Afro-Mexican Slave Labor in the Obrajes de Paños of New Spain, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

2003 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank T. Proctor
Keyword(s):  
Labor Force ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Textile Mill ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Woolen Textile

On April 5, 1723, Juan Joseph de Porras, a mulatto slave laboring in an obraje de paños (woolen textile mill) near Mexico City, appeared before the Holy Office of the Inquisition for blasphemy. According to the testimony of six slaves, including Porras’ wife, while his co-workers prepared to bed down for the night in the obraje Porras had blasphemed over a beating he had received from the mayordomo (overseer) earlier in the day. Señor Pedregal, the owner of the obraje, testified that Porras was one of nearly thirty workers, all Afro-Mexican slaves or convicts, who lived and labored in his obraje without the freedom to leave.The case against Juan Joseph de Porras and dozens of others like it in the Mexican archives raise important questions, not only about the makeup of the colonial obraje labor force, but also about the importance of Afro-Mexican slavery in the middle of the colonial period. Was the Pedregal labor force, composed entirely of slaves and convicts, the exception or the rule within obrajes of New Spain? If it was not exceptional, how important were slaves to that obraje and others like it? What exactly was the demographic makeup of the obraje labor force in the middle of the colonial period? And, how might the answers to those questions change our understanding of the histories of labor and slavery in colonial Mexico?

scholarly journals Adopted Pedagogies: Nahua Incorporation of European Music and Theater in Colonial Mexico City

2010 ◽  
Vol 66 (03) ◽  
pp. 311-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Truitt
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Franciscan Order ◽  
One Year

In 1519 Spanish conquistadors arrived on the shores of Mesoamerica under the leadership of Hernando Cortés. Following the defeat of Mexico-Tenochtidan, the Aztec capital, Cortés requested that members of the Franciscan order be sent from Spain to lead the conversion effort. In 1523 the first three Franciscans arrived, among them fray Pedro de Gante. One year later another 12 Franciscans made the journey. They established themselves in the southeastern portion of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and under their direction Nahua laborers built the principal Franciscan religious compound, San Francisco, and the first indigenous chapel in New Spain, San Josef de los Naturales. Together this friary and chapel served as the main point of interaction for Franciscan conversion efforts within the altepetl, ethnic state, of Mexico-Tenochtidan. In the courtyard of San Francisco, next to the indigenous chapel, fray Pedro established an indigenous school aimed at the indoctrination of the Nahua peoples of Mexico-Tenochtitlan and other outlying altepetl. Although its students were primarily members of indigenous nobility, other promising Nahuas received an education there as well.

scholarly journals Lady of the House: Augustina Meza (ca. 1758–1819), Print Publishing, and the Women of Mexican Late Colonial Art

Arts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Kelly Donahue-Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Art ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Women's Lives

Using archival records of the Sagrario Metropolitano and material analysis of extant prints, the paper presents the life and work of the only known woman printmaker in viceregal New Spain, María Augustina Meza. It traces Meza and her work through two marriages to fellow engravers and a 50-year career as owner of an independent print publishing shop in Mexico City. In doing so, the paper places Meza’s print publishing business and its practices within the context of artists’ shops run by women in the mid- to late-eighteenth century. The article simultaneously extends the recognized role of women in printing and broadens our understanding of women within the business of both printmaking and painting in late colonial Mexico City. It furthermore joins the scholarship demonstrating with new empirical research that the lived realities of women in viceregal New Spain were more complex than traditional, stereotypical visions of women’s lives have previously allowed.

Innocent Infants or Abusive Patriarchs? Spousal Homicides, the Punishment of Indians and the Law in Colonial Mexico, 1740s–1820s

2006 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 793-828 ◽  
Author(s):  
VICTOR M. URIBE-URAN
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Complex Combination ◽  
The Law ◽  
Legal Mechanism ◽  
Judicial Treatment

This article examines numerous spousal homicides occurring all over New Spain (colonial Mexico) during the last seven decades of the colonial period. After killing their spouses, sometimes in an extremely brutal manner, a considerable number of the defendants managed to get away with little more than a slap on the wrist. I argue here that this was not due to the fact that written laws were dead letters. After examining general patterns of spousal homicides, I focus on the legal treatment and punishment afforded to indigenous criminals, several of who were drunk at the time of their crimes. Being an ‘Indian’ or committing a crime while drunk – both characteristics of many defendants in the records – were treated as a mitigating circumstance under law and led to the acquittal of several of the accused. Royal graces, an important legal mechanism, also played a significant role in easing the severity of the treatment of these and other domestic criminals. The judicial treatment of spousal murders thus did not reflect a considerable gap between law and practice at the time. Punishment derived from a complex combination of socio-cultural factors and longstanding legal prescriptions, doctrines and traditions.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Healthcare Reform ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Rural Regions ◽  
Corporate Sponsors ◽  
French Physician ◽  
Critical Moments

The introduction recounts the experiences of French physician Esteban Morel, who arrived in Mexico City in 1778 and immediately set about introducing inoculation among the upper classes during an epidemic of smallpox. Reluctant parents and rampant rumors of deformity and death stymied the inoculation campaign that year and suggest the critical role of nonprofessionals in colonial Mexico in healthcare reform. In an age when European monarchs looked to govern from above the health of populations, the perspectives and sensibilities of laypeople in the socially heterogeneous barrios, subdistricts, and rural regions of New Spain remained pivotal. Experiments with disease and its control were critical moments in which amateur scientists, physicians, corporate sponsors, and lay communities came together to assess the merits of reform and the relevance of Atlantic practices and projects for their own lives.

The Codex Mexicanus: Time, Religion, History, and Health in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

2016 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori Boornazian Diel
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
New Name ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Aztec Empire ◽  
Conquest Of Mexico

About 60 years after the Spanish invasion and conquest of Mexico, a group of Nahua intellectuals gathered in Tenochtitlan. On the very site of the heart of the Aztec empire stood a city of a new name: Mexico City, capital of New Spain. There the Nahuas set about compiling an extensive book of miscellanea, now known as the Codex Mexicanus. Owned by the Bibliothèque National de France, the codex includes records pertaining to the Christian and Aztec calendars, European medical astrology, a genealogy of the Tenochca royal house, and the annals of preconquest and early colonial Mexico City, among other intriguing topics.

The Pulque Trade of Late Colonial Mexico City

1980 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Kicza
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Long Distance

Over the course of the colonial period the Spanish in Mexico, whether Creole or peninsular, not only created an economic and marketing structure based on their own practices and preferences but also penetrated and even came to dominate the marketing of certain Indian commodities, when these products were exchanged in a cash rather than a barter system and when involvement in the marketing appeared sufficiently lucrative. Cacao was probably the first item in the indegenous market economy whose distribution was taken over by Spaniards. Cacao had been a long-distance import item of high specific value even in the pre-Conquest world and the victorious Spanish quickly replaced the disappearing pochteca class of merchants which had controlled its distribution.

“A Bad Race of Infected Blood” The Atlantic Profile of Gaspar Riveros Vasconcelos and the Question of Race in 1650 New Spain

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25
Author(s):  
Matteo Lazzari
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
New Spain ◽  
National Archive ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Infected Blood ◽  
Cartagena De Indias

Abstract Based on manuscripts from the Mexican National Archive recording a 1650 Inquisition trial for astrology, this article will present a reconstruction of the story of Gaspar Riveros Vasconcelos, a “mulatto” born in Tangier, a descendant of a Portuguese father and Angolan mother. He travelled the Atlantic commercial routes – visiting Angola, Pernambuco, Cartagena de Indias, La Havana – and got involved in political discussions with Spaniards residing in mid-seventeenth century Mexico City. This period was particularly tough for Portuguese people in Spanish America, given the 1640 breach of the dynastic union of Spain and Portugal, which had been formerly achieved in 1581 by King Philipp ii. Vasconcelos’ story allows us to reflect on identity formation in time, on the concept of race, as well as on the ways in which “a persona miserable de color pardo” could deploy his agency as Afro-Portuguese in colonial Mexico society. As such, this paper aims to reconsider the relevance of individual narratives which can generate a growing awareness of the importance that Afro-descendants had in the Ibero-American world and how they could influence the process of racialization in the local context of seventeenth century New Spain.

“BIG-OLD LONG LIPS, BIG-OLD JAR NOSE”: ANCIENT MESOAMERICAN MONSTERS AND CLOWNS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CHRISTIANITY IN EARLY COLONIAL MEXICO

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Ben Leeming
Keyword(s):  
New Spain ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Transgressive Behavior

Abstract During the early Colonial period, Native writers, working under the aegis of mendicant friars, composed Christian texts in the Nahuatl language as part of the Roman Catholic Church's efforts to indoctrinate the Indigenous population of New Spain. Yet these Native “ghost-writers” were far from passive participants in the translation of Christianity. Numerous studies since the 1980s have demonstrated how Native writers exerted influence on the presentation of Christianity, in effect “indigenizing” the message and allowing for the persistence of essential elements of the Mesoamerican worldview. This article focuses on descriptions of demons and sinners drawn from Nahuatl-Christian texts and argues that Native writers drew on an ancient Mesoamerican repertoire of imagery involving physical deformity and transgressive behavior (the “monster-clown complex”). In pre-contact times, such imagery was associated with specific figures, including Olmec dwarfs, Maya “fat men,” and comic performers attached to the Mexica royal court. In each of these figures, both physical deformity and humor rendered them powerful, liminal beings often referred to as ritual clowns. By drawing upon this “monster-clown complex,” Native writers transformed what were intended to be terrifying motivators of conversion into something very different: morally neutral, supernaturally powerful, and ultimately essential members of the Mesoamerican sacred realm.

scholarly journals Adopted Pedagogies: Nahua Incorporation of European Music and Theater in Colonial Mexico City

2010 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Truitt
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Franciscan Order ◽  
One Year

In 1519 Spanish conquistadors arrived on the shores of Mesoamerica under the leadership of Hernando Cortés. Following the defeat of Mexico-Tenochtidan, the Aztec capital, Cortés requested that members of the Franciscan order be sent from Spain to lead the conversion effort. In 1523 the first three Franciscans arrived, among them fray Pedro de Gante. One year later another 12 Franciscans made the journey. They established themselves in the southeastern portion of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and under their direction Nahua laborers built the principal Franciscan religious compound, San Francisco, and the first indigenous chapel in New Spain, San Josef de los Naturales. Together this friary and chapel served as the main point of interaction for Franciscan conversion efforts within the altepetl, ethnic state, of Mexico-Tenochtidan. In the courtyard of San Francisco, next to the indigenous chapel, fray Pedro established an indigenous school aimed at the indoctrination of the Nahua peoples of Mexico-Tenochtitlan and other outlying altepetl. Although its students were primarily members of indigenous nobility, other promising Nahuas received an education there as well.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document