Michelle McKinley

Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593–1689

This article examines the ways in which enslaved litigants engaged with the ecclesiastical courts in 17th century colonial Lima. The article analyzes a sample of the types of litigation instigated by Peruvian slaves to assert their conjugal rights, to effect transfers of ownership, and to enforce oral promises of manumission. It also deals with complaints of domestic violence, abandonment, destitution, and infidelity brought by enslaved women. The article uses accusations of concubinage and adultery, and “crimes against public morality” to explore the role of church courts in policing the boundaries of inter-ethnic relationships. This article should interest scholars of slavery working at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, particularly with regard to distinctions between the civil and common law systems of slavery. It should also interest historians of comparative family law and the canon law’s treatment of marriage, illegitimacy and concubinage. How does a comparative perspective add to our understanding of the way that sexuality, race and gender influence family law, and vice versa? How does recourse to the court either influence hegemonic norms of marriage or contest these? Finally, the article should also interest those using legal records as narratives to “write history from below” through the optics of legal anthropology and critical legal studies.

THE AMAZONIAN PEOPLES' RESOURCES INITIATIVE: Promoting Reproductive Rights and Community Development in the Peruvian Amazon

[R]eproductive rights ... rest on the recognition of the basic right of couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health . .. [taking] into account the needs of their living and future children and their responsibilities towards the community. The promotion of the responsible exercise of these rights for all people should be the fundamental basis for ... community-supported policies and programmes in the area of reproductive health.... Programme of Action adopted at the International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo, 1994, Paragraph 7.3

Till Death Do Us Part: Testamentary Manumission in Seventeenth-Century Lima, Peru

This article joins a long-standing conversation among slavery scholars regarding the tensions that emerged from the legal status of slaves as property and as persons. This feature of quasi-personhood and property was perhaps most pronounced in the testamentary devise of freedom granted by slave owners. Posthumous bequests of freedom simultaneously recognised the property rights of the deceased in human beings, while validating the affective ties of loyalty and devotion spawned by the master–slave relationship. The article traces the efforts of Margarita de Torres, an enslaved woman, who waged a nine-year lawsuit for her freedom against the executrices of her owners estate. In so doing, the article analyses Margaritas motivations for embarking on a protracted and costly lawsuit, given the odds in favour of, and against, slaves seeking to enforce testamentary promises of manumission in seventeenth-century Lima. More broadly, the article explores the affective relationships between owners and slaves, the conditions that accompanied testamentary freedom and the complexities that arose with the legal treatment of enslaved offspring of free fathers.

Illicit Intimacies Virtuous Concubinage in Colonial Lima

This article examines the ways that plebeian women confessed to concubinary relationships in seventeenth-century Lima. Part One reviews complaints brought by casta and enslaved concubines to enforce matrimonial promises. Part Two analyzes the imprecise laws and policies of the canonists on concubinage. Part Three considers the Church’s inquisitorial function in policing interethnic intimacies, given the virtual synonymity of illegitimacy and concubinage. The article assesses the marriage–concubinage dichotomy from the perspective of women who, given their ethnic and social position in colonial society enjoyed limited legal standing vis-à-vis elite women, but conversely exercised greater sexual freedom in forming and dissolving partnerships.