Damned Notions of Liberty: Slavery, Culture, and Power in Colonial Mexico, 1640–1769 (review)

Damned Notions of Liberty marks an exciting and important contribution to the literature on slavery in the Atlantic World. Recent scholarship on Mexico has spotlighted the colony as a unique (yet possibly representative) example of various forms of agency, ranging from the ability to manipulate colonial institutions for individual gain to utilizing magic and witchcraft to gain leverage in local communities. In light of the accomplishments of recent works, Proctor challenges us to consider several correctives. One addresses the long-term ability of Mexico to serve as an incubator for African and black culture. Through re-examining the corpus of marriage records prior to 1650, Proctor reaffirms what others have already found: there was tremendous endogamy amongst slave populations that was ethnically-based. However, Proctor adds a subtle shift in how the evidence can be interpreted. Given the tremendous cultural proximity and interactivity that many African populations enjoyed, Proctor suggests that we broaden our view of endogamy to accommodate cultural relationships that did not conform to narrow ethnic designations. In other words, he notes that culturally endogamous unions could involve marriages between individuals of different but related ethnicities. Using this calculus, Mexico emerges with substantially greater degrees of African slave endogamy than hitherto imagined. By association, this high degree of endogamy could produce stronger African influences on black life.

Proctor even posits that endogamous forms of black behavior survived the 1650 fault line (where most scholars trace a substantial decline in Mexican slavery). While accurately conceding that the late seventeenth century was a time of mulatto ascendancy, wherein the rise of creole blacks expanded exponentially, Proctor’s revisionism deemphasizes some of the significance of this demographic change. Rather than inevitably muting African-based cultural expressions, Proctor sees the rise of the new mulatto class as generating other possibilities for African cultural preservation, since these mulattos were probably more tethered to slave life than has been previously taken into account. The critical link comes in construing the marriages between free or enslaved mulattos and black slaves as endogamous (rather than exogamous) unions. Although not overtly stated, Proctor’s idea intimates that older, seventeenth-century forms of black marital endogamy probably adapted to eighteenth-century realities. Hence, as the black population reconstituted itself physically over time, endogamy adjusted accordingly, shifting from ethnic to somatic expression. In the process, the cultural gap between blacks and mulattos may have been far less distinct than we have been led to believe, at least during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In no uncertain terms, Proctor’s ruminations are fascinating and deserve further attention and debate from specialists.

If the potential imprint of African or black culture was greater in Mexico than once thought, what did it look like? Proctor again offers interesting perspectives. Building upon the work of Joan Bristol, Serge Gruzinski, Colin Palmer, Laura Lewis, Herman Bennett, and others, chapters two and three propose that we not consider blacks and mulattos as part of an amorphous casta middle group in society, but rather that through assessing familial networks and expressions of magico-religious beliefs we consider the existence of a distinct Afro-Mexican consciousness. Proctor does not assert that such a consciousness was evenly and collectively felt across the broader black and mulatto populations. Yet he does demonstrate how in particular moments and instances, we can find the influence of West African cosmologies in Afro-Mexican behavior. He also demonstrates how in the realm of magico-religious practices, there were discernable differences between how Afro-Mexicans executed their arts, as opposed to Amerindians, mestizos, and whites. Finally, given the great number of Afro-Mexicans tried before the Inquisition for transgressions of witchcraft and sorcery, Proctor notes that instead of perceiving these cases as efforts by colonial institutions to assert their authority, we should view them as evidence for the pervasiveness of these forms of ritualistic behavior among certain...