Africans to Spanish America

Sherwin K. Bryant is an assistant professor of African American studies and history at Northwestern University. Rachel Sarah O'Toole is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru.Ben Vinson III is Herbert Baxter Adams Professor of Latin American History at Johns Hopkins University.

"A pioneering effort to write the history of Africans in colonial Spanish America using the African diaspora paradigm. The authors fully demonstrate the considerable potential of this approach."--Kris Lane, author of The Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires "A page-turning secret society history based on solid research and accuracy."--Southern Historian“Africans to Spanish America is both useful and provocative, with chapters drawing on a range of methodological approaches to explore the complexities and nuances of racial identity in diverse Spanish American societies.”-- Journal of Latin American Studies "Aside from "expanding" diasporic history geographically, Africans to Spanish America also reminds us that between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries the experiences of people of African descent in Spanish America were more varied than the paradigmatic plantation-centered historiography of the Caribbean and Brazil has implied."--New West Indiana Guide "Expands the spatial and chronological contours of the African diaspora. A rich anthology comprised of short, clearly argued, and jargon-free essays."--Hispanic American Historical Review "Deeply researched work. The essays pay due attention to the religious and political institutions that enabled Spanish colonial rule but show how African-descended subjects--in a departure from third-wave scholarship--identified with those institutions more often than they resisted them."--American Historical Review "The authors add valuable knowledge to the literature on slavery and colonialism in the Americas as they shift attention to the earliest phases of European imperialism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and to locations throughout the hemisphere. . . . An empirically rich work that contributes valuable knowledge to a fast-growing field of research."--International Migration Review "A truly significant contribution to the field of the African Diaspora in colonial Spanish America in the era of slavery and slave society. The volume's most striking feature is the depth of inquiry into various features of Spanish American slave society and their impact on the lives of people of African descent and on the character of the colonial societies and imperial policy."--David Barry Gaspar, coeditor of Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas

• Introduction      1Sherwin K. Bryant, Ben Vinson III, and Rachel Sarah O'ToolePart 1. Complicating Identity in the African Diaspora to Spanish America1. The Shape of a Diaspora: The Movement of Afro-Iberians to Colonial Spanish America      27Leo J. Garofalo2. African Diasporic Ethnicity in Mexico City to 1650      50Frank "Trey" Proctor III3. To Be Free and Lucumi: Ana de la Calle and Making African Diaspora Identities in Colonial Peru      73Rachel Sarah O'ToolePart 2. Royal Subjects, Loyal Christians, and Saints in the Alley4. Between the Cross and the Sword: Religious Conquest and Maroon Legitimacy in Colonial Esmeraldas      95Charles Beatty-Medina5. Afro-Mexican Saintly Devotion in a Mexico City Alley      114Joan C. Bristol6. "The Lord walks among the pots and pans": Religious Servants of Colonial Lima      136Nancy E. van DeusenPart 3. Comparisons and Whitening Revisited: Race and Gender in Colonial Cuba7. Whitening Revisited: Nineteenth-Century Cuban Counterpoints      163Karen Y. Morrison8. Tensions of Race, Gender, and Midwifery in Colonial Cuba      186Michele Reid-Vazquez9. The African American Experience in Comparative Perspective: The Current Question of the Debate      206Herbert S. KleinGlossary      223Bibliography      229List of Contributors      263Acknowledgments      268Index      269