SECTION 4 GENDER HISTORIES Trading Roles : Gender , Ethnicity , and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí

Located in the heart of the Andes, Potosi was arguably the most important urban center in the Western Hemisphere during the colonial era. It was internationally famous for its abundant silver mines and regionally infamous for its labor draft. Set in this context of opulence and oppression associated with the silver trade, Trading Roles emphasizes daily life in the city’s streets, markets, and taverns. As Jane E. Mangan shows, food and drink transactions emerged as the most common site of interaction for Potosinos of different ethnic and class backgrounds. Within two decades of Potosi’s founding in the 1540s, the majority of the city’s inhabitants no longer produced food or alcohol for themselves; they purchased these items. Mangan presents a vibrant social history of colonial Potosi through an investigation of everyday commerce during the city’s economic heyday, between the discovery of silver in 1545 and the waning of production in the late seventeenth century.

Drawing on wills and dowries, judicial cases, town council records, and royal decrees, Mangan brings alive the bustle of trade in Potosi. She examines quotidian economic transactions in light of social custom, ethnicity, and gender, illuminating negotiations over vendor locations, kinship ties that sustained urban trade through the course of silver booms and busts, and credit practices that developed to mitigate the pressures of the market economy. Mangan argues that trade exchanges functioned as sites to negotiate identities within this colonial multiethnic society. Throughout the study, she demonstrates how women and indigenous peoples played essential roles in Potosi’s economy through the commercial transactions she describes so vividly.

It is hard to exaggerate Potosí: the source of half of Spanish American silver (and hence of a good deal of the world's new silver) between 1550 and 1650; a city of well over 100,000 by 1600; a place isolated, 4000 meters above sea level, in the Cordillera Real of the Andes, well east of the altiplano of what is now Bolivia; a market, despite its inaccessibility, that was the destination of goods from distant regions of South America, Europe, and east Asia; the source, because of the assumed maltreatment of native miners there, of deep criticism of Spain by its European rivals-but a source, also, of deep and lasting envy among those powers.
A good deal has been published about colonial Potosí in the past few decades, in the form of editions of chronicles and other early texts, closely-focussed monographs, and books and articles treating the city directly or giving it a central role in some broader mid-Andean topic. Readers of Dr. Mangan's book will find many of these works in her bibliography. Most of them have addressed the large and obvious questions, such as Indian labor in mining and refining, output of silver (and the determinants of production), technology, local and long-distance trade, sources and patterns of essential supplies, the social history of mine and refinery owners, and government.
Dr. Mangan has dug deeper into the lives of the great mass of Potosí's population than any of the city's previous students. She has found a route into commoners' existence in the operations of small-scale trade in the city, making use of the abundant documentation that survives on that trade. Potosí is notorious for being too high, dry, and cold for comfort; but a positive effect of its climate is that insects and mold are barely present there, so that sixteenth-century manuscripts often appear to be freshly written on new paper. The splendid notarial collection forming part of the great archive housed in the Casa de Moneda (the colonial mint building) has served Dr Mangan well, as have the volumes of city council minutes held by the Bolivian National Archive in Sucre. She also made good use of the Archive of the Indies in Seville. Indeed, the first impression that readers may take from this book is of the extreme thoroughness of its research. For every point she makes, the author seems to have a dozen examples.
In succeeding chapters the book sets the stage of urban trade after the discovery of Potosí's silver ores in 1545; addresses regulation of the city's commerce by local and more distant authorities; analyses the production and sale of two essential items of local diet-chicha (corn beer) and bread; shows the high importance of credit in the city's internal trade, and describes the sources of credit; demon-strates the central role of women in urban commerce; and shows the contraction of that trading in response to the decline of silver production as the seventeenth century wore on.
In discussing these topics the book provides information, and suggests patterns, that will be useful to many historians of colonial Spanish towns. Some, indeed, of what is related here comes as much as confirmation as revelation: the entrepreneurship of Indian women, for instance, in local commerce has been noted before. But the scale of such enterprise in so large a market as Potosí, and the clarity and precision with which native women's business activities are described, make those entrepreneurial qualities doubly striking. Because it describes Potosí, the book may be generally said to provide many "super-examples" of this kind.
Potosí was, however, in some respects sui generis; hence what happened there may not exemplify what happened elsewhere in the Spanish colonies, or do so only partly. The fact, for instance, that for most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the city possessed, besides its prodigious mines, the only mint in Spanish South America made its local economy unusually monetized (with the stock of coin being supplemented by pieces of unassayed raw silver); and this may help account for the vibrant petty credit system that Dr. Mangan describes. The loans came not from merchants or religious houses-as they did so often elsewhere in the empire-but mainly from women, some Spanish but more of them indigenous. These women were often in reality pawnbrokers, accepting goods (again, from both Indians and Spaniards) as security for cash loans-and loans in some cases of several hundred pesos, money enough to set up a shop or a bakery.
With example after example, indeed, Dr. Mangan reveals in Potosí an effervescent and unified petty economy, with its root in the great open market (the khatu) of the strongly Spanish city center and its branches reaching out unbroken into the native suburbs (the rancherías). The standard picture of Potosí is one of Spanish mine and refinery owners controlling masses of male native laborers. This book shows a city in which Spanish and native small business was wholly intertwined, to the advantages of both sides. To the standard Potosí picture of male-operated silver production is opposed one of female-run exchange and small business. In one notable respect, however, Dr Mangan confirms the conventional view: her Potosí is a place strictly of Spaniards and Indians (with a few Africans interspersed). The physical and cultural conflation of the two, the mestizo, is barely present. Can this really have been so by, say, the mid-1600s? Mining towns elsewhere in the Empire seem generally to have been exceptionally efficient engines of mestizaje.
We are gradually getting the measure of colonial Potosí. A comprehensive history worthy of the place is still to be written. But when the city's Braudel finally appears, he or she will find a way into the lives of the mass of potosinos clearly opened by Dr. Mangan's work.

Southern Methodist University
Peter Bakewell