5 - “Of Greater Dignity than the Negros”: Language and In-Group Distinctions within Early Afro-Peruvian Cofradías

Summary

Abstract

Enslaved and free men and women of African origins or descent in Lima, Peru joined Catholic cofradías in order to form community. The earliest records of Lima's African-descent cofradías reveal some of the ways that members found community, as well as dealt with growing schisms and fissures due to the Atlantic slave trade and local racialized hierarchies. Peruvians of African descent drew upon their contemporary experiences, adapting the European rhetoric of “difference” deployed against them, to identify and police their own divisions during the first century of the institutionalization of African slavery in Spanish America. These documents also provide us with an early history of how African naciones, often misdiagnosed as ethnicities, came to be central to diasporic identities.

Keywords: Peru, black confraternity, African diaspora, black Catholicism, race, ethnicity

Introduction

In June 1791, the pseudonymous author Hesperióphylo offered the reading public of the Mercurio Peruano, an important journal of Peru's creole enlightenment, two short essays titled “Idea de las congregaciones públicas de los Negros Bozales,” or a description of the public meetings of African-born Black slaves. Premised on the inhumanity of slavery and the consolation enslaved Africans found in the Catholic Church, the essays contemplated the ways in which these “unhappy men and women” organized themselves into cofradías which both deepened their relationship with the Church and provided more secular entertainment and community. Indeed, cofradías serving members of African origin or heritage were formed within a decade of the conquest of Peru in 1531-1532, and – like the city's other cofradías – flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite repeated attempts by the Church and the Crown to rein in their enthusiastic increase. Hesperióphylo noted that “the first thing [slaves arriving from Africa] do is join a cofradía; these maintain the social networks of their respective communities.”

Those “respective communities” were the African ethnicities to which the author claimed the enslaved belonged, the ten major castas or naciones, which he enumerated as: Terranovos, Lúcumes, Mandingas, Cambundas, Carabalíes, Cangoes, Chalas, Huarochiríes, Congos, and Misangas.