Introduction

Summary

Texts produced by and about black interpreters and black spiritual intermediaries in seventeenth-century Peru and New Granada indicate the circulation of notions of blackness that demand more critical attention as they offer insight into the adoption and transformation of racial categories by racialized individuals themselves. This Introduction outlines the argument, provides historical context, and defines key terms used throughout the rest of the book.

On a May morning in 1659 in the Caribbean port of Cartagena de Indias, a man from Angola named Andrés Sacabuche testified before a notary and a judge in the city’s Jesuit church. Sacabuche was serving as a witness in a formal inquiry into the potentially saintly life of Jesuit priest Pedro Claver, his recently deceased supervisor. In his lengthy testimony, Sacabuche provided details about his own life as a survivor of the Middle Passage and an enslaved evangelical interpreter in Cartagena: after arriving in Cartagena as a young man on a slave ship, he was purchased by the city’s Jesuit school to help its priests evangelize the new black arrivals from central Africa disembarking in the port by the hundreds almost every year during this period.¹ As a speaker of the languages of Kimbundu and Anchico, Sacabuche became an important member of a group of enslaved black interpreters owned by the Jesuits in Cartagena. Sacabuche’s testimony and related Jesuit writings about missionary efforts in colonial Lima and Cartagena offer windows onto how black men and women in the diaspora used linguistic and spiritual mediation to communicate with each other and adapt to their New World surroundings.

While Sacabuche narrated his testimony in 1659, some 1,050 miles away in the Pacific coastal city of Lima, Úrsula de Jesús, a Peruvian-born black religious servant in the Convent of Santa Clara, was fashioning another kind of testimony. Úrsula’s narration took the form of a spiritual diary about her visions and conversations with holy voices and souls in purgatory that she related out loud to nuns in her convent at the request of her confessor.² Úrsula was a different kind of intermediary than Sacabuche: rather than translate between distinct languages, she served as a respected visionary and relayer of messages between God, souls in purgatory, and the living. Two posthumous biographies written about her shortly after her death in 1666 use her spiritual diary to fashion their own accounts about her. The biographies selectively repeat her diary’s portrayals of how black men and women should be perceived in and beyond her religious community.

Andrés Sacabuche and Úrsula de Jesús are two of the black intermediaries from colonial Spanish America who are the focus of this book. By examining texts by and about them, Beyond Babel highlights the influence black men and women had on the production of written texts in their respective communities through the work of linguistic and spiritual mediation. In the case of the evangelical interpreters in Cartagena such as Sacabuche, linguistic mediation describes the transposition of messages across the many different languages spoken by the black men and women disembarking from slave ships to facilitate their arrival in the port as well as their catechisms and baptisms. In the case of Úrsula de Jesús in Lima, spiritual mediation describes the labor of relaying messages communicated to her by God and other otherworldly interlocutors to her spiritual community and to serve as an advocate for the salvation of the souls of the living and the dead. This book will demonstrate that these black intermediaries used linguistic and spiritual mediation to shape notions of blackness in written texts that have been overlooked by previous scholarship on colonial Latin America and the African diaspora. Specifically, these intermediaries helped document and circulate notions of black virtue and black beauty even as racial hierarchies stigmatizing blackness were increasingly cohering in seventeenth-century Spanish America.

Men and women of African descent first arrived in the territories that would become Peru and New Granada along with the first Spanish expeditions to these areas in the sixteenth century. In some cases, they were conquistadors themselves, and in others they were servants to conquistadors.³ The importation of large numbers of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean for commercial purposes began in 1518 after the Spanish Crown authorized the first large shipment to Hispaniola.⁴ Then, when the Spanish Crown assumed control of Portugal in 1580, the volume of the transatlantic slave trade to Spanish America increased significantly until 1640. The enslaved black men, women, and children who survived the sea voyage during this period were taken to work in farms, fields, and mines or to serve as servants in domestic spaces and convents. Some already knew skilled trades on arrival in Spanish America; others learned them afterward.⁵ Some became free through their owners’ selective manumission, their own supplemental work as day laborers, or physical escape.⁶ Many more stayed enslaved. By the early seventeenth century, free and enslaved black men and women came to form a significant percentage of the population in these regions.⁷

The texts examined in this book were produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the urban centers of Lima and Cartagena, two coastal cities connected by empire, commercial routes, and evangelical projects.⁸ Together, as ports, Lima and Cartagena were tied to other cities across the globe such as Seville, Luanda, Lisbon, Veracruz, Portobello, Buenos Aires, and São Tomé. Colonial Peru and New Granada, the broader areas surrounding Lima and Cartagena, are usually studied separately, but by focusing on both in conversation in this book I can attend to some of the ways the movement of people, material goods, and evangelical projects between them were frequent and mutually influential.⁹ For example, most of the routes of the legal and illegal slave trades to Peru during this period passed through Cartagena such that the black men and women who arrived in Peru from Iberia or western Africa had to stop in Cartagena before resuming their voyage. As I will show in Chapter 2, people, materials, and evangelical projects also went in the other direction: missionary strategies that were first developed for indigenous populations in Peru in the late sixteenth century then served as models for Jesuit missionary efforts among black men and women in Cartagena when the order expanded northward into New Granada from Peru in the early seventeenth century. Focusing on both areas in this book allows me to examine a shared discourse about blackness produced in collaboration with distinct kinds of black intermediaries across different areas of colonial Spanish America. The juxtaposition demonstrates that the notions of black virtue and black beauty that circulated in each city were not merely local phenomena. They were shared across regions as well as among recent arrivals from Africa and black men and women born in the Americas. The bifocal frame of my study also offers an alternative to “Atlantic-only” readings of the African diaspora by foregrounding ways in which policies and practices developed to incorporate black men and women into colonial societies in the Atlantic were directly connected to precedents established in the Andean highlands and the Pacific littoral.¹⁰

The time period covered by this book begins in the late sixteenth century and closes toward the end of seventeenth century, a stretch of time that coincides not only with the demographic boom of Africans in colonial Spanish America, but also with the onset of the influence of Iberian Renaissance humanism and Counter Reformation theology in these areas.¹¹ As I will show in Chapter 1, the confluence of Renaissance humanist ideology and Counter Reformation theology had a profound effect on the way written texts began to codify blackness in early and mid-colonial Spanish America. In particular, I identify and analyze the work of a pervasive set of interlocking associations between black men and women and the uncivilized body, a limited capacity to speak, and a redeemable soul. Important alternatives to this set of stereotypes appear in the textual portrayals of black intermediaries who are described or describe themselves as masters of language, models of Christian virtue, and privileged relayers of religious signs. Their texts offer a set of aesthetic and moral valences that blackness held in this period that have gone unrecognized by scholarship on racial hierarchies of the more secular eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

For this analysis, it is crucial to note that one of the key ways blackness took shape in Spanish America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was through comparisons with indigeneity. Especially in the first two chapters, this book engages how attitudes and policies developed by Spanish missionaries to evangelize black and indigenous populations helped structure colonial ideas of race. In taking this approach, I join a growing number of scholars integrating the study of Africans and their descendants with that of indigenous peoples in Latin America, examining these groups’ social and political histories side by side or examining interactions between them.¹² While mine is not a full comparative study, it demonstrates that the Jesuit missionary strategies among black men and women in the Americas grew out of and then in distinction from evangelical projects among indigenous populations in the same regions. More specifically, I show that the roles assigned to and adapted by black linguistic and spiritual intermediaries in colonial evangelical projects were initially based on and then expressly different from those assigned to indigenous intermediaries.

The unique roles assumed by the black intermediaries examined in this book relate to the different treatment of black populations compared with indigenous populations in early colonial Spanish America. Key to this difference were the distinct juridical categories given to black and indigenous populations based on their perceived relationships to territorial possession by the Spanish Crown.¹³ While the Crown made efforts to legally protect indigenous populations of the Americas and to establish a separate governing system of la república de los indios to function parallel to la república de los españoles, there was no comparable legal space created for black political collectivities in Spanish American colonial governments.¹⁴ As has been noted by several scholars, black men and women were thus legally included as part of Spanish American viceregal societies without giving them means of collective representation and protection within them.¹⁵ Indeed, the Spanish Crown debated and defended indigenous rights by the mid-sixteenth century, making native slavery mostly illegal in principle (if not in practice) precisely at a time when black slavery began to grow. Contrary to the critiques of indigenous enslavement and violent evangelical methods that characterized the mid-sixteenth-century debates about Spanish treatment of New World natives, before the late seventeenth century few comparable critiques were made of the ownership of and trade in black men and women in the Iberian empire.¹⁶

As religious subjects in Spanish America, black men and women also differed from indigenous men and women. The Church in Spanish America administratively considered black men and women to be Old World peoples who had at least technically already converted to Christianity before crossing the Atlantic, whereas indigenous peoples were considered neophytes. Historians have attributed this phenomenon to the many Iberian contacts with Ethiopians, North Africans, and sub-Saharan Africans before and after Iberian colonization of the Americas began.¹⁷ (Ethiopia had long been an independent Christian kingdom and the Kongo had become Christian by the early sixteenth century.)¹⁸ Before and during the sixteenth century, it was not uncommon for peoples from what we now consider the African continent to arrive in Iberia as royal visitors, diplomats, servants, or slaves.¹⁹ Many of these were already Christian; others, especially if they were servants or enslaved, became Christian soon after arrival due to evangelization efforts inside the homes in which they worked.²⁰ These precedents contributed to the fact that black men and women in the early modern Iberian world were often rarely categorically identified as New Christians.

Indigenous populations of the Americas, in contrast, were cast as neophytes. The missionaries, theologians, and Crown officials committed to evangelizing New World populations generally agreed on the need to use different policies and practices than those developed for the Old World populations of Jews and Muslims, many of whom were forcibly converted to Christianity in Iberia in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.²¹ One important perceived difference between the Old World conversions of Jews and Muslims and those of the New World natives was that, unlike Old World Jews and Muslims, New World natives had not known of Christianity before the arrival of the Spanish and therefore could not be considered guilty of rejecting it or descending from those who had rejected it.²²

The black men and women in Spanish America who arrived with the boom in the trade to the region in late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were caught in between these distinct models. Some missionaries sought to evangelize black men and women using the coercive practices employed for Jews and Muslims in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Iberia, but others looked to accommodate policies and techniques developed for indigenous evangelization.²³ To complicate matters further, the Inquisition in Spanish America had jurisdiction over black men and women but not over indigenous populations.²⁴ This policy, historians have speculated, originated from the fact that before 1580 most black men and women taken to Spanish America arrived by way of Iberia (and would have therefore been already considered Christian on arrival in the New World).²⁵

The failure to update Inquisition policy on black men and women in Spanish America after 1580 when most black men and women began to arrive directly from Africa likely reflects the marginal priority black populations represented for New World missionaries and the Crown compared with indigenous populations. This was the case, in large part, because the basis for Spanish sovereignty in the Americas originally depended on indigenous evangelization, while African evangelization held no such connection to sovereignty.²⁶ A secondary, but also crucial, reason is that unlike missionary efforts among indigenous populations that had clear funding sources (from repartimiento labor and substantial tributes to the Crown), black men’s and women’s evangelization was not a lucrative enterprise in itself. Slaveholders were supposedly responsible for recompensing priests who tended to their slaves’ spiritual care, but in practice slave owners were often reluctant to do so.²⁷ And even though free black men and women were supposed to pay tributes to the Crown in recognition of the costs related to “civilizing them,” recent research has shown that they were not a significant source of revenue as many freed black individuals avoided tribute through exemptions related to military service or demonstrated poverty.²⁸

For related reasons, black men and women in Spanish America also occupied a significantly more marginalized position in relation to the production of written texts than indigenous peoples. For example, whereas there are many examples of missionary efforts to compose narratives of the pre- or post-conquest memories, histories, and beliefs of indigenous populations as part of New World evangelical projects – many of which involved the participation of indigenous assistants and intermediaries – very few comparable works were produced to study Africans and their descendants in the Americas.²⁹ There exists for this period a comparatively small corpus of narrative texts composed in Spanish America to describe black men’s and women’s beliefs and backgrounds before or after their arrival in Spanish America in any amount of detail.³⁰ The comparable dearth of sources derives from the fact that on the whole missionaries perceived the black men and women arriving in the New World as displaced and dispossessed individuals, not members of coherent communities that persisted in meaningful ways in the New World.

A related feature of blackness that separated it from indigeneity in colonial Spanish America is the multilingual nature of the African diaspora. Especially in ports such as Cartagena, Lima, and Veracruz that received ships from an especially diverse set of African ports, there was no consistent common language shared by the black populations passing through them. In the absence of a common language, newly arrived black men and women spoke to each other and to other inhabitants of colonial societies through interpreters and improvised creole languages (often called lenguas medias in Spanish documents).³¹ Eventually, Spanish or Portuguese became the common language if not the only one used by most black men and women in these areas.³² While indigenous men and women were also enslaved and displaced in Spanish America, as Nancy van Deusen and others have shown, they were enslaved in much lower numbers.³³ The common missionary strategy of relocating indigenous populations en masse (as seen in processes of reducción and congregación) allowed for many of these communities to preserve their languages as opposed to the more fragmented displacement and diaspora of African languages in the Americas that resulted from the transatlantic slave trade in black men and women.³⁴

In the context of the fragmentation and dispersal of linguistic groups among black populations reaching the New World, the importance of the work done by black intermediaries to facilitate communication among new arrivals is hard to exaggerate. We can imagine that long before the black men and women who disembarked from ships in Spanish America learned to speak Spanish they were in constant communication with each other and with other inhabitants of those colonial locations. These communications would have occurred through linguistic and spiritual intermediaries. Curiously, however, no extended study has examined the work of translation among black populations in colonial Spanish America.³⁵ Instead, scholarship on translation in colonial Latin America has focused entirely on the roles of native, mestizo, and Spanish intermediaries.³⁶

Beyond Babel addresses this lacuna and opens the field of colonial translation studies to consider the lives, labor, and influence of black linguistic and spiritual intermediaries in the African diaspora in the Americas. Similar to Louise Burkhart’s argument that translation in Nahuatl produced negotiated notions of Christianity in sixteenth-century New Spain, I will show in Chapters 3–5 that black men’s and women’s participation as linguistic and spiritual intermediaries created opportunities for them to shape understandings of Christianity and language related to blackness in seventeenth-century colonial texts.

Like other recent studies of colonial translation, this book examines colonial encounters that do not easily map onto a linear narrative of a unidirectional success in which Europeans harnessed language to establish colonial domination in the Americas.³⁷ For example, Alessandra Russo’s concept of the untranslatable image, Anna Brickhouse’s notion of the motivated mistranslation, and Allison Bigelow’s examination of composite vernacular languages of science in colonial mining treatises underscore the highly mediated and multiply negotiated nature of translation in many distinct settings in early Spanish America. Focusing on New World material culture, Russo borrows Barbara Cassin’s concept of the untranslatable philosophical term to demonstrate about how technes and aesthetics employed by artists on both sides of the Atlantic influenced each other. Brickhouse takes another approach, harnessing the power of conjecture to read European texts about native intermediaries to highlight numerous instances in which native intermediaries undermined Spanish efforts at settlement. Allison Bigelow, for her part, examines colonial mining treatises to demonstrate how indigenous languages and mining techniques were constitutive of the development of colonial mining science.³⁸ In different ways, all of these scholars use colonial translation as a means of indexing a remainder of difference that is not fully subsumed by a narrative of univocal and unidirectional Spanish conquest and domination in the Americas.

The cases of black men and women who served as intermediaries in the documents analyzed in this book provide distinct challenges and rewards for colonial translation studies than the precedents mentioned above. On one hand, few identifiable material art objects designed by black men and women in Spanish America have survived, so Russo’s approach, which depends primarily on the analysis of such objects, is hard to apply.³⁹ Furthermore, contrary to the native intermediaries about whom Brickhouse writes, the black men and women in the documents I analyze do not on the whole appear as actors with overtly anticolonial intentions. Instead, the black linguistic and spiritual intermediaries examined in this book appear to have worked within sanctioned spaces of colonial Christianity to articulate notions of blackness that are nonetheless different from those voiced by Church officials and slave-owning elites. And whereas Bigelow explores the discursive world of colonial mining for the influence of black and indigenous participation in the extraction and refining of the metals of the Americas, I consider the discursive world of Christianity in a multilingual black Atlantic that began earlier than has previously been considered. As I will show in Chapters 3 and 4, the black evangelical intermediaries’ unique linguistic abilities in Cartagena allowed them to hide the real points of negotiation of spiritual conversion from those limited to European languages such that the exact terms of acceptance or rejection of Christianity are hard to detect in surviving documentation. What we can see from written evidence of their oral mediations in these documents is the emergence of new notions of blackness that reverberated in and beyond spaces of evangelical translation.

In addition to bringing the study of black intermediaries to colonial translation studies, Beyond Babel contributes to two more debates that cut across colonial Latin American studies and African diaspora studies. One has to do with the question of cultural continuity and authority among black communities in the Americas. Contesting Orlando Patterson’s argument about the social death experienced by enslaved black men and women forcibly taken to the Americas, a steady stream of studies over the last three and a half decades has sought to demonstrate that enslaved Africans brought with them certain traditions and recreated others in their areas of arrival in the Americas.⁴⁰ A different track has been taken by some historians of colonial Latin America who examine Inquisition records for the appearance of black men and women rejecting Christianization, arguing that the vitality of black colonial social life be read from archival glimpses of unorthodox religious behavior.⁴¹ Critiques of this latter approach note that reading Inquisition sources for resistant black subjects can reify the colonial gaze of the Inquisition archive even as it tries to offer insight into black life.⁴² Beyond Babel treads a new path in the debates about the social lives of black men and women in the diaspora by considering how black men and women served as intermediaries in the articulation of Christian identities in texts beyond those produced by the Inquisition.

This approach is informed by the work of Herman Bennett, Joan Bristol, Karen Graubart, José Ramón Jouve Martín, Michelle McKinley, Nancy van Deusen, and Javier Villa-Flores, whose respective studies of people of African descent in New Spain or Peru focus on ways Christian categories were activated in colonial legal settings to shape black subjecthood.⁴³ Beyond Babel builds on their efforts by examining the notions of blackness that appear in a collection of narrative texts produced about or in collaboration with black linguistic and spiritual intermediaries. In doing so, it demonstrates that the projects, spaces, and language supporting the Christian salvation of black men and women in Spanish America served as venues for black men and women to craft new social lives and articulate notions of blackness beyond the negative stereotypes increasingly circulating in Iberian texts in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In analyzing these sources and addressing the construction of blackness within them, Beyond Babel also contributes to the ongoing debate about the emergence of race in the early modern world. This debate has many strands, and while there are too many to describe all at length here, I will signal a few of particular importance to this book’s argument. One important strand elaborated by David Nirenberg, among others, locates the emergence of modern discourse on race in mid-fifteenth-century Iberia at a moment when anticonverso polemicists began borrowing language from animal husbandry regarding inherited differences and disease in livestock to justify treating converted Jews and their offspring with suspicion even after becoming Christian.⁴⁴ Building on this argument, María Elena Martínez and Max S. Hering Torres place late medieval Iberian anticonverso discourse into conversation with descriptions of human difference in colonial Spanish America, tracing how language and institutional forms developed in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iberia transformed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America to differentiate between people based on skin color rather than creed.⁴⁵ These scholars joined an older but still ongoing debate about the origins and meanings of race specific to the Americas. Aníbal Quijano, for example, proposed that the modern epistemology of race was born in Spanish America from the first encounters between the New and Old Worlds in the late fifteenth century, such that a coherent system of oppression (conceived of as “coloniality of power”) can be traced from 1492 to the present.⁴⁶ In contrast, Irene Silverblatt and Daniel Nemser have argued in their different respective studies that racialization emerged in Spanish colonial enterprises of the mid-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through particular practices of colonial administration.⁴⁷ Another strand of the debate relates specifically to identifying modern forms of racial categorization and discrimination as emergent in the eighteenth century along with the epistemological changes of the European Enlightenment.⁴⁸ Finally, Ruth Hill and Eduardo Restrepo, among others, identify the nineteenth century as the beginning of modern racial classification in Spanish America.⁴⁹

This book’s intervention in these debates does not look to change our understanding of when race as we know it today began. I support others’ arguments for reading early modern portrayals of human hierarchies as approximate cognates for contemporary racial categories while attending to the specificities of the languages, time, and place in which they appear in colonial sources. As Kathryn Burns so clearly explains, race “has long organized notions of fixity but has never itself been stable.”⁵⁰ Instead of focusing on when exactly race “happened,” Beyond Babel demonstrates how black men and women participated in shaping what blackness meant as it happened. To do so, I underscore how the language black intermediaries helped produce about blackness overlaps with contemporary religious discourses related to territorial and political sovereignty of the Spanish Imperial project in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A key point of this overlap will demonstrate that the growing discrimination associating black men and women with enslaved or minimally paid labor in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America was actually based on gestures of inclusion in the Christian category of the human, not exclusion.⁵¹ This inclusion, while limited and hierarchical, became a condition of possibility of and a point of emphasis in black men’s and women’s own notions of what it meant to be black in colonial Spanish America: all people, even black people, are equal before God.

The term “blackness” itself (referenced in Spanish as lo negro or la negrura) rarely appears as an abstract concept in the sources I examine. While the abstraction itself is mine, it is done in close dialogue with the primary sources so as to attend to the differences between the distinct terms that make up the category and the reasons why the terms can be productively collapsed to make an argument about blackness in colonial Spanish America. More precise and contextualized definitions of what I mean by blackness will emerge from the individual chapters, but for the sake of establishing a common vocabulary as a point of departure, the remainder of this introduction offers working definitions of the most common terms associated with blackness in texts written about and from New Granada and Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: negro/a, etíope, moreno/a, pardo/a, and mulato/a.

Individuals identified with any of these terms were perceived in relation to two interlocking criteria: (1) coming from or descending from at least one parent originating from what we now consider the African continent and (2) having some form of dark skin tone. As I will show in the next chapter, there were other linguistic, legal, and physical associations with blackness beyond place of origin and skin color circulating in this period, too, but they were not sine qua non criteria as these two were. While the five terms named above share these two criteria, it is also crucial to note that the different terms are by no means merely equivalent to each other.⁵² Although texts sometimes use more than one term to describe the same person or group, each name tended to carry specific valences and values with different relationships to hierarchy and stigma.⁵³ I will therefore keep the terms in their original in italics to avoid ignoring important specifications. To attend to these specifications, below I survey their typical uses around the turn of the seventeenth century in Spanish America. In doing so, I will note how they increasingly although not exclusively began to associate people of African descent with displacement, enslavement, and servitude.

Many of the colonial valences and values associated with negro/a, etíope, moreno/a, pardo/a, and mulato/a began to appear in Spanish discourse and visual art after the sixteenth century witnessed the arrival of unprecedented numbers of enslaved men, women, and children from Africa in the Iberian Peninsula and the Spanish American territories, as mentioned earlier in this introduction.⁵⁴ For example, although there existed a late medieval aesthetic tradition in visual and written texts of figures such as Saba (the queen of Sheba), the black magus, and Prester John that associated blackness with faraway wealth, power, and spiritual virtue, references to this tradition are absent from all definitions related to black men and women in Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana, a dictionary published in Madrid in 1611. Instead of referring to any illustrious black figures of the late medieval and early modern imagination of blackness in Europe, Covarrubias explains in his definition for “negro” [black] that it is not only the term used for “el etiope de color negra” [the black Ethiopian] but also a term for a color considered “infausta y triste, y como tal usamos desta palabra, diziendo: Negra ventura, negra vida, etc.” [unlucky and sad, like when we say: Black luck, black life, etc.].⁵⁵ Covarrubias directly connects the color’s symbolism to what he presumes to be the lowly position of black people themselves in Iberian societies by then citing the proverb “Aunque negros, gente somos” [Although we are black, we are people].⁵⁶ Meanwhile, Covarrubias describes white as representing “castidad, limpieza, alegría” [chastity, cleanliness, and happiness]⁵⁷ and expressly identifies black as its opposite: “Uno de los dos estremos de las colores, opuesto a blanco” [One of the two color extremes, the opposite of white].⁵⁸ Covarrubias’s dictionary thus associates black men and women with servility, bad luck, and corruption, demonstrating key ways color symbolism affected the values assigned to individuals called negros in early seventeenth-century Spanish discourse. Such uses of the terms negro and negra traveled to Spanish America, appearing in now well-known texts composed by Spanish and indigenous authors before and after the turn of the seventeenth century.⁵⁹

Negro and negra also had a series of ambivalent religious associations on both sides of the Atlantic during this period. On one hand, there existed an association between the color and sin as seen in texts that invoke the stain of sin as a mark that could be either washed out through confession or continuously suffered as a literal and permanent trace of God’s curse of Cham for mocking his father.⁶⁰ A related connotation sometimes projected onto black men and women in early modern Spanish and Spanish American texts is an association with the devil and threatening sexuality. While this association has some precedents in early Christian and then medieval Europe, it became particularly prevalent in Spanish American texts in the seventeenth century.⁶¹ For example, several life writings from the Andes describe protagonists encountering the devil in the form of a black man. The motif appears most often in texts by or about white men and women who report having conversed or copulated with the devil in the form of a black man (in dreams, visions, or possessions).⁶² Blackness in these cases is conceived not only as sinful but as a demonic sexual threat.

On the other hand, there existed a competing religious connotation that associated black men and women with an innocent ignorance of God. This association conceives of the knowledge of God as “light” and the ignorance of God as “darkness.” Employing this dichotomy, many visual and discursive representations of blackness present black men and women as innocent victims of ignorance who need missionaries to save them from their own darkness. Art historians Tanya J. Tiffany, Victor Stoichita, and Carmen Fracchia, in distinct studies, analyze the effects of this ideology on the representation of black religious subjects in Hispanic art, baptismal manuals, and sermons from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁶³ This notion of blackness differs from the demonization mentioned above because it conceives of blackness as related to the blamelessness of the soon-to-be or recently converted, not the intentional (or inherited) guilt of a willful rejection of God and association with the devil. This particular Christian conception of blackness imagines black men and women as the ideal objects of evangelical efforts: like unconquered territory for the colonizer, they contain the promise of glory for missionaries capable of converting them.⁶⁴ Whereas the blackness associated with the devil reflects the fear of seduction by a black man or woman, the blackness associated with an innocent ignorance of Christ reveals the missionary fantasy of seducing black souls in a glorious spiritual conquest.

The notion of the black Christian, in fact, often circulated under another name: the etíope [Ethiopian]. The legends of Prester John, Moses’s Ethiopian wife Sepphora, and the black magus provide important precedents for this use of the term etíope. “Ethiopia,” during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, could refer to a variety of geographic locations, and therefore those described as etíopes were not necessarily tied to a fixed geographic area. Even though the term sometimes referred specifically to people from the kingdom of Ethiopia located in what is today’s northeastern Africa, it was also used more broadly to refer to any dark-skinned Christian people.⁶⁵ Uses of this term for the latter purpose relate to the fact that several passages in Scripture mention the promise of Ethiopian conversion to Christianity.⁶⁶ Sandoval’s treatise Naturaleza, policia sagrada manipulates the distinction between the different peoples of the African continent by referring to etíopes in the title of his text and then clarifying in the first book of the treatise that etíopes are also commonly called negros or morenos.⁶⁷

Moreno/a also had a variety of meanings in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish-language texts. Those composed in Spanish America generally use the term differently than contemporary texts from the Iberian Peninsula. For example, in Iberia Covarrubias defines moreno as a color with an uncertain approximation to black, relating it to the color of Moors.⁶⁸ This association coexists with another popular connotation for morena that appears in popular lyric from the period as the object of affection or the beloved. Scholar of Iberian popular lyric Margit Frenk argues that this association relates to the symbolism of the dark-skinned woman as colored by her loss of virginity.⁶⁹ In contrast to such uses common to the Iberian Peninsula in the sixteenth century, in Spanish America moreno/a explicitly referred to dark-skinned people from western Africa or descending from those who originated there. Sometimes moreno or morena appear to be synonyms for negro or negra (or etíope), as when Alonso de Sandoval describes the baptisms of morenos on the shores of western Africa before their shipment to the Americas.⁷⁰ Other times, moreno/a appears in Spanish American texts in distinction with negro and negra to name individuals of African descent who were not enslaved or who held a higher social status. For example, Gerónymo Pallas’s description of the different kinds of black populations living around Cartagena in the early seventeenth century employs moreno in distinction with negro to name people of African descent who occupied positions of higher status: “De los negros criollos (esto es los nacidos acá en las Indias) muchos son libertos, los cuales están alistados en compañía[s] de soldados con su capitán y oficiales morenos” [Of the black criollos (that is those born here in the Indies) many are freed. These participate as soldiers of militias with moreno captains and officials].⁷¹ Even though Pallas uses the term moreno to refer to individuals of a higher status than that of other negros, he includes all of them in the category of negros criollos.⁷² In another important example, Graubart’s study of black confraternities in seventeenth-century Lima notes that free or freed people of African descent sometimes chose to call themselves morenos to set themselves apart from enslaved black men and women.⁷³

Mulato/a is yet one more term used to describe people of African descent in texts from this period.⁷⁴ Compared with negro/a and moreno/a, however, mulato/a does not expressly refer to a color-related category but instead to a person’s mixed parentage when one of the parents is of African descent. As a result, a mulato or mulata in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish texts could be described as “light” or “dark.”⁷⁵ Covarrubias confirms that mulato/a refers to mixed parentage rather than a precise color when he defines the term as “El que es hijo de negra y de hombre blanco, o al revés y por ser mezcla extraordinaria la compararon con la naturaleza del mulo” [The child of a black woman and a white man, or the reverse; for being an extraordinary mix they compare it to the nature of the mule].⁷⁶ Comparing the mulato/a to the degeneracy and hybridity of the mule invokes animal husbandry language to describe new “kinds” of people emerging in the early modern period through global contact.⁷⁷ Additionally, in the Americas, mulato/a, like negro/a, had its more positively inflected euphemism that grew in popularity in the mid- to late seventeenth century: pardo/a.⁷⁸ As with the abovementioned phenomenon of morenos, Jouve Martín’s study of the self-representations of mulatos in seventeenth-century Peru finds that people identifying as mulatos sometimes tried to distance themselves from the label of negro because of the latter’s association with servitude and enslavement.⁷⁹

The term mulato carried with it an additional legacy tied to darkness: the stain of infamy related to the suspicion of having been born of an adulterous union. Associations between mulato/a and illegitimacy appear, for example, throughout Solórzano y Pereira’s Política Indiana from the mid-seventeenth century. In following passage, the Iberian jurist writing in Peru states that the infamy attributed to mulatos did not necessarily result from the mixture itself of which they were born, but rather from the presumed illegitimacy of the unions that produced them:

si estos hombres huviessen nacido de legitimo matrimonio, y no se hallasse en ellos otro vicio, u defecto, que lo impidiesse, tenerse, y constarse podrán, y deberian por Ciudadanos de dichas Provincias, y ser admitidos a honras, y Oficios de ellas … [p]ero porque lo mas ordinario es, que nacen de adulterio, o de otros ilicitos, y punibles ayuntamientos: porque pocos Españoles de honra ay que casen con Indias o Negras, el qual defecto de los Natales les hace infames.

[if these men were born of legitimate matrimonies, and if no other vice or defect that might limit him is discovered, they can and should be considered and included as citizens of these provinces and awarded honors and titles thereof … but it is most common for them to be born of adultery or of other illicit and punishable unions; because there are few honorable Spaniards who marry Indians or black women; this defect of the offspring makes them infame.]⁸⁰

Although mulatos were not always born out of wedlock, Solórzano y Pereira suggests that the suspicion of illegitimacy accompanied all mulatos/mulatas and mestizos/mestizas regardless of the actual marital status of their parents. For similar reasons, Baltasar Fra Molinero states that in seventeenth-century dramas performed in Iberia, mulatos/mulatas often appear as objects of ridicule due to the illegitimacy of which they were assumed to have been born.⁸¹ References to the darkness or blackness of a mulato/a in colonial Spanish American texts, then, could refer to an individual’s skin tone and/or to the metaphoric obscurity of his or her lineage or conditions of birth. The double interpretation of the mulato/a’s darkness is supported by Covarrubias’s definition of “claro” [light]: “Lo que se opone a lo escuro, tenebroso y dificultoso. Claro linage, el ilustre y generoso” [The opposite of that which is dark, shadowy, and difficult. Light lineage, illustrious and generous].⁸² For such a presumed lack of clarity and the additional infamy of having being born into slavery or descending from a parent who had been enslaved, invocations of limpieza de sangre in the New World began to exclude negros/as, mulatos/as, and other “mixed populations.”⁸³

In contrast, by the early seventeenth century in Spanish America, documents employ the terms blanco/a [white] as synonyms for español/a [Spanish]. Like the double meaning of the darkness of a mulato, the association between blanco/a and español/a was related not only to the presumed lighter skin tone of Spaniards but also to the supposed clarity of their lineage in comparison to those born of mixed parentage in the New World.⁸⁴ Joanne Rappaport, building on work by Ann Twinam, suggests that whiteness was first used as a color term before appearing as a category in late seventeenth-century Spanish America.⁸⁵ Yet there are earlier uses of blanco as a color-related category. For example, Pallas’s 1619 narrative demonstrates that by the second decade of the seventeenth century people in Spanish America used the terms Spaniard and blanco/a as synonyms to refer categorically to any European-born person of a presumed higher class who was free of the reputation of being “contaminated” with mixed or illegitimate parentage:

es de advertir que por español se entiende cualquier hombre blanco nascido en Europa y otras provincias o islas de los que acá passan y viven en estos reynos, porque el nombre español fuera de significar la naçión es título de honra, y vale lo mesmo que hombre no indio, ni mestizo, ni quarterón, ni mulato, ni negro ettz. sino como en Castilla se dize un hidalgo.

[It should be noted that Spaniard is understood as any white man born in Europe or other provinces and islands from which they originate and come here to live in these kingdoms, because the name Spaniard, other than meaning a nation, is an honorable title and is like saying a man who is not Indian, mestizo, quarterón, mulato, or black, etc., like the term nobleman used in Castile.]⁸⁶

Pallas’s explanation thus defines blanco as a category shaped by color, class, and geographic place of origin in Spanish America. Contrary to its use in the Iberian Peninsula, Pallas demonstrates that language to describe class differences (specifically related to the status of nobility compared with that of a commoner) was redeployed by the early seventeenth century to describe emerging racial hierarchies in the Americas. Pallas’s description implies that a person considered negro/a, indio/a, or producto de alguna mezcla would have limited access to whiteness’s categorical associations with nobility in the New World, whether it be nobility tied to wealth, titles, or merely the prestige of coming from or descending from white European parents.⁸⁷

Documents from this period demonstrate that the distinctions between negro/a, moreno/a, etíope, and mulato/a surveyed here were far from consistent. For example, some enslaved people called themselves morenos/as and some non-enslaved people called themselves negros/as; other times, both terms are used in the same text to refer to the same individual.⁸⁸ Such variations show that these different terms for blackness were not clear static markers of status and value, but that like “woman” and “lady” in today’s English they could at times demarcate the same person, while in other instances they could distinguish between people of different social statuses. Nor do the common distinctions between the terms reviewed above revolve around a single coherent ideology of limpieza de sangre or color gradation. Rather, they show the confluence of different generic norms and aesthetic and moral values that circulated in the early modern Hispanic world.⁸⁹ As a whole, their use evidences the prevalence of what Ruth Hill calls the “norm of inequality” that existed in viceregal societies in the Americas: “a written and unwritten hierarchy that ostensibly mirrored nature and its laws but was in fact a social construct.”⁹⁰

The chapters of this book will explore how such a “norm of inequality” that by the late sixteenth century tended to place black men and women on the lowest end of colonial social hierarchies coexisted with the Christian ideology that all people are equal before God. In its examination of this juxtaposition, Beyond Babel will show that the ideology of Christian equality was leveraged by certain black linguistic and spiritual intermediaries in seventeenth-century Spanish America to identify with and articulate notions of black virtue and black beauty in colonial texts. Engaging these notions with care allows us to tell new stories about the making of blackness in colonial Spanish America.