Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (review)

The free colored experience represents an enigma in colonial Spanish American historiography. Even at slavery's mid-seventeenth-century peak, New Spain's free colored population outnumbered slaves, and the number of free coloreds continued to grow unabated into the eighteenth century. Throughout this period, New Spain's free coloreds constituted the largest such population in all of the Americas. A comparable demographic trajectory characterized the free colored experience in Peru. Until now, the predominance of slavery studies, the question of sources, and the problem of conceptualizing the subjectivity of free coloreds have inhibited social historical studies of this important segment of the colonial population.

In Bearing Arms for His Majesty, Ben Vinson has begun the monumental task of recovering this population from historical obscurity. Using New Spain's militia as his lens, the author sheds light on the free colored experience as it touched on the defense of the colony. He observes that from the initial entrada into what would become New Spain, armed blacks accompanied the Spanish presence. Even as slavery took hold in the viceroyalty during the sixteenth century, Spaniards (despite the fear of Indian uprisings and European invasions) reluctantly armed some Africans and especially their free offspring. By the seventeenth century, the free colored militia constituted a fixed feature of the social landscape. In fact, according to Vinson, the century after 1650 represented the heyday of the free colored militia. Vinson takes issue with the idea that the late eighteenth century witnessed the apex of militia authority. For Vinson, the Bourbon reforms undermined the institutional strength of the free colored militias.

Arguing that 1650-1750 is a crucial period for understanding the place of the free colored militias in the colonial social structure, Vinson draws on the ample census and tribute records—records that scholars have long known but rarely employed for the historical reconstitution of the free colored population. These records, along with civil proceedings, underscore the centrality of the militia experience for free colored males. Vinson shows how the militia fostered, rather than diluted, a free colored identity. Though commonly assumed that free coloreds utilized the militia as an instrument of social mobility, seeking to distance themselves from the legacy of slavery and the African past, Vinson makes a convincing counterargument. Instead, he argues, the militia facilitated a corporate consciousness that heightened racial consciousness among free coloreds. Free coloreds joined rural and urban militias in order to avail themselves of the tax exemption and to enjoy the benefits of the fuero militar. Intent on receiving the benefits that accrued from militia service, free coloreds displayed an acumen that revealed the ways in which they envisioned freedom. In this respect, Vinson's richly documented and tightly constructed argument touches on much more than the free colored militia experience.

This book offers a novel perspective on the free colored experience. Although the militia experience constitutes the analytical lens, the reader also learns much about the lives and experiences of the free coloreds who were widely dispersed throughout New Spain. In contrast to pioneering studies of slavery, which leave the impression that Africans resided largely in urban centers or rural estates, Bearing Arms shows that freedom permitted African descendants to achieve vast geographical distribution. Though concentrated in Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz, free colored militias were ubiquitous throughout the colony. This very presence underscores the need for more studies of slavery and freedom in noncanonical locations. Similarly, this study also highlights the need for much more subtlety with regard to the postmanumission experience. As Vinson ably demonstrates, freedom involved more than a history of race relations, usually formulated in terms of the race-class debate or the free colored population's desire for social whitening. While social mobility was a critical aspect of the...