Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS)

Review
Author(s): Susan Deans-Smith
Review by: Susan Deans-Smith
Source: Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jan., 2005), pp. 138-139
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27733726
Accessed: 28-06-2016 15:03 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Wiley, Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS) are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to Bulletin of Latin American Research

This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 15:03:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Book Reviews

Lewis, Laura A. (2003) Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial
Mexico, Duke University Press (Durham), xiv + 280 pp. $79.95 hbk, $22.95 pbk.

Laura Lewis's analysis of caste, witchcraft, gender relationships and colonial

imaginings in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico is a suggestive and often
compelling work. Her study is based on deeply nuanced readings of three hundred
inquisition cases (drawn from a base of one thousand cases) for the period 1537-1695,
primarily from Central Mexico and its vicinities. Lewis analyses how arguments
presented by the accused, their accusers and defenders, marked out their positions in
society and their values through claims about caste and caste symbolism. Patterns of
kinship (including figurative), friendship and patronage which linked individuals to
Spaniards and to Indians expressed broader understandings/imaginings of the attrib
utes of Spanishness and Indianess. The former expressed a sense of conformity to
orthodox colonial values; the latter to nonconformity associated with supernaturalism.
Throughout her study, Lewis also probes the meanings of mestizoness, blackness and
the devil.
Lewis conceptualises the operation of two domains. The first, the sanctioned
domain, enabled colonising processes (particularly the Spanish judiciary) based on
caste which privileged Spaniards, subordinated Indians, and incorporated blacks,
mulattoes and mestizos as mediators who reinforced Spanish authority. These inter
mediary groups - described as henchmen - acquired their power over Indians from
their relationships with Spaniards. Lewis's examples include Spaniards who ordered
their slaves to beat, assault or jail Indian men and women for perceived infractions.
Women were deeply implicated as illustrated by the mother of an alcalde mayor who
ordered her female slaves to capture rebellious Indians and take them to jail. For Lewis,
the sanctioned domain is a vivid expression of the contradictions of Spanish colonial
ism as the judicial courts stepped in to protect Indian petitioners from the abuse which
Spanish control facilitated in the first place.
The second domain, the unsanctioned, delineated the world of witchcraft which
reversed sanctioned patterns. Caste was organised to privilege Indians and Indianess,
and subordinate Spaniards and Spanishness. The mediating roles performed by blacks
and mulattoes could also work in the reverse order. Alliances with Indians facilitated
challenges to Spanish authority. When blacks, mulattoes and mestizos used Indian
witchcraft, the result was to make Spaniards submit to Indian power rather than
making Indians submit to Spanish power. Mulatto slaves acquired herbs and powders
to tame their masters. It was not the suppliers of the supernatural - the Indians - who
faced the Inquisition, however, but the buyers, the blacks and mulattoes. Lewis con
cludes that witchcraft was not 'a revolutionary language of resistance as much as it was
an affirmation of hegemony. In the end, it not only developed out of colonialism, it also
upheld the allure of the wealth, mobility, and power controlled by elites'.
Using Foucault's 'thematics of power', Lewis argues that 'the cultural politics of
caste produced a system of fluid and relational designations that simultaneously
facilitated and undermined Spanish governance'. While the dis juncture between the
idealised hierarchy of the sistema de castas and the quotidian reality of colonial society
is a well-established argument, there is much in this work that moves questions of

138 ? 2005 Society for Latin American Studies

This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 15:03:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Book Reviews

caste, racial ideologies and colonialism in interesting directions. Her discussion of caste
as 'something of a capacity, elaborated through the genealogical, moral, and oper
ational aspects of a person's place in relation to other persons' is particularly useful and
allows Lewis to illustrate in considerable detail multiple levels of interactions, cultural
assumptions and understandings.
Less persuasive are her assertions that Indians viewed Spanish courts as a particular
form of white magic and that 'by colonizing Indians, Spaniards also colonized them
selves'. Indeed, while Lewis builds on well-rehearsed arguments about the hegemonic
role of the Spanish judicial system, she misses an opportunity to consider recent
arguments about the potential counter-hegemonic effects of indigenous uses of the
colonial legal system (Serulnikov 1996; Walker 1999).
One also wonders whether Lewis overstates her case in describing witchcraft as
ubiquitous in colonial society. This leads her to another questionable conclusion about
the commodification of supernatural remedies. She leaves readers with the impression
that sales of such remedies constituted one of the main sources of income for Indians in
late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico: 'Indians were clearly selling super
natural remedies even as they failed to produce sanctioned goods and services... In
answering the demand for illicit substances... Indians seem to have found a niche and
a way to survive in an increasingly cash-oriented economy'.
Finally, Lewis's engagement with the relevant historical literature on race, caste and
class in colonial Mexico and Spanish America seems underdeveloped. Several import
ant works are missing from her bibliography (Kuznesof 1995; Schwartz 1995; Twinam
1999, Vinson 2001). Tucked away in a footnote, Lewis comments that in the light of
Robert Douglas Cope's (1994) argument that class rather than race characterised
colonial Mexican society in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries 'his
evidence could also support the conclusion... that racial ideologies did form a barrier
to black, mulatto, mestizo, and Indian advancement, making the elite class almost
exclusively Spanish'. In fact, that is precisely what Cope argues in his discussion
of prosperous castas who found that the main obstacle to their continued upward
mobility was, in fact, race.

Susan Deans-Smith
University of Texas at Austin

Hirsch, Jennifer S. (2003) A Courtship After Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican
Transnational Families, University of California Press (Berkeley), xxi + 376 pp. ?15.95
pb, $24.95 pb.

The title of this fascinating and original volume derives from a comment made by one of
26 women interviewed by Jennifer Hirsch in three communities linked through inter
national migration - two Mexican towns (Degollado, Jalisco and El Fuerte, Michoacan)
and one US city (Atlanta, Georgia). To have a 'courtship after marriage' is about women
wanting to create the space and time available for love, pleasure and sexual intimacy
before the business of having children. Unlike their mothers, most women under 40 are

? 2005 Society for Latin American Studies 139

This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 15:03:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms