Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (review)

This is a welcome addition to a growing list of studies that explore the African experience in colonial Mexico. Here, orthodox and unorthodox ritual practices serve as windows into how Africans and their creole descendents learned to live in, and contribute to, colonial Mexican society. Afromexicans, Bristol argues, became adept at navigating Catholic ritual and institutions while also creating unorthodox practices, allowing them to gain power within a social hierarchy predicated upon them denying full participation while simultaneously constructing alternative systems of power.

Central to Bristol’s study is the concept of calidad, a complicated combination of factors primarily rooted in racial difference. Africans were defined as infidels, inferior by their rejection of Christianity. Yet, in terms of expectations for religious understanding and practice, Afromexicans were held to the same standards as Spaniards. Natives—defined as neophytes—by comparison, were not. Afromexicans were permanently marked by their continuing association with infidelity and slavery, and could never become fully part of Spanish society, whereas Indians potentially could. Employing this conception of calidad, Chapter 1 takes up the spiritual biography of an African slave who, after living much of her life in a convent in Puebla, professed as a nun in 1678. This was exceptional because non-Spaniards were prohibited, in theory, from becoming nuns or priests. In her biography, written by Spaniards, the nun’s blackness overpowered her holiness although it was renowned throughout the colony. The authors described her experiences so as to reinforce the perception that Africans could not attain the same religiosity and holiness as Spaniards. This chapter includes a fine treatment of Spanish debates surrounding the righteousness of African slavery and the slave trade.

The next two chapters interrogate the inadequate attention paid to the religious education of Afromexicans despite the requirement that they convert. Bristol concludes that Afromexicans learned Catholicism through participation—in mass, religious processions, confraternities, autos de fé, etcetera—becoming well-versed enough to be able to manipulate Christian practices and institutions to their benefit. Afromexican confraternities, she argues, reflected both the Spanish desire for Afromexican engagement with Christian practices and their fear of Afromexican collective action through Christian institutions. Chapter 4 treats blasphemy, predominantly by slaves, as an Afromexican tactic to achieve either immediate ends such as stopping a beating or calling attention to abusive masters, or, symbolic goals by undermining the religious foundations of slavery and the patriarchal authority of masters. Blasphemy is, therefore, evidence of how well Afromexicans understood the intricacies of Catholicism, but Bristol admits that it is difficult to conclude how successful it was as a form of resistance.

Next, Bristol investigates witchcraft and curing magic, an unorthodox system of ritual practices, which allowed Afromexicans to directly subvert Spanish authority when aimed at masters, employers, and even lovers, and to create alternative structures of authority. But, she argues, Spaniards used the Inquisition to reestablish normative power relations by denouncing Afromexicans when they became too powerful. This chapter includes an excellent historiographical discussion of witchcraft in New Spain. Lastly, Bristol explores the investigation of an unofficial ‘mulatto’ religious congregation in Mexico City in 1702. She asks whether this congregation, created and led by Afromexicans, although not racially exclusive, represented an attempt to subvert the social hierarchy, or, to celebrate their integration into mainstream colonial, Christian society. She concludes that it was a form of imitation, and perhaps an Afromexican attempt to become Spanish.

In the end, Bristol might focus too exclusively on Spanish attempts to impose a colonial order grounded in calidad and Afromexican attempts to gain power within it, leaving her discussion of alternative power structures less well developed. As such, she focuses on individual Afromexicans struggling against racial oppression with little consideration of the possibility of collective identity or action. Thus, her discussion of the unofficial congregation does not consider the possibility that it could have been an attempt to celebrate both...