Chapter 7 investigates Veracruz’s function as a military bulwark of the Spanish Caribbean, focusing on the role of the free-black militia in the defense of the port. In the second half of the seventeenth century, territorial losses in Jamaica and Hispaniola and frequent attacks on its ships and ports forced Spain to reconsider its strategic priorities. Setting aside earlier fears of arming men of African descent, Spanish ports turned to free-black militias to fulfill the duties of defense. In Veracruz, free-black militia service was formalized in 1669, when militiamen received relief from an unpopular tribute tax. Remarkably, in their petition for tribute relief, Veracruz’s free-black militia cited precedents in Havana, Cartagena, Santo Domingo, and Campeche, manifesting an explicit articulation of a Mexican-Caribbean regional identity. Over the next thirty years, tribute relief for militia service was extended to free-black men in other Gulf Coast cities, but did not reach militias in the interior until the middle of the eighteenth century. The uneven use of tribute relief thus reinforced regional variations in colonial status systems.

The Conclusion turns to the end of the seventeenth century, when Mexico and the Caribbean underwent a political realignment. In the Caribbean, ascendant European empires began to construct the monocultures that have come to dominate the study of Caribbean history. Meanwhile, in the mainland, renewed interest in New Spain’s northern frontier initiated a new series of cultural encounters and violent contests that signal the origin of borderlands history. While it is tempting to see in these two developments the disintegration of the Mexican-Caribbean world, I argue that the end of the seventeenth century was not an unmaking but a remaking. As Spanish power in the Caribbean declined, bonds between remaining Spanish island and mainland settlements strengthened. At the same time, Veracruz and the Caribbean both played an important role in the construction of Mexico’s northern border and the Caribbean’s new economic and political relationships. In this, the study points forward to the development of new material relationships that informed the social and cultural possibilities of people in Mexico’s Gulf Coast and the Caribbean Islands into the eighteenth century.