Diasporas, Bondage, and Intimacy in Lima, 1535 to 1555

Nancy E. van Deusen focuses on the description of diasporas, bondage, and intimacy found in the baptismal records of the Cathedral parish of Lima from 1535 to 1555. The urban diasporic site of Lima was a space where abducted, exchanged, and raped women from Nicaragua, the island of Cubagua, and a broad swath of the Andes formed consanguineal and fictive family ties, and intimate sexual and cultural relations. Indigenous men and women met others because they labored as servants and slaves in the same casa grande. Seventeenth-century chroniclers may have wished to craft a satisfyingly neat image of Lima as a solid and permanent place, but in the 1530s it was anything but that. Other prominent Andeans knelt before the marquis hoping to become yanaconas or personal retainers, with the understanding that the new bond established between them and their Spanish masters would limit reciprocal ties with their native lords and allow them to migrate.