Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (review)

In 1678, an African-born servant near death professed as a nun in the Carmelite convent in Puebla, where she had lived for more than six decades. When she died a year later, her funeral was attended by town notables and crowds of ordinary people drawn by this humble and obedient woman’s reputation for piety and virtue. This is the story that opens Bristol’s engaging book about seventeenth-century Afro-Mexican religion. Each of the six chapters that follow is framed around similar stories culled from spiritual biographies, colonial chronicles, and Inquisition records. In them, Bristol explores efforts by slaves and free people of color to assert their Catholic faith and defend heterodox forms of Christianity in the face of race prejudice and challenges from their masters and the agents of Spanish civil and ecclesiastic authority.

Bristol’s wide-ranging study stretches from the conversions of captives in the early days of the trade from West Africa to the public and private devotions of acculturated Afro-Mexicans during the middle years of the colony, primarily in Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz. By the mid-seventeenth century, most of New Spain’s black population was American-born, and blacks and mulattoes together outnumbered both Spaniards and Native Americans in the principal cities of the viceroyalty. As a result, Afro-Mexican ritual practices were a well-established part of urban cultural and social life, even though colonial authorities viewed them with ambivalence and suspicion.

Bristol focuses especially on the black confraternities that promoted community solidarity and shaped cultural expressions of ethnic identity, and also on medicinal and divination practices of African origin that gave authority to Afro-Mexican healers and legitimacy to their specialized knowledge. These latter practices, which invited accusations of witchcraft and sorcery, provide a context for Bristol to examine black resistance and shifting attitudes among Church authorities toward religious non-conformity. She also casts cases of blasphemy and renunciations of God in terms of resistance. When these utterances, often made during punishment, led to denunciations before the Inquisition, they gave slaves opportunities to air grievances publicly against cruel masters.

Bristol’s discussion of the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of her work is concise and useful, but limited. She characterizes her approach as drawing on the conventions of microhistory, with close attention to the details of individual case studies as a pathway to understanding broader contexts and reaching larger conclusions. With its emphasis on the contingencies of colonial authority and the interdependence of dominant and subordinate subcultures, her book is anchored in the familiar social history of accommodation and resistance. As such, it joins recent scholarship by Few, Villa-Flores, Procter, and Restall that shows how important the African contribution to Mexican history has been.¹ Though her interpretative framework may hold few surprises, the stories that she recounts are well chosen and compelling, and her treatment of historical context is artful and comprehensive.