Indian Petitioners for Freedom - Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain. By Nancy E. van Deusen. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp. xv, 319. Preface. Acknowledgments. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $94.95 cloth; $26.95 paperback

The preface and Chapter 1 present case studies: a 20-year-old woman whose Indianness (and thus her eligibility for freedom) was affirmed by Bartolomé de las Casas in 1549, and two mother-daughter pairs living in the town of Carmona, near Seville, who petitioned for freedom multiple times between 1558 and 1572. The vaguely defined but oft-granted status “neither slave nor free”—a legal solution to the New Law's inconveniences that van Deusen terms “palliative” (120)—may have afforded some ex-slaves a measure of personal dignity, but it failed to liberate them from claims to their labor by former masters. In this last regard, her book compares well to recent work on African Americans’ pursuit of equality throughout colonial and postcolonial Latin America.