Ladies and gentlemen, slaves and citizens: Dressing the part in Lima, 1723--1845.

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the relationship between clothing and status in a slaveholding society, with particular attention to the meanings given to dress and deportment both by subordinate members of the society and by those who presumed to control them. The story unfolds between 1723, when Lima's highest judicial authorities proposed a strict sumptuary law to regulate the dress of the city's slaves and free castas (as the offspring of Europeans, Africans, and Indians were known), and 1845, when Ramon Castilla was elected President of the Republic of Peru. This project draws upon eighteenth- and nineteenth-century juridical ordinances, court cases, manumission letters, testaments, inventories, census data, manuscripts, and periodicals, in addition to a rich body of scholarship on slavery and abolition and on studies of material culture. Using clothing as a tracer, I demonstrate the ways in which the legal, economic, and social restrictions imposed upon slaves and free castas affected their access to material goods, but could not prevent them from using such goods to display their own sense of honor and status. By continuing the study through the end of the colonial period and into Spanish America's independence struggles of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, I follow the evolution of the language of dress in Peru, which took new political importance as men of color joined both the uniformed royalist militia and the independence armies themselves.