The will of Ana de la Calle
After two centuries of colonial rule, the Andean cultures that had produced women shamans like La Señora de Cao and vibrant, exuberant ceramics like the Mochica stirrup vessels, and propelled Malintzin to integrate with the armies of conquest, Spanish laws, customs and language had been grafted onto native culture.
Indigenous beliefs in life cycles, chaos, sacrifice and priesthood survived alongside an institutional Catholic church and an oppressive trade in slaves. Native peoples were severely disadvantaged under imperial masters from the Old World, but they were also alive to opportunities afforded by a powerful legal system to protect and consolidate their own interests. A large number of legal testaments exists from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Peru and these were often written or commissioned by women of African origin or descent. Like the will of the Anglo-Saxon noblewoman Wynfl?d,Ω some eight centuries earlier, these wills offer intriguing insights into women’s status, possessions, self-image and ambitions for their own and their children’s souls.Women slaves were largely employed in domestic service and since, in these roles, they were often able to develop social relations with their masters, they were also more likely than males to be freed by means of a carta de libertad≈ or to be able to afford to buy their own freedom. Some women slaves probably had sexual relations with male members of free households, consensually or otherwise, while, one suspects, many male slaves were killed by the physical hardship of manual labour. Under Spanish law, slave status was matrilineal, so a female slave who won or earned her freedom automatically freed her offspring. Freed women might earn a living by continuing in domestic service, by opening and running small shops or chicherias, or by lending money at interest.
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century South America, as in Europe, knowledge of the domestic, legal and financial cultures of their masters empowered women to operate in areas far beyond the heavily circumscribed lives of male labourers and, often, beyond their own origins.Ana de la Calle was a free woman, a bread-seller, of Trujillo on the Moche River in northern Peru, who wrote her will in April 1719. She was a woman of mixed blood, a morena, but she also identified herself as a member of the Lucumi caste, a term used to denote slaves originating among the West African Yoruba people who thought themselves superior to the slaves of other countries.
Ana’s will, dictated to a public notary, begins with legal and religious formalities, standardised to ensure the document’s legitimacy and the testator’s adherence to the Catholic faith. Here we are told that Ana is ‘sick in bed of an illness that God our lord has seen fit to give me’. Should she die, she wishes to be buried with her husband, Pasqual de Segama (also a free moreno) who has predeceased her, in the monastery of St Francis, to which she leaves 4 reales. Ana then reveals a first layer of complexity in her history. She bore no children with Pasqual, but…
I declare that at present I was married and veiled according to the order of Our Holy Mother Church with Agustin de Saavedra, free moreno, of which we also do not have any children…
I declare that before I contracted my first marriage with the said Pasqual de Segama, as a weak woman I bore a daughter who is alive today named Maria de la Cruz, parda [a free-born morena]. I declare her, as such, to be my daughter.13
Now, having established the status of her principal beneficiaries, she disposes of her property. She owns a house, which, she says, she bought in 1692 with her first husband and in which she inherited sole rights after his death. Her second husband, Agustin, is to be given 25 pesos – comprising silver reales, at 8 to the peso – for his own burial and a life interest in Ana’s house, while her daughter Maria and ‘her creditors’ benefit to the tune of 461 pesos.
A fifth of Ana’s property is to be used for her burial and masses for her soul. And…Item: I also declare as my property a little black criolla girl named Eduvigia, who is a little more than a year old…
Item: I declare as my property a large trunk of Panamanian cedar with its lock and key.
Item: A table with its drawer and carved legs.
Item: A copper pan, a large tray, and another, smaller one.
Item: Also a black woman named Maria Isabel of casta lucumi [the mother of one-year-old Eduvigia]
And heeding that I have no more heir than the said Maria de la Cruz, I name her as such my universal heir so that after my death she may have and inherit my property with God’s blessing and mine because this is my will.
Like Wynfl?d before her, and like many other women who made wills to dispose of their property, Ana ensures that the bulk of her legacy goes to her daughter, with the church as secondary beneficiary. Like Wynfl?d, too, she bequeaths slaves, a mother and daughter, an indication of their value as current and future domestic servants but also, one imagines, a reflection of Ana’s status as a free woman and slave owner. Her possessions are fewer and much more modest than those of the Anglo-Saxon noblewoman and yet the worth of individual items of furniture, especially the trunk that can be locked, tells us about the value women placed on these important domestic centrepieces. Her ability to dispose of her house, first to her surviving husband and then to her daughter, echoes an ongoing theme in these stories: the rights and privileges of widows who became sole owners of land and property. It is also significant, I think, that her illegitimate daughter Maria is, effectively, legitimised by the taking of a new name – de la Cruz – and by her status as principal beneficiary.
Ana tells us even more, on a closer reading, about her identity. She has given herself the surname ‘de la Calle’ – of the street, perhaps the moniker by which she was known in public among her customers and suppliers.
She took neither of her husbands’ names, preferring her own professional identity. For her daughter, though, something more modest: she is Maria de la Cruz – of the cross – an identifier of lower-class piety in the colony.The portrait of Ana that can be drawn from the contents and wording of her will already suggests a multi-dimensional woman. The fact that two more documents survive to add nuance to her portrait is the social historian’s very good fortune. The first, a brief codicil to the will, was recorded less than a month later and states that the little slave girl Eduvigia, daughter of her slave-woman, Maria Isabel, is bequeathed directly to Ana’s granddaughter, Juana de Silva – another new surname, this time more neutral and carrying no hint of diasporic slave origins. A second document, undated, records the actual goods and chattels left at Ana’s death, which ended up in the hands of Maria’s husband, Baltasar de los Reyes – a military member of the city council. The document formed part of a dossier compiled by Juana de Silva (Ana’s granddaughter) and her husband, Don Faustino Vidaurre, in a legal action for recovery of those goods against de los Reyes in 1727. These items are even more revealing than the will of the sorts of possessions that a successful free woman of colour in the colonies might accumulate over a lifetime…
First, a gourd adorned in silver that is worth about four pesos.
Item: A piece of the True Cross adorned in Prince’s metal with its glass cover that is worth about eight pesos.
Item: A mirror that is worth about two pesos.
Item: A new copper frying pan that is worth about three pesos.
Item: A wheat-coloured shawl that is worth about ten pesos.
Item: And a worn, iridescent skirt that is worth about four pesos.
Item: A length of lace underskirting that amounts to 20 reales.
Item: Also a small piece of false gold jewellery mounted with stones of amethyst, ruby, and diamonds of alchemy that is worth about four reales with another four stones of alchemy that is worth another four reales…
Item: Also a bedstead that is worth 25 pesos.
Item: Also a canopy that is worth 14 pesos.
Item: Also a dais with its Holy Christ surrounded by engravings that is worth about three pesos.
Item: A spit that was my grandmother’s with the value of one peso.
Item: A small statue of the Most Pure Virgin with its little silver crown, that is mine, that is worth three pesos.
Item: In the possession of the said Baltasar de los Reyes, a snuff box with its silver fringe that is worth about three pesos.
Item: All the papers of bills, receipts, payments and settlements executed by the said Maria de la Cruz Cavero for Ana, who they commonly call Mama Anica, who was mother of the said Maria de la Cruz Cavero…14
What we see here is the result of a dispute. Maria evidently died intestate, leaving her husband in possession of chattels that Juana believed should revert to her through the female line. It is significant that the special keepsakes of symbolic or religious importance, evidently cheap paste or souvenirs, are worth much less than the bedstead – a woman’s prize possession, judging by its value, just as it was with Anglo-Saxon women – and a wheat-coloured shawl, whose technical excellence rather than its showiness must have made it a precious, and saleable, commodity. It is also significant, as historian Rachel O’Toole observes in her revealing study of Ana and her will, that Ana enjoyed another identity. O’Toole points out that the nickname Mama Anica – used of her by her granddaughter – may be a discreet reference to a woman who had earned a second income practising unorthodox spiritual rituals; that is to say, someone whom Wynfl?d might, in an earlier time, have referred to as a cunning-woman or seeress.
* A spokesperson or emissary.
† Cortes was known as Lord Malinche.
‡ Making a neat, if remote, pair with Snorri, the child of Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, half a millennium earlier.
§ The implications of such practices are intriguing. The son of a king’s wife might be anyone’s; only the children of his sister were sure to be of royal blood.
# See page 123.
∫ In a popular sitcom of British television in the 1960s and 1970s, Till Death Us Do Part, a new husband, socialist Mike, played by Tony Booth, comes to live with his wife Rita’s (Una Stubbs) conservative parents Alf and Else Garnett (Warren Mitchell and Dandy Nicholls). The matrilocal set-up and incompatible politics provide the pivotal tensions on which the plots devolve.
Ω See page 68.
≈ A deed of manumission, the legal guarantee of freedom.