2 - Confraternities of People of African Descent in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City

Summary

Abstract

This chapter discusses black confraternities in colonial Mexico City, their form of organization, their beliefs and practices, as well as their connection to specific instances of resistance. This analysis shows that confraternities were communal spaces that allowed Afro-Mexicans to develop social relations that in turn allowed them to recreate and preserve certain elements of their identity, while also allowing them to interact with members of other ethnic groups. This chapter also underscores that while confraternities allowed Afro-Mexicans to integrate into colonial society, they were also seen as a threat to the established order, precisely due to the cohesiveness of their social relations.

Keywords: Black confraternities, Mexico, resistance, African diaspora, Black Catholicism

In the capital of New Spain, the population of African origin was numerous and its participation in economic, social, political, and religious activities undoubted. In both America and Europe, Africans and Afro-descendants founded various confraternities: religious organizations formed mainly by lay people that functioned as spaces for meeting and expression for their members. This chapter presents novel information that broadens our knowledge about the black, moreno, and mulatto confraternities of Mexico City, their forms of organization, their beliefs, and practices, as well as the relationship between these corporate groups and uprisings that took place in 1612. I intend to show that the confraternities of people of African origin in the capital of New Spain were spaces of coexistence from which this population developed social relationships that allowed members to recover and recreate certain elements of their identities.

While these confraternities facilitated the integration of their members into Novohispanic society, they were considered a threat to the order established precisely by these social relations. This was reflected in ordinances that sought to control or eliminate them by associating them with the early seventeenth-century uprisings of Africans and Afro-descendants. This chapter reveals relevant aspects such as the forms of coexistence and interaction that developed from the confraternities, the conflicts that were generated within them and beyond, as well as the processes of resistance, cultural recreation, identity construction, and integration that these institutions made possible.

Confraternities were formed not only by Spaniards, but also by indigenous people of African and Asian origins, which shows that these corporations were accepted and promoted both by the Church and by Novohispanic society in general.