Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 (review)

In 1650 , New Spain was home to the second-largest slave population and the greatest number of free blacks and mulattos in the New World. Yet, the experiences of the African diaspora in colonial Mexico specifically, and throughout the colonial New World more generally, remain largely understudied. Herman Bennett's important study employs a rich and diverse documentary base—including marriage records and Inquisition and ecclesiastical court records—in order to begin filling this void. For Bennett, Christian marriage—as a metaphor for the imposition of a Catholic moral and social order—serves as the lynchpin in his study of the expansion of Spanish absolutism and the evolution of an Afro-creole consciousness, seen through the prism of the black and mulatto experience in colonial Mexico.

The extension of royal control over groups defined in canon law as extra ecclesiam—outside the Christian community and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of Christian monarchs (including Jews, Moors, and African slaves)—was part of the process of Spanish absolutist state building in the Old and New Worlds. For example, the decision to subject Africans and their descendants to the Mexican Inquisition in 1571 was a political strategy aimed at imposing a moral and social order on a potentially dangerous population. By 1571 , blacks and mulattos actually outnumbered Spaniards in many of New Spain's cities, representing "the greatest threat to the realm," according to colonial officials (p. 52 ). Furthermore, Bennett presents an innovative revisionist interpretation of crown and clergy encroachment on slaveholder authority in defining Africans, and their free descendants, as royal Christian subjects. The goal in extending the rights and obligations of Christian subjects to Africans was not to ameliorate slavery, as Frank Tannenbaum argued in Slave and Citizen, but rather to empower the state at the expense of the absolute authority that slaveholders theoretically enjoyed over their chattel.

The second half of the book focuses specifically on community formation and creolization within New Spain's African population. According to Bennett, current historiography assumes that race and slavery, as the "materiality of oppression," constituted the fundamental principles for identity and community formation within the diaspora (p. 82 ). Through his exploration of marriage applications, focusing on spouse and testigo (witness) selection patterns, Bennett argues that household (a core community extending beyond a single racial or legal status), extra-household, occupational, residential, ethnic, familial (real and fictive), and gender ties intersected with and mitigated against race and status (slave or free) in the formulation of specific identities among blacks and mulattos in New Spain.

For Bennett, the articulation of an Afro-creole consciousness represented more than cultural exchange; it also included the acquisition of a "legal consciousness." Specifically, he argues that blacks and mulattos became increasingly aware of the protections offered them by the church and state (specifically, the freedom to marry against master or parental objection and the right of slaves to cohabit with a spouse at least once per week) and their ability to initiate litigation in defense of those protections. Bennett ends his study with a close reading of the Inquisition trial transcripts of four black and mulatto bigamists punished in the second auto-de-fé in Mexico City in 1575. Central to his notions of creolization, Bennett contends that the ability of these accused bigamists to navigate within the Inquisition and manipulate their testimony to their own benefit, and to the detriment of others, highlights a highly sophisticated understanding of the dominant moral discourses in New Spain. Yet, an understanding of the norms that governed their lives and identities was tantamount to neither complete acculturation nor absolute compliance.

Interestingly, in his discussions of the perceived threats to social stability posed by blacks and mulattos, Bennett did not include a well-known instance when those fears were realized. The Mexico City slave rebellion of 1611-12—which resulted in the execution of as...