Sovereign Joy

Miguel A. Valerio's study of African confraternities and festival culture in Mexico—with an eye to the wider diaspora—is a story not only of Black agency, community, and resilience but of a vibrant, unyielding Black joy. Inspired by recent public discourse that rejects the transhistorical association of Blackness with suffering yet steeped in the social context of early modern Mexico and the Atlantic, Valerio transcends traditional binaries like agency and structure, resistance and accommodation, and creolization and survival to give a vision of Blackness as Afro-Mexicans may have seen themselves.Valerio examines Afro-Mexican festival culture from its origins in the early colonial period to its confrontation with the colonial state in the early seventeenth century and its negotiation with the state in the mid-seventeenth century. Chapter 1 examines Black participation in the mock battles, processions, and performances held in Mexico City in 1539 to commemorate the Truce of Nice. Drawing mainly from Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, Valerio uses an impressive amount of social, demographic, and cultural context to read a procession of 50 Black performers on horseback as a Mexican iteration of the Kongolese sangamento celebration. With comparisons to similar performances in West Central Africa and Brazil, Valerio inserts Mexico within a more traditional geography of Black Atlantic culture.Chapter 2, on the political entanglements of Afro-Mexican confraternities, focuses principally on two Mexico City confraternities accused of plotting to overthrow the viceroy, kill all European men, and enslave European women and Indigenous people in 1609 and 1612. Following María Elena Martínez, Valerio questions the allegations' legitimacy, focusing on the “colonial psychosis” of New Spain's European rulers. Contrary to other scholars, Valerio demonstrates that practices like the crowning of festival royalty did not end with the state's violent response to the supposed plots but were instead transformed, as Afro-Mexicans outwardly appeased Spanish expectations of fealty while deftly preserving earlier cultural meanings.Chapter 3 focuses on the material and affective aspects of early seventeenth-century Black festivities, drawing on an anonymous description of Mexico City's 1610 celebration of Ignatius of Loyola's beatification. Readers will find a remarkable reconstruction of the spaces, dress, music, and objects of Black festival performances. As Valerio shows, Black performers liberally adopted European festivals' material aspects for their own claims on space and status. Chapter 4 further examines the strategic use of European symbols via a performance before New Spain's new viceroy of the Queen of Sheba's visit to King Solomon (as described in Nicolás de Torres's Festín). Valerio argues that this performance by 11 Afro-Mexican women (whom Valerio understands as members of a confraternity) constituted both the calculated “creolization” of Afro-Mexican women and the continuity of officially proscribed forms of Black festival culture—a compelling argument that rejects both the construction of creolization as elision and representations of an undifferentiated cultural survival (p. 199).One of Sovereign Joy's many virtues is its deliberate comparisons and connections between Mexico and the Afro-Atlantic diaspora—sorely needed in Afro-Mexican history. In the past two decades, Afro-Mexicanists have repeatedly shown that the Mexican archive is a powerful tool for telling detailed, complex narratives of Afro-descended people and communities. Less often have Afro-Mexicanists ventured beyond Mexico's modern borders to examine how those narratives might add to understandings of African diasporas elsewhere in the Americas. Valerio's continual references to Brazil, New Orleans, the Caribbean, and elsewhere extend Afro-Mexico into the Atlantic, providing a valuable model for future studies.At the same time, however, potential differences in Black festival culture across space and time are occasionally neglected. While Valerio acknowledges that festivals were “neither static nor unchanging,” some of his comparisons do not raise significant distinctions or contemplate how potential disjunctures might affect our understanding, for example, of festivals in Mexico and Brazil (p. 65). “Black joy” in the face of colonial violence may be a centuries-long through line connecting African diasporas in Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere, but the quality of that joy—what it celebrates and how, the meanings imbued within those celebrations—undoubtedly changed significantly. This is in part a product of the book's synchronic methodology: each chapter offers thick description of select festival performances and their political, material, and gendered aspects. Future studies should build on Valerio's foundation of placing Afro-Mexico in live dialogue with the broader Black Atlantic by also turning a fresh eye to that dialogue's evolution in the long stretch of the colonial period.It is not uncommon for a reviewer to say that a reviewed work is important. Sovereign Joy is important, but I hope that it is moreover a sign of things to come, both from Valerio and from those sure to be inspired by his work. I hope, too, that Latin Americanists, Africanists, and Atlanticists take ample note of just how innovative this book is. In the archive, we are all forced to consider the lives of Black people as they were seen by non-Black observers, many of whom represented an anti-Black worldview. Confronted with this problem, we often revert to two models of analysis: either emphasize anti-Black violence, truncating Black agency, or emphasize Black resistance, eliding anti-Black violence. Valerio breaks new ground in the study of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora by showing that we need not be bound by this binary

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