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  • Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century
  • John K. Thornton
Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century. By Joan Cameron Bristol. [Diálogos.] (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2007. Pp. xiv, 283; 3 maps, 14 illustrations. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-826-33799-3.)

For all its horrors and brutalities, the Spanish Inquisition and its colonial branches produced a vast fund of documents about popular religion as well as community life, sexual practices, and other issues that occur in no other type of sources. Joan Bristol joins Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Colin Palmer, Solange Alberro, and other scholars who have tapped this resource in her finely tuned study of religious life among Africans and their descendents in seventeenth-century Mexico. In this book, Bristol explores Spanish attitudes about race, religion, and gender as well as strictly religious phenomena.

Her first chapter seeks to elaborate Spanish ideas of superiority, and of African inferiority, illustrated by life of Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, unusual because, in spite of her African descent, she was allowed to become a Carmelite nun on her deathbed and was greatly honored for her piety. The extraordinary nature of her case reveals both the possibilities and the limitations that people of African heritage had in becoming full members of the Mexican religious hierarchy whatever their level of piety and discipline. Bristol's second chapter takes on the important question of the impact of African Christianity, typified by the many thousands of slaves in Mexico from Kongo and Angola, Catholic areas in Africa. Africans from these regions made up the majority of Afro-Mexicans, but Bristol also examines the African religious background of other areas. Later, in chapter 5, Bristol returns to African [End Page 868] roots to consider specifically healing practices revealed in her texts and complements the African portions of her analysis.

From this background, Bristol moves on to consider Afro-Mexican devotion, particularly through membership in lay confraternities, as well as the possession of religiously significant objects. Chapter 6 also deals with devotion, although on a more unofficial level and often that practiced by mixed race or thoroughly ladino (Creolized) people. In her fourth chapter, Bristol adds nuance to the question of renunciation of God, a crime that was part of the Inquisition's portfolio, and which, as Colin Palmer has already broached, was also a strategy for improving individual slaves' lives by forcing a change of masters.

Bristol's work is vital in that it is more attentive than earlier works have been to the African background of a population that was largely born in Africa, especially in focusing, using recent Africanist scholarship, on the appropriate areas of Africa. It is also important in that it pays full attention to the specific character of the seventeenth-century African cohort in Mexico that hailed from Christian Angola.

Although the primary focus of her book is on religion, Bristol's most important subtext is that religious devotion provided Afro-Mexicans opportunities to maneuver in the struggle for power or autonomy in an otherwise oppressive environment of slave life in colonial Mexico. At times, this struggle for power becomes her primary analytical tool and thus presents most ideas through the prism of the struggle for power, rather than as having roots in theological or devotional feelings. In a more minor consideration, Bristol draws examples from all over colonial Mexico without always taking into consideration regional diversity, urban versus rural settings, or the ratio of Spanish to indigenous people and thus to Africans, even though these considerations might be important in shaping both Spanish-African relations and the pattern of religious life.

John K. Thornton
Boston University
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