Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531–1706 by Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva (review)

Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva’s new book is a sociocultural history of slavery in the second largest city in colonial Mexico, Puebla de los Ángeles. More specifically, the study focuses on the intricate, entangling social networks that enabled and empowered enslaved Africans and African creoles to maneuver, gain social mobility, and freedom in colonial Mexican society. This approach may be familiar in the broader context of slavery studies, but it has yet to be adequately applied or effectively undertaken in regions like central Mexico, in population centers outside Mexico City—places like Puebla de los Ángeles, where the African presence and slavery have historically been, like its descendants, marginalized and even denied. Sierra Silva “challenges us to understand the complex negotiation of urban bondage within spaces typically defined as Spanish, indigenous, or both” (9). This alone makes the author’s study a significant and important accomplishment. In addition to making a substantial contribution to a severely understudied region in the field of urban slavery studies, Sierra Silva broadens our understanding of the complex dynamics, and the relationship, between bondage and freedom, through an analysis of the adaptability and mobility of the enslaved. Primarily, he is concerned with Africans but also with Nahua and Asian populations, as well as the Atlantic slave trade writ large.

The sixteenth century represented the formative period for the introduction and evolution of African slavery in Puebla de los Ángeles, where it replaced a declining and increasingly royally protected indigenous population after the New Laws of 1542 (although indigenous enslavement continued for “rebellious Indians,” as did an illicit trade). At the same time, Sierra Silva does not write off Puebla’s indigenous population, and documents some of the dynamic interactions and relationships between indigenous and African actors that formed a part of the social network(s) he reconstructs. The author succinctly documents the rising demand for enslaved African workers, both male and female, alongside indigenous workers in the expanding obrajes (factories) that drove the city’s growing textile industry, as well as in the homes of Spanish colonists. The author’s central focus, chronologically and thematically, is on the seventeenth century and the agency, fluidity, and mobility that permeated and qualified the otherwise heavily regulated and therefore circumscribed daily lives of Puebla’s enslaved.

Sierra Silva reminds us of the contradictory and colluding relationship between the institutions of the Catholic Church and slavery in his chapter on the convents. He also accentuates the dynamic struggle of enslaved Africans and creoles to exercise varying degrees of agency, and therefore control, in their daily lives. They achieved this through various means, nonviolent and violent, and most consistently through social networks that encompassed individuals and extended families of both slaveholders and the enslaved. Such relationships afforded the latter more mobility, socially and literally, and an impetus toward eventually acquiring a more significant space or independence and transcending bondage.

As Sierra Silva demonstrates, enslaved peoples dreaded exile from their cities of residence far more than the threat (or reality) of lashings or hard labor. The networks forged through slave initiative—social mobility, identity, family integrity, and freedom—were the foundations of freedom. Each was grounded in the gradual development of intricate social networks in home centers like Puebla and its environs. Social death was a very real thing for the enslaved who found themselves in foreign towns or regions. The author marshals an impressive array of evidence in documenting the many cases in the struggles of individuals. Men and women, like María of São Tomé, defied their brutally imposed station by building trustworthy networks of friends, relatives, and patrons. These networks facilitated everything from preventing unwanted resale or transfer to freedom and keeping families together. As is at least implicit in Sierra Silva’s research and incisive analysis, the enslaved peoples of Puebla were able, in varying degrees from precarious to substantial...