Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain

In the preconquest period, the Nahuas, the indigenous peoples of central Mexico, spoke of family in terms of larger kinship units that shared a common space—cemithualtin, “those of one patio.”¹ Mangan’s beautifully written and exhaustively researched book inspires the question of whether colonial families should be described as cemailuikatltin, those of one ocean. Mangan’s book reconsiders the concept of family within the sixteenth-century Spanish empire through a transatlantic approach that illustrates the customary, emotional, and economic ties between Spain (primarily Seville) and Lima and Arequipa, which even an ocean could not dissolve. In analyzing the evolution of family within an Iberian context, Mangan’s study offers an excellent model of a history that is both global and local, while in the process examining whether the Atlantic served to unite or divide imperial peoples, a theme that she first explored in her co-edited volume, Women of the Iberian...