• Migration
• (Pre-)colonial Mexico/New Spain
• (Pre-)colonial Peru
• Ethnicity
• Social categorisations
• Imperial societies
• Tax systems and tax categories

since 2015
Principal Investigator at the Global South Studies Center

since 2014
Senior Researcher at the Department of Iberian and Latin American History, University of Cologne

2013 - 2015
Member of the University of Cologne Forum Ethnicity as a Political Resource – Perspectives from Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe

2010 - 2013
Managing Director (Senior Researcher) of the BMBF-funded Research Network for Latin America - Ethnicity, Citizenship, Belonging - at the University of Cologne

2011
PhD in Anthropology of the Americas, University of Bonn. Thesis title: "Contactos exteriores del Estado tarasco: Influencias desde dentro y fuera de Mesoamérica"

2007 - 2010
PhD scholarship from the Gerda Henkel foundation

2001-2007
Latin American Studies at the Universities of Cologne, Bonn, Lisbon and Mexico-City.
Thesis title: "Die Breve Relación des Pedro Ponce de León. Ein unbekannter Autor und sein Bericht über religiöse Praktiken in Zentralmexiko"

Description:
The post-doc project, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, deals with the strategies of indigenous migrants in colonial Spanish America when being categorized by a tribute system introduced and reshaped by Spanish rule. This tribute system was based on a rather static conception of society and presupposed a belonging to only one place. However, parts of the local population lived and worked at several places, employing this fact strategically to negotiate the belonging to a certain tribute category. Surprisingly, the tribute categories that existed for –mainly indigenous– migrants and their descendants in the two biggest viceroyalties, New Spain (Mexico) and Peru, differed considerably and have not been compared until now.

The project differentiates categories of migrants and their descendants in both viceroyalties throughout the colonial period, elaborating on the concerning tribute legislation and its implementation and negotiation. It is argued that the local inhabitants could, under certain circumstances, switch to neighboring categories and that therefore the categories should be interpreted as a continuum on which the actors moved showing a considerable degree of agency especially in cases of translocal forms of belonging. The dissimilarity in categories can be attributed largely to the (non-)existence of prehispanic institutions which the Spanish rulers adapted more or less and which the actors (i.e. the local authorities, but also migrants with a different status) reshaped. Not all these actors were migrants in the narrower sense of the word as they not always migrated; rather their belonging to a “migrant” tribute category was determined by their ancestry.

The project shows the entanglement of legal categories and human movement in two cases that might be expected to be very similar, but were surprisingly different. Like this, it contributes to clarify the fluid transitions and ambivalences between being mobile and sedentary. It focuses on Cajamarca in northern Peru and Michoacán in western Mexico and analyzes petitions to change the jurisdiction and tribute category, called peticiones de cambio de fuero. 

Support: 
DFG

Duration:
2016 - 2019