Remembering the tatas: Domestic women and slavery in Tetouan (19th–20th centuries) By Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste. Leiden: Brill, 2024. 444 pp.

Remembering the Tatas is an important contribution to understanding late-slavery practices in the Maghreb. It stands out for its thorough archival work and for being the only study of its kind to use a significant amount of qualitative data, including but not limited to about 50 testimonies from people who grew up with or knew others raised by female domestic slaves, known as tatas (an affectionate term used in the elite households of Tétouan, the capital of Spain's former protectorate in Morocco). The author assigns most of the book's argumentative weight to these testimonies, and lengthy interview excerpts are included to convey how elites remember these women. Readers will also appreciate the novel use of previously underused archival sources, particularly for the study of domestic slavery, as well as for the broader examination of the northern Maghreb in the modern period. Tétouanese elites of Andalusian origin have maintained a tradition of preserving family archives since the late 15th century, providing rich resources for understanding northern Maghrebi societies. Mateo Dieste accesses both smaller family collections and larger archives, like the Bennuna and Daoud archives, which have been instrumental in this research. Additionally, the author taps into archival collections in Spain, including those in Cádiz's Municipal Archives and the Biblioteca de Catalunya, which have seldom been explored by scholars studying these subjects. Chapter 1 offers a historical account of slavery in Morocco from the Middle Ages to the mid-20th century, focusing on soldiers and domestic workers. Chapter 2 introduces Tétouanese society, particularly its elite groups of predominantly Andalusian origin, who bought, sold, and lived with tatas. While the primary focus of the book is domestic slavery, several chapters address other forms of servitude, including chapter 3, in which Mateo Dieste details the institution of the Caliphal Guard and the various types of palace slaves. The guard, primarily composed of slaves from southern Morocco, served under the caliph based in Tétouan from 1913 to 1956, with political oversight by the caliph and the Spanish high commissioner. Chapter 4 is perhaps one of the book's most important, because it showcases a significant portion of the author's primary research with members of the Tétouanese elite, as well as with archival sources. It provides a rich picture of how the tatas became enslaved (i.e., whether they were abducted, bought, or given as a wedding gift), their life trajectories, the types of work they did, and various aspects of daily life (e.g., ways of dressing, speaking, behaving, and so on). While the focus remains on the tatas, the chapter also explores other forms of servitude. For example, it sheds light on the circumstances of ghulam, young slave boys who had sex with male slaveholders; jariyat, female concubines primarily engaged in sexual labor; and escort slaves who accompanied traders on their journeys away from home. Chapter 5 accounts for the legal status and partnership arrangements of domestic slaves. The tatas usually remained unmarried or married freedmen, slaves, or slaveholders. Their children could sometimes be recognized as members of the family with varying degrees of rights. Chapter 6 presents interviews and conversations with, as well as personal accounts of, people who either met tatas or are descendants of those who did, and it reveals the vast array of positions on domestic slavery among them, from the critical to the apologetic. In chapter 7 the author again explores forms of servitude other than that experienced by the tatas. The chapter explores the culture of the Gnawa, a Moroccan ethnic group of Sahelian origin who are known for their role as musicians in ceremonial contexts, and it elaborates on the role of slaves who worked as ritual performers, dancing or playing music at weddings, funerals, and Sufi gatherings. Chapter 8 studies the complex dynamics of manumission, a process that began once slavery was officially abolished in Morocco in the 1920s. The chapter includes valuable case studies of the quite diverse personal trajectories of many ex-slaves and their children after abolition, from those who continued to live in the households of their former slaveholders to those who took jobs as prostitutes, vendors, artisans, and traders, among others. A remarkable feature of Remembering the Tatas is the author's dedicated ethnographic documentation of slavery in Tétouan. The book is particularly noteworthy for its comprehensive research, which includes historical data, qualitative testimonies, and a wealth of visual material. Mateo Dieste's work pays special attention to questions of kinship, with detailed accounts of the family configurations in which the tatas worked and lived, illustrated in many charts. Some readers may find the author's contextualization of domestic slavery overly extensive. The book's attention to other forms of servitude is supported by abundant historical archival information, but it lacks comparable insight from ethnographic data—chapters 5, 6, and 7 explore forms of slavery that do not involve domestic work, and chapter 1 adopts a longue durée approach in which the reader learns about various forms of slavery in the Maghreb from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. The book, as the author acknowledges, lacks the tatas’ perspective, given that they have all now passed away. Yet this shortcoming is compensated for by the richness of the author's documentation. This includes testimonies from elderly people who remember the tatas from their early-childhood years, meaning that our only truly ethnographic data comes from their distant memories. In this sense, the book represents a last chance to study Moroccan domestic slavery through primary ethnographic data. By “studying up” (in Nader's sense), Mateo Dieste captures the perspective of those who enslaved rather than those who were enslaved, allowing him to explore the coexistence of “old” and “new” discourses on bonded domestic labor among members of the Tétouanese elite today. Apart from these considerations, Remembering the Tatas represents the culmination of years of meticulous research, during which Mateo Dieste acquired profound insights into slavery in Tétouanese society. As such, it will appeal to scholars of anthropology and regional history and those interested in the broader study of late forms of slavery in Muslim-majority societies.