Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Angeles, 1531–1706 by Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, and: Corruption and Justice in Colonial Mexico, 1650–1755 by Christoph Rosenmüller (review)

Legal structures are known to impact the lived realities of broad constituencies and create complex dynamics between power brokers and the masses highlighting uniqueness within localized contexts. This theme is intricately explored in different ways in Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva's Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531–1706 and Christoph Rosenmüller's Corruption and Justice in Colonial Mexico, 1650–1755. These two authors—both highlighted in Cambridge University Press's Latin American Studies series, which explores a wide range of topics related to Latin American history—provide evidence of the complex racial and ethnic diversity in Mexico in relation to power dynamics.

While the broader series focuses on a range of social, economic, geographic, and historic contexts in Latin America, these two pieces place us in New Spain (colonial Mexico) during partially overlapping periods related to the seventeenth century, a time span that both authors engage as traditionally neglected. They explore two of the largest urban spaces in the colonial period for New Spain (Mexico) and engage social contexts and legal structures in these locales as they related to other spaces in Mexico. Sierra Silva provides a focus on the city of Puebla, the second largest city in the colonial period of New Spain, while Rosenmüller discusses themes of politics and corruption in Mexico City.

Research on slavery in Mexico has received increasing interest in recent decades. Indeed, Mexico had an enslaved population throughout the colonial period; however, it seems to have more regional contexts relative to the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Veracruz. Sierra Silva moves us away from these coastal regions and engages the city of Puebla de los Angeles in central Mexico. Although slavery did not play a major part in the city's cultural imaginary, Sierra Silva fluidly gets readers to understand this history through his blend of quantitative and qualitative analysis that he so eloquently contextualizes with narratives of specific groups and characters in this space. Through these narratives, Sierra Silva allows the readers to see the ways that blackness and slavery fit into the sociocultural history of Puebla. However, Sierra Silva also gets us to understand that slavery was not confined to African descendants, and through his analysis of slavery in this period, he engages the enslavement of Asians and the ways that enslaved individuals of various racial classifications worked, lived, and inhabited space in the city of Puebla de los Angeles. Sierra Silva also stretches considerations of space when we engage the history of transatlantic slavery given that Puebla was neither a capital nor a port city, yet it had an intricate connection with transatlantic slavery.

Sierra Silva's text takes a spatial approach to slavery in Puebla as it engages the textile mill, convent, marketplace, and elite residence through a strategic analysis of thousands of municipal ordinances, notarial records, court cases, parochial records, and Inquisitorial records. Through this analysis, Sierra Silva begins the book with an exploration of the growth of Black population in the context of Indigenous depopulation, which led to increasing importation of Africans. We see here the significance of proximity between the Indigenous and Africans as Spanish colonial officials created a plethora of laws concerned with Afro-Indigenous relations reflecting their fear of these interactions while also appeasing their desire for enslaved labor. That labor, as chapter 2 details, revolved heavily around the obraje (textile mill) where slavery, confinement, and interethnic relations of enslaved Africans and Asians functioned in often harsh conditions. Yet slavery in Puebla also functioned outside the obrajes, as we see the ways that convents held enslaved individuals and the demand for enslaved servants in Puebla's convents created complex circumstances. Sierra Silva takes a different vantage of space and engages the encomendero de...