Negotiating authority in New Spain: Blacks, mulattos, and religious practice in the seventeenth century

This study examines the way that enslaved and free blacks and mulattos in seventeenth-century New Spain used a variety of different kinds of religious practices to negotiate hierarchies of authority. Blacks and mulattos learned about the colonial social structure, and the roles that they were expected to play, by learning about Christianity, and this knowledge allowed them to participate in colonial life while at the same time challenging its institutions. Such participation and challenges can be seen in the participation of blacks and mulattos in authorized and unauthorized confraternities, which were sites of accommodation to the Christian power structure as well as sites of occasionally subversive activity. The involvement of blacks and mulattos in blasphemy cases at the court of the Inquisition was, at times, a way to try to bypass the authority of an owner or boss by appealing to another authority. Medicines, often called "witchcraft" by contemporaries, allowed blacks and mulattos to participate in, and challenge, the social and political structure of colonial Mexico. Africans, along with creole blacks, Spaniards, Indians, and castas, contributed to a constantly evolving pool of colonial medicines used by all members of Mexican society. Blacks and mulattos were also practitioners of medicines as well as clients of healers from other groups. This study uses Inquisition records, legislation, and accounts of travelers and missionaries in Mexico and in West and West Central Africa. It shows that authority in New Spain was constructed in a variety of overlapping ways, through ideas about color, origin, culture, and gender. Religious practices, including orthodox Christianity as well as activities which were not seen as orthodox for various reasons, allowed blacks and mulattos to understand and conform to the colonial systems of authority as well as to try to manipulate them, and to try to create alternate systems of authority.