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Home , Ida Altman, Slavery in New Spain, Zacatecas

Acknowledgements

Over the years, I have been pulled towards this project in so many different ways.

Along the way, I have indebted myself to a number of wonderful and inspiring people. This thesis would not have come to be without the generous financial support in the form of a two-year fellowship and a summer research grant from the Stone Center for Latin American

Studies at Tulane University. Their support allowed me to visit the city and the archives of

Zacatecas in the summer of 2012. I would like to extend my gratitude to the staff and archivists at the AHEZ and specifically to the ever-patient Judith Medina Reynoso at the

APZ, who kindly guided me through my first parochial archive experience.

At Tulane, my greatest thanks goes to Kris Lane. Despite his recent arrival at Tulane and his numerous appointments, Kris was always generous with his time and his expertise. I was also fortunate enough to work with Kris on the Colonial Latin American Review, an experience that has been thoroughly rewarding. Those who have had the pleasure to work with him know what a gift he truly is. I must also thank Dana Velasco Murillo for her comments and critiques on this work, her insights into archival research in Zacatecas, but also for her helpful advice and tips about the city itself. I never did make it to those hot springs. My thanks also goes to Justin Wolfe, who has consistently challenged me to think about the bigger picture. Your questions will no doubt continue to drive me to grow as a scholar. I am also grateful to my cohort and fellow graduate students at Tulane. Your feedback and support has been requisite to my completing this project.

This thesis represents an amalgam, if you will, of a variety of interests nurtured at the

University of Florida. Susan Gillespie first sparked my interests in Central Mexico and

Nahua culture. However, Ida Altman is largely responsible for the passion I now hold for

Mexico and colonial history. When I was unable to make her courses fit within my own schedule, Dr. Altman graciously agreed to take on an independent study with me. This opportunity has meant the world to me. At the time, I had naively believed that I wanted to pursue archaeology, a rewarding albeit difficult field. I had originally hoped to study under

Kathleen Deagan, who had previously led archaeological field schools in St. Augustine, a place very close to my heart. Although I am sure that it would have been a wonderful experience, I am very grateful that it did not work out. If it had, I would not have had the honor of studying under James Davidson at Kingsley Plantation. Davidson has been an inspiration, and I am grateful for his advice and his friendship. It was at Kingsley that I spent many hours swatting mosquitoes and staving off heat stroke, but also developing an awareness and a curiosity for the experiences of African slaves in the Spanish Empire. This formative experience will continue to influence my work on the Diaspora.

However, I would have never reached these points in my life if it were not for my mother. As a child, she challenged me to do more, to be more creative, and to the exasperation of most of my school teachers and administrators, push past the limitations set before me. My drive comes from you. My heart also goes out to Emily Jones, whose stalwart support has sustained me through the years. Your encouragement in all of my endeavors has meant so much. Although, I am glad we both decided that interior design was not for us.

But my greatest debt is to my best friend. Phillip, there are no words that can truly encompass your patience, selflessness, and compassion. This work is dedicated to you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii

LIST OF TABLES vi

MAPS vii

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY x

INTRODUCTION 1

1. SITUATING RACE IN NEW SPAIN 17

The Sistema de Castas and Limpieza de Sangre 18 Racial Restrictions, Daily Realities 22

2. THE SILVER CITY 37

Labor and the Mines 39 Population and Migration 42 Marriage and Residential Patterns 45 Property Ownership 48

3. CREOLES, COMMERCE, AND COMMUNITY 58

Local Economy and Markets 63 Flour and the Alhóndiga 66 El Rastro: Monopolizing Meat, Tallow, and Candles 69

4. BECOMING CHRISTIANS 76

Matrimony: The Grand Remedy 77 The Holy Office of the Inquisition 81 Bigamy 82 Sexuality, Love Magic, and Folk Healing 84 Blasphemy 86 Bestiality: contra natura 91

5. CONFRATERNITIES & THE PARISH CHURCH 99

Afro- Zacatecan Confraternities 99 Confraternities in Colonial Latin America 100 Claiming the Parish Church 103 Baroque Penitence: Submitting to God 105 Patron Saints: Afro-Creole Identities 107 Dues and Alms 108 Women in the Confraternity 109 Hacienda Chapels 117

CONCLUSION 116

REFERENCES 120

List of Tables

2.1: Population Estimates, Zacatecas, 1572-1770 44

2.2: Comparative Population of Zacatecas by Racial Categories, 1546-1799 45

2.3: Marriage Petitions by Mulatos/Negros Libres, 1670-1730 47

Maps

Map. 1: The Northern Frontier of Colonial New Spain

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Map 2: Highways to the North

Source: Phillip Wayne Powell, Soldiers, Indians, and Silver

viii

Map 3: The City of Zacatecas, 1732

Source: Don José de Rivera Bernárdez, Descripción de la muy noble y leal ciudad de Zacatecas, 1732.

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

Throughout this thesis, I use a number of terms that reflect African heritage.

When discussing individuals in specific records, I will rely on the racial label designated in the case file. These terms varied throughout New Spain. However, in Zacatecas, the primary terms used to denote African descent were mulato (African and European heritage), negro

(generally used to describe individuals with particularly dark skin and generally associated with slavery), moreno, prieto, and pardo (the last three all relating to brown skin). Generally,

I will use “Afro-Mexican” and “Afro-Zacatecan” to describe entire populations of individuals of African descent. These terms are problematic in that they include free and enslaved peoples, but when these circumstances are relevant, I make the effort to emphasize this. Throughout the thesis, I have avoided using “black” to describe individuals of African descent, as this connotes the British/U.S. black/white racial binary.

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Introduction

The 1608 Relación de Nuestra Señora de Zacatecas describes Mexico’s most productive silver mining hub as being a “city of Spaniards from its initial foundation, although there are some Indians who served to work the mines for the benefit of [the

Spaniards].”1 From the first silver strike well until into the period of independence, officials continued to perceive Zacatecas as a “city of Spaniards.” Although native peoples are mentioned in the Relación, it is only as a source of labor for the benefit of the Spanish miners. Accounts such as this have reinforced the assumption that within mining towns, cultural and racial barriers tended to dissolve, leading to an ultimately “Spanish” culture.

Zacatecas, as the archetypical mining city of colonial Mexico, has shared such a reputation, whereby it is understood that its residents, despite their diverse racial and cultural backgrounds, inevitably succumbed to the cultural homogenization that is mestizaje. This thesis aims to expand this limited understanding of Zacatecas to shed light on the lives of

Zacatecans of African descent. Traces of their lives may be found in documents from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In the seventeenth century, colonial Mexico was home to one of the largest populations of free and enslaved Africans in the New World. Although many scholars have begun to delineate experiences of Africans and their descendants in central New Spain, the northern frontier has been consistently overlooked. In an effort to remedy this omission, this

2 thesis seeks to explore the lived experiences of men and women of African descent in the city of Zacatecas, which for many years was the center of colonial New Spain’s silver mining industry. Through the use of archival records, mostly from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this thesis offers an analysis of the different ways Afro-Zacatecans engaged with colonial structures of authority. Specifically, I hope to provide an understanding of how Afro-Zacatecans negotiated their way through various church and state institutions to traverse and sometimes challenge socio-racial exclusionary practices, construct communities, and create opportunities for themselves and their families. In analyzing the records from this time period, I hope to demonstrate how Afro-Zacatecans adapted to the circumstances surrounding mining productivity and the commerce it generated, as well as the changing perceptions of race, gender, and class at the dawn of the eighteenth century. By probing the unique conditions of this peripheral area, my hope is that we will better understand Afro-Mexican experience outside the bounds of central Mexico.

Afro-Zacatecas: A Review

Most scholarship on colonial Zacatecas has focused on the mining industry and its role in the colonial economy.2 Given the nature of this line of inquiry, most of the resulting publications have been chronologically framed according to the fluctuations in the industry and the economic policies that influenced them. There were several boom and bust cycles.

After the city was established in 1548, Zacatecas experienced economic vitality until around

1630. A depression ensued lasting until around 1690. This marked the beginning of a revival that lasted until the 1730s. Throughout the Spanish empire, the eighteenth century marked the beginning of the Bourbon period, a time of administrative restrictions and economic

3 reform. However, in Zacatecas, it appears that these reforms did not make deep impacts until after 1750. The most in-depth analyses of Zacatecas have focused on the formative (1548-

1630) and late revival (1750-1821) years, and so, we know very little about the boom years sandwiched in between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Although some general surveys speak of Zacatecas across the entire length of the colonial period, the periodization of this project allows us to zero in on social flux in Mexico’s most notable silver city during a time when relatively mediocre economic productivity gave way to the first eighteenth-century revival.

Several historians have mentioned the presence of African slaves and free Afro-

Mexican laborers in Zacatecas, but they have never been the object of a full-length study.3

However, the records, while fragmentary, are not silent. In the primary accounts of the city, as well as general surveys, African slaves are always listed among the city’s population.4

Peter Bakewell, an eminent historian of early Zacatecas and of mining cities in general, mentions this African presence in the mines but also in refining haciendas. David Brading, in his work on northern Mexico during the Bourbon period, dedicates a section of his book to

Afro-Mexican muleteers, remarking on their presence throughout the northern frontier. Most scholars who do mention Afro-Mexicans in the north refer to them almost exclusively as transient workers occupying this role.

Although Africans and Afro-Creoles in greater New Galicia and the province of New

Vizcaya have been largely ignored, a significant amount of research has been done on Parral, a truly isolated mining town in the state of Chihuahua. Beginning with Robert West’s pioneer work on the mining community of Parral in the 1940’s, historians such as Vincent Mayer Jr. and Florence Barkin have expanded our understanding of the role and the extent of slavery in

4 the mines of the far north.5 Carlos Manuel Valdés and Ildefonso Dávila have provided us with a short analysis of slavery in the town of Saltillo, another of Zacatecas’ far-flung satellites.6 Although these studies are valuable in that they expose the presence of Afro-

Mexicans in the north, they provide an analysis only of the institution of slavery and the slave trade. With the exception of Brading, historians who have written about Mexico’s northern frontier have not discussed the activities of free Afro-Mexicans except in passing.

Most importantly for this study, these scholars have not focused on individuals as subjects of historical inquiry, let alone as individual historical agents.7 By examining the experiences and survival strategies of the several Afro-Zacatecans who appear both in local and

Inquisitorial records, this thesis aims to help fill this lacuna.

Afro-Mexico

When thinking of Africans in colonial Latin America, Mexico is not generally the first place that comes to mind. Readers will think of Brazil, Cuba, and the Circum-Caribbean.

Perhaps one thinks of Colombia. And yet, throughout the colonial period New Spain had arguably the largest free African-descent population in the Americas and, second only to

Brazil, the largest enslaved African-descent population.8 Although it has only recently taken off, Afro-Mexican scholarship has existed in some form or another since the early twentieth century.

Writing during the Mexican revolution, one such author, Alfonso Toro, believed that

African descendants had an inherently “bellicose” nature and were thus worth studying for their temperament, which he deemed the key to winning the war.9 Toro’s interests were unusual but mark an important moment in the field of Afro-Mexican studies. Contemporary

Afro-Mexican scholarship derives in large part from the work of Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, whose 1946 work, La población negra de México, was the first to systematically employ a social science methodology to study the African roots of Mexico’s population. His demographic analysis stressed the extent to which Africans and Afro-Creoles could be found throughout New Spain. Much of the early work on Afro-Mexican history emphasized assimilation and hybridity, suggesting that the colonial sistema de castas was effectively abolished during the Independence era, thus creating a unique ‘label-free’ environment for racial mixture. Historians of this time period have argued that these circumstances created opportunities for Afro-Mexicans to blend into the broader national population, later categorized as the “cosmic race.”10

Historian Colin Palmer’s 1976 text Slaves of the White God was one of the first works to consider the individual experiences of Afro-Mexicans. Palmer was disturbed by the emphasis placed on twentieth-century Afro-Mexico and concerned that historians were distorting the contemporary understanding of slavery through an overreliance on the Siete

Partidas, a school of thought popularized by Frank Tannenbaum.11 Instead, Palmer wanted to demonstrate the minimal effect the code actually had on the operation of the colonial slave system in New Spain.12 Part of his approach was to move past the institutional comparisons within greater Spanish America. Instead, Palmer set out to examine the early colonial period, specifically hoping to “reconstruct the life of a slave in Mexico during the second period, roughly between 1570-1650… focus on his conditions of labor, his role in slave society and in the larger society, his interactions with his peers and with Indians, mestizos, and freedman, his social organizations, and his belief systems.”13 Although Palmer’s work focused predominantly on enslaved Africans, and male slaves at that, his work marked a watershed

6 for historians of Mexico and the African Diaspora interested in the lives and experiences of these individuals. Palmer, more than Aguirre Beltrán before him, demonstrated what

Mexico’s archival records had to offer on the subject.

In the last few decades, the field of Afro-Mexican studies has boomed, with historians and anthropologists exploring various facets of African and Afro-Creole colonial experiences.14 African-descended individuals inserted their narratives into colonial records in many ways—by going to court, joining the colonial militia, and perhaps most visibly, through their relationships with the Church. Recent studies of Afro-Mexico have demonstrated the vital importance of ecclesiastical records in highlighting how religious practice was used to mediate and contest colonial authority through religious brotherhoods, healing practices, and the power of love magic.15 The majority of Afro-Mexicanists have focused their efforts on the social milieu found within the cities of central and southern

Mexico, specifically Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz, with a smaller body of work on

Africans and their descendants in Guerrero and other parts of the southern highlands and pacific coast. However, the Afro-Mexican population was not confined to this southern sphere of Mexico and thus we need to explore Afro-Mexican experiences outside of this core zone.

In my analysis of Afro-Zacatecas, I am applying several ideas and observations that have come forth from Afro-Mexicanist scholarship on Mexico City and its environs. One of the principal ideas that I am utilizing in my own work is the concept of “Afro-Creole consciousness” as described by historian Herman Bennett. Creolization is often understood as the creation of new cultural practices through a blending of languages, beliefs, diets, and community structures. Bennett argues that creolization, as it occurred in sixteenth-century

7 urban New Spain, began with an “immersion in the cultural practices of power.”16 That is to say that, African descendants, the first persons to be identified as criollos before 1560, did not configure their culture through these traditional aspects alone. Instead, creole culture included customs, laws, and institutions that upheld the larger, colonial social structure. In this way, creolization came to include the ability to navigate the various institutions of the

Spanish Crown, its viceregal government, but also the Catholic Church and its various organizations.

Bennett’s analysis of this creolization process is focused on early colonial Mexico

City. The composition of the Afro-Mexican population in the capital during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was markedly different than in late colonial Zacatecas. Perceptions of

African heritage still carried a sizable social stigma, but as we will see in the following chapters, a shared-African ancestry continued to bring Afro-Zacatecans together. Perhaps due to the passage of time, African ethnicities, or naciones, do not appear to have been as significant a marker of identity in late colonial Zacatecas as they were for sixteenth and seventeenth century Mexico City. And because the general casta, or mixed-race, population utilized similar strategies to navigate the “judicial maze with the intent of exploiting the possibilities offered by legal obligations and rights,”17 when I use Bennett’s creolization model in relation to secular litigation, I am emphasizing the principles of creole- consciousness, as opposed to a specifically “Afro” exclusivity.18 As will be seen, I have found numerous traces of group consciousness among Afro-Zacatecans in the eighteenth- century records.

A Note on Sources

In a recent discussion of the historical record of colonial Zacatecas, historian Dana

Velasco Murillo notes a marked decline in the indigenous “documentary” presence leading into the nineteenth century, when national laws and regulations outlawed the designation of individuals by racial markers and also dissolved the city's indigenous towns. This process of legal “whitening” by the early republican state has obscured not only the indigenous presence in Zacatecas, but the African one as well. Historians of Afro-Mexico and race are acutely aware of the problems inherent in archival research, which relies so heavily on what is present or absent in the historical record, itself a construction of colonialism and its aftermath. Historian María Elena Martinez argues that:

Power is constitutive of history…because different groups have unequal access to the means of historical production, this inequality plays a part at every step of the construction of the past…in New Spain, the restricted ability that African-descended people had to produce, organize, and reproduce categories; to create sources and structure archives and therefore influence the recovery of facts; and to leave written traces of feelings, thoughts, and practices generated deep silences about their significance in Mexican history…colonial forms laid the groundwork for modern Mexico’s myth of its pure Spanish and Indian foundations.19

By engaging in historical production and archival research, contemporary scholars are part of this reification of power. Those who practice or ascribe to the aims and methods of subaltern studies intend to challenge these silences and give voice to those who are often difficult to hear and see. At the same time, historians of Afro-Mexico are limited to sources that were often created by elites in positions of authority with the intent to monitor and control. Very rarely do unfiltered testimonies and accounts of Afro-Mexicans make their way into our hands. However, in reconstructing these experiences through narrative, we must be especially careful to understand the context in which the records were created, collected, and

9 catalogued.20 With these precautions in mind, I would like to discuss the types of records used in this analysis and their limitations.

All original archival research was conducted in the municipal state archive in

Zacatecas (Archivo Histórico del Estado de Zacatecas, AHEZ) and the parish archive in the

Church of Santo Domingo (Archivo Parroquial de Zacatecas, APZ). Given only a month to conduct this research, my intention was to look at sources that had not yet been thoroughly examined. The most ignored aspect in the historiography of Afro-Zacatecan life deals with market activity and urban communities. Given my interests and time constraints, the majority of the records I looked at were judicial cases, both civil and criminal, and records from the ayuntamiento, or city council. Historians such as Richard Garner, Peter Bakewell, and David

Brading have provided a wealth of information on market policies in colonial Zacatecas, such as the alcabala tax and goods declarations, as well as the inner workings of the various municipal market organizations, including the granary and slaughterhouse. These sources were incredibly valuable and have provided much-needed context for analyzing Afro-

Zacatecan market activity.

The civil and criminal cases I was able to identify have provided me with many richly detailed accounts of individual Afro-Zacatecans and their engagement with the “legal consciousness” that Bennett describes along with creolization. Through these various cases, I have been able to demonstrate a number of goals and strategies put forth by men and women of African descent living in the city, especially during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. These individual cases certainly do not reflect the wishes and goals of all

Afro-Zacatecans, and although these cases reflect distinct instances in specific moments in time, by studying them in aggregate, we can discern a number of themes that appear to be

10 relevant to the Afro-Zacatecan population during this time. These strategies are examined in detail in chapters three.

In the parish archive, I worked almost exclusively with the confraternity books that were recorded by brotherhood leaders. Historian Nicole Von Germeten has also worked with these sources in a larger study of Afro-Mexican confraternities. However, I hoped to examine the inventories, membership lists, and dues paid to compare the practices of the city’s two predominantly Afro-Zacatecan brotherhoods. These analyses are presented in chapter five. At the APZ, I was also fortunate enough to work with the marriage registry database, composed of all of the marriage petitions made by individuals in Zacatecas throughout much of the colonial period. Unfortunately, I was not able to work directly with the individual marriage petitions, which would have been valuable sources of witness testimonies and social and familial networks.

The remaining primary sources I used in this thesis include published accounts from various visitors over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These sources reveal attitudes towards men and women of African descent, but also provide general information about urban geography and population estimates. I also made use of Richard Konetzke’s wonderful collection of colonial ordinances and cédulas to trace changing sumptuary laws and racial legal restrictions.

This study is certainly not exhaustive. For each question I felt was answered, several new questions were raised. Significant future research needs to be done to further explore the experiences and lives of Afro-Zacatecans. Census records housed in the archive of the archdiocese of Guadalajara will provide further information on household composition in the city center. Inquisition files at the national archive in Mexico City will reveal further record

11 of ecclesiastical and private struggles. Although the focus of this thesis was primarily the free

Afro-Zacatecan population during this little-studied mid-colonial silver boom, more research needs to be done to explore the sixteenth and seventeenth-century historical roots of these individuals and their families. This research also calls for further examination of notarial books and hacienda records to explore the pervasiveness of African slavery in the mining district and the urban center. As the following chapters will reveal, women of African descent were active participants in Zacatecan society. Recent research has shown that women of African descent were highly engaged in market activities in the Andean silver mining city of Potosí, 21 and although we only see glimpses of their activities in this thesis in

Zacatecas, I hope to conduct future research on their specific roles and experiences in the urban markets, mining camps, and religious organizations of the city.

Chapter Overview

In chapter one, I briefly trace the construction of race as a social construct for socioeconomic differentiation in the Iberian Peninsula and its adaptation to the circumstances of the New World and New Spain. This chapter will familiarize the reader with the colonial ideologies that influenced African and Afro-Creole experiences in Zacatecas, namely the sistema de castas and the often-misconstrued concept of blood purity, or limpieza de sangre.

This chapter also discusses the legal consequences of these ideologies, namely sumptuary laws and restrictions of privileges based on socio-racial categories, but also the exceptions to the rules—specifically militia service. Throughout this chapter, I demonstrate how Spanish laws and social norms were modified to meet local needs, which often took into account perceptions of honor, respectability, wealth, and class.

In chapter two, I introduce the city of Zacatecas and its relationship to the silver mining industry. This chapter provides background information on labor relations, including slavery, in the mines and the refining haciendas, as they developed over the early colonial period. This chapter also provides a discussion of migration and available population counts, which gives the reader an idea of the size of Zacatecas and its various ethnic populations over time. This section also includes an analysis of residential patterns in the urban center, as well as rates of racial endogamy, which reflect household compositions. The final section of this chapter is an analysis of civil suits relating to property sales and transfers, which reveal several neighborhoods in the city that Afro-Zacatecans inhabited. These cases also reflect an interesting relationship between property ownership and maternal inheritance.

The third chapter provides the core analysis of criminal and civil cases as they relate to the urban market and the local economy. From these records and other accounts, we see that Afro-Zacatecans owned shops and actively participated in the urban sphere. Although it is clear that many members of the Afro-Zacatecan population were engaged in mining, I argue that a significant portion of this group actually lived and worked outside of the mining haciendas. Throughout this chapter, I argue that Afro-Zacatecans had a firm understanding of their legal rights and obligations to the Crown. Through litigation, we see how individuals crafted testimonies playing on socio-racial perceptions, to create opportunities for their shops and economic interests, to improve their social reputations, and also to attain manumission.

In these cases, we also see the semblance of a permanent, creole community, where Afro-

Zacatecan families made use of their social networks to achieve positions of limited authority and power.

In the fourth chapter, I discuss the larger structure of the Catholic Church, demonstrating how the competing institutional mechanisms of slavery and Christianity often influenced individual rights of Africans and Afro-Creoles. Christian culture allowed for an assertion of personhood and freewill that enhanced personal liberty and granted a social existence beyond the grasp of slave owners. This complicated the experience of the enslaved individual but also enhanced the way in which free Afro-Creoles came to understand their rights and obligations to the Church. This chapter will also discuss the role of the Holy

Office of the Inquisition in Zacatecas, analyzing a number of religious crimes in which Afro-

Zacatecans were typically involved.

In the final chapter, I discuss the local religious institutions in which Afro-Zacatecans were the most involved. The chapter focuses predominantly on the two Afro-Mexican confraternities, the Cofradía de San Juan de la Penitencia de los Mulatos and the Cofradía de la Limpia Concepción y Santa Ana de los Morenos, analyzing the ways in which these two groups negotiated their participation in the larger Christian community and the city itself, while maintaining a separate identity based on a shared African heritage. I argue that over time, the strategies used by the confraternity of San Juan could no longer be employed by the early eighteenth century. In contrast, the confraternity of the Immaculate Conception was able to survive the religious reforms brought on by the Bourbon period. Part of this analysis is a discussion of women’s roles in confraternity life. I argue that compared to many black brotherhoods throughout the colony, women of African descent in Zacatecas were able to take on more leadership roles and responsibilities and maintain them into the eighteenth century. This final chapter also discusses the judicial conflicts that arose between private, ecclesiastical, and secular authorities over spiritual needs and mining profits.

1 Relación de Nuestra Señora de Zacatecas (Mexico City: Biblioteca Aportacion Historico, 1958).

2 Frederique Langue, Los Senores de Zacatecas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1999).

3 David A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge: University Press, 1971); Phillip William Powell, Soldiers, Indians, & Silver; The Northward Advance of New Spain, 1550-1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952); Peter Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700 (Cambridge Eng. University Press, 1971); Dana Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546-1806 (PhD diss., Los Angeles: UCLA, 2009); Harry Cross, The Mining Economy of Zacatecas, Mexico in the Nineteenth Century (PhD diss., Berkeley: University of California, 1976); Richard Lyle Garner, Zacatecas, 1750-1821: The Study of a Late Colonial Mexican City (University of Michigan, 1970); Edith Boorstein Couturier, The Silver King: The Remarkable Life of the Count of Regla in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).

4 Francisco García Gonzales, Familia y Sociedad en Zacatecas: La Vida de un Microcosmos Minero Novohispano, 1750-1830 (Zacatecas: Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, 2000); Jesús Flores Olague, Breve Historia de Zacatecas (México: El Colegio de México, 1997); Marco Antonio Flores Zavala and Roberto Ramos Dávila Zacatecas: Síntesis Histórica (Zacatecas: Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, 1995); Alonso de la Mota y Escobar and Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas, Descripción Geográfica de Los Reynos De Nueva Galicia, Vizcaya, y Leon (México: 1930); Relación de Nuestra Señora de los Zacatecas (Mexico City: Biblioteca Aportación Histórico, 1958); José de Rivera Bernárdez, Descripción Breve de la Muy Noble y Leal Ciudad de Zacatecas (México: por Joseph Bernando Hogal, ministro, e impresor del Real y Apostólico tribunal de la Santa Cruzada en toda esta Nueva España, 1732); Domingo Lázaro de Arregui, Descripción de la Nueva Galicia (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1946).

5 Robert C. West, The Mining Community in Northern New Spain: The Parral Mining District (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949); Florence Barkin, Black Slave Trade in the Seventeenth Century Real of San Joseph Del Parral from 1631-1645 (Tempe: Center for Latin American Studies, Arizona State University, 1977); Vincent Mayer, The Black on New Spain's Northern Frontier: San Jose De Parral, 1631 to 1641 (Durango: Center of Southwest Studies, 1974).

6 Carlos Manuel Valdés and Ildefonso Dávila B, Esclavos Negros en Saltillo: Siglos XVII-XIX (Saltillo: R. Ayuntamiento de Saltillo, 1989).

7 Recent work on Guanajuato includes a few instances of civil litigation pursued by women of African descent. See: John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in

the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) 175-183, 355- 359.

8 Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro- Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003) 23.

9 Alfonso Toro, "Influencia de la Raza Negra en la Formación del Pueblo Mexicano," Ethnos 1, nos. 8-12 (1920-1921), 215-218.

10 Colin M. MacLachlan and Jaime E. Rodríguez O, The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

11 Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, The Negro in the Americas (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946).

12 Colin Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 5.

13 Ibid. 4.

14 Matthew Restall, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times, edited by Ben Vinson III and Matthew Restall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009); Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America, edited by Matthew Restall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: University of California, 2001); R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); Patrick Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin, TX, 1991); Sherwin K. Bryant, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, and Ben Vinson Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Jane Landers and Barry Robinson Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).

15 Javier Villa-Flores, "To Lose One's Soul: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain, 1596-1669," Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 3 (2002): 435-68; Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006); Joan Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640; Laura Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Ann Twinam, Public Lives,

Private Secrets Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Edgar F. Love, "Marriage Patterns of Persons of African Descent in a Colonial Mexico City Parish," Hispanic American Historical Review 5 (February 1971): 79-91; Solange Alberro, Inquisición y Sociedad en México, 1571-1700 (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988).

16 Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 3.

17 Ibid.

18 The exception to this emphasis relates to an Afro-Creole understanding of Christianity. Although the general casta population developed and utilized a legal consciousness, as slaves and descendants of those who were enslaved, blacks occupied a unique position within the Church. This idea will be discussed more fully in chapter four.

19 Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 272.

20 See also: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

21 Jane Mangan, Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

Chapter 1: Situating Race in Colonial New Spain

On April 25, 1702, Sebastiana Velásquez, a free mulata, petitioned the authorities of

Zacatecas on behalf of her sons, Cristóbal, Mateo, and Salvador, recorded as mulatos blancos, requesting that they be allowed to carry swords.1 Ordinarily, individuals who wished to bear arms did not need the court’s permission. However, as these men were free and of African descent, they were thought to pose an inherent threat to society and were thus outlawed from carrying weapons of any kind. Sebastiana Velásquez’s petition includes testimonies from townsfolk throughout Zacatecas describing the character of the men in question. Sebastiana herself remarks that her sons were all upstanding vecinos, or householders, of the city and that they had never been in trouble with the law. However, her initial reason given was simply that the men shared a Spanish father. Because Cristóbal,

Mateo, and Salvador came from Spanish stock, it was then possible to argue for their right to carry swords.

Sebastiana’s case appears at odds with travellers’ accounts from the previous century.

Thomas Gage, a Dominican friar and Englishman, visited Mexico City in 1625, where he observed how:

The gallants of this city shew themselves, some on horseback, and most in coaches, daily about four of the clock in the afternoon in a pleasant field called la Alameda…two thousand coaches, full of gallants, ladies, and citizens, to see and to be seen, to court and to be courted. The gentlemen have their train of blackamoor slaves, some a dozen, some half a dozen, waiting on them, in brave and gallant liveries, heavy wit gold and silver lace, with silk

stockings on their black legs and roses on their feet, and swords by their sides.2

Through Gage’s account we can discern that Spaniards employed slaves not only as laborers but also as symbols of wealth that through conspicuous displays were meant to convey status and honor. Intent upon emphasizing their high social standing, Spaniards had their slaves adorned in such “gallant liveries” that often included weaponry.

This is not to say that New Spain’s elite society did not fear social upheaval at the hands of armed African men. The 1612 conspiracy, in which thirty-five African men and women accused of plotting a revolt were publicly executed in Mexico City, suggests that they most certainly did.3 However, at the dawn of the seventeenth century, the majority of the colony’s African-born and African-descended population was enslaved and considered under control. Domestic servants such as footmen could be allowed to don gilt swords, because, although Africans were considered to be characteristically quarrelsome, it was also believed that they constituted a type of ethnic “other,” capable of being restrained and tamed. By the time Sebastiana consulted the Zacatecas civil authorities on behalf of her children in 1702, official views had clearly changed. To understand these ideological shifts, it is necessary to then consider how race as a social construct developed in Spain and was brought to and altered in the New World.

The Sistema de Castas and Limpieza de Sangre

By the eighteenth century, New Spain saw the development of a social code known to historians as the sistema de castas, a fluid hierarchical schema at times codified in Spanish laws, in which factors such as wealth, heritage, racial perception, gender, and religious

19 affiliation determined one’s social standing, as well as one’s rights and obligations to the

Crown and the Church. Historians’ use of the term sistema de castas is inherently problematic, as it implies that a rigid “system” existed. Instead, these principles were manifested differently in different locations throughout New Spain and certainly changed over time. It is important to understand then that although “casta” or socio-racial categories deeply affected people’s lives, these categories were never fixed. Instead, the unique realities and consequences of the sistema de castas occurred at an individual level and were often manipulated to better serve individual interests. In daily life, honor and social perception far outweighed the racial categorizations imposed by elite society.4 Douglas Cope has neatly observed that, “elite Spaniards used racial status as a guide for moral qualities; the same actions could take on different meanings, depending on whether they were performed by whites or castas.”5 In a similar vein, Susan Kellogg and Norma Angélica Castillo Palma have noted:

Afro-Mexicans and Nahuas enjoyed each other’s company and could interact

with men of all socioracial categories without conflict much of the time.

When violence did occur, racial and ethnic stereotypes quickly emerged.6

To understand how this complex social code developed in New Spain, it is important to first understand its Iberian roots, which had strong religious overtones.

As María Elena Martínez has shown, the sistema de castas was in many ways a product of late medieval Castilian notions of social differentiation centered on limpieza de sangre, or blood purity. The first use of the term was deployed against Jewish converts to

Christianity, conversos or “New Christians.” Thus, blood purity was defined as the absence of

Jewish or heretical ancestors, which by the middle of the fifteenth century manifested itself in the exclusion of conversos from certain institutions, as well as public and ecclesiastical offices. The category of impurity was extended to include Muslim descendants as well, although never to the same degree as with Jews and their descendants. This concept acquired greater force throughout the next century, as various establishments within the Iberian

Peninsula adopted limpieza de sangre statutes. The Spanish Inquisition itself was founded to root out heresy and discover “secret Jews.” Blood purity also carried with it underlying assumptions about inheritable characteristics. Maria Elena Martínez notes that by the end of the sixteenth century, this ideology had created a Spanish society obsessed with genealogy, particularly one that included Christian ancestors and thus a “pure lineage” as critical proof of one’s loyalty to the faith.7 In this way, descent and religion came to be intertwined as the foundation for civil society.

Late medieval exclusion and discrimination were fundamentally religious.

Nonetheless, it is in these religious ideologies, most notably in the concept of inheritable characteristics, that the origins of the concept of race are found. “Race” enters European social consciousness more or less explicitly in the fifteenth century. The first recorded use of the term raza shortly follows the first use of ‘we’ as a collective to refer to Europe in papal letters during the mid-fifteenth century. It is after this that social difference came to be viewed increasingly through a racial lens.8 As Western exploration expanded after 1492, a generic image of “the savage” was modified to more clearly represent violence, sexual license, and a lack of civility or civilization; essentially a creature of sin, lacking in reason, discipline, culture, and morality.9

However, as Europeans encountered “new” peoples, the question of “enslavability” is what truly determined what legal status Indians and Africans would experience under colonial rule in New Spain. In Hispaniola, Columbus quickly enslaved some Taíno villagers, forcing them to labor for the newly arrived colonists. Native slavery was soon questioned, as

Queen Isabella questioned the automatic enslavement of her new subjects. Beginning in the sixteenth century, we see the rise of “just war” as the principal justification for indigenous slavery as inspired by such works as Aristotle’s Politics. Spanish theologians debated whether it was acceptable to enslave indigenous peoples if they rebelled or resisted Crown and Church rule. This debate is probably best exemplified by the famous 1550 dispute in

Valladolid between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. It is important to understand that the Portuguese did not engage in similar debates regarding the sub-Saharan

Africans they “discovered.” Instead, they defaulted to the just-war claim, purchasing prisoners from rival kingdoms and tribes. In participating in the African slave trade, the

Spanish accepted Portuguese authorities’ and merchants’ decisions regarding the natural enslavability of Africans.10

As Spanish colonists tried to recreate peninsular society in New Spain, they found themselves facing circumstances, peoples, and historical developments that inevitably altered their transplanted institutions, practices, and cultural-religious principles. The survival of native communities and pre-Hispanic nobility, the introduction of significant numbers of

African slaves into the region, the rapid rise of a population of mixed ancestry, the influx of poor Spaniards seeking to better their lot in life, the link between the conversion project and

Spanish titles to the Americas, and the establishment of a transatlantic economy based largely on racialized labor forces ensured that Iberian concepts and discourses of blood purity would

22 have to be adapted to the New World. The language of lineage also required modification. In

Spain, individuals were thought to belong to different estates: the nobles, the clergy, and the commoners. Nobility, or hidalguía, was inherited through paternal and maternal ancestry. By the third generation, nobleza de privilegio became nobleza de sangre, a highly valued status because it implied being a part of a venerable lineage.11 Indigenous nobility complicated this social code, throwing into question the right of local lords and their offspring to retain their noble rank, join the priesthood, or become nuns.

These changing ideas of limpieza de sangre and race-thinking were instituted into a hierarchical order by the second half of the sixteenth century, which then specified the very terms of social experience, the terms in which the peoples of the New World would be judged and framed, as part of what Irene Silverblatt calls the process of “identity-naming.”12

According to Silverblatt, this involves the structures of power that animate race and give it material consequences, and those historical actors, who by responding to the sistema de castas, reify its power. In understanding how race-thinking and blood purity came to be understood in Baroque New Spain, we can then better explore the nuances of how racial thought and identity-naming came together in the specific historical and geographical context of eighteenth-century Zacatecas.

Racial Restrictions, Daily Realities

With an appreciation for the way racial-thinking influenced the legal restrictions and rights of people of African descent, we can examine the multiple ways in which colonial authorities tried to prevent social upheaval and restrict social mobility. Throughout the seventeenth century, it became clear to colonial officials that the free Afro-Creole

23 populations in New Spain had grown at an alarmingly rapid rate. In their anxiety to prevent insurrection, authorities passed ordinances aimed at suppressing the growing Afro-Mexican population, as well as the indigenous majority.

As we have seen, these restrictions included a ban on the carrying of weapons. The right to bear arms was a contentious issue throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.13 Although these restrictions were certainly issued in response to the potential physical threat of armed subalterns, the denial of these rights had a larger, more symbolic, goal. Stephanie Wood has demonstrated how the portrayal of Spanish material culture, including weaponry but also clothing and horses, in indigenous codices was utilized to metonymically demonstrate the authority and power of the owners of these items.14 And so when colonial authorities restricted the use of weapons to Spaniards only, they were also sending a message about power and social hierarchy and their racial implications.

The practical defense needs of the colony could occasionally be at odds with notions of Baroque propriety as well as worries over rebellion. And so, militia service became the primary exception to the ordinance banning men of African descent from carrying arms.

Several Mexican maroon communities, especially on the coast and interior of Veracruz, took advantage of volunteering for militia service to gain a town charter for their community.

These persisted into the eighteenth century. Such was the case with the town of Mandinga, officially known as Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Negros de Amapa. In 1762, the colonial government was preparing to defend the coast against an imminent British naval attack. The viceroy sent out a call for men, and the maroons seized the opportunity to bring a petition for freedom directly to the highest authority in New Spain. They rode to the port of

Veracruz and volunteered. The tactic worked, and the viceroy gave them licenses of freedom

24 in recognition of their service during the crisis. However, after they were no longer needed, officials saw no reason to enforce their decision over the objections of their former slave masters. Persistently, the maroons petitioned, and in 1769 they were finally given their freedom and permission to establish a town on the site they had chosen. The town’s inhabitants swore allegiance to the king, vowed to obey the district authorities, pledged to serve in the coastal militia, and promised to pay the tribute, which the crown imposed on free men of African descent. In exchange, Amapa’s residents were required to patrol for, catch, and return any future runaway slaves to their masters for a bounty.15 Throughout the late eighteenth century, a significant free Afro-descent militia force developed along the Atlantic coast, ranging from the port of Veracruz as far north as Pánuco.16

These attempts to organize, arm, and properly train a colonial defense force were part of a larger undertaking initiated by the newly appointed viceroy in the face of potential

British attack during the Seven Year’s War. Around the same time that the maroon communities of Veracruz were gathering to defend the coast, the viceroy, the Marquis of

Cruillas, sent a lieutenant by the name of Don Juan Alonso Díaz de la Campa, a knight of the

Order of Alcántara, to organize a series of militia companies in Zacatecas.17 Communications appear to have begun in April of 1762, with Diaz de la Campa sent specifically to take an account of the existing militia companies, their weapons, uniforms, saddles, supplies, and their leaders, all of whom were considered Spanish. Having done so, the viceroy had a number of recommendations, which the corregidor was to implement. First and foremost, he recommended that the lieutenant captains of the two infantries and the cavalry be replaced.

His other recommendation was to create four new infantry companies, the first three to be composed of members of the city’s guilds: the sastres (tailors), zapateros (shoemakers),

25 puesteros (street vendors), and cargadores (porters). The final infantry company was to be composed of commoners, “de el común.”

The language referring to these commoners and guild members that is used by the viceroy, the lieutenant de la Campa, and the local militia officials is often confusing. When

Díaz de la Campa recounts his initial public announcement regarding the creation of the new militia companies, he said that he informed all of the “pardos de color quebrado” and above eighteen years of age of their requirement to report to the public plaza. There is no reference to the guilds but simply to all of the lighter-skinned pardo residents, presumably the free mulatos and potentially castizos. A second announcement, reiterating the requirement to register lest they be jailed for twelve days, refers to “pardos y mulatos.” But then when the equipment and uniforms were being described, Díaz de la Campa assures the officials that uniforms for the “indios, negros, o mulatos” would indeed be different, so as to distinguish them from the Spanish companies. It is difficult to know then how indigenous individuals came to be enlisted, as this practice was not generally allowed. The document contains a list of each newly created company, each of which was composed of fifty-nine men. These lists do not refer to racial categories, so we cannot know how many of the enlistees were in fact indio or mestizo; however, it appears that most of the new companies were composed entirely of men of African descent. No mention is made throughout the document to their length of service or wages. A reference is made to a list for reparation to the “guilds and the commoners,” but no specific amounts are revealed. Furthermore, no mention is made as to the preference for these specific guilds over the others in the city. However, historian Ben

Vinson suggests that most of the militiamen on the coast of New Spain in this period held similar artisanal occupations.18 It is unlikely that these men ever saw combat, although we

26 cannot know for sure. Combat experience or no, it is likely that this role, especially for the members of the three guild companies, conferred some measure of honor.

Civilian society was far less enthusiastic about men of color bearing arms. Its laws remained restrictive, if not downright punitive. In the late eighteenth century, the symbolic weight of arms bearing often carried gendered element as well. Post-colonial scholarship has highlighted the use of emasculating gestures by colonial authorities with the express purpose of relieving tensions regarding physical violence but also sexual competition between white and African men. By stripping men of African descent of their masculinity or adulthood, writers, painters, and law makers regularly constructed an image of the African male slave (with obvious implications for free men of color) as harmless, a child in need of protecting, and one that would certainly not pose a threat to one’s family, especially one’s female relatives. Even the term mulato, the racial category for men of African and European descent, implied sterility; if symbolically emasculated again and again, these men would not pose a sexual threat. These symbolic gestures often extended to extreme forms of punishment. When runaway slaves were recaptured or groups of Afro-Mexican men were thought to be plotting revolts, their bodies were often subject to mutilation, including castration.19

The restriction against carrying weapons carried a similar message. This was true for all of Spanish America but particularly so in the frontier zones of New Spain. When

Sebastiana Velásquez petitioned the colonial authorities of Zacatecas, she emphasized that if her sons were able to carry swords, they might better serve the public. At the time that

Sebastiana made her case, there were no official wars being fought near the mining district.

Rather than serving in an official militia, it is likely that Sebastiana simply meant that her

27 sons, with the ability to enact justice, would be useful in the effort to maintain order. The environs of Zacatecas and the silver trunk line continued to be a stage for maroon and

Chichimec raids throughout the colonial period. The frontier nature of the city lent itself to a particularly “wild west” style of justice. And so, for three men who were considered by some, at least, as blanco to not be able to legally defend themselves or their families would have been a particularly emasculating gesture.

Fortunately for the Velásquez sons, Sebastiana was successful in her petition.

Through community testimonies, along with Sebastiana’s own testimony of her sons’ past behavior and personalities, the courts allowed them the right to own swords, and presumably to carry them on their person. Others were not so fortunate. Eight years later, Joaquín

Ventura, a free mulato, was arrested for possessing just a fragment of a sword. Ventura was found one night with two other men at the head of the creek that ran through the city center.20

Not a vecino of the city, Ventura testified that he had made his way into town to find work in the mines. Given the recent boom in mining activity, it is easy to imagine a large group of unemployed miners searching for work throughout the city. However, this was particularly risky for men and women of African descent. Because the silver trunk line often brought criminals along with men and families simply looking for work, colonial authorities were notably harsh in dealing with the presence of what they referred to as vagabonds.21 Colin

Palmer notes that in the early seventeenth century, New Spain’s mobile free men of African descent were considered particularly troublesome for colonial authorities. Aside from their reputation as pillagers and inciters of slave rebellions, their mobility also made it difficult to collect tribute. Robert West found that in the mines of Parral, these unemployed “vagabonds” often became so numerous and troublesome that unless they hired themselves to some miner,

28 they could become subject to compulsory labor in the stamp mills.22 Unfortunately, we do not know what became of Joaquín Ventura.

However, in examining the cases of the Velásquez men and Ventura, we can see how community perception factored into these two cases. Because many residents of the city knew the Velásquez family, the sons’ pasts and their dispositions were known, and colonial authorities could more easily allow the carrying of weapons by men of African descent. The records mention only that Joaquín Ventura owned the broken sword; they do not mention him using it. But as an alleged vagabond, Ventura was perceived as a genuine threat to the city. Palmer notes that despite the restrictive legislation imposed on free men of African descent, Spaniards were amenable to granting certain privileges to men of color whom they felt were trustworthy. Colonial authorities would have had to establish the social reliability of any applicant before they would grant such a concession.23 On June 6, 1696, a letter was sent to the president of the Audiencia in Guadalajara from an official of the Council of the

Indies. This letter served to reprimand the authorities in Guadalajara for selling licenses to carry weapons to fourteen “mulatos de buena vida, costumbres y ocupaciones” since 1682, specifically disregarding previous ordinances banning men of color from carrying weapons.

24 A 1692 document from the Audiencia of Guadalajara notes the increased price for such a license, from thirty to forty-two pesos.25 Authorities in New Galicia often acted against the

Crown’s regulations when they believed that local concerns were more sensible. If the townsfolk of Zacatecas perceived the Velásquez men as being of “good style, customs, and occupations” and authorities could make money by granting them licenses, then local concerns were met. In these cases we can understand how racial thinking was manifested in

29 early eighteenth century Zacatecas, but also how social networks, class, and wealth could just as easily affect the "social reliability," and thus the rights and privileges, of Afro-Zacatecans.

Racial thinking also permeated legal restrictions against the consumption and sale of alcohol. Given that self-styled Spaniards believed indigenous and African peoples to be inherently less civilized than them, they particularly feared the dangers that wine and pulque posed. These concerns were most often focused on indigenous consumption of pulque or aguardiente, alcoholic beverages made from the native maguey plant and cane sugar.26

However, when Zacatecan authorities issued an edict in 1620 prohibiting the sale of wine to negros, mulatos, e indios, it was not so much a preventative measure against excessive drinking but a message regarding social hierarchy.27 This is not to say that authorities did not fear the consumption of wine by Indians and Afro-descendants for practical reasons. In fact, authorities were very much aware of the potential risks. In 1626, a group of merchants ignored this ordinance and sold wine to a group of Indians. On the fourth of October of this same year, during the festival of San Francisco, these merchants sold wine to Indians, who after becoming inebriated began to brawl, or “desencadenar otra más de sus celebérrimas guerras.”28 This “war” resulted in the death of five Indian laborers. Alcohol-induced calamities such as this pepper archives throughout Spanish America. Nonetheless, the 1620 edict, one of many sumptuary laws imposed on the indigenous and Afro-Zacatecan populations, was focused less on the immediate risk of public drunkenness and more on the message of rules of social hierarchy. Castas could consume pulque, but wine was to be consumed by Spaniards.

Such restrictive legislation extended to other aspects of social and even religious life.

Afro-Mexicans were banned from wearing excessive jewelry or rich clothing, entering the

30 clergy, becoming masters in most trade guilds, and even gathering in large numbers, especially at night.29 However, as mentioned before, rights and restrictions were limited to one's perceived socio-racial status. This status could be and often was altered. The best way to guarantee one’s rights as a Spaniard was to petition for a certificación de limpieza de sangre. An applicant would need to supply a genealogical history, as well as witness testimonies from those who knew him or her well, to verify that his or her lineage was free of indigenous, African, Jewish, or Muslim blood. Often, these cases required transatlantic verification and could take several years, if not decades, to satisfy the requirements laid out by colonial authorities. Similar measures were taken to legitimize or verify the legitimacy of one’s children. Although these cases did not necessarily require a verification of one’s genealogical past in Spain, they did require witness testimony of those who knew the applicant’s parents and the nature of their relationship.

For Captain Lucas Fernández Pardo, a resident of the city, such a petition was made for his sons, Lucas Fernández Pardo and Sebastián Fernández Pardo.30 In 1683, Captain

Fernández filed a request with the public notary Blas Núñez to sign over power of attorney to his son of the same name. In doing so, he entrusted the fate of his property, his wealth, and his family to his son. Although it does not appear that the legitimacy of his marriage and his relationship to his children was questioned by the authorities or by the community, Captain

Fernández wished to make it clear that his parents were “cristianos viejos” and that his children were products of a line of “gente noble.” Thus, he was able to verify that the power of attorney was unquestionably going to his blood kin. Potentially such an action would prove important for his children’s social standings, as Sebastián was beginning a career as a

Jesuit novice in the pueblo of Tepozotlán, and Lucas Fernández Pardo would soon replace

Blas Núñez as one of Zacatecas’s public notaries.

Because many of the legislated restrictions were enforced, namely access to guilds, public offices, or the clergy, men would often need to have the court acknowledge their limpieza de sangre as well as their legitimacy. This was the case for Don Antonio Jacinto de

Ayala, who in 1713, seeking affirmation of his blood purity, was required to testify as to his own legitimate birth.31 His testimony is as follows:

I am the legitimate son of the legitimate marriage of the Captain Juan de Ayala and Josefa Gutierrez, deceased, who were residents of this city [Zacatecas]. [They] were Spaniards, as were my paternal and maternal grandparents, long-standing Christians, descendants of a clean bloodline, free of bad race and caste.

To back this claim up, testimony was taken by Don Alonso Joseph Sanido, a parish priest of the bishopric who served the jurisdiction of Zacatecas. In his testimony, the priest verified that he knew Don Antonio, referring to him as a cleric of the lower orders, an ordinario of the city. He went on to say that Don Antonio’s grandparents were indeed true Christians, having never been punished by the Holy Office of the Inquisition or any other tribunal, no fueron castigados ni penitenciados por el santo oficio de la inquisición ni por otro tribunal alguna. It is likely that since his primary witness was a fellow clergyman, Don Antonio was seeking a higher position in the Church. This process would no doubt have been aided by such a verification of his bloodline.

The frequent use of and reliance on certificaciones de limpieza de sangre certainly gives the impression that with the court’s recognition, the category of español, and with it, whiteness, could be fixed and protected by law. And yet, another practice toward the end of the eighteenth century, the process of gracias al sacar, allowed some individuals of mixed

32 descent to purchase their whiteness. Ann Twinam discusses this phenomenon by focusing on a Guatemalan man of African descent, referred to as a pardo, named Bernardo Ramírez. In

1783, Ramírez appealed to the Council of the Indies to make him white. His petition to change his socio-racial status was not in and of itself unusual. The Council's response, however, was. Specifically, the royal official remarked that the petition was "repugnant or at least excessive" because it was evident that Ramírez "could neither disguise nor dismiss his infected quality even if he tries."32 Twinam notes that in the hundreds of petitions made to the Council of the Indies for such a request, this was the only instance where the various officials ever questioned whether a mulato or a pardo might become legally white. Other petitions were denied, but the fundamental proposition that an individual's blackness could be transformed, or that whiteness was a possible achievement, was never before the deciding factor. No such cases are known for late colonial Zacatecas, but it is important to understand that this route existed as a possibility for those with the means to make it happen.

By examining these various cases, we can discern the dominant ideologies and discourses at play in colonial legal culture but also in daily social experience. Although by the eighteenth century the sistema de castas was malleable, the underlying concept of limpieza de sangre continued to be a determining factor in the rights and privileges of colonial peoples. These socio-racial barriers limited the opportunities for peoples of African descent, but as we will see in the following chapters, these same peoples exhibited a legal consciousness that allowed them to turn official racial principles or legal categories to their advantage. In exploring the political and religious origins of racial thinking, we can see how these two lines of thought fed into one another but also remained in tension. In chapter four,

33 we will see how these tensions proved useful for individuals of African descent, as they pitted the Church against civil authorities, and often against slaveholders and mine owners.

In situating "race" in colonial Latin America, we are examining socio-racial categories imposed by institutional forces. How each individual conceptualized their ethnicity or racial identity (or identities) can only be guessed at. Nonetheless, in exploring race and categories, we are inherently exploring identity. By looking at the desires, petitions, and experiences of the various persons discussed in the archival documents, we can tease out how racial identities were used strategically for political or social gain. But in looking at families, witness testimonies, and confraternity records, we can also attempt to reconstruct how residents of Zacatecas might have felt about their social networks and community identities. In exploring examples of what can be termed "creole consciousness,"33 we will examine how notions of blackness and processes of creolization demonstrate some of the different ways that individuals of African descent coped with racial exclusion but also found a way to carve out a place for social and cultural autonomy.

1 AHEZ, Judicial, Civil, Caja 3, Exp. 29, 1702-1710.

2 Thomas Gage’s Travels in the New World, edited by J. Eric Thompson (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1858) 73.

3 Nicole Von Germeten, “Mexico City (New Spain) Rebellion Conspiracy (1611- 1612)” in Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion, Vol. 1, edited by Junius P. Rodriguez (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007) 321-322.

4 R. Douglas Cope, Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994) 49-67.

5 Ibid. 41.

6 Susan Kellogg and Norma Angelica Castillo Palma, “Conflict and Cohabitation between Afro-Mexicans and Nahuas in Central Mexico,” in Beyond Red and Black, edited by Matthew Restall and Ben Vinson III (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009) 124.

7 María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza De Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) 1.

8 David Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford, U.K: Blackwell, 1993) 21.

9 Ibid.

10 Some Spanish theologians did discuss the morality of enslaving Africans. See: Tomás de Mercado “On the Trade in the Blacks of Cape Verde” in Sources of Crossroads and Cultures: a History of the World’s Peoples, Vol. II edited by Bonnie G. Smith, Marc Van De Mieroop, Richard Von Glahn, and Kris Lane (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2012) 75-80.

11 Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 49-53.

12 Irene Silverblatt, “Forward,” in Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D O’Hara (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009) xi.

13 Throughout the colonial period, authorities views on this matter vacillated. The cédulas referring to castas bearing armsreflect elite concerns over time. The sixteenth century and early seventeenth century documents reveal concerns over negros and esclavos carrying arms. By 1663, the racial categories of mesitzos and mulatos are added to this list. This specific document is recorded for Dec. 30, following the July 6 cédula of the same year,

which requested militia assistance on the coast. The later cédula was very likely done to remind the colony that despite their role in the militia efforts, castas were still banned from carrying weapons. Richard Konetzke, Colección de Documentos Para la Historia de la Formación Social de Hispanoamérica, 1493-1810. Vol. 2-2, docs. 120, 162, 281, 348 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953); Ibid. Vol. 3-1, docs. 13, 32.

14 Stephanie Wood, Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003) 23-59.

15 Patrick J. Carroll, “Mandinga: The Evolution of a Mexican Runaway Slave Community, 1735-1827,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 19. 4 (1977): 12-16.

16 Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

17 AHEZ, Militia, Caja 1, Exp. 3, 1762.

18 Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty, 104.

19 Edgar F. Love, "Negro Resistance to Spanish Rule in Colonial Mexico," in The Journal of Negro History 52 (1967): 4.

20 AHEZ, Criminales, Caja 4, Exp. 1, 1710.

21 Colin Palmer, Slaves of the White Gods: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976) 182.

22 Robert West, The Mining Community in Northern New Spain: The Parral Mining District (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949) 49.

23 Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 183-4.

24 Konetzke, Colección de Documentos Vol. 3-1, doc. 32.

25 Ibid. Doc 13.

26 William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979) 29.

27 AHEZ, Comercio, Caja 1, Exp. 3, 1620.

28 José Enciso Contreras and Almudena Gómez, Procesos Criminales Ejemplares del Zacatecas Colonial (Zacatecas: Tribunal Superior de Justicia del Estado de Zacatecas, Cuadernos de la Judicatura, 2004) 163-189.

29 Ann Twinam, "Purchasing Whiteness," in Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America Edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O'Hara (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009) 147; Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 45; Konetzke, Colección de Documentos, Vol. 2-1, docs. 160, 231, 238, 403.

30 Here “Pardo” is a surname, not a racial designation. AHEZ, Cargos y Oficios, Información y Certificación de Raza, Caja 1, Exp. 3, 1683.

31 AHEZ, Civil, Caja 8, Exp.19, 1713.

32 Ann Twinam, "Purchasing Whiteness," 141.

33 Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro- Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003) 2-13.

Chapter 2: The Silver City

Zacatecas, located over three hundred and fifty miles northwest of Mexico City, occupied a unique geographical and cultural space in New Spain. Nestled in the semi-arid eastern foothills of the Sierra Madre, Zacatecas was at once a northern frontier town and an outpost of colonial administration and Spanish ideals of civilized society. Although its distance allowed it a fair amount of autonomy from the viceregal authorities in the capital,

Zacatecas answered to the Audiencia of New Galicia located in Guadalajara, whose council held jurisdiction over that province. When an investigator from Mexico City was sent to carry out a visita, or investigative audit, in 1572, crown officials did not notify the Audiencia of New Galicia. Threatened by outside interference, local officials imprisoned the investigator and released him only after having received word from the Crown.1 Instances such as this reflect Zacatecan independence that grew out of a relative geographical isolation but also out of local concerns over mining practices and silver production. Although

Zacatecas became known for its markets and other economic outlets, the mining, refining, and exporting of silver remained the city’s raison d'etre.

From 1548, the year of the official founding of the city, the silver industry in

Zacatecas continued to flourish until the early decades of the seventeenth century. From around 1630 until the end of the seventeenth century, the mines of Zacatecas fell into a state of near abandonment and population levels reached their nadir—so much so that when a mining boom hit in the early eighteenth century, scholars refer to it as a revival.2 The mining district of Zacatecas remained the most important and prominent silver production center in

Mexico until its second decline in 1732.3 During its apogee in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is estimated that the mines generated roughly two million pesos of silver a year in revenue to the Crown, with particularly high outputs in the years 1570 to 1575,1590 to

1630, and 1690 to 1732.4 Crown taxes, especially the royal fifth, from Zacatecas supported several facets of the colonial economy, as they were sent to the viceregal capital of Mexico

City to pay off loans and to transatlantic traders to pay the crown’s debts. This was made possible through the silver trunk line, or camino real, which spanned Zacatecas to the port of

Veracruz, via Mexico City.

By the late sixteenth century, mining activities, along with diplomatic and administrative activities, transformed the city of Zacatecas into a large financial and commercial center, which according to Peter Bakewell was known to its citizens as the second city of New Spain.5 As the geographic heart and most prominent city in New Galicia,

Zacatecas assumed numerous political and financial responsibilities. It was the seat of the district’s caja real, the treasury office, and the administrative hub for a district whose jurisdiction included the communities of Mazapil, Avino, Nieves, San Martín, Sombrerete,

Chalchihuites, Fresnillo, Jérez, San Demetrio (Plateros), Charcas, Sierra de Pinos, and

Ramos.6 The prosperity of the mining economy attracted men and trade and provided the impetus for the creation of many satellite towns, the base for religious conversion, and the threshold for northern expansion. Even as mining production decreased and neighboring areas, such as Sombrerete, rose to prominence, Zacatecas remained the third most prosperous mining site in New Spain.7 Enduring several famines and recessions, the city reached what historian Dana Velasco Murillo calls its “apogee of geographic, political, and economic importance.” 8 This revival was achieved through the labor of the city’s indigenous and

African descended migrants.

Labor and the Mines

Soon after the conquest, in central Mexico, indigenous peoples were forced to labor for the benefit of the colony through what is known as the encomienda system. Many conquistadors received an encomienda, or a grant to rights to tribute from a village or pueblo, as a reward. Soon this system was deemed inhumane and the repartimiento system became the primary mode of extracting indigenous labor. Indigenous nobles would delegate work and then receive payment, of which a portion was to be paid to the workers themselves and a portion contributed to the tribute owed to the Crown by the pueblo. This repartimiento system was used to supply labor to the silver mines of Taxco, in central Mexico.9 Such draft labor arrangements were possible, in part, because sedentary groups had paid a similar tribute to the Mexica rulers of Tenochtitlan. This was not the case for the indigenous peoples living in and around the Zacatecas mining district, far away in the desert north. Considered chichimecs, a derogatory Nahuatl term for the semi-sedentary groups that included the

Zacatecos to the north of the city center, the Guachichiles to the east, the Tepehuanes to the northwest, and the Tepeques to the west, and the Caxcanes to the South (who were actually sedentary),10 these groups were not subject to the pre-Hispanic Triple Alliance or the so- called Aztec empire. As such, these groups challenged Spanish authority over their lands.

Although many of the indigenous laborers in the mines were free workers who were paid wages, the ongoing skirmishes throughout the sixteenth century provided Spaniards with indigenous slaves, taken prisoner in “just war.” Regulations from 1571 state that chichimecs captured in war could be enslaved for twenty years, given that they were males over the age

40 of twenty. Although it is only in the sixteenth century that indigenous slaves appear to have been numerous, many locals did not escape slavery even in the seventeenth century. In a

1672 fiscal report, a crown inspector remarked that sixty-two indigenous slaves had been found in Zacatecas.11 At this time, indigenous slavery had long been illegal. Ordinances also prohibited repartimiento labor.12 Yet even as early as the mid-sixteenth century, the majority of the mine laborers were free wage earners, most notably indigenous migrants from central

Mexico.13

Enslaved Africans were also an option for some wealthy mine owners; however, it was believed by Spaniards for much of the colonial period that Indians were inherently better suited to work in the mineshafts. In 1602, the Bishop Don Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, in his description of the city, remarked that,

The hardest task in the mines is to go down into them, for they are now very deep in many places, to dig, to cut the ore with crowbars and to carry it out. This job is done by Indians, not by Negro slaves, for it is known from experience that if the latter are in the mines but for a short time, they are filled with a thousand illnesses by the great cold and dampness that are found in the center of the mines.14

Bishop Mota y Escobar estimated that there were about 800 negro and mulato slaves working in and around the mines at the time of his visit. Peter Bakewell notes that African slaves contributed about one fifth of mining labor at that time.15

Exactly how many Africans labored in the mineshafts is not known. It is clear, however, that underground slave labor was not preferred. Enslaved African and African- descended women mostly served as domestic servants to the mine and refinery owners. Men more often had the unfortunate role of ore-refiner in the stamp mills. Refining practices changed over time; however, in the early days, the so-called patio process was the primary method of refining silver ore. This process involved the crushing, or stamping, of the silver

41 ore into a slime-like liquid, which was spread out over a small open patio, where salt and mercury, and at times copper sulfate, were added. Horses or mules would be driven around the patio to further mix the solution. After baking in the sun for weeks, the mercury would have amalgamated with the silver. From here, the amalgam was collected and subjected to intense heat in an oven built for this purpose, releasing the mercury vapors and leaving a pure ingot of silver. As mercury became scarcer, miners made attempts to recapture it, often in the form of catches or retorts built into the oven. Regardless, close contact with mercury vapors remained a health risk for the slaves, and later, free wage earners, who were required to handle such toxic materials.

Bakewell notes that as records of slave sales are only available in the notarial books of the city, and that many of the early records no longer exist, it is difficult to discern the extent that African slavery was relied upon in Zacatecas’s early years. However, we do have records of mine owners requesting special imports of African slaves due to labor scarcity.

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, studies of New Spain are rife with references to epidemics that wiped out significant portions of the indigenous population. This was also true of the African and casta population. It is no surprise then that such a special request was made to the Council of the Indies in 1636, proposing that an asiento, or monopoly contract, for 500 slaves a year be instituted.16 Deliberation continued for two years without resolution. Even so, slaves arrived in Portuguese vessels in significant numbers.

Indeed, the period between 1580 and 1640 marks the highest numbers of New Spain’s importation of African slaves. After the Spanish and Portuguese crowns split in 1640, the supply chain was broken and the enslaved population steadily dropped. Although many

42 criollo slaves were still sold throughout the colony, considerable pockets of free Afro- descent populations began to grow.

For Zacatecas, we do have fairly reliable sources beginning in the year 1656, when, according to surviving notarial records, sixty-eight slaves changed hands. Only twenty-eight of them were imported into the city itself. Bakewell documents a similar sales pattern for

1685.17 His figures reveal that the majority of transactions occurred between buyers and sellers within the city. This was presumably due in part to the relatively high price of transportation to the north. Dana Velasco Murillo has shown that from 1681-1700, the earliest uninterrupted twenty-year period in the records, the majority of the slaves sold in

Zacatecas were considered criollo, having been born in New Spain and served elsewhere before having been brought to the city. During this time period, the only exceptions to this

Mexican criollo majority were five slaves, originating from “Guinea” (1687), Lisbon (1687),

Cape Verde (1691), Angola (1693), and Cádiz (1701). 18 Only the slaves from Cape Verde and Guinea were labeled esclavo bozal, the term for an African slave recently arrived to the

Americas from Africa.

Population and Migration

Colonial population records are generally incomplete, and the relatively high number of migrants that moved in and out of Zacatecas makes tracing these numbers that much more difficult. During the decline years of the seventeenth century, the records are extremely fragmentary. Extant numbers are made all the more problematic in that the census takers were most interested in viable workers, and so, as is the case for much of New Spain, population counts tend to ignore women and children. Even so, surviving records do reflect

43 the population trends we have discerned from other accounts. These include reports of chroniclers and cabildo officials complaining that after news reached them of a lucky strike in another area, the city would soon become deserted. Such claims were exaggerated to be sure, but we can see demographic vacillations mirroring the productivity levels in the mines.

Although much of the city’s population remained stable throughout these fluctuations, laborers certainly migrated northward in search of better working conditions or higher wages.

The number of marriage petitions filed in Zacatecas over time also appears to reflect this relationship. We see for example that only 227 petitions were made between 1681 and 1690, reflecting the generally small population of the city at the time.19 Marriage petitions picked up in subsequent decades, but the 1730s marked the end of the second boom and the beginning of a citywide population decline. From then until 1770, high mercury prices, a lack of credit, and inadequate draining techniques led to a decrease in silver production.20

Zacatecas’s mid-eighteenth century mining bust contributed to the subsequent population decrease, which is visible in table 2.1.

Table 2.1: Population Estimates, Zacatecas, 1572-1770

1572 2,300° 1602 2,880M 1608 6,100A 1667 15,000-16,000G 1724 24,000GA 1732 44,000RB 1739 24,000° 1742 26,500v 1754 21,250° (omitting Panuco) 1760 25,000° 1770 16,260°

Source: Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians, 156.21

It is difficult to discern from the extant records what percentage of the total population was considered African-descended. The following chart with data composed by

Dana Velasco Murillo gives a semblance of these proportions when given or ascribed in the records. We know that by the end of the seventeenth century, Zacatecas’s casta categories

(mulato, lobo, and morisco) greatly outnumbered those labeled as negro, a term that was generally used to designate particularly dark skin and most often associated with slaves.22

Marriage records from 1681-1700 reveal that mulattos, at eighty percent, comprised the largest subgroup of African-descended petitioners.23 From the chart below, we can see that by the end of the eighteenth century, castas, specifically negros and mulatos, constituted the largest part of the city’s population.24

Table 2.2: Comparative Population of Zacatecas by Racial Categories, 1546-1799

Year Group Number % TP 1546 Chichimecs c. 4,500° 100 1572 Spanish 300° 13 Indians 1,500 65 Black slaves 500 22 c. 1602- 1605 Spanish vecinos 570M 20 Indian laborers 1,500 52 Slaves-all sex and 800 28 ages 1608 Spanish 1,500A 33 Indian laborers 1,500 33 Mestizo/mulato 1,500 33 1754 Spanish 7,000° 33 Indian 9,950 47 Others 4.300 20 c.1799 Spanish/mestizo 11,000° 33 Indian 9,500 29 Black/mulato 12,500 38

Source: Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians, 163.25

Marriage and Residential Patterns

Through criminal and civil cases, we see anecdotal evidence of informal interracial relationships throughout the city of Zacatecas. These relationships were not recognized by the church, but they should in no way be discounted as valid reflections of colonial experiences. However, we can rely on and quantify marriage petitions to give us an idea of spousal preference; these reflect social interactions but also workplace relations. Specifically, we see that during the early-eighteenth century mining boom years, there were more people in the city and hence more evidence of racial integration. We can look at these types of records as likely indicators of how socio-racial perceptions changed over time in Zacatecas.

It appears that when increased trade and silver production stimulated the local economy,

46 urban activity increased and perceptions of class and/or community outweighed racial designations or perceptions.

Through an analysis of marriage petitions, along with ecclesiastical census records,

Dana Velasco Murillo has shed light on late colonial endogamy and exogamy practices in and around Zacatecas, as well as residential patterns for the city. Specifically looking at the spousal selections of the indigenous population, Velasco Murillo found that during the period from 1681 to 1691, indigenous endogamous marriages were eighty-seven percent of the total petitions made. After 1691 until 1700, these numbers drop to fifty-six percent. As we might expect, this pattern reflects the mining revival and consequent population rise. Interestingly, during the boom years, there appear to have been more indigenous men petitioning to marry mulatas and negras than there are mulato and negro men petitioning to marry indigenous women.26 It is possible that these women were widows of mine workers or refiners, as increased mining activity would no doubt have been accompanied by increased mining accidents and refining-related deaths.

In examining ecclesiastical census records from 1671, Velasco Murillo found that much of the indigenous population chose to reside in the barrios on the outskirts of town. In contrast, a greater number of Afro-Zacatecans lived with their Spanish employers or owners in town. Velasco Murillo argues that these domestic arrangements reflect labor patterns.

Afro-Zacatecans constituted the primary domestic labor force, so it follows that many of them would live where they served. Afro-Spanish households commonly had from three to ten occupants of African descent. For example, Velasco Murillo notes that in the house of the alguacil mayor (chief justice) at least half the servants (ten out of twenty) were individuals of

African descent. In addition, several unmarked individuals and children were probably also

47 of mixed-race descent.27

The work that has thus far been done in exploring residential patterns focuses on domestic servants within Spanish households. These studies do not speak to the rest of the free Afro-Zacatecan residents living in the city. In examining marriage petitions from 1670 to

1730, we can compare the number of individuals who claimed Zacatecas as their hometown to those who were simply passing through. It is important to note that when discussing migration trends, these petitions only provide information on a select group of migrants, those who intended to marry. Despite these limitations, the marriage petitions provide insight into the origins and settlement patterns of mulato and negro migrants, as well as those who already permanently resided in the city.

Table: 2.3 Marriage Petitions by Mulatos/Negros Libres, 1670-1730

Migrant Resident Decade Resident Resident Migrant Migrant Incomplete 1670 0 0 0 0 1 1680 11 6 3 7 9 1690 6 6 1 15 10 1700 11 4 2 18 10 1710 25 30 4 27 20 1720 106 84 10 97 0 1730 100 86 16 122 2

Migrant  Resident  Decade Resident Resident Migrant Migrant Incomplete 1670 0 0 0 0 1 1680 31% 17% 8.00% 19% 25% 1690 16% 16% 3.00% 39% 26% 1700 24% 9% 4% 40% 22% 1710 24% 28% 4% 25% 19% 1720 37% 28% 4% 33% 0 1730 31% 26% 5% 37% 0.60% Source: APZ, Database, Matrimonios, Informaciones, Indians, Negros, y Castas, 1670-1780, Cajas 60-70.

Property Ownership

In addition to reflecting the growing Afro-Zacatecan population, as well as the number of men and women of African descent traveling through the city during the mining boom years, marriage petitions also reflect the significant percentage of those who considered themselves residents of the city. We also see these individuals as property owners in surviving records, mostly made up of civil suits dealing with house sales, purchases, and transfers. These records reflect a permanent Afro-Zacatecan presence within the city center, but the cases I am introducing here also reveal a number of different ways that individuals could acquire property.

According to Bakewell, by the turn of the seventeenth century, ownership of urban property was evenly distributed among the residents of the city.28 In the absence of census records, we can use the civil suits to determine where Afro-Zacatecans would have actually been able to afford to live. As renting was a major source of income for many residents, we can assume that many Afro-Zacatecans rented, rather than owned, their own homes.

However, in these records we see evidence of Afro-Zacatecans, usually women, owning property, which sometimes stayed in their families for generations. These records also leave out individuals who owned their property and chose not to sell prior to this periodization. We may never know their total numbers. Nonetheless, through the following cases, we can discern that Afro-Zacatecan ownership of urban property was considered quite normal.

Furthermore, we can see certain neighborhoods, or barrios, within the city center as spaces that Afro-Zacatecans not only inhabited but also had a stake in. These spaces include the barrio del pedregoso, which Velasco Murillo describes as a multi-ethnic neighborhood just west of the city center and north of the indigenous town of Tonalá Chepinque,29 as well as a community which was partially owned by the Mercedarian convent, known as the barrio de

San Agustín, located to the east of the city center edging up to the hill of La Bufa.30

In 1710, Nicolasa del Arroyo, mulata libre, petitioned the Audiencia of New Galicia in

Guadalajara to acknowledge her inheritance of a house and sum of money given to her by the deceased Juana del Arroyo for her years of service.31 It appears that one Juan del Valle, a second heir of Juana del Arroyo, refused to acknowledge Nicolasa’s inheritance and thus refused to allow her the house or the twenty pesos willed to her. After five years of litigation,

Nicolasa eventually won the case and occupied the house, which was listed as being worth

150 pesos. Five years later, in a civil suit against her neighbor, Juan de Guizar, we learn that

Nicolasa still lived in Juana’s old home. Nicolasa complained to the local authorities that water from Guizar’s house had caused damage to her own and argued that Guizar should be responsible for the repairs. Specifically, Nicolasa tells us that occasionally the Jesuits made a trail of some sort that blocked the flow of water from Guizar’s house. In Guizar’s testimony, we learn that both homes were located in the Pedregoso neighborhood, which was relatively close to the Jesuit compound in the city. In the end, both parties were required to each pay half the costs of the repair. Apparently, it was not an option to petition the Jesuits for compensation.

From the original property transfer record and the civil suit filed by Nicolasa del

Arroyo, we learn that Afro-Zacatecans could occasionally acquire property through inheritance from former employers or slave-owners. However, Nicolasa’s two cases reveal a few inconsistencies. Namely, in the 1710 audiencia edict, she says that the house was granted to her for her own years of service without pay. In her suit against Guizar, she claims authority over the home by referring to her inheritance, but tells us that the house was given to her on behalf of her mother, Sebastiana del Arroyo, who served and nursed a sick Juana

50 del Arroyo for twenty years. In repayment for the years of caring and devotion, she granted the house to her caregiver’s daughter. No reference is made in either document to Sebastiana or Nicolosa as slaves. It is possible that either or both of these women were in fact former slaves and did not wish to remind the officials of their “blemished” pasts. Then again, it is possible that both mother and daughter simply served the ailing Juana without compensation, but with room and board for those two decades. It is possible that Nicolasa grew up in that house, and saw her inheritance as not only a source of wealth but as her home. We can never know these things for sure, but through Nicolasa’s cases we can see that not only local officials but also the high court in Guadalajara honored such inheritances. The fact that this humble dispute reached the regional circuit court and was heard is remarkable.

Around the time that Nicolasa and her neighbor were battling over repair costs on the west side of the city, Juana Luisa, a free mulata, was closing a sale on a house she owned on the east side to a man named Nicolás de León.32 In the título de comprador, or buyer’s title, we learn that the house site was nine-and-a-half varas (a vara being about thirty-three feet) wide by thirteen varas deep and located next to a stream, rising up to the Shrine of Our Lady of the Remedies (near the Mercedarian convent), valued at twenty-nine pesos. Juana Luisa notes that she is the legitimate wife of Pablo Rodríguez, but this is the last we hear of her husband in the document. Juana Luisa reinforced her ownership by stating that the property was inherited from her mother. The property had been given to Juana Luisa’s mother by her mother, also named Catarina de Molina. Juana Luisa refers to the original title, transferred to her grandmother by one Juan Baptista Díaz on January 31, 1653. The house had stayed in the family then for sixty-six years. This case reflects the permanence of this Afro-Zacatecan family in the city center, but also the role of women in owning property and retaining power

51 of it.

On Sept. 5, 1718, in the barrio of San Agustín, Petra de la Encarnación, a free mulata, purchased a solar, or plot, of ten-and-a-half varas from the Mercedarian convent for forty pesos.33 The property included two small houses, each with a small living space, kitchen, and yard. The document also reveals the sale of several sites within this community by the convent, although no mention is made of the reason for doing so. Religious orders often made a fair amount of their income through rents, so it seems an odd choice for the convent to sell their property instead. Regardless of their reasons for selling, Petra de la Encarnación was able to take advantage of this opportunity to become a homeowner. Three years later, she and her husband, Francisco de Atilano, also described as a mulato libre, sold one of the houses on that site to a José Montalvo for 190 pesos. It is possible that the mining boom had driven up the value of the property, or that the convent, in financial straits, was willing to sell the site for less than its true value. It is also possible that the couple had made improvements to the houses as well.

If the Mercedarian convent was hurting for money in 1718, they had obviously recovered by 1725. In January of the same year, the convent made a donation to a free mulata, Pascuala de Salazar, and her husband, Antonio Díaz, of a portion of a site that was eight by fourteen varas, located behind the convent leading to La Bufa, which rose on the east side of the city.34 In the document, a friar, speaking on behalf of the Mercedarians, notes that the donation was made as a payment and reward for Salazar’s assistance and personal service over many years to the convent. Again, we do not know if these years of service were entirely without payment or if, at one point in time, Pascuala was in fact a slave of the

52 convent. We do know, however, that the brothers of the convent felt Pascuala deserved the property, which belonged not only to her but to her heirs as well.

These cases demonstrate a striking presence of African-descended women owning and controlling the sale and inheritance of their property in mid-colonial Zacatecas. In looking at women of indigenous descent in the same period, Velasco Murillo has found similar instances whereby women not only were the buyers of their homes, but also through inheritance transmission, provided their daughters and granddaughters with the opportunities to accumulate capital through renting and moneylending. Such was the case of María

Gerónima (surname unknown), who bequeathed two houses in the same Pedregoso neighborhood to her two daughters, Petrona López and María de los Angeles.35 Velasco

Murillo found that the sisters rented out the properties and divided the income. During this time, Petrona acquired two more houses in the same neighborhood. In her will, she left one of the houses to her niece Gertrudis de la Cruz and a small house with a garden to Mariana

Luna, a young orphan that Petrona raised, according to her words, much like a daughter. She also arranged for one of her houses to be sold, which would cover her burial expenses. The last of her houses was bequeathed, with her remaining possessions, to her sister María.

These cases reveal a range of options available to Afro-Zacatecans (and also indigenous women) who hoped to acquire their own property. There is certainly a range in the value of these properties as well. Bakewell found that in 1688 the average home in

Zacatecas was worth anywhere from 40 to 800 pesos depending on its size and location.

These houses were generally just one story, with a living space, a kitchen, a yard, corral, and access to water.36 For the late eighteenth century, Richard Garner analyzed a list of property values within the city, which he found to reflect the “economic importance and dominance of

53 the center of the city.”37 This was evidently true despite Zacatecas’s lack of a grid plan, a consequence of its rugged, mining camp origins.

Garner’s analysis included house sales recorded between 1760 and 1795 from the Plaza de García at the northern end of the valley through the Plaza Mayor to the aptly named barrio of Barrionuevo at the southern end of the valley. On the outskirts of the city, houses rarely sold for more than 200 pesos and generally for less than 100 pesos. In the heart of the city, houses usually sold for between 500 and 1,000 pesos. Houses on the streets of Tacuba, Santo

Domingo, Zapateros, and San Agustín often sold for several thousand pesos, with the most valuable properties located between the Plaza Mayor south to the Plaza de Villareal, bounded to the east by Calle de Tacuba and to the west by Calle de Santo Domingo.38 Taking into account the obvious inflation of prices by the late eighteenth century, we can see that although Afro-Zacatecans clearly owned urban property, their homes were valued on the low end of the scale. This point should be taken into account, especially in the next chapter. Afro-

Zacatecans owned homes and businesses, but if we can trust the records, very few individuals attained any significant wealth.

We know that free mulatos and mulatas had been working in Zacatecas long before the revival of the mining industry in the first years of the eighteenth century. Early accounts note their presence, such as that of Bishop Mota y Escobar, who remarked of people of African descent, “commonly they are bad and vicious, both the free and the slaves; but the saying is there [in Zacatecas], bad to have them, but much worse not to have them.”39 Most accounts in the secondary literature refer to single men of African descent, often as cowhands, muleteers, and mine workers. And yet we know that there was a significant sedentary free

Afro-descent population, including women, who considered Zacatecas their home. Some

54 owned property, but probably most of these men and women lived within Spanish households as domestic servants, alongside African slaves and paid indigenous workers, as well on the outlying haciendas and mining camps.

Of those Afro-Zacatecans who lived within the urban center of the city in their own homes, working in the shops and markets that made Zacatecas famous, we would like to know more. The records offer us glimpses of their lives. These individuals will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters. For now, it is important to understand that Zacatecas was home to a significant population of free mulattos and African slaves, many who were involved in the primary industry of silver mining and refining, but also many who were not.

In exploring the circumstances of those who were not, we can better visualize the city of

Zacatecas, as opposed to the mining district of Zacatecas, as a community of urban residents, churchgoers, and market participants.

1 Peter Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700 (Cambridge: University Press, 1971) 86.

2 David Brading, “Mexican Silver Mining: The Revival of Zacatecas” in The Hispanic American Historical Review 50, no. 4 (1970): 665–681.

3 David A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge: University Press, 1971).

4 Peter Bakewell, “Zacatecas: an Economic and Social Outline of a Silver Mining District, 1547-1700” in Provinces of Early Mexico: Variants of Spanish American Regional Evolution (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, University of California, 1976) 227.

5 Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico, 40.

6 Dana Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546-1806 (PhD diss., Los Angeles: UCLA, 2009) 4.

7 Ibid. 9; Brading, "Mexican Silver Mining," 308-319.

8 Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City, 6.

9 Robert Haskett, "Our Suffering with the Taxco Tribute": Involuntary Mine Labor and Indigenous Society in Central New Spain" in The Hispanic American Historical Review 71, no. 3 (1991): 447-475.

10 Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City, 33-42.

11 Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico, 122.

12 Ibid. Bakewell notes that although the ordinances themselves have not come to light in the archives, many other documents reference them, often in complaint against their restrictions. Bakewell makes mention of an early reference in April of 1583 by a judge in Guadalajara.

13 Ibid. 124.

14 Alonso de la Mota y Escobar and Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas, Descripción Geográfica de Los Reynos De Nueva Galicia, Vizcaya, y Leon (Mexico: 1930) 68.

15 Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico, 124; no mention is made to free mulattos working underground, however, we know from other sources that this occurred.

16 Ibid. 200.

17 Ibid. 123.

18 Dana Velasco Murillo, “Mine Workers and Weavers: Afro-indigenous labor Arrangements and Interactions in Puebla and Zacatecas, 1600-1700” in City Indians in Spain's American Empire: Urban Indigenous Society in Colonial Mesoamerica and Andean South America, 1530-1810, edited by Dana Velasco Murillo, Mark Lentz, and Margarita R. Ochoa (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012) 110.

19 Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City, 169.

20 Ibid. 172.

21 Original data corresponds to superscripts: G= Gerhard, The North Frontier, 158-159; M= Mota y Escobar, Descripción Geográfica, 145; A= Anonymous, Relación de Nuestra Señora, 182, 185; AR=Arregui, Descripción de la Nueva Galicia, 125; O=Olague, Breve Historia de Zacatecas, 81-83; RB= Rivera Bernardez, Descripción Muy Breve, 48; GA= Garner, Study of a Late Colonial Mexican City, 73; V=Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians, 156.

22 Velasco Murillo, “Mine Workers and Weavers,” 111.

23 Ibid.

24 Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City, 187.

25 Original data corresponds to superscripts: M=Mota y Escobar, Descripción Geográfica, 145; A= Anonymous, Relación de Nuestra Señora, 182, 185; O=Olague, Breve Historia de Zacatecas, 81-83.

26 Velasco Murillo, “Mine Workers and Weavers,” 118.

27 Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City, 190.

28 Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico, 53.

29 Dana Velasco Murillo, “Laboring Above Ground: Indigenous Women in New Spain’s Silver-Mining District, Zacatecas, Mexico, 1620-1770” in Hispanic American Historical Review 93.1 (2013): 13.

30 It appears that the barrios within the city center during this time all fell within a single parish. However, several Indian parishes existed on the outskirts of the city.

31 AHEZ, Casas y Solares, Compra, Venta, y Traspasos, Caja 1, Exp. 11, 1710-1715.

32 AHEZ, Casas y Solares, Compra, Venta, y Traspasos, Caja 1, Exp. 24, 1719.

33 AHEZ, Casas y Solares, Compra, Venta, y Traspasos, Caja 1, Exp. 32, 1718.

34 AHEZ, Casas y Solares, Compra, Venta, y Traspasos, Caja 1, Exp. 34, 1725.

35 Velasco Murillo, “Indigenous Women in New Spain’s Silver-Mining District,” 14.

36 Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico, 51.

37 Richard Garner, Zacatecas, 1750-1821: The Study of a Late Colonial Mexican City (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1970) 41.

38 Ibid. 43. Garner notes that it was customary in New Spain for merchants to reside in the upper floors of their stores. As most of the stores with the highest-valued inventory were located in this vicinity, it would follow that, although a few of these property owners were miners, the vast majority of them were wealthy merchants.

39 Mota y Escobar, Descripción Geográfica de Los Reynos De Nueva Galicia, 66.

Chapter 3: Creoles, Commerce, and Community

The previous chapter served to demonstrate how the colonial city of Zacatecas developed over time and how a sizable free and enslaved Afro-Mexican population came to live and grow there. In this chapter, I aim to provide an analysis of the archival records of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the period of time leading up to and during the district’s great mid-colonial mining revival, that relate to Afro-Zacatecans and their criminal and civil litigation, occupations, guild memberships, and market activities within the core urban district and their implications for a creole urban community. This analysis engages with the concept of creolization and the ideas put forth by Herman Bennett, namely what he has called afro-creole-consciousness, which was presented in the introductory chapter. In examining the following cases of Afro-Zacatecan litigation, I argue that there was a genuine, urban Afro-Zacatecan community by at least 1700, and that they made active use of the legal system, crafting their testimonies in ways that played on perceptions of honor, respectability, and also social hierarchy. I also argue that these community members were actively engaged in their local economy and city markets. In applying the ideas of “creole- consciousness,” I argue that Afro-Zacatecans were able to successfully own urban shops and achieve positions of authority because they were members of a creole community. By maintaining permanent residency in the city, individuals and families accumulated social capital, as well as an understanding of their legal rights, thus enabling them to succeed in business, craft social perceptions, and occasionally even attain manumission.

As colonists in New Spain pushed into the northern frontier, authorities wished to steer indigenous labor into the mines, and indigenous household labor and market involvement was often restricted. These restrictions encouraged an African presence in the urban setting. As the available pool of indigenous labor declined, Spaniards employed ever- increasing numbers of free mulattos in their households and workshops. Urban slaves also worked the streets as carriers of people and goods, becoming indispensible to colonial city life. In this urban setting, they acquired a cultural insight that was pivotal to navigating colonial society. Through the use of the Spanish language and a learned legal consciousness that was composed of an understanding of their rights and obligations, familiarity with the legal system, and the ability to initiate litigation, urban slaves and free mulatto servants pressed for autonomy. In doing so, many of these individuals became integral members of a creole community that could own homes and businesses and work for decent wages.

Very little work has been done to examine the criminal and civil judicial cases brought to court by Afro-Zacatecans.1 However, these cases provide unique insights into the daily experiences of the petitioners and reveal an African presence outside of the mines and the haciendas that other scholars have mentioned. Specifically, through petitions to the local court, we see men and women who actively engaged in the city markets, owned businesses and property, took on positions of authority, joined guilds, and sought out litigation when they felt that they or their families were wronged. Through civil litigation we also see a number of cases that discuss letters of freedom, demonstrating that many individuals actively pursued manumission. In examining these different themes within the judicial records, we can gain a better understanding of urban Afro-Zacatecan society and the way individuals and

60 families immersed themselves into what Herman Bennett calls “the cultural practices of power.”

In 1729, Francisco Javier Cuervo, a free mulatto, filed a suit against Antonio Quinto, also described as a mulato libre, whom he accused of kidnapping his wife, María Josefa.2

The testimonies given by all three parties create a twisted tale. From Cuervo, we are told that

Quinto, who was already serving out a previous sentence, attempted to kidnap his wife,

María. María’s testimony reflects this same story, but with further damning accusations against Antonio, noting to the authorities that Antonio slapped her across the face. Perhaps we are to assume that this was Antonio’s reaction to María’s resistance? Antonio, however, told the story very differently. At eight o’clock at night on Holy Thursday, María supposedly came to Antonio’s home, having previously asked him to run away with her to Fresnillo, a town about thirty-six miles northwest of Zacatecas. Francisco potentially knew about their arrangement, or otherwise found his wife’s nighttime excursion odd, because Antonio reveals that Cuervo, having followed María to Antonio’s house, confronted them. The details within these testimonies certainly raise a number of questions, which the alcalde mayor shared, no doubt. The end of the document reveals that the officials, if they were to process this case with integrity, would require a hearing.

This criminal case, and the multitudes of cases like it, reveals that Afro-Zacatecans did not only initiate litigation to combat social inequality or racial exclusions. They also utilized the legal system to further personal concerns and, often, social reputations. Although

Francisco Javier Cuervo’s case is riddled with contradictions, it reveals a number of ways that individuals could have tried to restore their social perception and honor. Cuervo, a shop owner in town, was most likely well known in the city. If his wife had left him for a known

61 criminal, he would certainly have been disgraced. In an attempt to salvage both of their reputations, it appears that Francisco and María crafted their own version of the story, in which Antonio was at fault. Wouldn’t the courts accept the word of a productive business owner over that of a sentenced criminal? Although we do not know if this case ever made it to the audiencia, it seems that the local authorities in Zacatecas were not so easily fooled by

María and her husband’s tale.

Many of the criminal cases involving Afro-Zacatecans include such personal grievances, physical abuse, and domestic troubles. We might expect these types of cases to emerge in a place as isolated as Zacatecas, where physical violence was often relied upon to settle disputes. However, we also see that Afro-Zacatecans engaged in civil litigation which, outside of notarial records, is where we see much of the information pertaining to manumission. African slaves could be manumitted in a number of ways. We do not know how common manumission was overall, but when it occurred slave owners would offer freedom to their slaves as part of their last will and testament. Slaves were quite valuable, however, so many owners chose to retain their ownership and allow their heirs to inherit their slaves. Occasionally, slave owners would allow their slaves the opportunity to purchase their freedom. In 1707, Agustina de los Santos, a mulata and domestic slave of María Gertrudis de

Zúñiga, was able to purchase her freedom for 380 pesos, a fairly high rate.3 In 1725, we see that a woman from Nuevo León, Doña Nicolasa de Anda y Altamirano, had allowed her slave, Joseph López, to purchase his freedom for only 200 pesos.4 Once these Afro-

Zacatecans received their carta de libertad, they were legally free. However, these arrangements were not always so cut and dry.

At some earlier point in time, Francisco Antonio Cumplido, a negro esclavo, had made a deal with his master, the physician Antonio Cumplido, a resident of the city. In 1707,

Francisco filed a suit against the doctor, claiming that he had gone against this agreement.5

Essentially, Francisco claimed that the doctor had allowed him to run a tendejón, a small shop or booth, selling groceries, so as to accumulate enough money to purchase his freedom.

If masters did not always intend their slaves to purchase their freedom with such funds, many urban residents encouraged their slaves to work in such a trade. Unfortunately for Francisco, his agreement was never recorded before a notary. Under Roman law, peculio, the assets and money that Francisco had earned and acquired legally belonged to the doctor. The doctor, who was indebted to other residents in Zacatecas, decided to liquidate Francisco’s assets to pay back his creditors. When Francisco protested, the doctor had him imprisoned and threatened to have him kicked out of town. In this suit, Francisco attempted to force the doctor to testify under oath about their previous agreement. The final page of the record appears to be a decree by local officials in favor of the master. It is possible that Francisco appealed this decision, although I did not find any further record of this case. Nonetheless,

Francisco’s decision to pursue litigation, even after having been jailed and threatened, reflects a strong willingness to take legal action. The fact that he sought out legal counsel, through the “defender of the poor,” shows a deeper understanding of the legal system and his rights as a resident of the city, regardless of his status as property. The many other Afro-

Zacatecan petitioners discussed below demonstrated a similar legal consciousness.

Local Economy and Markets:

“The haciendas de minas, with their long sheds, stables, houses, and corrals, occupied most of the space along the banks of the streams passing through the city; and were strung out along the stream towards the mines in the north and down the valley to south-east. They were the first signs of habitation seen by the traveller, …[who] would have been less immediately interested in the slow processes of milling and refining ores than in one of the principal consequences of the silver makers’ activities: the thriving markets and shops of Zacatecas.”6

In discussing the city market, Peter Bakewell laments, “the Zacatecas of the market place, the warehouse, and the shop is not the one celebrated by modern writers on the city and by local singers of its colonial glory. Yet commerce was an activity second only to mining.”7 Since the 1970’s, when Bakewell was writing, more research has been done on the markets of Zacatecas, which will provide an important context in exploring the litigation pursued by Afro-Zacatecan petitioners. As in the case of Francisco Cumplido above, much of the civil litigation involving Afro-Zacatecans dealt with the market and local economy.

Judicial records reveal concerns over treatment of the wagon and mule trains, payments for goods, and the conduct of the various officials associated with market monopolies governed by the colonial authorities.

As early as 1602, Bishop Mota y Escobar remarked that in Zacatecas, “few are rich, and those are miners; but among the middling people there are many with fortunes of twenty, thirty, or forty thousand pesos, and there may be three or four worth a hundred thousand, and all these are merchants with public shops.”8 Zacatecas, although certainly much smaller than the metropolises of Mexico City or the mining capital of Potosí, was nevertheless a sprawling urban center that presented travellers with an unusual sight. Traveling along the primary road that cut through the twin peaks, the Cerros de Bufa and Grilla, one would have almost immediately stumbled into a bustling market, where tendejones, booths, were scattered along the main plaza beneath the parish church.

Given the city’s climate and terrain, “largely useless for cultivation,”9 the people of

Zacatecas were hardly capable of growing enough produce to feed the majority of the population. Instead, fruits and vegetables were grown in market gardens (huertas) in the valleys on the outskirts of town, especially the main valley that led out to the southeast.10

Elite homes within the city center had garden plots, yet even these probably provided no more than herbs and a few vegetables. It appears that for the most part families were dependent on the market for their food. As foodstuffs and wares were imported to the city, traders and farmers were required to declare their consignments with the authorities within three days of arrival so as to assess a fixed price.11 In this sense, the markets of Zacatecas were not “free.”

However, the oft-repeating ordinances requiring declaration reflects the frequency with which traders no doubt disregarded these policies. Zacatecas’s relative isolation made it easier to challenge city authorities. Bakewell notes that although goods other than food were also subject to declaration and would be taxed, in practice, prices for these items were largely unregulated. This was in keeping with Spanish law, which emphasized allegedly fair prices for basic foodstuffs. Items that were regularly imported included textile goods from Puebla,

Campeche, Spain, and China; soap from Puebla, leather goods (especially shoes) from

Michoacán; and earthenware from Guadalajara and Michoacán. Foreign imports brought from Mexico City included iron and steel, necessary items for mining and refining.12

Once these goods were declared, they were distributed through the market in the public plaza or through retail shops. Bakewell notes that toward the late seventeenth century, of these permanently established shops, the most common was the pulpería, followed by stores selling dry goods.13 In describing the public shops in the city, Bishop Mota y Escobar

65 mentioned the various technical trades, or guilds, of which there were many, such as tailors, shoemakers, blacksmiths, and carpenters, all of which were made up of mulattos and Indians.

14 In addition to these occupations, a list of guild members from the eighteenth century mentioned barbers, water carriers, porters, and hat makers.15 Others dealt in a myriad of goods, including clothing, cured meats, confections, and charcoal and wood.

Historian Richard Garner, in his description of the city’s geography, notes that by this time the center of the city had a highly commercial character and that most all of Zacatecas’s retail businesses were located in the main plaza and in the adjacent streets and plazas. In

1780, he found there to be sixty-seven stores and pulperías of varying sizes, which he organized according to their location, proximity to the main plaza, and inventory value. 16

His analysis reveals that twenty percent of those inventories were located in the main plaza itself with twelve percent in the plaza San Agustín, twenty-five percent on the Calle Tacuba, ten percent on the Calle Parroquia, and thirteen percent on the Calle Zapateros. As the store locations moved away from the plaza mayor, the value of the inventories declined.

Interestingly though, although the combined value of the inventories for the stores on the

Plaza Mayor de San Francisco, the farthest location from the plaza mayor, was only 800 pesos, it had the highest number of individual stores for any area. Most of these had an inventory of fifty pesos or less.17

A visita general of the “tiendas, tendejones, y pulperías” in October of 1710 and

February of 1711 sheds light on the number of stores operating during the mining boom.18

The 1710 inventory lists a total of eighty-nine stores, of which thirty-six were tendejones and fifty-three were tiendas. Of the tiendas, thirteen of the shop owners were given the honorific of “Don.” These numbers rise in 1711 with a total of 118 shops, with no distinction given to

66 their size. Nineteen tienda owners in this inventory were considered “Dons.” The record does not reveal the locations of the individual shops, however, it is likely that the commercial areas that Garner found for the late eighteenth century occupied the same general spaces of the city in the earlier part of the century. In these inventories, no mention is made of socio- racial categories, with the exception of a man by the name of Nicholas moreno. However, within this list, we do learn that Sebastiana Velásquez’s sons Cristóbal and Francisco went on to own their own tendejón and tienda. These documents then show us that the local retail stores and booths within the public plazas were very much thriving during this time.

Although surely a number of these men and women were indigenous, Dana Velasco Murillo has shown that much of the municipality’s indigenous population preferred to live and work within their barrios on the edges of town.19 Furthermore, as mining productivity increased, local authorities encouraged indigenous persons to seek work in the mines.20 And so, although we cannot know how many of these shop keepers were of African descent, it is likely that many of them were.

Flour and the Alhóndiga

Of the imported goods brought into the city, flour (and its distribution) remained a difficult problem for colonial authorities. Maize was considered a more important food-stuff, as it was among the traditional staple crops of the indigenous population, as well as an essential fodder for much of the edible livestock and mules in the area. However, sold at higher prices, wheat flour was available for those who could afford it. Much of the grain was supplied from distant regions, most notably Michoacán and the Bajío, located fairly nearby, south of the city.21 Declarations of consignments were technically required at checkpoints,

67 however, it must not have been that difficult for individuals to avoid the camino real and to bring in their own private supplies of grain for their own use or sale without declaring them to the authorities. For this reason, Bakewell remarks that his analysis of the alhóndiga records is problematic. 22

Within the city proper, the distribution and marketing of grain was controlled from the early years of the seventeenth century by the town council. Cabildos in New Spain, as in

Europe, attempted to supervise supplies of food within their jurisdictions. The agency for storing and redistributing cereals was the alhóndiga, or granary, to which all grain entering the city had to be taken before sale. The producer or carrier declared the size of the consignment he brought before the supervisor, paid an excise tax on it, and was then permitted to sell it at the alhóndiga, but nowhere else. The object was to control the retail price of grains by ensuring that all transactions took place under supervision. It was hoped that this would prevent attempts at cornering the market and profiteering.23

The alhóndiga, a ramshackle building near the main plaza, was established in 1623, in part to monitor prices and sales, but also to secure dues for the municipality. The Audiencia of Guadalajara issued an ordinance, following those set in place in San Luis Potosí in 1609, whereby the cabildo could charge a duty of two reales on each incoming carga, or mule-load, of wheat flour and one real on each carga of maize. In 1696, control of the alhóndiga was transferred from the cabildo to a private contract, which was auctioned out for a two-year lease.24 Juan Ignacio de Algarra y Loyola successfully bid for the first contract, agreeing to pay the city 1,400 pesos a year. After several supply shortages, in 1693 the alhóndiga began to function alongside a pósito, a storage facility intended to bank against future shortages, but

68 that also acted as a depository of municipal funds used to buy grain when the market was favorable.25

The contract holder, and before this, the alcalde, of the alhóndiga was also responsible for regulating the freight charges imposed on the traders who brought in flour on mule trains and carts. This often caused tensions between traders, the local authorities, and the buyers. In the early seventeenth century, Pedro de Huerta, acting on behalf of the laborers and cartwrights of Aguascalientes, filed a complaint with the local court over what he called a deviation in the conduct and freight charges for bringing flour to the refining haciendas around the city.26 Huerta noted that his men provided supplies throughout New Galicia, as far as Guadalajara, and that the alcalde of the alhóndiga was acting “criminally” by interfering with the “derechos y leyes” of the hacienda owners. In playing on the needs of the ever- important silver producers, the traders hoped to sway the local authorities.

Based on descriptions and accounts of these wagon and mule train teams from all over New Spain, we know that men of African descent were often employed in this line of business. Occasionally they led their own team, trading various goods along the northern frontier. In other instances, we see how they acted as agents for employers engaged in the trade of specific goods, in this case, flour. In a suit against a deceased client and her son, we learn of Miguel de la Cruz, labeled as a mulato libre, who in 1715 filed a suit against Doña

Nicolasa de Arzola on behalf of his employer, Capt. Alonso Genera, for the 200 pesos that she had owed him.27 Miguel de la Cruz, a resident of Zacatecas, worked as a middleman, or encomendero, (as in someone “entrusted” with shipments) for Genera, who actually lived in

Nuevo León. Luckily, de Arzola’s son, Don Alonso, paid de la Cruz in full.

A year later, Isidro Peguero, also described as a mulato libre and an encomendero de arinas, was on the other side of such a conflict. It appears that Don Cristóbal Brihuega y

Lucío, a resident and merchant of the city, extended a bill of exchange, a libranza, worth

1,000 pesos to Isidro, on the recommendation of a Don Juan de Arostigui, a resident of

Irapuato (a town south of Guanajuato).28 Isidro had originally agreed to pay Brihuega back

100 pesos each week, but according to Brihuega, as of June of the past year, he had only paid a total of 73 pesos and 7 reales. Consequently, Brihuega petitioned to have Isidro imprisoned and his possessions seized. Unless one earned wages over time in the mining industry, it was difficult to amass the necessary capital to go into business on one’s own. It is likely that many traders and merchants of African descent were forced to rely on loans from well-off merchants in the city.29 Unfortunately, if these loan recipients were unable to repay their debts in a timely manner, they could easily have found themselves in a predicament much like Isidro’s. Although he was arrested and briefly incarcerated, his absence from the market seems to have caused his employer a fair amount of trouble. It appears that another employee of Captain Don Pedro de Baptista de Retana, Juan de Yduya, stepped in and agreed to pay the remaining 926 pesos owed to Brihuega within six months.

El Rastro: Monopolizing Meat, Tallow, and Candles

If the lands surrounding Zacatecas were ill-suited for cultivation, they were well suited for cattle ranching, especially the western flood plains of the Río Grande. And so, although the city was required to import grains from a significant distance, meat was readily available. The cabildo supervised asientos with local breeders to provision the city through the rastro, or slaughterhouse. Bakewell notes the earliest reference to this institution was in

1587, where complaints were made about the riots and fights between Indians, free mulattos,

70 and slaves from different refineries, who were sent on Saturdays to collect the week’s supply of meat for their mining gangs, or cuadrillas. Despite this, in his inspection tour of New

Galicia in 1609, the Licenciado Gaspar de la Fuente remarked that in the absence of a regular supply by contract, “the indiscriminate slaughter of cattle” by the inhabitants of Zacatecas was seriously diminishing the livestock of New Galicia.30 Soon after this visit, regulation attempts were stepped up, so that contractors paid a fixed fee in cash to the city and were responsible for supplying, at fixed prices, beef and mutton, as well as offal, hides, and tallow.

A specific amount of meat was to be sent each week to all of the monasteries and the prison; bulls were to be provided for feast days two or three times a year. In return, the contract holder obtained a monopoly of the meat and tallow supply to the city.31

By 1715, the contract for the rastro was leased to Joseph Fernández de Bustamante, labeled as prieto. Although there are no extant cases that reflect a breach of his rights for the meat supply, there are two suits he filed in the summer of that same year, both dealing with the manufacture and sale of candles, which were made from tallow and were critical to the mining industry. On August 5, 1715, Joseph Fernández filed a suit against Francsico

Menchaca for making and selling his own candles.32 The actual sale of the candles does not seem to have been the problem. Instead, it seems that Menchaca went outside of the municipal rastro and manufactured the candles himself. In doing so, Menchaca put his customers in the position of purchasing candles that might not meet the municipal standard.

The rastro administrator’s second suit, this time against a Vicente Ferrel, claimed that Ferrel was selling badly made candles.33 As the candles in the city were supposed to be manufactured according to criteria set by the city, Ferrel’s selling of sub-standard candles was technically illegal. Although we do not know the result of Joseph Fernández’s suit

71 against Ferrel, we do learn that Menchaca was ordered to pay a fine of twenty-five pesos.

Within five years, Joseph Fernández would go on to become a judge, regidor y juez fiel ejecutor, within the local court.34

The examination of these types of goods being sold throughout the city fell under the job description of the agent of weights, measures, and balances, “el corridor de pesos, medidos, y balanzas.” Through a suit filed against him in October of 1715, we learn that a man named Cristóbal Suacedo, a free mulatto, held this position.35 Afro-Zacatecans held other unique positions within the city center. In a series of transcriptions relating to the will and testament of Capitan Don Juan de Infante, a local administrator of the Holy Office of the

Inquisition, we see references to a town crier, pregonero público, by the name of Pascual

Francisco, labeled as a mulato, through the years of 1724 through 1729.36 In this case,

Pascual appears in the record auctioning off many of the Capitan’s belongings. Though neither of these records reveals significant information about these two individuals or their circumstances, it is interesting to note that they held these urban occupations.

By examining these various cases, I have aimed to demonstrate how Herman

Bennett’s ideas of “creole-consciousness” and “cultural practices of power” are visible within the records of the city center of Zacatecas. In approaching the judicial records in this way, we can see how Afro-Zacatecans made active use of the legal system, but also how they crafted their testimonies in ways that played on perceptions of honor and respectability but also social hierarchy. These records also reveal that there was a significant urban Afro-

Zacatecan population engaged in the local economy and city market. In many ways, these records reflect what we might expect to see in a late-colonial mining town in the midst of a boom. Although the legacy of slavery remained a perpetual stain on one’s social standing, it

72 is clear that race did not inhibit Afro-Zacatecans from successfully owning businesses or achieving positions of authority within the local government. I would argue that many of these free Afro-Zacatecans were capable of these achievements because they were part of a creole community. In maintaining their permanent residence in the city, they could continue to accumulate social capital, and by actively engaging with a “creole consciousness,” Afro-

Zacatecans could make use of their legal rights to succeed in business, attain manumission, and craft a dignified public persona.

1 In a recent essay, Soizic Croguennec responds to this lacuna in an analysis of criminal and civil suits filed in the early years of the eighteenth century. For more, see: Soizic Croguennec, “Between Marginalization and Integration: Colonial Castas in the Zacatecas Area at the Beginning of the 18th Century” in Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas: Anuario de historia de América Latina 48 (2011): 203-226.

2 AHEZ, Judicial, Criminal, Caja 5, Exp. 38, 1729.

3 AHEZ, Judicial, Civil, Caja 5, Exp. 19, 1706.

4 AHEZ, Judicial, Civil, Caja 18, Exp. 5, 1725.

5 AHEZ, Judicial, Civil, Caja 6, Exp. 4, 1707.

6 Peter Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700 (Cambridge: University Press, 1971) 57.

7 Ibid. 80.

8 Alonso de la Mota y Escobar and Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas, Descripción Geográfica de Los Reynos De Nueva Galicia, Vizcaya, y Leon (Mexico: 1940) 146.

9 Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society, 58.

10 Ibid. 74.

11 Ibid. 75.

12 Ibid. 76.

13 Ibid. 77.

14 Mota y Escobar, Descripción Geográfica, 146.

15 AHEZ. Cargos y Oficios, Gremios, Caja 1, Exp. 39, 1796.

16 Richard Garner, Zacatecas, 1750-1821: The Study of a Late Colonial Mexican City (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1970) 38.

17 Ibid. 39-40.

18 AHEZ, Commercio, Caja 2, Exp. 53, 1710-1711.

19 Dana Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546-1806 (PhD diss., Los Angeles: UCLA, 2009).

20 Nonetheless, we do know that indigenous men and especially women engaged in small-scale trade in the markets as well as their homes. For more on indigenous women in Zacatecas, see: Dana Velasco Murillo, “Laboring Above Ground: Indigenous Women in New Spain’s Silver-Mining District, Zacatecas, Mexico, 1620-1770” in Hispanic American Historical Review 93.1 (2013): 3-32.

21 François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico; The Great Hacienda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963) 76-78.

22 Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society, 64.

23 Ibid. 65.

24 Ibid. 65-66.

25 Ibid. 66.

26 AHEZ, Judicial, Criminal, Caja 1, Exp. 2, S/F.

27 AHEZ, Judicial, Civil, Caja 11, Exp. 15, 1716.

28 AHEZ, Civil, Caja 11, Exp. 23, 1716.

29 For information on credit lending by mining town merchants, see: David Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico 1763-1810 (Cambridge: Univ. Press, 1971) 98- 103.

30 Ibid. 69.

31 Ibid. 70. Occasionally miners, if pre-registered with the Corregidor, could purchase cattle directly from stock-raisers and manufacture their own candles for use in the mines and their hacienda.

32 AHEZ, Judicial, Criminal, Caja 4, Exp. 33, 1715.

33 AHEZ, Judicial, Criminal, Caja 4, Exp. 35, 1715.

34 AHEZ, Judicial, Civil, Caja 14, Exp. 31, 1720; AHEZ, Civil, Caja 14, Exp. 32, 1720.

35 AHEZ, Judicial, Criminal, Caja 4, Exp. 39, 1715.

36 Thomas Hillerkuss and José Arturo Burciaga Campos, Diligencias Testamentarias del Capitán Don Juan de Infante, Administrador del Santo Oficio en Zacatecas, Siglo XVIII. (Zacatecas, México: Doctarado en Historia Colonial, Unidad Académica de Docencia Superior, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, 2006) 96-113.

Chapter 4: Becoming Christian Subjects

As slaves and descendants of those who were enslaved, Afro-Mexicans occupied a unique and somewhat liminal position within New Spain’s Catholic community. In describing the development of “Afro-creole consciousness” in New Spain, Herman Bennett expands the general use of secular litigation discussed in the previous chapter to include the manipulation of rights and obligations to the Church. Afro-Mexicans’ liminality derived from these specific rights and obligations that did not extend to other racial groups. Many scholars have examined these circumstances to reveal how the institutions of slavery and the Church, and more broadly Christianity, often created tensions that Afro-Mexicans could exploit.1

In the following chapter, I will discuss the opportunities created by these rights, restrictions, and obligations that the Church created and imposed on Afro-Zacatecans.

Throughout the chapter, I will also discuss the Holy Office of the Inquisition and its role in

Zacatecas. The religious crimes I focus on include blasphemy, bigamy, love magic, and witchcraft. In examining these cases, I argue that Afro-Zacatecans living in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were able to make use of ecclesiastical law and

Christian rites, such as marriage, to mitigate the pressures, and often, the horrors, of slavery.

I also hope to use these cases to assess ecclesiastical and lay attitudes regarding African heritage, as well as perceptions of Zacatecas as a frontier space apart from the central realm of colonial Mexican society.

Soon after the discovery of the Americas, the Spanish Crown mandated that only

Christians should come to the New World. This decision had lasting consequences for

Africans and their descendants in New Spain. To adhere to this regulation, mass portside baptisms were orchestrated along the coasts of the African continent.2 In “converting” these individuals, the slave traders and the Portuguese crown imposed a new and conflicting legal status upon their cargo. At once chattel, Iberian authorities assigned converted slaves

Christian identities with defined obligations and rights that were formulated long before

Spanish or European contact with “Guinea,” the early modern term for west and west central

Africa.3 Through secular legislation and ecclesiastical law, by classifying slaves as the king’s vassals and baptizing Africans as Christians, royal and church officials overrode the master’s authority to define captives solely as chattel. As Bennett observes, thus began a

“jurisdictional contest involving the Spanish monarchy, the Catholic Church, and New World masters over whose definition—vassal, Christian, or chattel—would prevail.”4 In 1518, King

Charles I granted the direct importation of African slaves to the Spanish colonies, provided that they were Christians.5 Thus the early Middle Passage transformed Africans into both

Christians and slaves

Matrimony: The Grand Remedy

Afro-Christian conversion, although theoretically aimed at the salvation of the troubled African soul, was in practice an effort to enforce orthodoxy and control over African bodies and behavior. As the principal source of New Spain’s moral code, canon law addressed what was perceived as illicit behavior via explicit gender norms, which often manifested themselves in the rite of marriage. Rather than enforce canon law via military action, Charles V, by then the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, attempted to regulate order through this Christian sacrament. In doing so, the king stipulated how persons of

African descent should experience their gendered identities. Nonetheless, because

“matrimony has to be free and not burdensome,” authorities could not legally enforce racial endogamy.6 In keeping with Christian beliefs and Iberian norms, authorities were then made responsible for protecting the free will of African slaves.

Aware that slaves might see marriage as a route to freedom by improving the odds of self-purchase but also by creating new identities that might have challenged their status as property, Charles ordered that masters make clear that, “they should not think of themselves as free persons but slaves as if the said marriage never occurred.”7 Emphasizing that slavery and Christianity were not inherently antithetical, Charles observed that, “it will be of service to Our Lord and benefit the land to make the said slaves marry according to the law and benediction in order to teach them and make them live as Christians.”8 Given the frequent reminders issued by the Crown, it is clear that African slaves continued to perceive Christian marriage as a potential conduit for freedom. Much of Bennett’s work on the history of Afro-

Christian marriage deals with the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Mexico City.

Nevertheless, we can see how these historical antecedents affected the place of Afro-

Zacatecans in the church during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As has been mentioned previously, the majority of the Afro-Zacatecan population during the early- eighteenth century consisted of free mulattos. Nonetheless, there were still several enslaved

Afro-Zacatecans during this time. The strategies constructed during the early colonial period were still viable means of attaining freedom, as we can see in the following case.

On July 19, 1712, Luisa Rodríguez, labeled as a mulata libre, petitioned the court for the freedom of her husband, Joseph de Mesa, a mulato esclavo belonging to Don Andrés

Benetta.9 From Luisa Rodríguez’s testimony we are told that Andrés Benetta was intending

79 to move from Zacatecas to the hacienda de San Juan de Vanegas (located in the northern tip of the modern-day state of San Luis Potosí). He also intended to bring Joseph de Mesa with him. Upon learning this information, Rodríguez and her husband arranged for him to purchase his freedom from Benetta. Joseph de Mesa borrowed the requisite 300 pesos from one Francisco Briseño and proceeded to pay Benetta. In return, he received his letter of freedom and receipt of purchase. Joseph de Mesa was now legally a free man. However, after this arrangement took place, it appears that Benetta went back on his word and accused Mesa of stealing a small amount of saffron from his store’s inventory that Mesa appears to have managed for him. For this crime, Mesa was arrested and imprisoned in the local jail. At this point, Luisa Rodríguez petitioned the cabildo, bringing with her the receipt for her husband’s manumission as proof of his freedom. When confronted with this situation, Benetta testified that he went to Briseño to inquire about Mesa’s borrowing money and found that Briseño had never given him any such loan. Benetta then went so far as to accuse Mesa of stealing the

300 pesos from him and then daring to pay for his freedom with his master’s own money.

However, after Briseño himself and another lender testified that they did in fact lend Mesa the money for this purpose, the court eventually released Mesa.

This case is interesting for a number of reasons. Aside from the information we can glean about Joseph de Mesa’s likely occupation as a shopkeeper in the city, and one that might sell such luxury goods as saffron, the testimony of his wife, Luisa Rodríguez, reflects a solid understanding of her rights as a married woman and her husband’s rights as a man who was both enslaved and married. In the Siete Partidas, a collection of statutes and laws first compiled by King Alfonso X in 1252, laws were established to deal with married couples that were enslaved and potentially owned by separate masters.10 Theses statutes encouraged

80 local magistrates to do everything in their power to keep the couple together. In Spain, as well as New Spain, officials considered peace in a city to be enabled through married couples and stable families. In this case, Luisa Rodríguez intervened with the help of a visiting judge from Guadalajara to prevent her husband from being taken out of the city. In her petition, she uses specific language to reinforce her and her husband’s marital rights. Specifically, she argues that her husband did not want to leave the city and that he did not want her to have to leave the city "by reason of being married to me.” Rodríguez’s petition emphasizes her marital status over the innocence of her husband or the specific allegations against him. In reminding the officials of this longstanding law, without directly challenging them or Benetta with an official “right,” Luisa Rodríguez was able to subtly push her case without subverting social norms or gender hierarchies.

In considering the opportunities that Christianity made available to Afro-Zacatecans, we should remember that marriage, among other obligations to the Church, was originally employed as a means of controlling African slaves and their offspring. The Church did not envision Christianity to conflict with slavery. In fact, the Church remained the largest slave owning body throughout the colonial period. Although there were slaves owned by parish churches, the primary owners of slaves were the regular orders. As Joan Bristol observes,

“the Jesuits, who in New Spain and elsewhere showed genuine concerns for the fate of slaves’ souls, were also economically dependent on the slaves who worked their haciendas.”11 The Jesuits were not major slave owners in Zacatecas, as far as we know, but other church institutions had a hand in slavery. In Zacatecas, several civil cases and wills reflect transfers and donations of slaves to the parish church, as well as the convent and hospital of San Juan de Dios.12 Most of what we know about Afro-Zacatecans as Catholic

81 subjects comes from Inquisition cases and confraternity records. This chapter examines the former.

The Holy Office of the Inquisition

Efforts to enforce orthodox practice and Christian behavior were regulated by the

Holy Office of the Inquisition. In 1569, concerned with the Protestant and converso threat,

Philip II extended the jurisdiction of the tribunal to his New World colonies. In 1571, the

Holy Office established a tribunal in Mexico City. Despite its purported concerns over

Protestant and Jewish heresy, the tribunal’s efforts were largely targeted at the Catholic laity.

Although the vast majority of this population was in fact indigenous, Indians were not subject to the Inquisition. This explains, in part, why much of the tribunal’s activities were targeted at the African and African-descent populations.13 In fact, Solange Alberro has found that nearly half of the 1,553 extant Inquisition cases involve persons of African descent as the accused.14 As Old World peoples, Africans were considered by royal officials as people of reason, gente de razón, which conferred to them a juridical status in the Spanish commonwealth, the República de los Españoles (as opposed to the República de los Indios), and thereby subjected them to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.15

A significant section of Solange Alberro’s book on the Inquisition and society in New

Spain is dedicated to Zacatecas. In her analysis, Alberro does not mention how many total cases were filed, but notes that the majority of the surviving cases was pursued between 1630 and 1650, and were characterized by crimes largely relating to magic or witchcraft. Alberro characterizes the period between 1650 and 1670 as corresponding to fewer cases and those of lesser types of religious crimes, including superstitious and heretical or blasphemous

82 statements.16 This decline in cases in the mid to late seventeenth century reflects a general decline for other northern cities, namely San Luis Potosí and Durango.17 Alberro’s analysis of the proceedings from Zacatecas (or involving the city) reflects the popular portrayal of the mining district as the epitome of the colonial frontier. In several cases that originate outside of Zacatecas, but refer to it, witnesses reflect what appears to be a generally shared view of

Zacatecas as a place of refuge but also rebirth.

The Inquisitorial tribunal existed to enforce Catholic orthodoxy; and for the enslaved and free Afro-Mexican populations, the tribunal represented an instrument intended to regulate behavior in accordance with Christian gender, kinship, and marital norms.

Consequently, many of the proceedings focused on the laity’s sexual behavior. As such, bigamy was one of the most frequently investigated crimes tried by the Inquisition.18 Many of these denunciations include accusations of actual bigamy, that is, entering into a marriage when one was already married, but also instances of adultery and extra-marital cohabitation.

As a place to run away to, Zacatecas, as we might expect, was a hotbed for bigamous relationships.

Bigamy

Historian Richard Boyer discusses a number of bigamy cases from colonial Mexico.

These cases were tried in Mexico City but several involve events that took place in

Zacatecas. It appears that most of the bigamy cases concerning Zacatecas are centered on muleteers and mine workers, mobile men whose work carried them far from their wives and communities.19 Boyer discusses several intriguing cases of bigamy involving Spanish and

83 mestizo muleteers, but it can be presumed that similar cases involving Afro-Zacatecans were filed with the tribunal as well.

Accusations against bigamists were not only targeted at men. Such is the 1622 case of María de Figueroa, a Spanish woman, accused of running away with

Francisco Gómez, a mulatto who worked on her father-in-law’s hacienda. From

María de Figueroa’s testimony, we learn that after six months of marriage, her husband, the Spaniard Alonso Martín Cabello, had abandoned her, “abducted” another woman, and remained out of contact with her for two-and-a-half years. At that point, in January of 1624, Cabello appeared before the judge of the rural constabulary of León and petitioned that Figueroa, his “legitimate wife” be arrested for being with Gómez, who he also accused of abducting his wife. Gómez testified that “one night about midnight María de Figueroa came to this witness and begged him to take her ‘for the love of God’ to Zacatecas or where he wanted, because her father Pedro de Ortega and grandfather Santiago give her the mala vida.”20 Gómez does not go into detail about the treatment María received at the hands of her husband’s family, but we can assume that they were abusing her in some way.

Gómez’s testimony implies that he had not previously met María, so in approaching a man that she presumably did not know until that night, María de

Figueroa was willing to face unknown dangers and certain dishonors to escape mistreatment at the hacienda. The husband Cabello’s accusations against Gómez, for the exact crimes he himself had committed reveal a number of colonial social conventions. As Richard Boyer notes, “Cabello judged the mulatto a violent abductor because males assumed the right to ‘steal’ women but not to have their women stolen.

And here, as Gómez had recognized at the time, a mulatto was adding insult to injury by running off with a Spanish woman.”21 Through this case we see how mulatto men could get caught up in the domestic disputes of Spanish men and women, but also the limitations imposed on women, even Spaniards, to escape an unhappy marriage. And of course, we see through Figueroa’s exclamation the way Zacatecas was conceptualized as a place to which one might escape.

Sexuality, Love Magic, and Folk Healing

The Inquisition was also highly concerned about the activities of curanderas (folk healers) and hechiceras (spell casters). Women were most frequently charged with using their power to heal the sick, induce illness, and practice love magic or sexual witchcraft.22

Unorthodox religious practices entailed by magical healing and spell casting generally concerned ecclesiastical authorities. However, as historian Susan Migden Socolow points out, the goal of most female magic was the seduction and conquest of a man, and so the

Inquisition prosecuted these women for deviating from the dogma of free will.23 Depending on the situation, love magic could be used to “determine a man’s amorous intentions, obtain a man’s love, recover the attention of a neglectful lover, or control a husband more prone to excessive violence.”24 Socolow also argues that love magic “clearly threatened the social order.”25

I would argue that elites certainly felt threatened. However, as historian Joan Bristol argues, “Afro-Mexicans used magic to create alternative definitions of authority that diverged from those of the crown and Spanish elites…to mediate their social relationships and gain power over others.” Bristol also notes that love magic was not specific to Afro-

Mexicans and was “squarely in the mainstream of colonial curing practices.”26 As anthropologist Laura Lewis observes, “consultations with indigenous and Afro-Mexican curers were routine events for colonial residents, regardless of caste.”27 So although the

Inquisition found these practices to be deviant, it appears that lay society found them to be fairly normal. Bristol concludes that Afro-Mexican healers and love magicians were not seeking to disrupt colonial hierarchies through witchcraft, but instead saw themselves as operating within the Spanish system of social hierarchy. Furthermore, Bristol argues: “Their attempts to harness the power of Christian prayer and images illustrate their respect for the power of these symbols.”28

By creating these “alternative definitions of authority” within the existing system, these women and at times, men, could gain an income and improvement in living conditions. These individuals were often considered important members of their community and were often relied upon in times of trouble.29 Access to secret knowledge, whether through love magic or through curing, often afforded them a unique honor and status within their communities. However, this was not always the case. Solange Alberro recalls the case of Beatriz de Padilla, a morisca, or light- skinned woman of African descent, who in 1650 was accused of using love magic to bewitch and eventually murder her lover, the local commissioner of the Holy Office in Lagos, a town outside of Guadalajara. Although the Mexico City tribunal eventually found her to be innocent of these crimes, Padilla was nonetheless shunned in her hometown for her suspicious behavior.30

In her article on indigenous women in Zacatecas, Dana Velasco Murillo presents us with a very different case, that of Ana Tizil, an Indian resident of

Zacatecas and migrant from Tlaltenango, who dispensed herbs, notably the hallucinogenic drug peyote, practiced divination, and offered advice from her home.31

Matthew Restall and Joan Bristol note that among other things the Nahua traditionally used peyote for “the purposes of attraction and repulsion.”32 Velasco Murillo notes that in 1627, “[Ana’s] business was so popular that the local curate insisted that the entire city was ‘infected’ by her products; yet no one would testify against her in his quest to stop her practice.”33 Joan Bristol’s analysis of similar practices in

Inquisitorial cases does not include any denunciations of Zacatecans. However, she does include a number of cases from the silver mining town of Guanajuato and nearby Querétaro, a town along the silver trunk line, and so we see that love magic was certainly practiced by Afro-Mexicans in mining areas. Perhaps by the eighteenth- century, the residents of Zacatecas were too reliant on their healers to ever accuse or testify against them to an ecclesiastical official.34 It is of course possible that records of prosecution simply have not survived.

Blasphemy

Although there are no clear cases of Afro-Zacatecan healers presented in this chapter, we do know of other instances of these practices occurring in mid- seventeenth-century Zacatecas through Inquisition cases targeted at another religious crime, that of blasphemy. Blasphemy, or the use of sacred names in curses or renunciations of God or saintly figures, has been well researched by a number of scholars, most notably the historian Javier Villa-Flores, who in his 2006 social history of blasphemy, Dangerous Speech, dedicates a chapter to Inquisition cases in which

87 the accused were slaves charged with making blasphemous acts or statements.35

Focusing on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Villa-Flores traces the different circumstances that might have led slaves to blaspheme and their different reasons for doing so.

Owners often cruelly mistreated their slaves both by overwork and physical punishment. Renouncing God to provoke the intervention of the Inquisition was one strategy to gain temporary freedom from such brutal working conditions and punishments. Occasionally, slaves were able to use “the blasphemy option” to force a sale and obtain a transfer to a new location with a new master. In some instances, as Villa-Flores observes, enslaved Afro-Mexicans “ deployed an ingenious rhetoric that transformed the master’s ‘legitimate’ punishment of slaves into torture, chastisement into martyrdom, and the slaves’ own blasphemies into painful reactions of persecuted Christians.” 36 Furthermore, he argues that in claiming to “lose their souls” at the hands of their masters, slaves were able to invert the colonial discourse that justified slavery as a route to Christian salvation.37 Only in a world steeped in

Baroque notions of piety could such a defense seem plausible.

Villa-Flores emphasizes that blasphemy to attract the attention of the Inquisition was a strategy that was learned through interactions with other slaves. He introduces several cases that demonstrate that slaves only began to blaspheme after another slave taught them to do so. An example among many is the 1658 case of a mulata named

Gertrudis de Escobar, who revealed in testimony that she learned to blaspheme from a slave known as Scorpian, who was whipped on the streets of Mexico City for having renounced God.38 Many of the accused admitted that they had learned this strategy.

Because so many Afro-Mexicans charged by the Inquisition had utilized this method, over the course of the seventeenth century, it appears that it became less effective with ecclesiastical officials. Indeed, Villa-Flores remarks that by the end of the eighteenth century, when Baroque piety began to wane, slaves found it increasingly more difficult to draw the attention of the Holy Office. Eventually the tribunal declined to involve itself in the various disputes between masters and their slaves, especially if it cost the Inquisition time and resources.

Although the strategy of blaspheming to protest maltreatment was probably not that effective in early eighteenth-century Zacatecas, one particular case from not that long before demands attention—the now famous 1650 Inquisition case of Juan de Morga.39 The richly detailed narrative of Juan de Morga’s life was first presented by Inquisition scholar Solange

Alberro, but it has since been examined by a number of scholars interested in Afro-Mexicans, blasphemy, slavery, and mining towns. Morga, the illegitimate son of a Spanish-born priest and an African woman, was born in 1627 in Oaxaca and sold to Antonio Millán, a Mexico

City accountant, as a teenager. Morga was considered quite handsome and was taught to read and write as a youth, but he was also quite restless. After running away, at times for months on end, the frustrated accountant finally sold him to the mines of Zacatecas, which as Kris

Lane notes, “was roughly the equivalent of being ‘sold down river.”40 Alberro recalls that soon after arriving in Zacatecas with the agent of Antonio Millán, the two men came across a haughty mestizo gentleman by the name of Diego de Arratia, who offered to purchase

Morga. Morga, willful as ever, remarked that there were plenty of Spaniards in Zacatecas and that he would very much prefer to serve one of them. This insult would not go unpunished.

Arratia bought him on the spot, promising the agent that he could use him as a secretary and clerk. However, as soon as he and Morga arrived at Arratia’s home, the new master had Morga put in chains and branded his face with the letter “s” and a figure of a nail, clavo, to signify his permanent status as a slave, a common practice throughout New Spain.

This cruel treatment continued almost daily, and so by Juan’s early twenties, as Lane summarizes, “Morga had been successively slashed across the face, branded, publically flogged, dragged behind a horse, confined in shackles for extended periods, and beaten about the mouth with a hammer (to break his teeth).”41 Morga, in later testimony, recalled the many times he considered suicide. At one point, he imagined placing his head beneath the powerful hammers of the stamp mill, on another occasion he considered leaping into a mineshaft that dropped deep into the mountain.42 After several failed attempts to end his own life, and incapable of convincing anyone, including the city’s corregidor, to order Arratia to sell him,

Morga resolved at last to sell his soul to the Devil.

Alberro describes how Morga, one evening after work, “profound with desperations and amid tears called once more upon the Devil to help him escape from this life of torture.”43 At that point, an Indian mine worker approached him and, with pity, offered him information about an herb that would prevent his master from doing him any further harm.

According to Morga’s testimony before the Inquisition, the price for this herb was the renunciation of God and his saints and permanent service to and worship of the Devil.

Having agreed to this pact, the Indian gave him an amulet containing some grains of mustard seed. From that day on, Morga found that “the attitude of Arratia towards him changed as if by a miracle.” This went on for some time until the Lenten season of 1650, when Morga began to have doubts about his pact with the Devil. A baptized Catholic and son of a priest,

Morga wished to repent for his sins and threw his amulet into the fire. However, before he was able to confess, he could sense the return of Arratia’s ire. Before his master could enact any new tortures upon him, Morga stole a horse and escaped.

Eventually, however, he was captured in Jilotepec, a town north of Mexico City.

Having related his story and confessed his sins to a local magistrate, Morga asked to be investigated by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The unfortunate Morga’s confession letter was not delivered, so finally, in an act of desperation, he pretended to experience terrifying visions of his pursuit by the Devil. Eventually, the terrified townspeople of Jilotepec pressured the local representative of the Holy Office to relieve them of his presence. Finally, through several witness testimonies of Arratia’s sadism, the Inquisition was able to force his sale. Morga’s blasphemy was apparently understood to be the product of mistreatment, or sevicia, which went largely unpunished.44 Morga was then transferred to Mexico City to join the household of a wealthy resident.

Although extreme in its violence, Juan de Morga’s case was not unique. Joan Bristol observes that the blasphemous crime of renouncing God was closely associated with Afro-

Mexicans, especially slaves, but also with free servants and others serving sentences of bound labor.45 Bristol recalls a 1618 report sent to Inquisitors by a friar in Zacatecas that illustrates this connection. In this report, the friar claimed that “they bring in large part the most incorrigible slaves and fugitives in the world to this frontier mining city.” Among these people, he wrote, “it is very common to renounce [God] with little occasion.”46 This friar urged that slaves who blasphemed in this way should be punished to set an example to others who might do the same. If we can trust the friar’s claims, it appears that ecclesiastical authorities were already well aware of the strategy of blasphemy-as-protest used by African

91 slaves and free workers of African descent in the first decades of the seventeenth century. By the time of Juan de Morga’s multiple attempts at blaspheming his way out of his terrible situation in Zacatecas, it is not surprising then that the Inquisitorial representatives were hesitant to involve themselves in his affair. The Inquisition, it appears, was also hesitant to involve itself in accusations of bestiality.

Bestiality: contra natura

Throughout this chapter, we have seen that church officials were deeply concerned with regulating normative religious practices and sexuality. Perceptions of deviant behavior extended to sexuality that was considered “unnatural,” or contra natura. This term included the crimes of sodomy and clerical sexuality, but also bestiality.47 Of the cases pertaining to these practices during our periodization, one involving bestiality in Zacatecas stands out.

In his recent dissertation on the unnatural in New Spain, Zeb Tortorici devotes a chapter to what he calls the “human/animal” boundary, where he argues that cases of bestiality provide historians with a surprising amount of information about rural societies, sexual desires, nonhuman animal experiences, legal traditions, social control, and human- animal interactions in history. One particular case also reflects a jurisdictional conflict between the parish church and the secular authorities, whereby a local parish priest intervened on behalf of a mulato libre, sentenced to death for the crime of bestiality.

Contrary to what we might otherwise assume, bestiality, as well as sodomy, fell outside of ordinary ecclesiastical control. Of the 133 bestiality cases that were addressed in Mexico

City, only 25 of them were brought to the Inquisition.48 Tortorici observes that the vast majority of bestiality accusations and convictions involved young indigenous men in rural

92 areas.49 As the Inquisition did not hold jurisdiction over indigenous peoples, it stands to reason these crimes would have been tried by secular authorities.

In his analysis, Tortorici describes the pervasiveness of bestiality, with the majority of these instances having occurred in the eighteenth century, and only a handful of cases occurring in both the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.50 The terms of punishment assigned to men convicted of bestiality changed over time and reflect the institutional attitudes towards human/animal sexual deviancy and its racial implications. According to scripture, all those guilty of bestiality (as well as sodomy) were subject to the death penalty.

Regarding bestiality, Tortorici cites Leviticus 20: 15-16, which states that:

And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death; and ye shall slay the beast. And if a woman approach unto any beast, and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman and the beast: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.51

Although men convicted of sodomy, that is, homosexual relations, were routinely put to death, those convicted of bestiality were not. Between 1563 and 1821, the secular courts in

New Spain sentenced at least twelve individuals to be executed for this crime. Of these, only three executions were actually carried out, all within the first few decades of the eighteenth century. All three, interestingly, were tried and executed in northern mining towns: Juan

Thomas in Zacatecas (1704), Lorenzo Benitiz in Parral (1718), and Joseph de la Cruz in San

Luis Potosí (1723). It is also noteworthy that all three men happened to be labelled as mulatos libres. Tortorici has found that of the 133 extant secular cases, only nine involved mulatos libres as the accused.52 Punishment was not initially harsh, or at least it varied over time. Although many of those convicted were given death sentences, the vast majority of these were appealed through the high court. As the seventeenth century progressed, an

93 increasing number of men convicted of bestiality were punished with temporary banishment and forced labor in public works.53

So if other men accused of bestiality, even prior to 1704, had their death sentences appealed, then we have to ask, what made these three men different? What were the circumstances surrounding their particular crimes, and what would have driven the secular authorities to carry out their harsh sentences? Again, it appears that the vast majority of bestiality convictions involved young indigenous men in rural areas.54 Tortorici presents a number of the claims made by the accused parties that either explained or justified their behavior. Many of these claims involved sexual curiosity or a desire to prepare oneself for sex with a woman. Authorities judged these endeavours as excusable given that they were committed to eventually meet sexual norms.

Tortorici has also found that with the exception of a turkey, all of the animals that were involved in these sexual acts were Old World creatures brought to the New World.

Many of the men, often indigenous, involved in these cases genuinely seemed surprised to learn that bestiality was considered a sin. Their recent introduction to these animals and

Christian doctrine often allowed them more leniency with the authorities. In fact, those indigenous men who did receive stricter punishments were older and often repeat offenders.

Because authorities came to associate this crime with young indigenous men, I believe that when men of African descent, especially those who were free citizens, were accused of this crime, authorities did not feel that they merited the same mercy. When it comes down to it, authorities believed that as members of the república de españoles and gente de rázon, men who were considered mulatos libres should have known better. These preconceptions further reflect the liminality that Afro-Mexicans endured under Spanish law.

By examining these different cases of religious crimes together, we can gain a better understanding of ecclesiastical authorities’ concerns over Afro-Mexican and specifically

Afro-Zacatecan piety and sexuality as they related to orthodox Christian doctrine.

Throughout this chapter, I have attempted to demonstrate how the Catholic Church and the

Holy Office of the Inquisition tried to regulate the lives and relationships of Afro-Zacatecans and how these regulations adjusted to new circumstances and demographic changes over time. As scholars of the Inquisition and of Afro-Mexico have found, these attempts to correct what the Church perceived to be deviant or unorthodox practice were frequently targeted at the African and African-descent population throughout the colony. The geographical and cultural isolation of Zacatecas does not seem to have impeded these efforts. For the

Inquisition, at least in the seventeenth century, the silver city was not so far away. However, much in the way that the citizens of Zacatecas refused to testify against the indigenous healer, Ana Tizil, it is possible that they were equally resistant to report other such instances of deviancy or heterodoxy, and thus it is possible that there were many more occasions of bigamy and love magic of which the Inquisition and the local commissioner of the tribunal never learned. The archive’s silences must also be considered.

1 Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007) 63-91.

2 Ibid. 73; See also: Alonso de Sandoval and Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Un Tratado Sobre la Esclavitud (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987) 382-384.

3 Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro- Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003) 4.

4 Ibid. 33.

5 Ibid. 41.

6 Ibid. 45.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid. 46.

9 AHEZ, Civil, Caja 8, Exp. 3, 1712.

10 King Alfonso of Castile and Leon and Gregorio López, “Libro V, Titulo V, Ley I” in Las siete partidas del rey Don Alfonso El Sabio (Paris: R. Bouret, 1851) 170.

11 Bristol, Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century, 67.

12 AHEZ, Civil, Caja 2, Exp. 17, 1675; AHEZ, Civil, Caja 20, Exp. 5, 1727; AHEZ, Civil, Caja 5, Exp. 12, 1705; AHEZ, Civil, Caja 8, Exp. 12, 1703; AHEZ, Civil, Bienes de Difuntos, Caja 6, Exp. 113, 1692.

13 Bennett observes that in that year, the African descent population was numbered at 11,645 while Spaniards numbered 9,495. For more see: Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 52.

14 Solange Alberro, Inquisición y Sociedad en México, 1571-1700 (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988) 8, 455.

15 Ibid. 9. For more on the Inquisition and Afro-Mexicans, see Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 51-78; Alberro, Inquisición y Sociedad en México, 455-490.

16 Alberro, Inquisición y Sociedad en México, 382.

17 Ibid. 412. Alberro’s analysis of cases from Zacatecas is limited to the period of 1550- 1700, and thus does not include the primary years of the mining revival.

18 Richard Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995) 6.

19 Ibid. 52, 119-120, 141.

20 Ibid. 134.

21 Ibid. 134-135.

22 In using terms such as “witchcraft,” I recognize the problematic nature of this terminology, but am trying to remain faithful to terms used in the documents; Susan Migden Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 156.

23 Ibid. 155-6.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Bristol, Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century, 168.

27 Laura Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham, 2003) 119.

28 Bristol, Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century, 188.

29 Ibid.

30 Alberro, “Beatriz de Padilla: Mistress and Mother” in Struggle and Survival in Colonial America, edited by David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) 247- 256.

31 Dana Velasco Murillo, “Laboring Above Ground: Indigenous Women in New Spain’s Silver-Mining District, Zacatecas, Mexico, 1620-1770” in Hispanic American Historical Review 93.1 (2013): 13.

32 Joan Bristol and Matthew Restall, “Potions and Perils: Love-Magic in Seventeenth- Century Afro-Mexico and Afro-Yucatan” in Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times, edited by Ben Vinson III and Matthew Restall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009) 163.

33 Velasco Murillo, “Indigenous Women in New Spain’s Silver-Mining District,” 13.

34 Again, source limitations prevent me from providing an exhaustive analysis of love magic practices in Zacatecas. Future research in the AGN will hopefully provide better answers to these questions.

35 Javier Villa-Flores, Dangerous Speech: A Social History of Blasphemy in Colonial Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006) 127- 147.

36 Ibid. 128.

37 Ibid. 128.

38 Ibid. 145.

39 Solange Alberro, “Juan de Morga and Gertrudis de Escobar: Rebellious Slaves” in Struggle and Survival in Colonial America, edited by David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) 165-188.

40 Kris Lane, “Africans and natives in the mines of Spanish America” in Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America, edited by Matthew Restall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005) 160.

41 Ibid; Alberro, “Juan de Morga and Gertrudis de Escobar: Rebellious Slaves,” 170- 174.

42 Ibid.

43 Alberro, “Juan de Morga and Gertrudis de Escobar: Rebellious Slaves,” 173.

44 The Siete Partidas stipulated that masters were prohibited from exhibiting excessive or overly cruel physical punishment.

45 Bristol, Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century, 116.

46 Ibid.

47 My work on the Inquisition in Zacatecas results primarily from secondary literature, which does not discuss any cases of sodomy that occurred in the city. Future research in the AGN may reveal such cases. For more on this growing subfield, see: Neil Whitehead, Sexual Encounters, Sexual Collisions: Alternative Sexualities in Colonial Mesoamerica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Zeb Tortorici, Contra Natura: Sin, Crime, and "Unnatural" Sexuality in Colonial Mexico, 1530-1821 (PhD diss., Los Angeles: UCLA 2010

48 Ibid. 361-362.

49 Ibid. 386.

50 Tortorici, Contra Natura: Sin, Crime, and "Unnatural" Sexuality in Colonial Mexico, 386.

51 Ibid. 402.

52 Ibid. 387.

53 Ibid. 402.

54 Ibid. 386.

Chapter 5: Confraternities & the Parish Church

As we have seen in the previous chapters, the Catholic Church played an important role in the lives of many Afro-Zacatecans in the middle to late colonial period. Through the obligations to and the basic rights afforded by the Church, these men and women were able to negotiate their socio-religious place in the city, most clearly in the seventeenth century.

The previous chapter focused specifically on the larger institution of the Holy Office of the

Inquisition, which was based in Mexico City but employed local representatives, or comisarios, in various cities throughout New Spain. This chapter will instead focus on the local parish church and its relationship with its Afro-Zacatecan congregation. Although Afro-

Zacatecans were free to participate in the confraternities, or lay religious brotherhoods, founded through the regular orders in the city, we see that the two confraternities organized by Afro-Zacatecans, the Cofradía de San Juan de la Penitencia de los Mulatos and the

Cofradía de Limpia Concepción y Santa Ana de los Morenos, were in fact based within the parish church. This chapter will discuss the regular orders when necessary, but the primary focus is the parish church and these confraternities. This chapter will also focus on local ecclesiastical and secular conflicts, which occasionally played out in the parish church itself, but also in the chapels on the surrounding refining haciendas and remote mining camps.

Afro- Zacatecan Confraternities

Compared to other cities, such as the viceregal capitals of Mexico City and Lima,

Zacatecas had comparatively fewer confraternities in general, and only two primarily Afro-

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Mexican confraternities. In my discussion of these two groups, I intend to explore the different ways members of each group negotiated their place in Zacatecan society over time and in doing so, how they balanced participation in shared Catholic ritual life while simultaneously emphasizing their racial and cultural differences.

Throughout its existence, it appears that the mulatto confraternity of San Juan more readily emphasized its racial character, but did so in part by employing a Baroque language of submission and penitence. By contrast, the “moreno” confraternity of the Immaculate

Conception, although it emphasized certain black patron saints, appeared more willing to fully assimilate into novohispano society. The confraternity of San Juan does not appear to have been able to support itself after the 1740’s, whereas the confraternity of the Immaculate

Conception remained intact well into the nineteenth century. In doing so, however, it appears that the confraternity was required to abandon much of its original character to meet Spanish norms. As the eighteenth century progressed, Bourbon reforms extended even to the way

Catholic piety was performed. As Brian Larkin has observed, these reforms attempted to shift

Mexican catholics away from baroque practices—that is, exuberant ornamentation and lavish rituals, to a simpler, and in their minds, more interior piety.1 Those confraternities that adapted managed to survive the reforms.

Confraternities in Colonial Latin America

Confraternities were among the many socio-religious institutions brought by the

Spanish and Portuguese to the New World. Long established in Europe, these devotional and mutual aid organizations were managed by lay people, priests, and friars through an official constitution approved by the Church. The primary function of a confraternity was the

101 celebration of a saint’s day or some other feature of religious doctrine stated in their constitution. Confraternities created what Asunción Lavrin calls an “economy of eternal salvation,” whereby members would pay dues, referred to in the books as a limosna, which was then used, along with collected alms, to finance the group’s religious activities, maintain chapels and religious images, and ensure that members received proper burials and funeral services when they died.2

In his 1627 treatise, De instauranda aethiopum salute, Cartagena-based Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval wrote that “care in sickness, a decent burial, and a good death” were among the benefits that confraternity membership could offer African slaves that otherwise endured

“deep humiliations” in life. Criticizing slave owners, Sandoval described piles of slaves’ bodies left unburied in the streets of Cartagena “as if they were beasts, mouths dropped open, looking up and full of insects.”3 The brotherhoods that African slaves and free non-whites maintained managed to rectify these conditions, providing a “good death” for thousands of men and women who might otherwise not receive their final rites. These organizations provided for their members in life as well as in death. In mining towns, hospitals were an additional concern, as the conditions of mine and refining labor were particularly hazardous.4

Of course, confraternities also offered spiritual and social opportunities outside the realm of physical health and well-being. As one of the few places that Africans and Afro-

Creoles could gather legally, confraternity chapels were a social space to build communities, develop social networks and friendships, and occasionally attain manumission. For those who were already liberated, confraternity membership created the potential for social mobility and a measure of respect in society. In examining the circumstances of the confraternities in Zacatecas, we can better explore and make sense of the complex issues of

102 identity, community, race, gender, and religion that far exceed the basic necessities that the

Church had in mind.

In many places throughout colonial Latin America, there existed confraternities that did not encourage, and many that refused, the inclusion of Africans and Afro-Creoles. As

Joan Bristol observes, confraternities could be formed on a number of bases, including class, employment, neighborhood, ethnic group, and color.5 However, most confraternities de los mulatos, de los negros, or de los morenos stipulated that any man or woman, regardless of ethnic group or color, was free to join their confraternity. We should understand then that although the members of the “black brotherhoods” of Zacatecas were predominantly of

African descent, this does not mean that Indians and Spaniards could not also join. It should also be noted that elite men and women were not likely to be members of just one confraternity. If one had the means to support multiple religious organizations, this practice was thought to enhance one’s status in life but also after death.

Even as elites donated alms to these groups, their perceptions of Afro-Mexican confraternities remained ambivalent. Historians often emphasize the confraternities of

Mexico City in the events of 1608 and 1612, described in the first chapter, as sources of conspiracy feared by Spanish elites. Even when riots were not of immediate concern, descriptions of Afro-Mexican confraternities often included elite perceptions of Africans and

Afro-Creoles as inherently debauched and rambunctious, creating loud and unseemly spectacles during religious processions. It seems that these descriptions were not entirely unfounded. Nicole Von Germeten has traced changes in Afro-Mexican confraternity practices throughout the colonial period, showing that in the seventeenth century their practices were relatively flamboyant, reflecting baroque forms of spirituality at its most

103 extravagant. During this time, many Afro-Mexican confraternities encouraged their members to engage in public self-flagellation as a way of expressing their piety. By the mid-eighteenth century, Afro-Mexican confraternity practices became more sedate as members tried to establish themselves as upstanding members of society. The practices of the Afro-Zacatecan confraternities appear to follow this pattern of gradual sedation more or less. Elite perceptions mirrored these changes over time; however, complaints were still targeted at these groups in eighteenth-century Zacatecas, especially as they dealt with alcohol consumption during festivals.6

Despite attempts at integration into novohispano society, Afro-Zacatecans and their confraternities still were treated by most vecinos as something “other.” This was certainly due in part to elite perceptions of “African-ness” and the allegedly contaminated legacy of slavery, but this “other-ness” was also reified by the Afro-Zacatecans themselves through their choice of patron saints and their decisions to emphasize their African heritage. Just as confraternities provided the means to create smaller communities within the larger Christian community, Afro-Zacatecan confraternities carved out a space to create collective identities and express religious values in a personal and individual way. The structure that most often honored Afro-Zacatecan confraternities was the parish church.

Claiming the Parish Church

Bishop Mota y Escobar, in his 1602 account of Zacatecas, remarked that most of the city’s houses were constructed of adobe and tamped earth.7 Although some were constructed of stone, the general impression is that many of the buildings of the early city were frequently in need of repair, especially after a heavy rainy season. Peter Bakewell believes

104 that the first parish church was also made of adobe and erected sometime in the 1570s. It appears that it began to collapse in 1605 and was finally demolished soon after.

Reconstruction of the parish church lasted from 1612 to 1625, often delayed for lack of funds. In 1621, the bishop of New Galicia called on the existing nine confraternities to contribute one-fifth of their annual income for up to six years to this project.8 Although some private donations were made towards this endeavor, Bakewell notes that the city’s original parish church was significantly less fortunate in attracting benefactors and bequests than the religious orders, among them the Franciscans, Augustinians, and the Jesuits.

Bakewell argues that Zacatecans’ preference for the regular orders over the parish church derived from a feeling that the church was less easily recognized with less defined roles in the city than the monasteries, which “with their permanent bodies of friars, their mission activities, and their property holdings, seemed more a part of the life of the city.”9

He goes on to say that at least in the early years the confraternities were usually associated with a particular monastery. Other historians have found more evidence of this. Dana

Velasco Murillo has shown how the orders, specifically the Franciscans, became involved very early in the indigenous barrios on the outskirts of town, choosing their church and compound sites to benefit the indigenous communities.10 Because the Spanish and the

Indigenous populations of the city did not seem to claim the parish church as exclusively their own, at least early on, I would argue that this created an opening for Afro-Zacatecans to carve out a space and to build up their own socio-religious place in the city.

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Baroque Penitence: Submitting to God

Having been founded in 1635, the confraternity of San Juan of the Penitence clearly reflected the baroque ideals of sensuality and personal experiences of religiosity. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, poverty and a low station in life represented a kind of holiness that Christians in New Spain respected. As Nicole Von Germeten has said, “in baroque Catholicism, submission empowered a subjected people by bringing them closer to

Christ.”11 This African form of poverty and humility often manifested itself in the figure of

St. Benedict the Moor, who to Spanish and Portuguese priests and missionaries represented the ideal slave. Illiterate, docile, and a trustworthy cook and shepherd, St. Benedict was capable of teaching slaves how it was possible to draw nearer to Heaven by way of suffering without subverting social norms. Church elders wanted to promote a message of love and general fraternity to the majority population, but they did not wish to suggest any sort of social equality. St. Benedict made it easier for missionaries to spread the Gospel, without subverting social norms, since he pointed to a model of sainthood centered on humility, obedience, and love between different social classes and races.

The confraternity of San Juan made use of this trope of sanctified submission by emphasizing their socio-economic status and by highlighting penitent practices of self- flagellation. In their founding constitution, they stated: “We wish to have a blood procession to make penitence for our sins, to serve God, and to commemorate his Passion and death.”12

The procession would have occurred annually on Holy Tuesday. The books from this confraternity reveal annual minutes, or the repartimiento de insignias, which record the meetings held prior to their procession. These records denote annual expenses and officer

106 elections, but special attention was given to the assignments for specific objects to be processed.13

In 1652, the confraternity of San Juan began recording these lists, which detail ornate processional items that represent different aspects of the Passion but also of the life of John the Baptist. These inventories include items such as “several standards and banners, a head of

San Juan with a diadem displayed in a curtailed box, a platform to carry San Juan and the hardware to carry it, bells, some kind of insignia (rotulo), a silver machete, an iron cross, and a crown of thorns.”14 After 1671, the inventories became more complex, revealing hair shirts and other penitent items that would have been used during such a religious processions, including “a small bell, a knife, a lamb made of ‘wood with a diadem of silver,’ a shell, a natural skin (a symbol of San Juan), shackles/handcuffs, a representation of the River Jordan, a crown, an image of San Juan, a palm, a reliquary, a basin, and an angel.” 15 Von Germeten notes that these inventories continue to become more elaborate until the records end in 1742.

The members of the confraternity of San Juan were deeply concerned with how their organization was perceived by Zacatecan society. In 1667, the leaders used group funds to pay several university-educated clerics to carry its cross in the procession that year. We also see that they were highly concerned with the order of procession and the items to be carried.

Members were ordered to process in this way: with the bells, standards, banners, then crucifix, pennants, candles, and various insignias; then image of San Juan; then representation of his head in a box; then the angeles de bien (possibly children dressed as angels); confraternity sisters then followed with twelve lighted candles and the insignia of the confraternity; at the end was a holy relic, carried by a priest under a canopy. From there, the

107 procession included the “brothers of the light” (non-flagellating members who carried candles) and then four more clerics.16

The route of procession was also important, as it marked the sacred geography of the city. The procession route began at the entrance of Zacatecas’s main parish church, moved through the narrow street to the church of Santo Domingo, then to the hospital of San Juan, the Augustinian convent, the Jesuit compound, the Franciscan convent on the northern outskirts of the city, and then finally returned to the parish church.17 By processing in proper order through these spaces, the confraternity members publically associated themselves with each sacred place within the city. They were both distinct from and part of the larger Catholic community.

Patron Saints: Afro-Creole Identities

Members of Afro-Mexican confraternities throughout New Spain, including

Zacatecas, chose similar patron saints, often including those who shared an African heritage, namely St. Benedict of Palermo and St. Efigenia. By including images of these saints in their processions, confraternity members were making a statement about their active participation in a deeply religious society. They could be a part of the larger Christian community and still preserve a remembrance of their African heritage with those who shared in this collective identity. Following the regulations of the Church, Afro-Creoles could construct a space to display not only pride in their heritage but also to redefine gender roles. Both Afro-Zacatecan confraternities listed banners of St. Efigenia in their inventories. These were to be carried expressly by African and mulata women. As Von Germeten notes, if the goal of these processions was to be seen and also to conquer urban public spaces, the processing of St.

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Efigenia must have made a strong statement about the importance and imposing presence of women of African descent in the city.18

Within the confraternity books of the Immaculate Conception, an inventory also included such items as a small bell, a banner, a crucifix, a well (or fountain) of flowing water, a mirror, a rose, a rosary, a door, a rainbow, a banner with an image of St Benedict, a star, and a miniature golden house. This inventory also included an image of St. Anne and the Virgin with a crown on top and half-moon.19 Although the original constitution has not been found, the confraternity’s 1742 reconfirmation lists the provisions and stated goals of the group. Specifically, they emphasize their requirement to annually celebrate the feast day of Our Lay of the Immaculate Conception (December 8th) and the day of St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary (celebrated on July 26th but occasionally on December 8th as well).20 This emphasis on women, and particularly mothers, must have carried a similarly gendered message regarding the importance of women in religious life. What is particularly interesting is the inclusion of the “half-moon” or crescent moon, which is a signifier of the Virgin of the Apocalypse, best known in the image of Mexico’s Our Lady of

Guadalupe. It appears that this confraternity was also making a statement about its creole identity.

Limosnas: Dues and Alms

Members of the confraternity of San Juan would pay what appears to be a one-time due of one peso and four reales (half of a peso), which went towards the mutual aid of the entire confraternity. However, it seems that the confraternity relied mostly upon alms, which were collected from Zacatecan parishioners every Sunday throughout the year. From the

109 records, it appears that the confraternity of San Juan began this practice, or at least began recording it, in 1705, when they gathered a total of 105 pesos. After peaking in 1707 with

132 pesos, the confraternity’s annual alms collection steadily dropped until 1731, when the records end, but for a brief list of alms collected in 1742. This period of inactivity reflects the general depression felt by the city after the mining industry collapsed in 1732. However, this disruption was also likely due to the fact that the parish church caught fire in the early 1730s and so potentially much of the confraternity’s chapel was destroyed.21

The “moreno” confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and St. Anne seemed to fare somewhat better financially than the mulatto confraternity. Records of membership dues, elections, and expenses begin in 1661. Aside from the dues, the confraternity of the

Immaculate Conception also received large donations in specie and in silver goods from such benefactors as the count of Santa Rosa and Francisco de Olivas.22 The brotherhood’s inventory from 1703 reveals a number of luxury goods, such as a gold ring decorated with yellow zircon, probably worn by a sculpture during processions, but possibly just a pious gift held as capital. Although private donations certainly boosted the financial success of the confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, a significant amount of their wealth was derived from the women of the confraternity.

Cofradas, Hermanas, y Madres: Women in the Confraternity

Although Spanish women participated in New Spain’s many Baroque-era confraternities, Von Germeten argues that they were not nearly as active as women of

African descent. Specifically, she argues that the leadership roles “black and mulatto women” held, mainly in seventeenth-century mining towns, linked them to the traditions of

110 rural Indian confraternities and perhaps even to gender roles in Africa. 23 Although the rules prevented them from being elected as traditional officers, women were highly active in processions, decorating chapels, collecting alms, and even founding confraternities. After

1703, women of the confraternity of San Juan could officially hold office as head mothers.24

However, where confraternity women truly shone was in collecting alms from the community. Von Germeten notes that when men went out to collect funds, they could barely gather five pesos altogether. And yet Zacatecas’s confraternity women brought in roughly two-thirds of the annual budget. Spectacularly, at one point, three female members of the confraternity of San Juan, Ángela de Águilar, María de la O, and Nicolasa Pérez, each brought in an average of twenty pesos every time they collected.25 After each collection, the confraternity would pay for a meal for these women, and so in a way, alms collecting became a means of sustenance for confraternity sisters. These women provided for their confraternities as well. In the 1720’s, three sisters donated property to the confraternity of the

Immaculate Conception, enough to allow it to change the basis of its income from alms to rent. 26

In her study of African-descended confraternities throughout New Spain, Von

Germeten observes that as the eighteenth century dawned, and mulatto men began to strive towards social integration, women’s leadership was generally the first thing to go.27 As confraternities in general became more organized, they focused predominantly on providing dependable funeral benefits for all members, generally through a steady income based on rents. They also began to spend less on fiestas and flagellant processions. Across much of

New Spain, in the eighteenth century mulatto men took over women’s leadership roles and made their confraternities look more like male-dominated Spanish brotherhoods.28

111

However, this general trend in the viceroyalty does not appear to have been as evident in Zacatecas. By 1742, women actually appear to have become more involved. In the confraternity of San Juan, for example, women were finally listed as carriers in the repartimiento de insignias. It appears that this was an attempt to resuscitate the confraternity, which had begun to neglect the flagellant processions in the 1730s. Although women were strictly carriers of candles and images, they appear to have been deeply involved in the revitalization of flagellant processions and the preservation of the confraternity.

Unfortunately, there are no records of this group after this date, so we cannot know what became of them. Perhaps the confraternity did eventually adopt Hispanic norms.

As for the confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, we do have records that extend all the way into the nineteenth century. However, even by the mid-eighteenth century the confraternity appears to have become a very different organization. In the late seventeenth century, women in this group were not only highly visible, but actually more numerous as well. Until 1695, there were significantly more women joining the confraternity than men. However, by the 1730s, the lists of elected officers began to include titles such as

“general” and “captain,” which were rarely used to describe Afro-Zacatecans. Although it seems that Afro-Zacatecan women (and men) were still active participants in this confraternity, it appears that their presence became much less public. The use of militaristic titles may reflect the region-wide trend toward male takeover of religious brotherhoods.

Hacienda Chapels

For the Afro-Zacatecan men and women living in the urban center, it is likely that they participated in a confraternity and attended services within the parish church. It is also possible that members of these confraternities actually lived on the outskirts of town on the

112 many refining haciendas or mining camps that lined the roads running out of the city.

However, if they lived on a particularly large hacienda, it is more likely that they attended mass at a private chapel owned by the hacendado, or refinery owner. Throughout the colonial period, in mining towns throughout the north, these chapels were contested spaces. Nicole

Von Germeten observes these contestations outside of Zacatecas. Using the example of

Parral, she notes how dependence on patronage from the hacendado greatly restricted the freedoms and abilities of African and Afro-Creole laborers wishing to organize their own religious affairs.29

Just as the miners who first settled in Zacatecas ignored the spiritual needs of their workers,30 hacienda owners and miners continued to hinder the spiritual progress of the laborers and slaves living on their property. Mine owners’ parsimony and greed led to continued legislation mandating that miners give their workers time off on Sundays and religious holidays. Mine owners continued to ignore the rights of their workers. Ordinances were issued throughout the late sixteenth century31 and even up to 1712 reminding them of their moral obligations.32 It is important to note, however, that not all of the laborers were in favor of taking time off to attend religious services. Dana Velasco Murillo points out that the indigenous laborers in the mines often used this time to exploit vacant or abandoned mines or to smelt ore in their private furnaces. 33

Throughout this chapter, we can see how Afro-Zacatecans traversed local religious practices and the complex ways in which race, gender, identity, and community influenced their different experiences. As in much of colonial Latin America, religious brotherhoods in

Zacatecas offered numerous opportunities for men and women of African descent to gather and socialize, as well as participate in an intimate spiritual community. In Zacatecas, we see

113 how these groups carved out a space for themselves in the parish church and used this site to contribute to the life of the city, while still maintaining a separate identity derived from a shared African heritage. We also see how women found ways to not only reap the benefits of confraternity membership, but to actively engage in processions and financial concerns long after other women throughout the colony lost these roles.

The examples described in this chapter also illuminate how private, ecclesiastical, and secular interests often came into conflict with one another, sometimes providing more space for Afro-Zacatecans to assert themselves. These instances complicate our understanding of local religious needs and practices, revealing the different opinions and voices often silenced through official legislation. We can see how mineworkers and laborers often found the opportunity to earn extra money, which could be more important than participation in religious services. This chapter then reflects the different ways that religious activities,

Church bureaucracy, and individual orders could interfere with personal interests but also create opportunities.

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1 Brian Larkin, The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City (University of New Mexico Press, 2010).

2 Asunción Lavrin, “Cofradías novohispanas: economías material y spiritual,” in Cofradias, Capellanías, y Obras Pías, edited by Pilar Martínez López-Cano, Gisela von Wobeser, and Juan Guillermo Muñoz (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónama de México, 1988) 49.

3 Nicole Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006) 1.

4 The vast majority of the Zacatecan population relied on the hospital services of the Hospital de San Juan de Dios. For more on this institution, see: José Luis Raigoza Quiñónez, La Historia del Hospital de San Juan de Dios en Zacatecas (Zacatecas: Sindicato del Personal Académico de la Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, 2007).

5 Joan Bristol, Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century, 96.

6 Von Germeten, Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans, 62.

7 Alonso de la Mota y Escobar and Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas, Descripción Geográfica de Los Reynos De Nueva Galicia, Vizcaya, y Leon (Mexico: 1930) 143.

8 Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700 (Cambridge: University Press, 1971) 48.

9 Ibid. 54.

10 Dana Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546- 1806 (PhD diss., Los Angeles: UCLA, 2009) 245-248.

11 Von Germeten, Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans, 36.

12 Ibid. 31.

13 Archivo Parroquial de Zacatecas (hereafter APZ), Libros de la cofradía de San Juan de la Penitencia, Zacatecas, 1651-1742, Caja 138.

14 Von Germeten, Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans, 31.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid. 32.

115

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid. 20.

19 APZ, Libros de la cofradía de la Limpia Concepción y Santa Ana, Zacatecas, 1695- 1858, Caja 136.

20 Ibid.

21 Ernesto Lemoine Villicaña, “Noticias Ocurridas en Zacatecas en el Año de 1736” Miscelánea zacatecana: documentos histórico-geográficos de los siglos XVII al XIX (México, 1964) 276-277.

22 APZ, Libros de la cofradía de la Limpia Concepción y Santa Ana, Zacatecas, 1695- 1858, Caja 136.

23 Von Germeten, Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans, 44.

24 Ibid. 62.

25 Ibid 61-62.

26 Ibid. 63.

27 Ibid. 43.

28 Ibid. 44.

29 Ibid. 159-187.

30 Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City, 94.

31 Ibid. 245.

32 AHEZ, Ayuntamiento, Festividades, Cuentas, Gastos, y Donativos, Caja 1, Exp. 4, 1712.

33 Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City, 246.

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Conclusion

In setting out to write this thesis, my original goal was to bring the mining city of

Zacatecas into conversation with the larger field of colonial Afro-Mexican studies. Colonial mining towns, in their relative isolation from viceregal authorities, tended to create environments for social interaction that might not otherwise have developed or have been allowed in areas closer to the center of Crown authority. Zacatecas presented a unique situation for historical analysis. Both an administrative capital and commercial hub,

Zacatecas represented law and order, as well as trade, for much of the northern frontier. At the same time, local interests in silver extraction and refining often took priority over viceregal law or dictates. Many Zacatecan cabildo members, mine owners and stockholders in mining operations, were themselves often guilty of smuggling untaxed silver out of the city. Contraband trade and corruption aside, I was curious to see if this communal interest in the success of the city would have manifested itself in other ways. In thinking about Africans and their descendants in New Spain, I was curious to see if a city such as Zacatecas would have been more conducive to creating economic and social opportunities for these individuals, as opposed to the more centrally-located metropolises of Mexico City or Puebla.

As I have demonstrated throughout this thesis, legal restrictions were certainly breached or simply unenforced. Men and women of African descent who were considered part of the urban community appear to have been more successful than perceived outsiders in gaining privileges and attaining higher social status. Nonetheless, the stigma of slavery continued to affect the way Afro-Zacatecans were able to participate in their society.

117

The turn of the eighteenth century brought about a number of changes for these individuals, as well as for the organizations they formed and maintained. In Zacatecas itself, changes in technology allowed for higher levels of silver extraction, which brought an influx of mine investors and laborers into the city. This population boom increased overall economic activity and presumably boosted the profits for the many Afro-Zacatecans who worked or owned shops in the various markets throughout town. This period of abundance no doubt introduced not only migrant laborers but also increased numbers of Afro-Mexican muleteers, providing the city with much needed supplies. Often deeply involved in urban commerce, we see how Afro-Zacatecans continued to engage in litigation to protect their interests, but also their reputations and social standings.

The later eighteenth century marked changes in the way expressions of religiosity were valued and perceived. The evocative and outward displays of devotion that reflected sixteenth and seventeenth-century Baroque notions of piety began to wane. Concurrently, religious confraternities throughout much of New Spain began to function in a stricter manner, eliminating the flamboyant processions and vivacious celebrations that marked their festivals in previous years. As confraternities began to rely on more dependable incomes from rents from properties and loaned funds, these organizations began to rely less on alms collecting, a practice that was performed predominantly by confraternity sisters, especially those of African descent. For most of New Spain, it appears that these changes made it difficult for confraternities that emphasized an African heritage to remain viable. This was especially true for members who participated in penitent practices, which were becoming less accepted. These changes also made it difficult for women of African descent to maintain their position as leaders and alms-gatherers. These circumstances appear to have had similar

118 effects for the mulato and moreno confraternities in Zacatecas. However, it does appear that these organizations were able to maintain a public display of their African heritage for a somewhat longer period of time than similar organizations elsewhere in the viceroyalty.

Afro-Zacatecan community ties appear to have been viable resources in civil and criminal litigation pursued under the jurisdiction of the Audiencia of New Galicia. However, this does not seem to have been the case with the more autonomous Holy Office of the

Inquisition. Paradoxically, inquisitorial omnipresence could prove beneficial to enslaved

Afro-Zacatecans, especially if they faced routine mistreatment. Although slaves such as the much-abused Juan de Morga were initially unsuccessful in drawing the tribunal’s attention via blasphemy, presumably many slaves before his time achieved their intended goal of using the Inquisition as an adjudicator of slaves’ rights. For others, especially those accused of sexual heterodoxy, whether in an extreme form, such as bestiality, or in more common instances of concubinage and bigamy, the reach of the Inquisition was not so beneficial.

In many ways, Zacatecas, even into the eighteenth century, continued to be a frontier space, concerned with its own survival above all else. However, Zacatecas did not operate in a vacuum. The city was open and inviting to those who might wish to better their lives or escape their pasts, so long as they adhered to local customs. Zacatecas was also unforgiving in many ways. Like all mining towns, it was a place of risk, and opportunities for success were just as likely to end in failure. Mining offered prospective laborers the chance at ore shares and high wages. It could also offer untimely death from rock fall or silicosis.

Similarly, silver refining was labor-intensive and highly toxic due to the massive consumption of mercury. Market vendors were equally reliant on the mines’ productivity.

When silver output was high, commercial activity thrived. However, a myriad of

119 circumstances could bring about financial ruin. Impatient creditors often made these situations that much worse.

Throughout this thesis, I have attempted to illustrate this perpetually tenuous state that Zacatecas and its residents experienced. Within this fragile crucible, free and enslaved

Afro-Zacatecans did what they could to gain a living and find dignity for themselves and their families. By participating in local religious organizations, owning shops, serving in the militia, healing the sick, keeping house, and even bewitching would-be suitors, Afro-

Zacatecans made a place for themselves in the urban center and in the colonial record.

12 0

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Biography

Farren Yero, originally from North Florida, earned her B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Florida, with minors in both History and Art History. At UF, she participated in two archaeological field seasons at the Kingsley Plantation in Jacksonville,

Florida. At Tulane, she has held the post of publishing assistant for the Colonial Latin

American Review, as well as an office in the Latin American Studies Graduate Organization.

She will join the History PhD program at Duke University in the fall of 2013. Undoubtedly, she will miss New Orleans.