Sounding Race, Identity, and Devotion in Puebla de los Ángeles

This book examines the performance of Christmas villancicos in public festivals within the institutional and social fabric of Puebla, México. It centers on the large collection of villancicos by Guatemalan composer Gaspar Fernández during his tenure as chapel master of Puebla Cathedral in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. It argues that these polyphonic songs reflect not only the spread of early modern Catholic practices across the Atlantic but also the formation of local collective identities steeped in the complexities of the city's multi-racial population. By delving into the cultural history of New Spain, the book offers an innovative approach to the villancico tradition, demonstrating that representations of common people of diverse racial or regional origins reflect intricate processes of global mobility and cross-cultural interactions in the New World, as well as the dissemination of the Spanish empire's obsessive preoccupation with ethnic and religious distinctions. More significantly, the book contextualizes the representation of indigenous and black characters within the conditions and expressive cultures of Nahuas and free and enslaved African descendants living in Puebla, particularly when they express ancestral notions of the sacred or when they voice defiant messages about race, slavery, and labor injustice. The volume shows that these voices not only reflected the city's social reality but also served various and even contradictory interests for different members of the society, including marginalized communities of indigenous workers and enslaved Africans.