Associate Professor of History, History
School of Humanities

colonial Latin America, the Andes, African Diaspora, Atlantic world, history of race, gender

2013 Premio al libro Latin American Studies Association Perú Section Flora Tristán/Latin American Studies Association Peru Section Flora Tristán book prize for _Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru_ Pitt Latin American Series (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)

2013 Honorable Mention - Erminie Wheeler-Voeglin Book Award (The American Society for Ethnohistory) for _Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru_ Pitt Latin American Series (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)

2006 – 2007 Residential Research Fellowship of the Law in Slavery and Freedom Project at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan

2004 John Carter Brown Library Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities

In my first book, _Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru_, I examined how indigenous and African laborers together struggled against impositions on their labor to demonstrate how colonialism and slavery were mutually supportive. A social history, my analysis intervened in the history of critical race theory and colonialism by exploring how enslaved and indigenous employed state discourses distinguishing “Indian” from “black” in the seventeenth century. With a microhistorical approach, I demonstrated how indigenous laborers and enslaved Africans replicated but transformed colonial racial distinctions and the categories of slavery through their participation in emerging markets. By arguing for the value of their labor, as slaves or “Indians”, Africans and native Andeans complicated colonial definitions of justice with the very racial terms that lay at the heart of colonial labor debates.

In my current book project, I explore how Africans in the colonial Andes imagined their uncertain freedoms, long before the era of emancipation, within the Spanish empire’s discourses and practices of slavery. As throughout the Americas, Africans and their descendants employed colonial courts to defend their persons and families and to claim individual freedom, or manumission. The project argues, however, that enslaved people traded debt agreements and kin obligations for legal manumission. The result was uncertain freedom. Uniquely combining detailed microhistories of enslaved and freed families in the Peruvian coastal city of Trujillo (carefully constructed from thousands of notary records) with a textual analysis of contemporary publications, the book boldly theorizes the instability of freedom, and also the nature of legal bondage within the Spanish empire.

Rachel Sarah O’Toole is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine where she teaches classes on colonial Latin America, the African Diaspora, and sex and gender. Her monograph, _Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru_ received the 2013 Latin American Studies Association Peru Section Flora Tristán book prize. With Sherwin Bryant and Ben Vinson III, she co-edited _Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora_ (2012) and with Ivonne del Valle and Anna More, she co-edited _Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization_ (2019). She has published articles on the construction of whiteness, masculinity within slavery, African Diaspora identities, indigenous politics, and gender influences on racial constructions, and currently is completing her second monograph regarding the meanings of freedom in colonial Peru.

“Llamas, Snakes, and Indigenous Colonial Equivalency in the Andes,” Animals and Race, Jonathan Thurston-Torres, editor (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2023): 53 – 71.

“Securing Subjecthood: Free and Enslaved Economies within the Pacific Slave Trade,” _From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas_, Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat, editors (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020): 149 – 175.

“Afro-Latin Americans Within and Beyond Enslavement,” in Engaging the African Diaspora in K-12 Education. Kia Caldwell and Emily Chavez, editors (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2020), 15 – 27.

“(Un)Making Christianity: The African Diaspora in Slavery and Freedom,” _The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity_, David Orique, Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, and Virginia Garrard, editors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020): 101 – 119.

_Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization_, Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, Rachel Sarah O’Toole, editors Hispanic Issues (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2019)

“Afro-Peruvian Cimarrones: Raiding the Archives and Articulating Race,” _Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film_, Rudyard Alcocer, Kristen Block, Dawn Duke, editors (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018): 59 – 81.

“The Bonds of Kinship, the Ties of Freedom in Colonial Peru,” _Journal of Family History_ 42:1 (January 2017): 3-21.

“Mobilizing Muleteer Indigeneity in the Markets of Colonial Peru,” _To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America_, Mónica Díaz, editor (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017): 95 – 121.

“Devotion, Domination, and the Work of Fantasy in Colonial Peru,” _Radical History Review_ 2015: 123 (October 2015): 37-59.

“The Work of Race,” in _Ethnicity as a Political Resource: Conceptualizations across Disciplines, Regions, and Periods, University of Cologne (UoC) Forum ‘Ethnicity as a Political Resource,’_ eds. (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015): 209 – 219.

“Fitting In: Urban Indians, Migrants, and Muleteers in Colonial Peru,” _City Indians in Spain’s American Empire: Urban Indigenous Society in Colonial Mesoamerica and Andean South America, 1600-1830_, Dana Velasco Murillo, Mark Lentz, and Margarita R. Ochoa, editors (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), pp. 148 – 171.

_Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru_ Pitt Latin American Series (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)

_Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora_, Sherwin Bryant, Rachel Sarah O’Toole,and Ben Vinson III, editors. The New Black Studies Series (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012)

“To Be Free and Lucumí: Ana de la Calle and Making African Diaspora Identities in Colonial Peru,” _Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora_, Sherwin Bryant, Rachel Sarah O’Toole, and Ben Vinson III, editors. The New Black Studies Series (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), pp. 73 – 92.

“Don Carlos Chimo del Perú: ¿Del Común o cacique?,” _Secuencia: Revista de historia y ciencias sociales_ [Mexico] 81 (septiembre-diciembre 2011), pp. 13 – 41.

“’The Most Resplendent Flower in the Indies’: Making Saints and Constructing Whiteness in Colonial Peru,” _Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600 – 1850)_, Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2009), pp. 136 – 155.

“Religion, Society, and Culture in the Colonial Era,” _A Blackwell Companion to Latin American History_, Thomas H. Holloway, editor (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008),pp. 162 – 177.

“From the Rivers of Guinea to the Valleys of Peru: Becoming a Bran Diaspora within Spanish Slavery,” _Social Text_ 92, 25: 3 (Fall 2007), pp. 19 – 36.

“In a War against the Spanish”: Andean Protection & African Resistance on the Northern Peruvian Coast,” _The Americas_ 63:1 (July 2006), pp. 19 – 52.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_americas/v063/63.1otoole.html

“Danger in the Convent: Colonial Demons, Idolatrous Indias, and Bewitching Negras in Santa Clara (Trujillo del Perú),” _Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History_ 7:1 (Spring 2006)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v007/7.1otoole.html

“Castas y representación en Trujillo colonial,” in _Más allá de la dominación y la resistencia: Estudios de historia peruana, siglos XVI - XX_, Paulo Drinot and Leo Garofalo, editors (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005), pp. 48 – 76.

"Ellos no son los únicos dueños de sus historias: liderazgos paralelos de Ferreñafe y Lambayeque (1750 –1790)," in _La Memoria de los Ancestros_, Luis Millones and Wilfredo Kapsoli, editors (Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma Editorial Universitaria, 2001), pp. 91 - 114.

2004 Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library John D. and Rose H. Jackson Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship

2003 Albert J. Beveridge Grant for Research in the History of the Western Hemisphere from the American Historical Association

2003 Short-Term Research Fellowship from the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World at Harvard University

2003 Newberry Library Short-Term Resident Fellowship

2012 Mellon-Latin American Studies Association Grant Seminar Series (with Anna More and Ivonne del Valle)

2015-6 John Carter Brown Library Long-Term Fellowship funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=5358

Last updated
01/18/2023