Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico

Six: Narrating Freedom

161 six Narrating Freedom In the conventional characterization of Mexican history, including social histories, seventeenth-century New Spain slept.1 In these narratives of Mexican history, social and cultural quiescence defined the middle period, a contrast to the tumult of conquest and the era of independence. These scholars view colonialism through conventional formulations of politics and economics. They argue that societal stasis was compounded by the contraction of New Spain’s economy, which led to a period of imperial neglect. The decline of the mining economy—a problem of inadequate production and a steep decline in the indigenous population—restricted social and cultural possibilities. Scholars interested in the Atlantic economy have recently started to question such claims of stasis. Economic historian David Eltis suggests that far from slumbering, the economy of colonial Mexico during this period was awake and active. He writes that “the question of the relative size of the export sector in the Spanish Americas is poorly understood.”2 The need for a reappraisal of the colonial slumber becomes even more pressing when we consider the extent of the growth of the creole population over the course of the seventeenth century. Both the volume of the slave trade and the subsequent process of cultural formation require us to reassess the standards we use to assess the middle colonial period. The slave trade brought an unprecedented number of ethnic Africans into the viceroyalty in the first half of the seventeenth century, bringing the slave population to its apogee. While the slave population 1. D. A. Brading, Miners & Merchants in Bourbon Mexico: 1763–1810 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 8–14; Louisa Schell Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite, 1590–1660: Silver, State, and Society (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991). 2. David Eltis observed that “while coerced Indian labor was the mainstay of the silver mines, the number of free and mita laborers employed in the production of silver in New Spain and Peru even at peak export periods was small compared to the number of slaves that were employed on sugar plantations.” David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 25. 162   Colonial Blackness grew rapidly, the number of free blacks grew even faster. Among the creole population , free mulattos were steadily moving toward numerical ascendancy. The growth of the free black population in the seventeenth century raises numerous questions about the nature and meaning of freedom in the Atlantic world. Scholars of slavery typically situate freedom in relation to the economy. They overlook the link between sexuality and freedom. In the Atlantic, freedom initially emerged from sexual contact between free and enslaved people. If Spaniards sought to stave off the growth of the free black population (a goal they acknowledged ), they needed to regulate sexuality. Yet the Spanish Crown never prohibited interracial contact or punished slaves for having sex with free persons. Though the clergy punished sinners, the legal status of the offending parties was not the issue for the Church. If free blacks posed a threat to Mexican society, as so many have claimed, why did Spanish settlers, the Spanish monarchy, and the Catholic Church choose not to restrict sexual relations between black male slaves and Indian women ? Such relations likely played a key role in fostering the growth of the free black population. In the New World, freedom did not emerge as an abstraction. In the wake of the Spanish conquests and the slave trade, freedom was above all a lived experience . Freedom was a social practice, something people learned in and through their relationships with others long before early modern theologians and modern philosophers upheld it as an abstraction and ideal. Enslaved Africans and creoles made it abundantly clear that the freedom they experienced cannot be equated with the ideologies of liberty formulated during the Age of Revolutions. New Spain’s black population conceived of freedom in and through the encumbrance of slave status. This chapter offers a contextualized understanding of first freedom in New Spain—an emerging social practice in the New World among human chattel whose existence defined the meaning of freedom for the modern world. Africans in Spanish America forged this freedom through their lived experience as slaves who nonetheless could stake claims as Christians to social selves. As we have seen, individuals of African descent channeled many of their life experiences through Christianity, and their understanding of freedom is no exception; Africans and creoles linked Christianity, sexuality, and freedom. The words...