Taverns, Witches, and Marketplaces: Ethnicity and Race in Colonial Peru

by Leo J. Garofalo

Taverns, Witches, and Marketplaces reconstructs the commercial and ritual activities of daily life in multiethnic Andean towns to show how colonial elites and commoners marked identities and status through what they produced and consumed. In the 1600s and 1700s, markets drew together Europeans, Africans, and the indigenous as they worked out how to provide for a rapidly expanding population in new ports, administrative capitals, and mining camps. Workers needed food and drink, merchants needed outlets for goods, and local markets needed buyers and sellers. Drawing upon archival evidence and a re-reading of the chronicles of the colonial coca leaf debate, this book explains how economic participation how women tavern keepers, black and Indian beer brewers, and people accused of selling magic created an intersection of economic and cultural forces from which sprang new colonial meanings of alcohol, stimulants, and magic. Piecing together this intersection of cultural, economic, and political ethno-racial categorization opens a window into how Spanish imperial rule was constructed through imposition and contestation.

360 pages, Hardcover

First published July 24, 2015