Cacicas: The Indigenous Women Leaders of Spanish America, 1492–1825 ed. by Margarita R. Ochoa and Sara Vicuña Guengerich

Reviewed by: Cacicas: The Indigenous Women Leaders of Spanish America, 1492–1825 ed. by Margarita R. Ochoa and Sara Vicuña Guengerich Camilla Townsend (bio) Cacicas: The Indigenous Women Leaders of Spanish America, 1492–1825 edited by Margarita R. Ochoa and Sara Vicuña Guengerich University of Oklahoma Press, 2021 in the concluding comments in this fine new edited collection, Mónica Díaz suggests that we should sometimes relinquish our scholarly need to prove that we are changing paradigms and simply “appreciate the changes that have occurred in our disciplines and celebrate important milestones” (269). The pieces in this anthology are uniformly excellent, reminding us how far the study of Native American women has come in the past thirty years. Ida Altman opens the volume with a prologue on female political leaders recognized by the Spaniards in the early Caribbean; then the editors Ochoa and Guengerich provide a thorough introduction to the subject of women leaders in mainland Spanish America in the context of Indigenous nobility in general. They acknowledge that the term “cacica” was a Spanish invention (feminizing cacique, the Arawak word for “chief”) and that women most often did not hold formal political power either in preconquest America or after the Spanish incursion. The editors and authors encourage the study of women’s interventions in the public arena through other means. Most of the evidence comes from Native women’s active participation in the extensive litigation in the Spanish American world. The volume consists of two sets of essays, the first on Mesoamerica (with contributing authors Brad Benton, Peter Villella, Margarita Ochoa, and Catherine Komisaruk), and the second on South America (including authors Karen Graubart, Chantal Caillavet, Liliana Pérez together with Renzo Honores, Sara Guengerich, and Florencia Roulet). At nearly every turn, the authors argue that cacicas used the tools at their disposal to influence events around them. The most common theme is that they used Spanish law to carve out increasing power for themselves. To my mind, the book begs two sets of questions, calling out for further analysis in two arenas: First, how might we put what we know about Indigenous women leaders in Spanish America in conversation with what we know about North America? Second, is it possible that we are going too far in our search for women’s power and consequently overlooking evidence of devastating loss? Comparisons with North America come to mind numerous times. When [End Page 154] Roulet writes about “Peacemaker Cacicas in the Río de la Plata Southern Frontier,” one is struck by the close parallels not only with Julianna Barr’s work (which the author mentions) but also with nearly every other study of women in peripheral middle grounds. When Peter Villella writes about the “Founding Mothers” of Querétaro in his piece on the Otomí women whose husbands and brothers allied with an early arriving Spaniard to form a frontier trade empire, one thinks repeatedly of the literature on the fur trade and the establishment of wealthy Métis families. All the essays provide food for thought on the eternal conundrum of how to weigh both power and loss at the same time. The volume offers a rather relentless focus on empowerment, even on occasions when the evidence leads this reader, at least, to see enforced limitation. The essays by Komisaruk and Graubart come as something of a relief in this regard, as they speak directly to questions others choose to ignore. Komisaruk, for instance, reminds readers that over the course of the colonial era, Indigenous nobles lost the power that had belonged to their family by right of tradition; instead, Native people learned to take power through their access to political positions or to certain trades. But women were excluded from both; over time, their power became more tenuous. She trenchantly observes, for instance, that one “ex-gobernadora” (the widow of an Indigenous gobernador, head of a local cabildo) in Guatemala lived in penury; her grandson worked as a day laborer. Graubart shows how Indigenous women in Peru made strategic use of arguments that Spanish courts would accept in their quest to have themselves named to political positions that probably would not have been...

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