Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico

This is a beautifully rendered, deeply engaged study of slavery in Puebla de los Angeles. Puebla is a city famous for its mole poblano, Baroque architecture and picturesque ceramic tiles—but not for its enslaved Afro-descendants and Asian historical presence. Indeed, as Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva points out, while most Poblanos know about the saintly china poblana, ‘it has never been explained to [them] why she was a slave in Puebla’ in the seventeenth century (p. 6). In writing a sociocultural history of slavery of Puebla, Sierra Silva details a century of birth and rebirth, social navigation and network consolidation, and pain as African people made their lives in the city. The book’s strengths lie in Sierra Silva’s close reading of parochial records, litigation, and notarial documents. The textual imperial power that underpinned Iberian bureaucracy is on full display here, as Sierra Silva pores over more than 9,000 entries

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Baroque · Bureaucracy · China · Colonialism · Consolidation (business · Ethnology · Geography · Humanities · Mexico city · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Anthropology · Architecture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History · Law