Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640

Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640

Indiana University Press
2005-02-02
288 pages
1 bibliog., 1 index, 6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21775-2; ISBN: 0-253-21775-X

Herman L. Bennett, Professor of Latin American History
City Univerisity of New York

The African community in colonial Mexico under Spanish and Catholic rule.

In this study of the largest population of free and slave Africans in the New World, Herman L. Bennett has uncovered much new information about the lives of slave and free blacks, the ways that their lives were regulated by the government and the Church, the impact upon them of the Inquisition, their legal status in marriage, and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Africans, Absolutism, and Archives
1. Soiled Gods and the Formation of a Slave Society
2. “The Grand Remedy”: Africans and Christian Conjugality
3. Policing Christians: Persons of African Descent before the Inquisition and Ecclesiastical Courts
4. Christian matrimony and the Boundaries of African Self-Fashioning
5. Between Property and Person: Jurisdictional Conflicts over Marriage
6. Creoles and Christian Narratives
Postscript
Glossary
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

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