Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (review)

In Black Blood Brothers, Nicole Von Germeten offers a substantial and original contribution to our understanding of the colonial Afro-Mexican experience. The book's originality resides in the examination of Catholic confraternities led by New Spain's sizable black population. In mining long-neglected cofradía (a term curiously under-utilized in this study) records including founding constitutions, membership lists, account books, and petitions that are complemented by a corpus of wills and a diverse selection of ecclesiastical records, the author brings significant archival substance to a still neglected past. Building on the method that Ben Vision initially pioneered in his study on Afro-Mexican militiamen, Von Germeten brings an institutional approach to her analysis of black life. In both cases, this approach has resulted in rewarding historical studies. After reading Black Blood Brothers, even the specialist's knowledge of the Afro-Mexican experience will be broader and deeper.

Organized around the institutional trajectories of African and Afro-Mexican-led confraternities, Black Blood Brothers touches on far more than the existence of New Spain's black cofradías. "While this study explores other aspects of confraternal culture, such as local pride, baroque piety, and charity," Von Germeten rightly suggests, "the emphasis here is on the social aspects of confraternities and the role they played in the changes Africans and their descendants experienced from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, especially as they moved up the social ladder from slaves to more prosperous colonial subjects" (p. 3). Confraternities, in other words, offer a lens onto the shifting social dynamic informing the experiences of Africans and their descendants. Introduced by two thematic chapters establishing the parameters of confraternity history in New Spain and in particular among Afro-Mexicans, the five case studies of urban resistance and accommodation, social mobility in the provinces, and Spanish patronage and its limits form the book's core. By means of an approach that filters the Afro-Mexican experience through the storied history of confraternities the reader comes to share Von Germeten's perspective on the relationship between the institutional and the social.

Novelty aside, this study offers tough going for the reader. Much of the difficulty rests with the book's organization, argument, and in particular the presentation of the evidence. Von Germeten introduces the confraternity as a vehicle intent on facilitating a proper burial and a "good death." In turn, the reader is informed of a particular form of religious practice identified as "Afromexican baroque piety," which the author suggests is "best seen in public displays such as alms-collecting, flagellant processions, lavish processions, and fiestas" (p. 11). But the reader searches in vain for a discussion on death in the African and black imaginary. When, how, and why did Africans embrace the Christian afterlife? Even the slightest engagement with the Sarah Nalle's study of post-Tridentine Catholicism and João José Reis's funerary practices in colonial Brazil would have been instructive. Instead the study seems curiously detached from a contextualized discussion of Christianity in New Spain, especially in the lives of Afromexicans. Oddly enough, most of the sources on which this study relies have an ecclesiastical provenance. Narrating how the clergy effected the transactions that generated these sources and thereby demonstrated an interest in African and black souls seems fundamental for a history a Christian institution. This lapse mars the book's argument and the overall impact of the prodigious archival research.

In the final analysis, however, Von Germeten has made an important contribution to the study of the Afro-Mexican experience and racial formation in New Spain. Readers might quibble over her interpretive gestures and circumscribed historiographical forays but will surely marvel at the archival treasure that she has mined. For this reason alone this book deserves a wide readership.