Social Differentiation, Gender, and Ethnicity: Urban Indian Women in Colonial Bolivia, 1640-1725

Abstract

Recently, a number of scholars have begun to piece together the economic and social history of Indian women in the Andes during the colonial period. It has not been an easy task: too often quantitative materials, such as tributary censuses, mention women only as wives and mothers and then may not provide even minimal demographic data on them. Moreover, although court and notarial records can be rich sources of information about Indian women, they generally deal with those who lived in cities or who were familiar enough with them to know how to use the colonial legal system. Consequently, it is no accident that most research has concentrated on native women in urban settings, certainly a small minority of the female indigenous population.