“I had heard versions of merpeople stories—primarily those about mermaids—in many highland villages while doing research in the Andes…I didn’t yet understand how these stories tied into the larger sociopolitical context of Spanish rule.”
-from “The Revolutionary Power of Andean Folk Tales” by Dr Di Hu
Mermaids and sirens have long played a prominent role in our oldest and most famous myths and legends. Swimming around the human psyche’s watery depths since Mesopotamian times, they have remained a subject of intense fascination, appearing in a litany of scholarly and literary works. In one such work, “The Charango and the. Sirena: Music, Magic, and the Power of Love,” Thomas Turino has shown how some musicians in the Andes revered and still revere mermaids (sirenas) as conduits of erotico-magical powers. Like sorcerers of the Middle Ages, who—according to tradition—consecrated their books at a spirit-haunted lake on Mount Pilatus, these musicians travelled to out-of-the-way, aqueous places, such as springs and rivers, to bless their charangos (guitar-like stringed instruments).
Turino wrote that the rituals often took place during a full moon and involved depositing a newly acquired charango, along with propitiatory offerings like cocoa and alcohol, in a sacred spot overnight. The charango-player would return to the spot the following morning, believing that his instrument had been specially tuned and played by the mermaid.
Calling it “sanctification” or “initiation”, Turino argued that the primary purpose of the nocturnal rite was to gain enhanced seductive abilities in all courting and musical endeavours. However, Turino also stressed that the musicians, while respectful of their supernatural patronesses, feared them immensely. “In some contexts,” he maintained, “sirenas are associated with the devil.”
In her essay “The Revolutionary Power of Andean Folk Tales”, Professor Di Hu, an anthropological archaeologist at James Madison University, has argued that this was certainly the case in places like Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, where mermaids were sometimes seen as Faust-like figures, offering wondrous gifts for a deathly price.
Hu has also noted that sirenas, with their unfettered ability to both empower and enervate individuals, were likened by local populations to colonial administrators. She specifically cited the example of Don Antonio Vera, a native of Otavalo in modern-day Ecuador. In 1737, Vera told a court that several people in his village believed “mermen of the local lakes” blinded men in exchange for “giving them good singing voices”. Vera went on to say that, in reality, women had been blinding or even killing their own children in order to save them from the horrors of the of the Spanish-run textile workshops (obrajes).
In this way, mermaid folk tales, which frequently illustrated the dangers of Faustian bargains, “helped spread dread of the workshops.” As a narrative form of anti-colonial resistance, they also helped to mobilise all underclasses–from Africans to poor Native Andeans–against Spanish labour institutions.
We spoke to Hu learn more about the Andean mermaids and the dark history of the obrajes.
The Custodian: What are obrajes and what is their significance?
Professor Di Hu: Obrajes were workshops or manufactories dedicated to the production of textiles in colonial Latin America. There are instances of obrajes producing glass, but I would say more than 95% of obrajes were dedicated primarily to textiles. They were relatively self-sufficient, with all stages of textile production represented in the obrajes and in their nearby ranches. Officially, an obraje had at least six looms. Smaller workshops called “chorillos” were more informal. Anywhere from a few dozen to around a thousand people were directly “employed” by a single obraje. If you count their family members, the population could reach several thousand for a single obraje. Often, the obraje was the entire village. I use the word “employed” with quotation marks because working in an obraje was rarely a completely free choice for the indigenous people who made up the great majority of the workforce.
Obrajes used debt slavery, prison labor, and enslaved labor to ensure a workforce. Obrajes were profitable enterprises because the cloth commanded high prices in mining towns and cities. For example, the obrajes of Pomacocha and Cacamarca would send their cloth as far as Potosí and Oruro, thousands of kilometers away in Bolivia. Despite the great transport costs, selling cloth to those markets would still be highly profitable. Another reason why obrajes were so profitable was that they paid next to nothing to their “employees.” The obrajes used debt to ensnare most of the workers because they needed to pay elevated prices for their food and “shelter” inside the obrajes. The vast majority could never pay off their debts. In my research on obrajes in Peru, I found that obrajes had great cultural significance in enabling the revolts and rebellions that gripped Peru during the “Age of Revolution” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The first seeds of this insight came not from me, but from the Peruvian historian Miriam Salas. She had a couple of paragraphs in her comprehensive book, Estructura colonial del poder español en el Perú: Huamanga (Ayacucho) a traves de sus obrajes, siglos 16-18, about the connection between the obrajes and the 1781 Tupac Amaru II rebellion.
The rebellion was the largest indigenous-led uprising ever in the Americas. She briefly commented that the dynamic cultural exchange and innovation that occurred with obrajes and the societal changes that led to rebellion. Intrigued by this hypothesis, I made it an important part of the design for my research. I showed that Salas’s hunch was indeed correct and broader in its implications. The obrajes brought about the long-term evolution of social landscapes that were conducive to mass mobilisation and social movements in general, not just to the Tupac Amaru II rebellion.
C: Since the publication of your essay on Andean mermaids, have you identified other instances where members of the indigenous Andean population also used sirena legends to express the harsh realities of colonial rule?
DH: Unfortunately, this is still the only case of a documented and contemporaneous connection between folk tales about sirens and the harsh realities of colonialism.
I stumbled upon the document by accident in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain. The sirens reference was part of a witness statement by a Spaniard who was familiar with the abuses at a local obraje. I suspect that information may be buried in archives around the world, but one is only likely to stumble upon them by chance. Hopefully, as more archival documents are digitised and transcribed, more references will become public.
I also hope that my Sapiens piece has raised awareness of the importance of folktales in the colonial period. I myself would not have registered the detail about the sirens if I had not spent a lot of time in Andean villages listening to people tell these stories. The sirens folk tale plays a central role in the Peruvian film, La Teta Asustada, and the protagonist’s name is Fausta, perhaps a reference to the Faustian bargains involved in the exploitation of people of Indigenous descent. Fausta sings a song referencing a version of the sirens folk tale, highlighting the exploitation by her white employer, who stole her song. Here is my rough translation from Spanish:
C: How, in your view, did these tales become sources of empowerment and rebellion?
DH: The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci talked about the necessity of a greater consciousness among people who share similar material conditions, like those exploited by the Spanish colonial economy. This shared consciousness is necessary for people to recognise that they are on the same side and organise their efforts toward appropriate goals. Rebellions are quite rare in history because of a lack of shared consciousness. The Peruvian historian Alberto Flores Galindo showed how the story of the return of an Inka utopia was critical to various social movements in Andean history, even after the colonial era. This folk tale was critical in building up social consciousness about an exploitative system. Beyond the literature, I personally observe the power of stories in rebellions and social movements in general. People connect emotionally to stories and songs, not to academic treatises. Folk tales and songs can become a succinct, yet multi-layered rallying point for people. Shared stories provide the common language in social movements.
C: In 2016, I wrote about how the Spanish Empire, via a directive spearheaded by the Council of Lima, devised and promoted a certain artistic trope–the ángeles arcabuceros figure–to further its
oppressive imperial propaganda. Do you know whether sculptures of sirenas, which adorn many churches across Peru, Chile, and Bolivia, also served a similar function?
DH: I never made this connection, but as I think about it, you are probably right about sirenas in churches playing a similar function. Whereas the angeles arcabuceros might reinforce fear, sirenas playing musical instruments may give a false sense of levity around churches. While Native Andeans re-purposed Christianity in their own frameworks, the Spanish did leverage the power of the church in oppressive ways. Because most people were not literate, art was the medium of communication. The folk tales about the Faustian bargain themes of mermaids, however, show that the art could not completely dupe the people. They were aware of the structural inequities and traps.
C: What else can you tell us about your forthcoming book, The Fabric of Resistance?
DH: My book, currently titled The Fabric of Resistance: Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru, is due to come out in the fall of 2021 from the University of Alabama Press.
I am finishing editing it now. The book examines, through archaeological and historical lines of evidence, the long-term social conditions that enabled the large-scale rebellions in the late Spanish colonial period in Peru. I argue that despite the Spanish government’s emphasis on divide-and-control, workers of diverse backgrounds actively resisted proscriptions against inter-caste mixing. This cultural exchange underpinned the coordinated nature of late colonial rebellions. Given the lack of archaeological perspectives on what were the largest and most cosmopolitan indigenous-led rebellions of the Americas, this book will fill an important gap and provide fresh perspectives and arguments on a perennially important subject.
While the late colonial Andean rebellions have been a topic of fascination for historians, there has been no archaeological or historical anthropological research done on the long-term cultural innovations that enabled such rebellions. The book also challenges the received wisdom of several classics in the social sciences.
For example, it challenges the Marxist idea that religion and folk culture work against worker solidarity and rebellion. Far from being the opium of the masses, such beliefs often serve as the foundation that enables local revolts to spread like wildfire. Second, in much resistance literature, the “weapons of the weak” are seen as inherently weak weapons, e.g., privately expressing discontent or non-compliance, but not effective at overthrowing an oppressive system.
In contrast, I show that the “weapons of the weak” are far from weak. Over time, small everyday acts of resistance against indignities can form social landscapes conducive to effective coordinated political action. Popular narratives about resistance elevate armed rebellion, like with Kanye West saying in an interview that because slavery in the US lasted for hundreds of years, the enslaved were partly to blame for their plight.
In contrast, my research shows how armed rebellion is just one of the many manifestations of rebellious social landscapes. The book is timely in that indigenous resistance movements today are becoming more cosmopolitan, just as in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Andes. It highlights how important social landscapes are to facilitating the spread of social movements. We end up with a more bottom-up understanding of these resistance movements in general, as opposed to the usual focus on their leaders.
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