinate men, by forcing them into the role of passive recipients of active, conquering penetration. The use of anal rape and other techniques of literal and symbolic emasculation was, says Trexler, common to both Mediterranean and native American cultures. In the latter area, institutionalised cross-dressing and homosexuality – often centred on the figure of the berdache – were structured by political power: in Trexler’s view, younger berdaches were sexual, economic and political resources for older men of power. Among the Maya, too, native conquest discourse “was centred around a portrayal of masculinity and power through the symbolic penetration of the defeated warriors by the victorious” (Sigal 2003:123). Despite parallels between Iberian and some native American views on sodomy, the Iberians often viewed native American men as sodomites – partly due to their interpretation of widespread cross-dressing behaviour and partly due to seeing ethnic-racial others as sodomites. As sodomy was a “nefarious sin”, this provided a justification for conquest as well as effectively feminising the vanquished (Trexler 1995:84).
Race, desire and conquest
Trexler comes up against the problem – of which he is aware – that many of his sources on Native American practices of homosexuality were written by Spanish or American-born white observers (Horswell 2003, 3005). This raises the issue of representation: some observers did not ‘see’ much homosexual practice, although they did ‘see’ cross-dressing; some downplayed the issue of homosexuality in an effort to dignify indigenous cultures. Others saw homosexuality everywhere. The same problem arises with the question of coercion and consent in heterosexual, inter-ethnic relations: where does the balance lie between native women’s ‘docile compliance’ and their coercion?
Gutiérrez (1991) runs into this question in his account of Pueblo sexuality and how it figured during conquest. As we saw above, he describes Pubelo sexual practices as open and relaxed. He also shows that the Spanish soldiers saw Pueblo women as licentious and unfaithful to their men, whom they saw as sodomites and unprotective of their women; the Franciscan friars documented the sexual abuses practised by the soldiers but tried to impose European sexual and gender norms of the Pueblo. However, he also argues that
Because sanctity and sex were so closely related in the Pueblo world, it was common for men and women to give their bodies to persons they deemed holy (Gutiérrez 1991:50)
and that native practices of dealing with angry spirits induced women to offer themselves sexually to the conquistadores who were initially seen as visiting spirits:
The Pueblo women cooled the passion of the fierce fire-brandishing Spanish katsina (spirits) through intercourse, and by so doing, tried to transform and domesticate the malevolence of these foreign gods. But the Spaniards as a group would interpret their subjugation of the Pueblos as a supreme assertion of masculine virility, and, as such, would see 1598 as a sexual conquest of women. (Gutiérrez 1991:51).
Gutiérrez has been accused of seeing Pueblo sexuality through the eyes of the conquistadores and the priests. It is clear, however, that he is aware of the biased representation of indigenous sexuality by the Spanish; what is less clear is the extent to which this shapes his own description of the Pueblo of whom he says that, although they did not live a life of “unbridled lust” as portrayed by the Spanish, they were “sexually spirited” (Gutiérrez 1991:72).
The important point is that Iberian preconceptions and fantasies clearly shaped the way they perceived indigenous peoples as Others: an important aspect of that othering was to see these people as sexually uncontrolled, which was both barbaric and exciting. As I argued in Chapter 2, in understanding the articulation of race and sex, it is useful to pay attention to the processes that shape desire and hate: the way the Iberians saw Others as sexually despicable but also desirable is important in grasping the role that sex played in racialised domination. Now it is very possible that native sexual behaviour towards the conquistadores – whether due to local understandings of how to deal with unknown incomers through the exchange of services and gifts or to local (female)strategies of survival in the face of violent (male) dominance – fanned Iberian ideas about native licentiousness, but it seems clear that these ideas already existed in thinking about non-European others.
In Europe, “medieval, like ancient Roman, thinkers conceived barbarians and wild men to be enslaved by nature, to be, like animals, slaves to desire and unable to control their passions” (White 1972:20). There was a distinction between barbarians, who were taught to live collectively in some kind of social order outside the borders of civilised society, and wild men (or women), who were seen as solitary creatures, animal-like, usually living in the interstices of the civilised world (the forest, the mountains) and subject to no social order at all. Yet in practice, barbarism and wildness were often interwoven ideas (ibid, 19-20). Certainly, both categories shared in being the opposite of civilised. Unbridled sexuality was a key feature, as it was for the ancient Greeks: “It is barbarians or non-Greeks who flaunt their sexuality quite shamelessly: and so Herodotus reports that the natives of the Caucasus copulate in the open like animals” (Walcot 1998:172).
In the same way, European ideas about Africa depicted it as a region saturated with lust (Bush 2000; Nederveen Pieterse 1992). Leo Africanus, a ‘Spanish Moroccan Moor converted to Christianity’, in about 1526 described the “Land of Negroes” thus: “there is no Nation under Heaven more prone to Venery…They have great swarms of Harlots among them; whereupon a man may easily conjecture their manner of living” (Jordan 1977:33-4). Depictions of Moors were similarly sexualised throughout Europe, from Shakespeare’s Otello to Iberian medieval poetry: “the voyeuristic fantasy of imagined Oriental female sexuality is prevalent in a Hispanic poem about moras [Moorish women] (Vasvári 1999:33).
By the time of the conquest of the Americas, the wild man had come to symbolise not just fear and threat, but also the possible virtues of living at one with nature and, especially, the pleasures of erotic freedom, which the Greeks had projected onto mythical fauns and satyrs (White 1972:25). Europeans approached indigenous Americans with the intertwined categories of barbarian and wild man in mind: images of native cannibals vied with images of innocents living in an Edenic paradise, but both linked to different facets of contemporary notions of wildness (Robe 1972:45-6). Existing ideas and fantasies about exotic and racialised Others – Moorish, African, wild, barbarian – informed and shaped Iberians’ perceptions of indigenous Americans and predisposed them to see the natives as licentious. One foot soldier (actually a German mercenary) in the conquest of the Río de la Plata region said of the local Jarayes women that they were “very handsome and great lovers, affectionate and with ardent bodies, in my opinion” (Ulrich Shmidel, cited in Mörner 1967:22). Other contemporary sources reveal a powerful interest in indigenous women’s nakedness, sexual attractiveness and supposed lust. The image of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci “discovering” America has strong sexual overtones (See figure 1), while Vespucci himself asserted that the local women in the Caribbean were so fond of Christians that they “debauch and prostitute themselves”, while a Portuguese invader “went into raptures about the local Brazilian women’s ‘privy parts'(described in intimate detail) and how, “even when we examined them very closely, they did not become embarrassed.” (Wood 1998:12, 14). A colonial drawing, first published in 1509 (Figure 2), shows an incident recounted by Vespucci in which a Spaniard is distracted by three naked indigenous women, while another woman is about to club him over the head from behind (ibid.). In this, and more generally, we can see the classic ambivalence attached to others, explored in Chapter 2: disgust (as perceived sexual excess) and fear (of cannibalism), but also fascination and desire (particularly around sexuality).
Sex was certainly an instrument of conquest, but one problem with an exclusive emphasis on sex as racialised domination is that it tends to assume that male desire emerges straightforwardly from the practice of domination itself and from the access to subordinate women (and men) that ensues. It is important to note that the male desire that drove sexual conquest did not emerge simply from the encounter between conquering males’ instinctual lust and the actual availability of subjugated people, but was already present in socially-constructed dynamics of desire around exotic others who were ‘naturally’ different and were seen as both disgusting and desirable. The ambivalence of otherness in a content of hierarchy gave rise to pre-existing conceptions which structured the process of conquest itself by shaping the way Iberian soldiers, priests and other invaders understood the people whose territories they were conquering.
This brief look at the character of (male) Iberian sexual images and fantasies about others raises the question of indigenous and black women’s (and men’s) desires and feelings about sexual relations with ethnic others, which is, unfortunately, a subject on which there is much less evidence. Rape, coercion and abuse were widespread and the context in which all relationships existed was, of course, structured by racial and gender hierarchy, but various kinds of consensual relationships did exist: marriage, concubinage, casual consensual sex. The longevity of some of the relations between Spanish conquistadores and their indigenous lovers indicates that “they combined mutual endearment with mutual opportunity for both man and woman” (Socolow 2000:35), although we have to be very cautious about evoking an unrealistic image of racial and gender equality, given the power differences involved. Homosexual relations between white masters and their black slaves could be “surprisingly affectionate” even if they generally did not avoid the “violence and coercion typical of the system” (Vainfas 2008[1997]:11). On the other hand, indigenous women in early colonial interracial unions, whether coerced or chosen, often had to painfully negotiate two cultural worlds and conflicting loyalties. One example of this was the common practice of removing mestizo children from the care of indigenous mothers deemed not suitable for raising the offspring of Spanish men (Powers 2005:76-8).
Formal marriages between Spaniards and indigenous women became less frequent in the context of the increasing immigration of Spanish women and patterns of informal concubinage became the norm, unions which were “the product of power relations in which white men held the upper hand”; the women were the victims of rape, or they consented out of fear (Powers 2005:91). There remained the possibility that they might also consent from desire or because they sought to improve their status and that of their children. Indeed, some indigenous men saw this as the norm: Gueman Poma, the indigenous Peruvian chronicler who reported at length to the Spanish king on the state of the colonies in 1615, said that “All Indian women are….above all great whores…They prefer to live as concubines of the Spaniards, and on occasion with black and mulatto men, then marrying Indian commoner” (cited in Powers 2005:69). One senses that resentment may have coloured Guaman Poma’s views!
In any event, it seems likely that indigenous and black women must have had very varied motives. An interesting example is that of slave woman called Paula de Eguiluz, whose history appears in the Inquisitorial records of people accused of witchcraft (Maya Restrepo 2005:599 -615). She was a black slave born into Santo Domingo an, at age 13, given to a Spaniard, Otaco, who took her to Puerto Rico. Otacoá wife became jealous of her and she was sold to Joan de Eguiluz in Havana, moving with him to the copper mines near the city of Santiago in eastern Cuba. She had three children with him and was given privileges, such as the right to wear certain clothes reserved for whites and go to mass with the local whites. She was accused of witchcraft in 1624 and taken for trial to Cartagena (a city on the Caribbean coast of what is now Colombia), where she lived for many years. In her testimony to the Inquisition, she made it clear that she loved her owner, missed him when he was away and that some of her “witchcraft” consisted in making cures for his ailments, by drawing on African and indigenous knowledge of magic and curing.
However much she loved her owner, the freedom she had to move around also allowed her to get together with other black and white men and women in celebrations held in isolated locations, where she danced and ate and where her companion diablillo (little devil) “knew her carnally”, a sexual experience which she said she did not enjoy. Paula also admitted to having sexual relations with other men whom she actively sought out, some of whom she had cured with herbal and magical remedies. It is difficult to interpret such Inquisitorial records for motive and motion, but clearly Paula had a number of sexual relationships in which she, despite her slave status, managed a certain amount of autonomous action.
In contrast to Paula’s case, the seventeenth-century Andean ‘virgins’ abjured all sexual relations and became sacred representatives of Andean gods in ways that evoked both the aclla, the virginal wives of the Inca sun god, and the Catholic Madonna. As sacred priestesses, they became active in nativist movements to challenge Church dominance and to reassert traditional Andean religious practices (Silverblatt 1994).
To summarise this section, sex was an instrument of conquest and a means by which domination was effected, above all by white men and indigenous, black and mixed-race women, but also on men in these categories – and also by non-white men or women in these same categories, as in the cases where indigenous men “gave” indigenous women to Iberian conquerors. In this sense, race and sex “fitted together” because sex was being used as a means of dominating categories that were racialised (in a seventeenth-century meaning of the term) and this occurred because existing patterns of gender inequality in Iberian societies meant that conquest included the domination of women and sexual access to their bodies. But I argued that race and sex also fitted together because Iberian notions of the other were deeply sexualised, even before the conquest, and those seen as ‘naturally’ and radically different were seen as sexually exciting as well as sexually degenerate.
Excerpt from Wade, Peter (2012). Race and Sex in Latin America. London: Pluto. Chapter 3.
Cover image: Copyright owned by Getty Images
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