„En habito de una india”: Dressing as Free in the Seventeenth-Century Andes

James Almeida
BCDSS Fellow

In September 1666, slaveholder Joseph Gutierrez de Leon appeared before the city authorities of Potosí, the economic hub of colonial Peru, located in today’s Bolivia, with an unusual request: he wanted to brand the face of the woman he enslaved, Catalina, to mark her as an enslaved person. Described as a mulata, a person of mixed African and European ancestry, Catalina had made a habit of resisting her enslavement by absconding from work in the clothes of an india, an indigenous woman. In doing so, she was able to represent herself as free and not enslaved.

An enslaved mulata (fig. 1) would typically dress simply in a blouse and skirt, white or undyed in color and without decoration. To the india, however, more options were available. Indigenous women typically wore brightly colored, patterned skirts, blouses, and shawls, often pinned together with gold or silver pins known as tupus (fig. 2). In this image, the Spanish husband offers his Indigenous wife a silver tupu.

Indigenous men and women wove fine textiles in the home or increasingly in workshops located in Andean cities (fig. 3). The patterns on their textiles like the belt or sash shown here indicated ethnicity or royal status, details sometimes missed by the Spanish authorities. These patterns, the quality of the tupus, and hairstyle could all mark one’s social identity, as they do for the Inca queen in this seventeenth-century illustration (fig. 4).

Wearing such attire represented freedom and potentially a place in the market as a producer of food or the Andean maize beer known as chicha, as in the scene here where another Inca queen or noblewoman offers chicha to male workers (fig. 5).

Fig. 5: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, “August: triumphal songs, time of opening the earths” in Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, 1615. Royal Danish Library, GKS 2232 kvart: Guaman Poma, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (c. 1615), page [1153 [1163]]
https://poma.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/1163/es/text/

The case ended without resolution, suggesting that Catalina was never branded. Perhaps she escaped to Cuzco (in today’s Peru) with her boyfriend, a plan her enslaver suggested she had made. Or perhaps she continued to blend into Potosí crowds, representing herself as free in the dress of an india.

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Further Reading

Mangan, Jane E., 2009. “A Market of Identities: Women, Trade, and Ethnic Labels in Colonial Potosí.” In Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America (Latin America Otherwise), edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara, 61–80. Durham: Duke University Press.

Minchom, Martin, 1994. The People of Quito, 1690-1810: Change and Unrest in the Underclass. Dellplain Latin American Studies, no. 32. Boulder: Westview Press.

Presta, Ana Maria, 2010. “Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman: Market Economy, Clothing, and Identities in the Colonial Andes, La Plata (Charcas), Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.” Hispanic American Historical Review 90, no. 1 (January 2, 2010): 41–74.
https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-2009-090.

Walker, Tamara J., 2017. Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima. New York: Cambridge University Press.