On Weaving the Past

This is a short, but interesting, book about a dimension of Latin American history that usually goes ignored: indigenous women. The book is made up of six chapters: an introduction, pre-hispanic LatAm, the colonial period, the 20th and 21st centuries in Mesoamerica, the 20th and 21st centuries in Central & South America, and current activism.

Because of its length and the amount of material it covers, it’s really hard to gather a sense of a general argument other than “indigenous women have and do play many important roles in Latin American society and should not be ignored.” The text is broadly synthetic, although it does seem that some primary research was done by the author in writing the book. Additionally, the book is comparative, looking to compare indigenous women across time and space.

From what I’ve gathered, as an average, indigenous women had the most access to power in the pre-Hispanic period, although Mayan women were comparably worse off compared to many other groups. The coming of the Spanish and Portuguese was a game-changer and put indigenous women in a much worse position, but some women did thrive and a great many survived and took advantage of their new environment. There’s a great discussion of Malintzin/Doña Marina in here, and I really liked to see that. Afterwards, the material is too diffuse to come to any general major theme, but it does seem that Andean women in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador tend to be able to find much more power to shape their own societies, while the indigenous women of Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil tend to be the worst off. Today, there is a great deal of indigenous women’s activism, in large part due to the spread of the internet, although it is ignored in lowland South America to a point where it isn’t elsewhere.

The text makes a good case why indigenous women should be studied and understood, but I think most of us who picked up this text already agree with that case. It does set some of the ground for future research by putting material on indigenous Latin American women in the same conversation, but the brevity of the text makes it impossible to have any strong take-aways. As such, this makes for a good starting point, but no reader should take this for the end of the discussion—there’s so much that still is not known about indigenous women in LatAm.

As a side note, this caption is ludicrous. Obviously this “ancient lost wax technique” isn’t “lost” if we have evidence of people relying on it. I’m not sure if the caption was written by Kellogg or the editor, but it’s honestly shameful for the way it exoticizes this woman’s everyday practice.