Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire

Abstract

In the 1770s, dramatic changes were occurring along the southern coast of South America (current-day Uruguay and Argentina). Improvements in transportation and a growing demand for hides for an industrializing and expanding Europe generated the east coast revolution, transforming a then-peripheral region in Spain's American empire into a vibrant and important economic zone. As it exported goods across the Atlantic, the scarcely populated Río de la Plata, as the viceroyalty was christened in 1776, looked to the Spanish peninsula for its own necessary import: people. The province received few migrants from within South America. It was far from the center of viceregal power in Lima, Peru, and bordered the territorially aspirational Portuguese in Brazil. Nor did imperial authorities recognize the region's native groups as a solution to their quest to establish a larger and more stable colonial society. In 1778 the Bourbon crown, driven by fears of foreign encroachment and Enlightenment principles of utility, began the process of sending 1,900 people from Spain to settle the Patagonian coast. This colonization plan is the subject of Allyson M. Poska's Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire. By placing the focus on the 875 women and girls who made the weeks-long trip across the ocean, Poska genders the east coast revolution, heretofore a story of men, politics, and trade.Bringing civilization through European, not indigenous, families was at the heart of the project, although family often translated into extended kinship units of cousins, siblings, and even neighbors, not the young reproductive couples envisioned in the plan. The crown recruited individuals from its impoverished northern kingdoms—Galicia, Asturias, and Cantabria—and later from northern Castile and Asturias. Colonists found themselves in strategic frontier zones around Buenos Aires and along the Banda Oriental. The implementation of such a population scheme involved money and political stratagems on both sides of the Atlantic, not to mention the indefatigable drive of the plan's main administrator, Jorge Astraudi. Poska takes these factors into consideration, but her central focus is on how gender affected the colonization process at each stage.Poska's arguments consider how expectations about men and women shaped normative behaviors that heavily influenced the project. Ideas about paternalism and masculinity shadowed male behavior, while women were expected to uphold certain sexual, moral, and familial positions in their role as civilizing agents of regions with too many men (and Indians). Among others, Poska's contribution lies in the exposition of how these prescriptive notions actually operated on the ground. On American soil, Iberian women who had previously run their own small farms, migrated to cities, or openly cohabited with men found themselves pushed into early marriage (to significantly older men) and mothers to more children while having less sex and autonomy. At colonization sites, the collapse of authority and morale undermined the project as officials fought over precedence and as male settlers attempted to prove their masculinity to soldiers, officers, and native peoples through insubordination, fights, and work slowdowns. But ultimately this is a story about women. Poska illustrates how female colonists contradicted or manipulated prescriptive ideals to their advantage, such as women who played on the project's obsession with fertility to secure better postpartum care or those who led their households even as the British invaded.Poska's study is one of several works, most recently Jane Mangan's Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain (2016), that take a more holistic approach to their topic by grounding their narratives firmly in both Spain and the Americas. Atlantic and Iberian studies, an outgrowth of global history movements, have emerged as leading fields in early Latin American history. Indeed, Poska published a chapter treating similar material in the anthology Women of the Iberian Atlantic (2012). While Atlantic, empire, and Iberian have appeared in some titles rather gratuitously, Poska's work thoughtfully and cogently considers the structural forces that connected empire and colony by drawing on sources from the peninsula (Seville and La Coruña) and the Americas (Buenos Aires and Montevideo) in eight chapters evenly bifurcated between Spain and Río de la Plata. Yet, while Gendered Crossings ends in the Americas, it still reads more like an Iberian story. Poska masterfully illustrates how physical conditions and administrative discord at the settlement sites affected their short- and long-term viability. Yet what does not emerge is a sense of the other structural forces in play—political, social, economic—within the Americas that influenced the project. Greater context on the state of the region's native populations and the nature of ethnoracial attitudes in this period would have offered valuable insight on what turned out to be important long-term positions and policies in this area: campaigns to whiten via foreign immigration and indigenous relocation and persecution. Despite these minor issues, Gendered Crossings serves as an excellent model for future Iberian studies and will appeal to undergraduates and professional scholars.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.