African-Descent Women in Colonial Latin America
Authors: McKinley Michelle 
Published: November 2023

Latin American history has been enriched by scholarship that centers gender and Blackness in the production of colonial histories, in ontologies of freedom and enslavement, in elaborations of syncretic religious experience and medical knowledge systems, and in formulating imperial regimes of governance, labor, and property. Feminist historians had insisted on the importance of gender as a category of analysis in deciphering hidden colonial scripts for the past four decades. This insistence deepened our understanding of the importance of sexuality, intimacy, domesticity, calidad, and marriage in colonial Latin American societies, and established the centrality of the Catholic Church in consolidating Spanish imperial rule. However, these studies overwhelmingly retained a Eurocentric gaze. African-descent women appeared as objects rather than subjects of study—exemplars of the fragile and incomplete reach of colonial honor conventions and elite anxieties over the slipperiness of race and calidad. Over the past two decades, the field of colonial Latin American history has shifted from an additive “just add [Black] women” posture to a well-rounded and burgeoning set of inquiries that centers African-descent women at its core. A robust literature explores how African-descent women shaped empire, religion, science, medicine, healing, law, and legality. Given the rich documentary evidence proffered by Inquisitorial proceedings, ecclesiastical, notarial, criminal, conventual, and judicial documents, historians have produced numerous studies of enslaved litigants, Black militias, venerated saints, beatas and mystics, medical and healing practitioners, and sovereign confraternity queens and kings. In addition to these exceptional subjects, we also have histories of African-descent women laboring in expected and unexpected places—urban centers, plantations, repúblicas de indios, palenques, mines, port towns, and haciendas where they shaped local and regional economies. Enslaved people left a pronounced archival footprint throughout the viceregal Audiencias (courts) and notarial offices, as they claimed and exercised the right to matrimony and the customary right to self-purchase (coartación). In so doing, they articulated innovative legal ideals of custom, liberty, dignity, and equity. From the outset, the Spanish empire was marked by a biopolitical compulsion to register race according to tripartite categories of Black slaves, Iberian rulers, and Indigenous vassals. Yet colonial Latin American societies were asymmetric spaces of racial mixing (mestizaje), which produced seemingly endless new racial categories of difference or casta. Scholars of colonial racial formations have repeatedly pointed out that ascription was not tantamount to lived everyday experience. Despite this longstanding acknowledgment of the interstices of race, calidad, class, and gender, studies of colonial Blackness have been tied to an insurgent (and urgent) mission of recovery in contemporary multicultural Latin American nations. Census figures have shown persistent racial drift, deeply rooted to discriminatory social practices that privileged whitening and a depreciation of Black ancestral heritage amid official policies promoting idealized racial democracies. Historians have countered Black erasure (“no hay negros aquí”) and cosmic hybridity with numerous studies from the viceregencies of New Spain, Lima, Cartagena de Indias, and Nueva Granada—colonial sites with significant populations of Africans and African-descent communities. Historians are increasingly bringing a diasporic lens to national histories, situating African-descent peoples as historical subjects of the early modern Iberoamerican empire. The bibliographic entries enumerated here begin contemporaneously with George Reid Andrews’ Afro-Latin America, published in 2000, which coincided with a boom in publications about Afro-Latin American studies. Readers will note that his bibliographic essay does not include Brazilian sources, as the vast Brazilian literature deserves its own essay.