Race is a powerful concept for the organization of labor. Dominant and subaltern actors use it to build work forces and work places. After several centuries of capitalist and colonial worldmaking, it is hard to draw a line between racial formations and other structures of political economy. Yet there is always a sense in which race and work refuse to reproduce each other. Their co-production is always creating other things, other relations. Does racialization, as an analytical tool, allow us to understand this process?
In CSSH 68/3, two essays explore the imposition of racial categories in different historical settings, on different scales. Given the fascinating overlaps, we invited the authors to read each other’s papers.
Sam Holley-Kline. How the United Fruit Company Racialized Archaeological Labor in Guatemala, 1910–1953. Comparative Studies in Society and History 68(3): 581-605.
R. Alan Covey and Emilio Ramírez. The 1582 Registro de Mulatos and the Politics of Labor and Race in Early Colonial Cusco, Peru. Comparative Studies in Society and History 68(3):606-634.
Holley-Kline writes about Guatemala in the first half of the 20th century, where the United Fruit Company funded big North American archaeological projects. The racial logics used to organize the intensive production of fruit crops influenced how archaeological work was done, how Mayan pasts were “rediscovered,” and by whom. Covey and Ramírez, writing about Spanish efforts to count and control free Afro-Peruvians in 16th century Cusco, explore ideas of Blackness, Indigeneity, and European identity that are related, across centuries, to the racial constructs used to organize work crews on Guatemalan plantations and excavation sites.
In both settings, workers balked at, adjusted to, and openly resisted state-sanctioned attempts to racialize them. Work life – like race work – was shaped by elaborate patterns of subordination and non-compliance. Yet the data needed to interpret these contests were generated, disproportionately, by the classifiers. The archives are already racialized. Is this an opportunity or a constraint for the comparativist?
Clearly, it is both. In the commentaries below, our authors consider their options. Having done meticulous archival research, they confront patterns of agency, and forms of community and history, that can be interpreted only with new types of data, or new ways of assessing absent and refracted data. As Holley-Kline suggests, working across disciplinary lines – blending ethnographic, archeological, and historical research – can broaden the interpretive field. Covey and Ramírez agree, calling for oral history, attention to kinship and domestic politics, closer engagements with Black diaspora studies, deeper archival research, more community-based and public-facing work, and new attempts to bring materiality into historical narrative.
The possibilities, it would seem, are endless.
Read on. And enjoy.
Racialized Labor, Context or Argument?
Sam Holley-Kline
It’s been a pleasure to think with Alan Covey and Leo Ramírez’s “The 1582 Registro de Mulatos and the Politics of Labor and Race in Early Colonial Cusco, Peru.” In addition to the broad empirical connections—the socioracial system that the authors describe continues to reverberate across Latin America, centuries later—I was struck by the shared conceptual challenges, varied bodies of evidence, and distinct analytical approaches that link our pieces. Covey and Ramírez’s laser focus on the 1582 Registro de Mulatos enables them to read the document as both a tool of Spanish statecraft and evidence for Afro-Peruvian agency, through which the authors consider the possibilities for autonomy embodied in, and behind, the entries themselves. Yet, as the authors note, neither constraint nor autonomy developed in a vacuum.
In thinking with reference to my “How the United Fruit Company Racialized Archaeological Labor in Guatemala, 1910–1953,” I recall the challenge of finding the points of articulation between overlapping racialization regimes. For Covey and Ramírez, the exploitation of enslaved and free Afro-Peruvian laborers developed in a context already characterized by the use of Indigenous encomienda labor, itself conditioned by Spanish legal codes, the specifics of the Cuzco context, and precolonial antecedents. The Registro, in Covey and Ramírez’s reading, captures the racialized, class-based, and gendered points of articulation between the exploitation of different forms of labor. In so doing, it affords a fine-grained reading focused on the possibilities for Afro-Peruvian autonomy in early colonial Cuzco.
Here, I confess, I felt my own work falling short. My original intent in working with the archival materials I cited was precisely to elucidate workers’ agency, “not as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination but as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create,” in Saba Mahmood’s phrasing (2001:203). Yet what I thought would be my context became my argument: the forms of racializing labor that North American archaeologists employed overlapped with the labor management practices of the United Fruit Company, both of which were drawn from broader questions of race and labor prevalent in the Jim Crow-era United States. These were transplanted into a Guatemalan context in which Indigenous and Afrodescendant workers were already grappling with local forms of discrimination. In methodological contrast to Covey and Ramírez’s richly contextualized reading of the Registro, I found myself ranging across sources that tied broad ideas of race and labor to the day-to-day of fieldwork, like post-hoc representations of workers’ speech, accounting practices, and parallel non-archaeological research. Understanding these “historically specific relations of subordination” would enable a more detailed analysis of workers’ possibilities for autonomy, I thought, before realizing that I had already very much taken advantage of CSSH’s generous word count. So the chance to think about the subaltern side of the equation is a welcome one.
One key insight on definitional politics I draw from Mary Leighton (2016), who notes that scholars and workers may have very different ideas of the uses of archaeology. For workers, contributing to the interpretation of the material remains of the past—or being excluded from the same—may be less important than, say, being able to hold a job that supports one’s family. In that sense, workers could contest their working conditions in ways similar to other jobs; I cited a few examples in the conclusion to my paper. There are also occasional examples of workers leveraging their participation for their own ends. When archaeologist Sylvanus Morley sought an exemption from Guatemala’s compulsory universal military service for his workers, he noted that “they all loath [it]… because they have to work for nothing” (1919). While, from the archaeologist’s perspective, he was doing his best to advance science in the face of obstinate government roadblocks, we might see from the workers’ side a chance to earn a wage while avoiding obligatory unpaid service to the state.
Such examples may offer other ways of getting at possibilities for autonomy—as long as one is careful not to presume the distinctive importance of employment in archaeology, always a challenge when working with materials generated by the archaeologists themselves. To be sure, the sources historians use to interpret processes of production, exchange, and consumption should help us determine who benefited from the development of archaeological research in specific times and places. I’ve been fortunate to find such material while working in Mexico. For the archaeological site of El Tajín, I cross-referenced archaeologists’ payroll records with anthropologist Isabel T. Kelly’s ethnographic data on kinship, employment, and land tenure. By integrating these different kinds of data, I was able to argue that archaeological labor functioned as part of a survival strategy in a context of widespread land dispossession for some, a process of transferable skill development for fewer, and a gateway to a lifetime of stable work as a site guard for a very select few (Holly-Kline 2025: 97-117). I’d hoped to find similar materials in the archives I examined for the United Fruit Company’s projects. Unlike for the exclusively Indigenous Totonac workforces of El Tajín, however, archaeologists’ notes on payroll proved to be much more illustrative of how corporate ideas of racialized labor influenced the administration of archaeology.
Yet in considering Covey and Ramírez’s piece, I’m also struck by a key difference in our bodies of evidence. They read the registry entries as “social performances” that reflect and embody exercises of autonomy. Though recorded by a notary, details like a single conjunction (“with” rather than “for”) reflect the autonomy of skilled male workers, and strategic silences (for instance, the omission of children’s names) exemplify efforts to limit exposure. In the materials I studied, workers did not represent themselves; in the end, piecing together the recorded speech of workers said much more about the archaeologists than the workers. Where else, I now wonder, might I have looked for social performances? For archaeological workers, there are some relevant sources—archaeologists’ memoirs, journalists’ travelogues, and the like—but I might pose the question to Covey and Ramírez for early colonial Peru. By extension, and taking advantage of Covey’s work as an archaeologist, I might ask about the potential of material evidence for Afro-Peruvian autonomy. How might such evidence inform, recontextualize, or contradict the kind of careful, close reading we get in “The 1582 Registro de Mulatos”? I appreciate this chance to consider the comparative dimensions of our work, and I look forward to the ensuing dialogue.
Race Work in Early Colonial Cusco
R. Alan Covey and Emilio Ramírez
Sam Holley-Kline’s engaging article invites us to consider the racializing narratives that feature in our own paper in a longue durée perspective, and to think about the hermeneutic entanglements that constrain scholars (ourselves included) who try to describe and recover past lived experiences in the field and archive. The Guatemalan cases Holley-Kline develops share interesting parallels with the coastal-highland differences seen in Peru, helping us to hear echoes of the colonial race rhetoric that lay the foundations for racialization by the Guatemalan government, the United Fruit Company, and anthropological archaeologists from the US.
Our article grew from an interdisciplinary collaboration between an anthropologist (Covey) and a historian (Ramirez). We were interested in building a richer picture of identity work in early colonial Cusco, where scholarship in our fields has focused mostly on interactions between Spaniards and Incas. Interested in what stories could be told about early colonial Afro-Cuzqueños, we approached the 1582 registro as a singular opportunity to examine the possibilities and constraints of life for free people of color, rather than the abundant notarial evidence we compiled documenting the sale of enslaved individuals. The project resonated with the themes of racialization and identity we have explored in distinct ways in our individual scholarship, and our efforts to bridge different fields (and scholarly generations!) created a productive space for simultaneously taking a deep dive into the broader literature on colonial Afro-Peruvian lives and finding inspiration in the critical readings of Spanish texts that African diaspora historians have been doing for many years.
Like Holley-Kline’s article, ours builds on a curiosity, still unsated, about how racialization shapes cultures of work—how individuals in the past navigated race-based expectations around skills, relationships, and workplace practices, balancing opportunity, advancement, and autonomy against task-related risks and the costs of discriminatory backlash. For example, we now understand that metalworking professions in early colonial Cusco were racialized, with Andean artisans maintaining a pre-contact emphasis on silverwork—albeit under the supervision of better-paid Spaniards—and Afro-Peruvian men finding success as blacksmiths. We would like to know more about how apprenticeships, guilds, and everyday workshop dynamics promoted and tempered the efforts of elite Spaniards to establish distinct racial categories.
Some historians are already probing municipal records, regional and national archives in Peru, and Spanish repositories like the Archivo General de Indias, and it is likely that there is more information to be found about tools and properties listed in wills, as well as property transaction records, lawsuits, and ecclesiastical records. Recent seventeenth-century scholarship examines Afro-Peruvian and Afro-descendant lives by reading “along the archival grain” (Stoler 2009) for evidence of strategic identity performances amid racialization and colonial constraints.
Kathryn Burns (2010) directed attention to the performances that built colonial archives, informing scholarship by Rachel Sarah O’Toole (2012), Michelle McKinley (2016), and others who describe how Afro-Peruvians situated themselves through engagement with colonial institutions. The fine-grained reconstruction of individual lives in this scholarship is richly contextualized through big-picture studies of colonial governance and philosophies of race, such as recent books by Karen Graubart (2022) and by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters (2026).
Further work might enrich our appreciation of how identity performances in labor settings intersected with the home lives of people who were trained or hired for their apparent “fit” with racialized qualities. In the 1582 Cusco registro, we interpreted the “strategic silences” of skilled workers regarding their homes, spouses, and children as a protective stance that contrasted with the details Spanish men provided for Afro-Peruvian women serving in their homes. For the Guatemalan cases Holley-Kline develops, the racialization of the archaeological workplace makes us curious about the different kinds of self-presentation workers engaged in, as well as the personal and financial motivations that led them to seek relatively short-term work on archaeological expeditions.
As Holley-Kline explores the motivations of archaeological workers, we might further consider how workers understood and negotiated the identities available to them in the context of their communities. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) attention to how people inhabit racial domination and Hazel Carby’s (2019) analysis of how imperial relations are lived and reproduced in intimate life, we might ask what it meant to different individuals to perform and inhabit racialized expectations in and outside the workplace. How were workers’ relationships with friends, family, and neighbors affected by racialized expectations at work? How did the support (or lack thereof) of a broader community in Cusco, Lima, Quiriguá, and Zaculeu shape the possibilities for enduring or contesting racialized expectations, and thus the extent to which workers could inhabit identities that diverged from those demanded by their labor?
In the absence of a developed Afro-Peruvian community like that of Lima, several Afro-Cusqueños settled in indigenous communities, with new opportunities and constraints to navigate. We wonder what racial performances were expected of Catalina, an Afro-Cusqueña woman who sold coca leaf since childhood, as she negotiated her place in the Indigenous barter market and sought official Spanish permission for her business. For Afro-Cusqueños with Andean spouses, we wonder how their children learned to perform their mixed heritage, which is part of our broader curiosity about the diverse personal histories blending together as mestizo in early colonial Cusco (and lumped together as ladino by the American archaeologists Holley-Kline documents at Quiriguá).
For the early colonial Andes, archaeological fieldwork has begun to investigate the material lives of Afro-Peruvians and Native Andeans, and archival histories documenting Afro-Peruvian freedom and agency can help connect those material traces to the social worlds in which people made their identities. We hope our CSSH paper will inspire new research on the multiplicity of Black identities in early colonial Peru, work that seeks out new sites where material stories can be reconstructed. Such research will necessarily wrestle with the persistent legacy of racialized assumptions about identity—including the kinds of fieldwork practices Holley-Kline details—as well as disciplinary boundaries (prehistory/history) and epistemologies that influence methods and interpretations. The records of Spanish colonizers or American corporations can help to reconstruct the promotion of racialized labor practices, but other voices are needed to recover the tactics, successes, and frustrations of the professionals, artisans, and laborers who had to contend with these simplified and stereotyped expectations, thereby producing and negotiating their society. Our colleagues working on African American archaeology in the US have shown that listening to the oral histories of descendant communities and collaborating actively in fieldwork and analysis are important ways to recover obscured human stories (e.g., Menaker et al. 2023). Such collaborative work, in turn, must be understood alongside descendant communities’ questions, purposes, and mobilization of the past (Franklin et al. 2020; Deloria et al. 2018).
References
Burns, Kathryn. 2010. Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru. Duke University Press.
Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge and Adrian Masters. 2026. The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World. Harvard University Press.
Carby, Hazel. 2019. Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands. Verso.
Deloria, Philip J., K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, Mark N. Trahant, Loren Ghilione, Douglas Medin, and Ned Blackhawk. 2018. Unfolding Futures: Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century. Daedalus147(2):6-16).
Franklin, Maria, Justin P. Dunnavant, Ayana Omilade Flewellen, and Alicia Odewale. 2020. The Future is Now: Archaeology and the Eradication of Anti-Blackness. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 24:753-766.
Graubart, Karen. 2022. Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World.Oxford University Press.
Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press.
Holley-Kline, Sam. 2025. In the Shadow of El Tajín: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico.University of Nebraska Press.
Leighton, Mary. 2016. Indigenous Archaeological Field Technicians at Tiwanaku, Bolivia: A Hybrid Form of Scientific Labor. American Anthropologist 118(4): 742–54.
Mahmood, Saba. 2001. Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival. Cultural Anthropology 16(2): 203.
McKinley, Michelle. 2016. Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700. Cambridge University press.
Menaker, Alexander, William Howard Clark, Douglas K. Boyd, Maria Franklin, Halee Clak Wright, and Kevin Hanselka. 2023. Collaborative, Public Archaeology of the Nineteenth-Century Tom Cook Blacksmith Shop along the Chisholm Trail in Bolivar, Texas. Advances in Archaeological Practice 11(3):328-340.
Morley, Sylvanus Griswold. Diary of Sylvanus Griswold Morley, Vol. 11, May 23rd, 1919. American Philosophical Society Digital Library.
O’Toole, Rachel Sarah. 2012. Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press.
R. Alan Covey is a Professor of Anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin. He has held appointments at the American Museum of Natural History, Southern Methodist University, Washington University in St. Louis, and Dartmouth College. He has conducted archaeological surveys and excavations in the Andes since 1996, with particular focus on the Cuzco region of highland Peru, where he directed a series of regional settlement pattern surveys near the Inca capital. His archaeological studies include complementary archival research in Cuzco, Lima, London, and Seville. Covey publishes on the origins and expansion of the Inca empire, the European invasion of the Andes, and the 16th century transformation of the Inca heartland through complex negotiations of Spanish colonial rule.
Sam Holley-Kline is Assistant Clinical Professor in the University Honors program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of In the Shadow of El Tajín: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico(University of Nebraska Press, 2025) and co-editor (with Allison Mickel) of Histories of Labor in Archaeology, a 2024 special issue of the Bulletin of the History of Archaeology. Holley-Kline’s research has appeared in Ethnohistory, the Journal of Social Archaeology, and Archaeological Dialogues, among others, and has been supported by funding from Fulbright-Hays, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Emilio (Leo) Ramirez is a history PhD student at Duke University with a BA from the University of Texas at Austin. He studies Mexico and Peru, with special focus on the intellectual articulation of racial ideas, especially in relation to socio-legal and intellectual structures. Through close analyses of figures and texts, he has studied the emergence of indigenismo in Porfirian historiography; race, fear, and belief in Chimalpahin’s Diario; and the racialization of colonial-era Afrodescendants beginning with Cusco’s 1582 Registro de Mulatos.
