The famous tapadas limeñas moved through public life completely veiled, with only one eye showing, a vexing mix of burlesque and provocation. Before Toledo’s arrival, efforts to ban the style were met with a women’s strike: “Domestic anarchy loomed. Women refused to tend to their houses, servants dallied, cooking was bland, and children couldn’t find their mother to hug them and wipe their noses …. Everything was upside down.” Women resisted Toledo’s renewed efforts to ban the saya y manto, as the skirt and cloak that made up the attire was called. The fashion would transfix visitors to Lima for centuries. Some saw Islam: “They could be taken for those phantoms of invisible women that travelers to the Orient find in Constantinople and all the Muslim cities,” wrote a French traveler. Others glimpsed Indian sorcery in the “one sinister eye peering” out of the veil. Another observer thought Africa lay behind the “treacherous” shawls, which made it impossible “to guess the color of the skin” and might conceal “an African, black as the night” and “flat-nosed as death.” Wealthy and poor women alike adopted the dress, adding to the uncertainty. The cloak “afforded women only advantages” and “men only discomforts.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin