African Diasporic Ethnicity in Mexico City to 1650

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank “Trey” Proctor
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Old World ◽  
Pan African ◽  
Catchment Areas ◽  
Race Ethnicity

This chapter examines the intersections of race, ethnicity, and slavery in Spanish America and the African Diaspora by focusing on the development of African Diasporic ethnicity in Mexico City to 1650. Drawing on marriage records from early seventeenth-century Mexico City, it considers how Africans constructed multiple new ethnic and community identities in Spanish America. Through an analysis of selection patterns of testigos (wedding witnesses) alongside marriage choice, the chapter highlights the networks of social relations formed by slaves. It shows that ethnic Africans tended to marry and form communities of association with Africans from the same general catchment areas. It argues that the foundations of the ethnic communities under formation were not intact African ethnicities, pan-African identities, or race-based identities. Rather, slave marriages in Mexico City point to the creation of African diasporic ethnicities that were spontaneously articulated in the Diaspora. Africans formed new ethnic identities based upon Old World backgrounds and commonalities while in Diaspora.

“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.

“A Stalwart Motor of Revolutions”: An American Merchant in Pernambuco, 1817-1825

2008 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlin A. Fitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
New Order ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old World ◽  
Republican Government

A new order for the New World was unfolding in the early nineteenth century, or so many in the United States believed. Between 1808 and 1825, all of Portuguese America and nearly all of Spanish America broke away from Europe, casting off Old World monarchs and inaugurating home-grown governments instead. People throughout the United States looked on with excitement, as the new order seemed at once to vindicate their own revolution as well as offer new possibilities for future progress. Free from obsolete European alliances, they hoped, the entire hemisphere could now rally together around republican government and commercial reciprocity. Statesmen and politicians were no exception, as men from Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay tried to exclude European influence from the hemisphere while securing new markets for American manufactures and agricultural surplus.

TWO RENAISSANCES: URBAN POLITICAL CULTURE IN POST-REFORMATION ENGLAND RECONSIDERED

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP WITHINGTON
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Urban Renaissance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Historiography

This review reconsiders the place and importance of urban political culture in England between c. 1550 and c. 1750. Relating recent work on urban political culture to trends in political, social, and cultural historiography, it argues that England's towns and boroughs underwent two ‘renaissances’ over the course of the period: a ‘civic renaissance’ and the better-known ‘urban renaissance’. The former was fashioned in the sixteenth century; however, its legacy continued to inform political thought and practice over 150 years later. Similarly, although the latter is generally associated with ‘the long eighteenth century’, its attributes can be traced to at least the Elizabethan era. While central to broader transitions in post-Reformation political culture, these ‘renaissances’ were crucial in restructuring the social relations and social identity of townsmen and women. They also constituted an important but generally neglected dynamic of England's seventeenth-century ‘troubles’.

Spanish Folklore in the Southwest: The Pioneer Studies of Aurelio M. Espinosa

1978 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-237
Author(s):  
J. Manuel Espinosa
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
First Century ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
History Of

The centuries-old Spanish folk heritage of our Southwest, and its many faceted and enduring influence on the cultural life of the region, has been written about from various rims of observation. This article describes the pioneer studies of Aurelio M. Espinosa on Spanish folklore in the Southwest, with special emphasis on northern New Mexico. Although he made important contributions to the study of Spanish folklore of southern Colorado, Arizona, and California, and to that of Spain, Mexico, and other parts of Spanish America as well, he devoted most of his research and field work to the upper half of New Mexico which is the richest field of Spanish folklore in the Southwest.In viewing the cultural history of New Mexico, Espinosa reminded his readers that its first century as a Spanish colony, the 17th, was the second great century of Spain's Golden Age of arts and letters. With the vigor of Spain's sense of mission in those centuries, her Golden Age radiated to all parts of Spanish America via Mexico City, Lima, and the other principal colonial capitals. At the same time, from the bookshelf and the store of knowledge of the humble missionary, and the folklore of the Spanish settlers, passed down from generation to generation, the spirit of the Golden Age was reflected on the most remote settled frontiers.

Respectable Mistresses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole von Germeten
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Sexually Active ◽  
History Of

This chapter begins with a quote from the celebrated seventeenth-century Mexico City Poet, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, highlighting the hypocritical intersection between gender and sexuality in this era. The focus here is on the legal history of eighteenth-century middle class women who retained a degree of public honor as they took part in sex work inside their homes.The confused eighteenth-century reactions by church, state, and neighbors to sexually active women often derived from increased opportunities for permitted or at least tolerated socializing between the sexes. These new social spaces challenged official ideas of public order and permissible gender interaction.

The Colonial City

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
D.A. BRADING
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Clear Vision ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City ◽  
Political Decisions ◽  
Looking Back

This chapter demonstrates that while Spain had a clear vision of what the conquered Aztec city should be, the city of the conquistadors was relatively short for it was soon transformed by its Creole inhabitants who made their own identity pronounced on its building and culture. For 300 years, the city of Mexico was the capital of viceroyalty. It was the capital of New Spain and was the seat of the metropolitan archbishopric of Mexico. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, a generation of young Creoles entered the secular priesthood and the religious orders. They challenged the predominance of European Spaniards, affirmed their talents and identity, and started looking back to the glorious past the conquistadors had destroyed. However, the development of the city was constrained and limited by the city’s status as the viceregal capital of New Spain. Its status hence meant that the city depended on the political decisions and cultural influences emanating from the Spanish. Out of this tension, a creative process of change emerged in which different ethnic groups and cultures intermingled and conflicted to ensure that the social composition and character of Mexico City would be different from the other cities in Spanish America. However, these changes were not brought without due loss. Due to the conquest and the Old World diseases the Mexico population fell to the near brink of oblivion. These epidemics and natural calamities continued to afflict the city throughout the colonial period.

Up from Middlebrow

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Rose
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Access To Higher Education ◽  
Middlebrow Culture ◽  
Two Generations

The Chinese had a word for it—wanbao quanshu. It’s a bibliographic term, which literally means “complete compendia of myriad treasures,” but an alternate translation might be “middlebrow.” These were encyclopedic works that distilled and summarized sophisticated science, history, and politics in cheap, accessible, illustrated guidebooks. Their audience (as a 1933 survey of Shanghai bookstalls confirmed) was neither the educated elite nor the impoverished peasantry, but an intermediate semi-educated class of shop-clerks, apprentices, housewives, workers, and prostitutes. Very few readers had thoroughly mastered the Chinese vocabulary of 50,000 characters, but many more, without much difficulty, had learned 2,000 basic terms, enough to read popular newspapers and wanbao quanshu. The latter commonly ran the subtitle wanshi buqiuren (“myriad matters you won’t need to ask”), which underscored their mission: self-education. They had titles like Riyong wanshi baoku choushi bixu, which could be rendered “Treasury of all daily things necessary for social relations” or (more idiomatically) “How to win friends and influence people.” Wanbao quanshu were the contemporaneous counterparts of H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History and Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. They flourished in Republican-era China, the same time frame that Joan Shelley Rubin identified as the heyday of American middlebrow culture. In societies where a wide gap opens up between elite and pulp literature, where literacy is growing but access to higher education is still restricted, where modernizing forces arouse both optimism and anxiety, middlebrow bridges those divides and makes sense of rapid change. Those conditions certainly prevailed in China, the United States, and Great Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, but not only then. Middlebrow has a very long history: wanbao quanshu can be traced back to the seventeenth century. And how about eighteenth-century Europe? Two generations ago historians studied the High Enlightenment of Voltaire and Rousseau, one generation ago Robert Darnton discovered a Low Enlightenment of Grub-Street hacks and smut-mongers, and now a team of young scholars at Radboud University in the Netherlands are creating the database MEDIATE: Middlebrow Enlightenment: Disseminating Ideas, Authors and Texts in Europe (1665–1820).

Pan-African Chronology: A Comprehensive Reference to the Black Quest for Freedom in Africa, the Americas, Europe and Asia, 1400–1865. By EVERETT JENKINS, JR. North Carolina: McFarland, 1996. Pp. viii + 440. £44.95 (ISBN 0- 7864-0139-7).

1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-177
Author(s):  
HAKIM ADI
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Comprehensive Index ◽  
Pan African ◽  
Comprehensive Reference

Everett Jenkins' book is an admirable attempt to present a comparative chronology of events in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora. The volume is divided into five principal chapters, corresponding to the five centuries covered, each preceded by a brief introduction, and includes a short bibliography and guide to sources, as well as an extensive and comprehensive index. In addition to sections on Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, the author also includes useful sections on ‘related historical events’.

Portuguese Encomenderos de Negros and the Slave Trade within Mexico, 1600–1675

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Tax Evasion ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Puebla De Los Angeles

This article focuses on local slaving agents, encomenderos de negros, during the first half of the seventeenth century. Drawing on notarial documents, Inquisition cases and investigations on contraband and tax evasion, the study explains how Portuguese intermediaries sold and distributed African captives in colonial Mexico between 1616 and 1639. The ability to extend credit was key to the success of these agents-on-commission. The article also explains why agents of the Grillo and Lomelín slaving monopoly (asiento) failed to replicate the success of their Lusophone predecessors in Nueva Veracruz, Mexico City and Puebla de los Ángeles in the 1660s and 1670s.

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