Jeremy Mumford

Assistant Professor of History, Brown University

Invasion by marriage: Race, sexuality, and colonialism

Abstract:

In the 1550s, one of the princes of an independent Inka enclave on the eastern slope of the Andes that lay outside Spanish control accepted a Spanish offer to adopt Christianity and Spanish overlordship in exchange for a valuable encomienda in the Inka heartland. Within a few years, the prince died, leaving behind his sister-wife, doña Maria Kusi Warkay, and young daughter, Beatriz Coya. Seeking a new kinship network, Kusi Warkay arranged a marriage between her daughter and Cristóbal Maldonado, the younger brother of a neighboring Spanish encomendero. However, the marriage subverted the Spanish governor’s own plans for the girl’s marriage. It led to the arrest and prosecution of many of the people involved, generating a large trial record. I am writing a microhistory about the episode.

In various Spanish possessions, but above all in the core territories of Peru and New Spain, indigenous royal and noble lines retained both prestige and a variety of concrete legal claims in the colonial period, while some conquistadors and encomenderos, in building their own grandiose ambitions and resisting Crown efforts to sideline them, claimed continuity with or succession from indigenous royalty. Their discourse of continuity harkens back to the medieval tradition of union of crowns through marriage, associated most famously with the Habsburg dynasty itself, and touches also on Las Casian visions of a non-violent, voluntary basis for Spanish empire.

Jeremy Ravi Mumford is Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. His first book, Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes (Duke), published in 2012, focused on a massive colonial social engineering project carried out in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru in the 1570s. Vertical Empire won honorable mention for Best Book Prize from the New England Council of Latin American Studies, and was the subject of a symposium at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima. Jeremy Mumford has published in the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Latin American Research Review, the Colonial Latin American Review, the Canadian Historical Review, and the Boston Globe “Ideas” section. He has presented his research, which has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, a Fulbright-Hays fellowship, and a Charlotte W. Newcombe fellowship, at conferences in Peru, Ecuador, Spain and the United States. Mumford has studied Quechua in Bolivia, worked on archaeological excavations in Peru, and was co-director of a spatial humanities project at Vanderbilt University on “Deep Mapping the Reducción: Toward a Historical GIS of the General Resettlement of Indians in the Viceroyalty of Peru,” which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently working on a microhistory of a child marriage in mid-sixteenth-century Cuzco.