Africans to the Spanish Americas: Expanding the Diaspora ed. by Sherwin K. Bryant, Rachel Sarah O’Toole, and Ben Vinson III (review)

Africans to the Spanish Americas: Expanding the Diaspora is a collection of essays that examine the history of the African Diaspora in Latin America, taking “as its cue the need to further expand the framework by which we chart the African Diaspora, based upon a close reading of a variety of texts from the Spanish American cultures” (3). In the introduction the editors examine the different waves that constitute the study of the African experience in the Spanish Americas from its beginning in the nineteenth century when “scholars writing within Latin America, enjoyed the distinct challenge of trying to situate blackness within nascent nation-states that were trying to articulate their national character for the first time” until the present moment, in which “the emerging prominence of the concept of Diaspora as a way to evaluate the black experience has helped provide new theoretical insight and sophistication into how we should interrogate the black presence” (4, 8). Historians situated within this present fourth wave, the contributors to this volume, articulate in their research the need to transform African-descended people into the subjects of their narratives. In their essays, the scholars geographically reconfigure the concept of diaspora by “accentuating its early extension into Iberia in the fifteenth century and its reach beyond the Atlantic basin into the Pacific/Andean territories not long thereafter” (13). The book is divided into three different sections that illustrate the diversity of the Afro-Latino experience and which ultimately “advocate a blending of viewpoints so that a more balanced synthesis can emerge from fourth-wave scholarship” (10).

Section one “Complicating Identity in the African Diaspora to Spanish America” consists of three different essays that explore the strategies employed by Afro-descendants to articulate their identity in the Spanish Americas. Leo J. Garofalo’s essay “The Shape of a Diaspora: The movement of Afro-Iberians to Colonial Spanish America” points out the need to expand temporary and geographically Diasporic studies through the inclusion of the Afro-Iberian experience inside its scope: “life in southern Iberia offered enslaved and free Afro-Iberians a role as intermediaries at a time when European expansion into the Americas and along Africa’s coast demanded many more people with skills as mediators and experience with adaptation and assimilation” (30). Employing as primary sources the lists of passengers that traveled from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas, Garofalo examines the historical importance that Afro-Iberians had for the transmission of the Hispanic culture in the New World, and how such a role transformed them into active agents in the formation of a Transatlantic culture. As Garofalo points out the inclusion of Afro-Iberians within the concept of Diaspora further complicates its understanding. Frank “Trey” Proctor III’s article “African Diasporic Ethnicity in Mexico City to 1650” explores through colonial marriage records, that dated from 1640 until 1650, the ethnic patterns established in the matrimonies among people of African heritage. Marriages, as Proctor theorizes, “highlight the creation of African Diasporic ethnicities that were spontaneously articulated in the Diaspora and were based on the redefinition of the common linguistic and cultural traits shared by slaves who originated from within common regions in Africa” (55). Through matrimony, slaves defined their ethnic identities challenging priestly (colonial) classifications that aimed to categorize and fixate their cultural identity. Similarly, Rachel Sarah O’Toole in “To Be Free and Lucumi: Ana de la Calle and Making African Diaspora Identities in Colonial Peru” examines the ways in which African-descended people in Peru defined themselves by appropriating colonial terms to designate their identities. O’Toole centers her analysis in the figure of Ana de la Calle, a free woman of color who addresses her ethnic heritage as “Lucumi,” a term employed by colonial authorities to classify slave identities. As O’Toole signals, this particular case exemplifies how men and...