Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru

Rachel O’Toole’s new book focuses upon the valleys of Chicama and Trujillo, on the north coast of Peru. It is an excellent vantage point to witness the interrelations of Andeans, Africans, and Spaniards. A city in Lima’s shadow, Trujillo was home to an entrenched old conquistador aristocracy but also to numerous indigenous communities and an African population comprised mostly of slaves on coastal estates. The region’s Spanish and indigenous populations have long been studied; O’Toole’s contribution is to reintroduce Africans to that scholarship. Her intention is to remind colonial historians of the integral relationship between Africans and Indians: nearly any description of an Indian had an often- unspoken African as its foil, and vice versa. In particular, she notes how the legal systems that Spaniards created to govern their new territories erected juridical identities for Indians that they refused to Africans, who were neither vassals nor citizens of the crown...