Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico

Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva’s study of slavery and freedom in seventeenth-century Puebla de los Ángeles is an important new contribution to the history of African-descent lives in New Spain. Via a very impressive and in-depth use of parish, municipal, inquisitorial, ecclesiastical, judicial, and, most notably and effectively, notarial sources, Sierra Silva narrates the experiences and long-term influence of both the enslaved and freedmen and -women inhabiting the second largest city in the viceroyalty. The book expertly guides readers through the spaces of Puebla, including the dehumanizing slave market, convents that must have felt claustrophobic to their protected but captive servants, brutal obrajes (rudimentary factories, especially for cloth production), and the vibrant entrepreneurialism of the food and secondhand goods markets.The book starts and finishes with anecdotes relating how Afro-Poblanos passionately supported their families and took advantage of their learned knowledge of Spanish law, commerce, and religion. Sierra Silva carefully situates these lives within a broader economic and political context in several ways that prove that African slavery shaped the history of New Spain. To give a few examples: The use of enslaved Africans in textile obrajes came about due to the New Laws of 1542 and the determination of Puebla’s early religious leaders to avoid forced indigenous labor. Owners desperately forced slave marriages within the obrajes to maintain their costly workforce. While the obrajes flourished, these Spaniards succeeded in developing the viceregal infrastructure so they could more easily access the port of Veracruz. Despite these efforts, the decline in slavery meant the end of Puebla’s textile boom, but Afro-Poblanos continued to sustain the economy in a number of ways.Building on the work of Ben Vinson, Michelle McKinley, and others, Sierra Silva recounts three fascinating case studies representing how African-descent individuals in Spanish America took advantage of institutions (most notably, militias, and, as I argued in my 2006 book Black Blood Brothers: Social Mobility for Afromexicans, Catholic brother-/sisterhoods), patronage and family networks, as well as the legal knowledge of their peers, to significantly improve their fortunes and status in the later years of the seventeenth century. These biographic anecdotes depict such individuals as a “Terranova” freedwoman fishmonger whose savvy entrepreneurialism intimidated her previous owner. Another Afro-Poblano who excelled in business was a fabulously wealthy pardo freedman who, with his indigenous wife, bought and sold an enormous inventory of chilies, enough to fund the classic Baroque goal of founding a chaplaincy upon his death. Sierra Silva engages his reader with memorable narratives as he deeply explores the emotional lives of these individuals, including their marriage strategies. As historians have also observed in other cities with surviving baptism records (such as Valladolid, now Morelia, Michoacán), rates of legitimacy started to climb in this era, documenting the decline of slavery and a striving for Spanish understandings of personal honor. Sierra Silva argues that men considered the social value of marrying a freedwoman (often not of African descent), which, over time, gradually increased the rate of slavery in Puebla. Unfortunately, this exercising of choice meant that enslaved women faced tough competition on the marriage market.By weaving together literally thousands of seemingly trivial threads of references found in scattered documentation, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico leaves readers with a complex and powerful vision of over a century of Afro-Mexican history in an important city. With his remarkable archival mining; on-point analysis; and readable, compassionate and storytelling prose, Sierra Silva has set a new standard for scholarship on this topic

Archaeology · Colonialism · Geography · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies in Latin America · Latin American history and culture