Africans In Colonial Mexico

From secular and ecclesiastical court records, Bennett reconstructs the lives of slave and free blacks, their regulation by the government and by the Church, the impact of the Inquisition, their legal status in marriage and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects.

"Colonial Mexico was home to the largest population of free and slave Africans in the New World. This book is a study of this population, chiefly in the Mexico City area. It looks at the ways in which slaves and free blacks learned to make their way in a culture of state and religious absolutism. Herman L. Bennett is particularly interested in the way blacks learned to use Spanish and ecclesiastical legal institutions to create a semblance of cultural autonomy, while at the same time enmeshing themselves and their descendants with the dominant culture. This distinctive aspect of Afro-Mexican creolization in an absolutist culture has been little studied. Bennett has gone to the secular and ecclesiastical court records and teased out much new information about the lives of slaves and free blacks, the ways in which their lives were regulated by the government and the Church, the impact upon them of the Inquisition, their legal status in marriage, and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Asking readers to imagine a history of Mexico narrated through the experiences of Africans and their descendants, this book offers a radical reconfiguration of Latin American history. Using ecclesiastical and inquisitorial records, Herman L. Bennett frames the history of Mexico around the private lives and liberty that Catholicism engendered among enslaved Africans and free blacks, who became majority populations soon after the Spanish conquest. The resulting history of 17th-century Mexico brings forth tantalizing personal and family dramas, body politics, and stories of lost virtue and sullen honor. By focusing on these phenomena among peoples of African descent, rather than the conventional history of Mexico with the narrative of slavery to freedom figured in, Colonial Blackness presents the colonial drama in all its untidy detail.

This book is a history of Asian slaves in colonial Mexico and their journey from bondage to freedom.

Sovereign Joy explores the performance of festive black kings and queens among Afro-Mexicans between 1539 and 1640. This fascinating study illustrates how the first African and Afro-creole people in colonial Mexico transformed their ancestral culture into a shared identity among Afro-Mexicans, with particular focus on how public festival participation expressed their culture and subjectivities, as well as redefined their colonial condition and social standing. By analyzing this hitherto understudied aspect of Afro-Mexican Catholic confraternities in both literary texts and visual culture, Miguel A. Valerio teases out the deeply ambivalent and contradictory meanings behind these public processions and festivities that often re-inscribed structures of race and hierarchy. Were they markers of Catholic subjecthood, and what sort of corporate structures did they create to project standing and respectability? Sovereign Joy examines many of these possibilities, and in the process highlights the central place occupied by Africans and their descendants in colonial culture. Through performance, Afro-Mexicans affirmed their being: the sovereignty of joy, and the joy of sovereignty.

Focuses on enslaved families and their social networks in the city of Puebla de los Ángeles in seventeenth-century colonial Mexico.

This edited volume compiles the most recent research on a pivotal topic in Latin American history--Afro-Mexican experiences from pre-conquest to the modern period.