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  • Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans
  • R. Douglas Cope
Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans. By Nicole Von Germeten. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Pp. xiv, 288. Graphs. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Cloth $55.00.

With this book, Nicole von Germeten joins a group of young scholars whose innovative work is reshaping our ideas about African life in Latin America. This literature has moved beyond the celebratory study of resistance toward a more incisive focus on the intersection between subaltern agency and Iberian hegemony. One approach that has proved highly worthwhile is to examine how people of African descent operated within and manipulated Spanish institutions, such as marriage and compadrazgo, militias, and in the current case, religious brotherhoods. Confraternities, [End Page 315] although European in origin, held great appeal for Africans, initially because they helped counteract some of the worst effects of slavery. Over time, as the Afromexican community evolved, they took on many other roles. Like Ben Vinson III's Bearing Arms for His Majesty (2001), this book is designed as both an institutional history—providing detailed accounts of confraternities in Mexico City, Valladolid, Parral, and other locales—and a vehicle for exploring important questions of ethnicity and identity.

Von Germeten's wide-ranging research, which encompassed archives in more than a dozen Mexican cities, allows her to present the most complete portrait yet of these Afromexican brotherhoods. Where possible, she takes us inside specific organizations, showing their strategies, internal conflicts, and above all, their struggles to survive in sometimes indifferent or hostile environments. Naturally, her information is uneven (surprisingly few confraternity records from Mexico City are extant), and the brotherhoods themselves had widely varied fortunes (Parral, in the end, lacked the economic vitality to sustain a successful mulatto cofradía). Nonetheless, she outlines a general trajectory. In the seventeenth century, Afromexican confraternities mediated between Spanish and African worlds. Many participants were slaves who embraced a "distinctly Afromexican ritual expression best seen in public displays such as alms-collecting, flagellant processions . . . and fiestas" (p. 11). The author's measured prose does not perhaps capture the visceral excitement of these displays. But she persuasively argues that they allowed confraternity members to demonstrate an elevated spirituality, and to claim a space for themselves in New Spain's Christian community in a way that did not threaten Spaniards, and may even have reinforced racial distinctions. For example, the prominent position of Afromexican women—as founders, nurses and caretakers, and as highly proficient alms-collectors—clearly separated these confraternities from their Hispanic counterparts.

By the eighteenth century, however, Afromexicans had turned to a more assimilationist model. Von Germeten sees this as part of a broader demographic shift. Mexico's African-descent population became increasingly creole, mulatto, and free born. Family life stabilized: illegitimacy rates declined, while fathers more often acknowledged their children, and more readily accepted patriarchal values and responsibilities. In short, a kind of mulatto "middle class" emerged and took over the leadership of confraternities (demoting women to the role of beneficiaries). They now strove to raise the profile of their organizations, making them wealthier, more dignified, and more respectable—and in the process, safeguarding and increasing their own social status. The author is quick to underline the limits of such ascendancy. Thus the head of Valladolid's Rosary confraternity, the mulatto architect Diego Durán, rejoiced in the title of "master," but never received the coveted "don." In provincial cities such as Parral, African brotherhoods faced even more overt racism, as elites questioned whether they were worthy to handle sacred objects.

The assimilationist paradigm thus led to some upward mobility, but people of color could not fully surmount society's racial barriers. Von Germeten suggests that although class divisions became more salient in the eighteenth century, race [End Page 316] remained a stubborn fact of life, one which continued to shape confraternities. Brotherhoods both united and divided. They presented themselves as multiracial bodies, and reached out to other organizations and the non-Spanish population in general. Yet mulattos in many brotherhoods jealously guarded their leadership prerogatives, not only against intrusive Spaniards, but against Indians, whom they apparently saw as...

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