No Friends in the Holy Office: Black and Mulatta Women Healing Communities and Answering to the Inquisition in Seventeen Century Mexico

The desire to understand the myriad experiences of and historical contexts in which people of African descent enslaved in Africa then brought to the Americas lived invites scholars to look beyond well-trodden North American landscapes and adjacent island colonies whose academic emphases has generated robust historiographies that are at once illuminating and skewed. The concerted turn away from earlier lines of inquiry stems from the trajectories forged largely within the broad areas collectively termed African Diaspora studies. Scholars with interest in the field have underscored the shortcoming of using only narrow examples of diasporic experiences, which commonly centered on the ways in which enslaved persons were oppressed and victimized within hegemonic societies that an elite stratum controlled. The field's shift recommends, if not insists, that such themed-histories, while relevant, must be interwoven and examined as part of an melange of disparate and unique diasporic realties in which diasporic people, too, shaped their life's course and those of others. Moreover, it maintains that the breadth of representations recovered and the analyses and conclusions they generate must themselves be the scaffold that leads us to develop relevant theories built from and across their multifarious realities. (1) The histories of African people and their descendants in sixteenth and seventeenth century New Spain (Colonial Mexico) offer an opportunity for Diaspora scholars to not only broaden the geographic scope of diasporic experiences and theory, it also opens a chance to reach into and reconstruct historical narratives centered on the early modern period that include people of African descent as subjects of those histories. (2) The current contribution stems from the examination of three Inquisition records housed in the Archivo General de la Nacion de Mexico. (3) Using these sources, its aim is to recover facets of Black and Mulatto people's lives within a dynamic milieu in which their multiple, variable identities collided, merged, emerged, and were at times negotiated, appropriated and even shed. Their choices highlight the environment of change, skepticism, mistrust, and ubiquitous uncertainty in seventeenth century New Spain. (4) More specifically, it combs the documents whose primary protagonists are women to draw out an understanding about aspects of the lives enslaved and free Black and Mulatta women experienced and shaped. (5) Assessing files pertaining to three women whose actions were brought to the attention of the Inquisition for witchcraft allegations, the case is made that within the testimonies the Inquisitors amassed to determine the validity of and resolution for reports made about them located in the stories of shrewd women involved in complex social networks, and healing works that tied them to multiple people within their communities. The women's stories introduced below transpired within the framework of seventeenth century Mexico. By that time the colonial enterprise had been in process for more than fifty years. The major economic enterprises they developed in agriculture and mining made them dependant on Indigenous and African labor. Throughout the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century African laborers and their descendants--enslaved and free--had been transported to New Spain to offset the dearth of labor caused by the early decimation of Indigenous populations. The importation of African origin peoples--some directly from the African continent and others from the Iberian world--set the stage for creating a colony in which "[b]y the mid-sixteenth century, people of African descent outnumbered Spaniards in New Spain and comprised the second-largest slave population in the Americas." (6) Throughout the seventeenth century the demographic growth of African origin people and their descendants continued to grow, and that included the increasing number of New Spain born African descendents (creoles). …