| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Laura A. Lewis. Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico. (Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2003. Pp. xiv, 262. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.95.
The "hall of mirrors" in Laura A. Lewis's title refers to an inversion of Mexico's colonial caste hierarchy within the domain of witchcraft, a realm of unsanctioned, supernatural, Indian-associated power that mirrored the sanctioned political and juridical power of the Spanish elite. Lewis focuses in particular on the roles of blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos as mediators between the social poles of Spaniard and Indian in both the sanctioned and the unsanctioned domains. She uses case records from the Mexican Inquisition as her principal window into the unsanctioned domain; although Indians were exempt from prosecution, they were frequently involved as suppliers, mentors, collaborators, or bewitchers of plaintiffs or defendants.	1
Sanctioned Spanish power simultaneously exploited Indians, through various mechanisms including tribute demands, forced labor, usurpation of political offices, rape, and property destruction, and offered them, through a reasonably effective and respected judicial system, some protection from its own excesses. Spaniards typically deployed these exploitative mechanisms indirectly through mestizo, mulatto, or black (slave or free) middlemen; these intermediary castes gained social legitimacy and authority by pursuing alliances of kinship and patronage with Spaniards. The bellicose nature ascribed to persons of African descent made them seem especially well suited to the role of enforcer, while the passive, feminized nature ascribed to Indians cast them as helpless victims. When Indians litigated against their ill treatment, as they frequently did, the non-Spanish middlemen were the immediate targets of their complaints, while Spaniards were somewhat shielded from prosecution.	. . .

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