202557(en)/39 - Between Work and Affectivity: Breastfeeding and Child Rearing in La Plata, Charcas (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries)

This article offers an approach to the work of wetnurses in colonial Charcas between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing in particular on documentation from the La Plata-Potosí regional axis. It reveals a local market characterized by a constant supply and demand for this service, and shows that the motivations behind the women’s labor—most of them Indigenous and Afro-descendant—lay along a fine line between coercion and personal will. The study also demonstrates that their work extended beyond breastfeeding, encompassing the broader upbringing of children in their care. Within a context regulated by particular social codes, the study highlights not only the persistence of this practice despite prescriptive discourses on motherhood, but also the intimate bonds that could develop between minors and wetnurses, even amid fears and prevailing prejudices toward working women from certain backgrounds. The approach links the history of labor with that of affectivity, both marked by the violence of slavery and by entrenched notions of difference based on the origin, sex, legal status, and age of the people involved.

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