Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America

This stimulating edited volume takes a timely and novel approach to the study of confraternities by analyzing sodalities composed of predominantly Indigenous, African-origin, and African-descended populations in the same publication. The book, divided into four parts based on critical geographies within colonial Latin America, aims to document and contemplate “indigenous and black confraternal cultural practices as forms of negotiation and resistance” that undermined and at times subverted power structures and social hierarchies sanctioned by Catholic authorities and the Spanish and Portuguese crowns (p. 10). The first part analyzes colonial New Spain, and the second focuses on the early Viceroyalty of Peru. Parts 1 and 2 together aim to highlight scholarship on Indigenous, African-origin, and African-descended people in racially and ethnically exclusive sodalities and in associations composed of brethren across lines of origin, color, and calidad. The third part uses the Southern Cone to frame analysis of Amerindian associations, and the final section recapitulates important scholarship on Black-identified lay Catholic brotherhoods and lived religion in colonial Brazil, with a strong focus on the mining-rich province of Minas Gerais and Salvador da Bahia, the colony's administrative capital from 1549 to 1763.The parts that treat Indigenous confraternities successfully link lived religion in the early colonial period to pre-Columbian cultures of the ancient Americas. The chapters examining New Spain were particularly effective in terms of including case studies highlighting pre-Hispanic cultural continuities in colonial-period organizational records. For example, Laura Dierksmeier's essay highlights note-taking practices that referred to dates using Nahua cultural conventions rather than the Gregorian calendar, which provides strong evidence that precolonial temporal and epistemological frameworks continued to influence how people understood their world even as proselytization led local Indigenous communities to form sodalities. The section also deepens documentation and historiography by utilizing primary source records that corroborate significant ethnic diversity among West and West Central Africans in the viceregal capital of New Spain. Confraternities forged solidarity among participants but could also foster and reflect practices of exclusion. Conflict also routinely ensued when confraternities raised funds to build churches that parish officials later aimed to administer. Struggles for authority in and control of the built environment of churches meant that the legal recognition granted by the crown and church officials consistently and continuously required negotiation and rebuff.The chapters considering colonial Lima and its environs introduce a measure of methodological innovation. Here we see the impact of the visual turn in history spurred by the increasing digitization of primary sources, including images. Ximena Gómez focuses on material culture, exploring commissioned sculptures, paintings, vestments, and organizational inventories; she uses methodologies from the field of art history to highlight notions of reciprocity between congregants and representations of the divine. The “sumptuous” gowns in which saints were adorned acted as earthly confirmation of celestial authority; in this way, associations across boundaries of race functioned as active participants in the construction of a meaningful “visual language of power” (p. 128). Landscapes, including mountains and glaciers, also maintained their pre-Hispanic significance within confraternal associational life, as Angelica Serna Jeri argues. Her chapter challenges readers to think of the relationships between glaciers, mountain peaks, and human actors as imbued with multivalent spiritual significance.The fourth part, exploring the world of Black-identified confraternities in colonial Brazil, includes important writers contributing to the study of Lusophone confraternities. Célia Maia Borges provides a strong orienting essay for readers encountering the subject of Black-identified brotherhoods for the first time. The essay comprehensively describes the internal organizational patterns typical of sodalities, how missionary efforts contributed to sodality formation patterns, and the concerns that linked sodality participants. The chapter by Marina de Mello e Souza categorizes and analyzes the critical approaches taken by generations of Brazilian scholars studying colonial-era Black-identified brotherhoods. She discusses how readers should understand the relationship between confraternities and cultural resistance among African-origin and African-descended people. Lucilene Reginaldo, foregrounding the symbolic and imaginative power of festivals, parades, and pageantry, highlights the power of the sacred and profane even within a paternalist, slaveholding society.The amount of work taken on by the editors, who translated slightly more than half the chapters from Spanish and Portuguese to English in collaboration with Bruna Dantas Lobato, is commendable. Until now a significant portion of this research has been inaccessible for English-only readers; the translated essays can now easily reach undergraduate students, early career graduate students, and more general readers. One of the limits of including such a significant number of chapters based on previously published work in translation, however, is that the volume reflects a consensus of ideas rather than overwhelmingly pointing to new trends or lines of interpretation, even when the material has been modified or amended. The book constitutes a decidedly useful starting point for readers who want to explore the rich and varied locales and worldviews that confraternities document as locally oriented social and legal entities in burgeoning imperial projects in Spanish and Portuguese America

Archaeology · Colonialism · Creole language · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Latin Americans · Negotiation · Political science · Portuguese · Power (physics) · Scholarship · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Law

• Beyond the (Holy) Shroud

  Miriam Franchina•Atlantic Studies•2023

  Add to list

• Early Modern Atlantic Cities

  Open Access•Mariana Dantas, Emma Hart•Early Modern Atlantic Cities•2024

  Add to list

• Approaching Gender and Race in Colonial Latin American Art

  Kathryn Santner•Early Modern Women An Interdiscipli…•2024

  Add to list