The black blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, racial violence, and gendered power in early colonial Mexico

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 61, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 479-520

  Martínez, María Elena ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65849359701     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491806     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (94)

1. See, for example, David M. Davidson, "Protest and Palenques: Black Resistance and Control in Colonial Mexico," in Ann M. Pescatello, ed., The African in Latin America (New York, 1975), 214
2. and Irving Leonard, Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-Century Persons, Places, and Practices (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1959), 19-20
3. For an eloquent analysis of how the construction of historical narratives involves power (including the power to silence) at different stages, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995), esp. 1-30
4. For a discussion of how archives limit the historical study of crime, in particular, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, Calif., 1987)
5. For the English translation, see Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, Codex Chimalpahin: Annals of His Time, III, trans. James Lockhart, Susan Schroeder, and Doris Namala (Norman, Okla., forthcoming). I thank Susan Schroeder for providing me with a copy of the English translation of the relevant portion of Chimalpahin's Mexico City annals
6. Chimalpahin, "La conjuración de los negros," in Villar, ed., Lecturas, I, 522
7. and Ann Laura Stoler, "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia," in Micaela di Leonardo, ed., Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 51-101
8. As Hazel Carby has discussed, among the first to theorize the links between colonialism, patriarchal power, and racial and gender hierarchies were nineteenth-century black feminist intellectuals; see Carby, "'On the Threshold of a Women's Era': Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist History," Critical Inquiry, XII (1985), 310-316
9. Various scholars of colonial Latin America have discussed the relationship between the concept of purity of blood and Spanish women's sexuality. See, for example, Susan Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge, 2000), 7-9
10. Verena Stolcke, "Invaded Women: Gender, Race, and Class in the Formation of Colonial Society," in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, 'Race, ' and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London, 1994), 272-286
11. and Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574-1821 (Stanford, Calif., 1988), esp. 146-150
12. María Elena Martínez, "The Spanish Concept of Limpieza de Sangre and the Emergence of the 'Race/Caste' System in the Viceroyalty of New Spain" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2002)
13. L. N. McAlister, "Social Structure and Social Change in New Spain," Hispanic American Historical Review, XLIII (1963), 353-354
14. Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston, 1967), 54-55
15. Julio Caro Baroja, "Antecedentes españoles de algunos problemas sociales relativos al mestizaje," Revista Histórica, XXVIII (1965), 197-210
16. and R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720 (Madison, Wis., 1994), 14-26
17. See, for example, Juan Hernández Franco, Cultura y limpieza de sangre en la España moderna: puritate sanguinis (Murcia, 1996); and Ruth Pike, Linajudos and Conversos in Seville: Greed and Prejudice in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spain (New York, 2000)
18. For a more extensive discussion of the historiography, see Martínez, "The Spanish Concept of Limpieza de Sangre," chap. 4
19. Leslie B. Rout, Jr., also stressed this point in The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1976), 126-127
20. Gregorio García, Origen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo (Mexico City, 1981) 79-128
21. For a defense of the purity of native people and mestizos by a leading Spanish jurist, see Juan de Solórzano Pereira, Política Indiana, I (1648) (Madrid 1930), 436-437
22. Colonial Mexico's sistema de castas, with its whitening logic and stress on reproduction as a means of redeeming certain colonial groups, to a certain extent anticipated the nineteenth-century ideas of the Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) on racial mixture. Basically, he endorsed moderate metissage because he believed that it was necessary for civilizations to grow more powerful and to remain dynamic. Characterizing the encounter between European (especially Aryan) and colonized groups as that between active and passive, respectively - and, by extension, between male and female - he cast "race-mixture" as a mechanism by which the stronger races met weaker ones in a dynamic of master and servant. See Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge, 1998), 63-64
23. Colin Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650 (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 39
24. and Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., LIV (1997), 103-142
25. On Iberian notions of blackness and slavery before and during the expansion to the Americas, see James H. Sweet, "The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought," WMQ, 3d Ser., LIV (1997), 143-166
26. Michel Foucault suggested that the importance of blood in the early modern period stemmed primarily from its function as a central sign for a person's place within the largely birth-determined system of social hierarchies or estates as well as from its role as a symbol of the relationship between the king and his subjects, which at root was about the sovereign's power of life and death over the latter; see Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1990), 135-150
27. Robert Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521-1555 (Austin, Tex., 1991)
28. Hugo G. Nutini, The Wages of Conquest: the Mexican Aristocracy in the Context of Western Aristocracies (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1995), esp. chap. 4
29. and Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810 (Stanford, Calif., 1964), 58-98
30. On the passage of the New Laws of 1542 and the debates by Spanish jurists and theologians over Spain's right to rule over the indigenous people, see Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1982), 27-56
31. D. A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge, 1991), 58-101
32. and Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb, Ill., 1974)
33. and Susan Kellogg, Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500-1700 (Norman, Okla., 1995)
34. For Peru see Ward Stavig Ambiguous Visions: Nature, Law, and Culture in Indigenous-Spanish Land Relations in Colonial Peru," Hispanic American Historical Review, LXXX (2000), 77-111
35. and Steve J. Stern, "The Social Significance of Judicial Institutions in an Exploitative Society: Huamanga, Peru, 1570-1640," in George Collier et al., eds., The Inca and Aztec States, 1400-1800: Anthropology and History (New York, 1982), 289-320
36. Emilia Viotti da Costa, "The Portuguese-African Slave Trade: A Lesson in Colonialism," Latin American Perspectives, XII (1985), 45-47, 54-60
37. and Russell-Wood, "Before Columbus, in Lawrence and Nettleford, eds., Race, Discourse, and the Origins of the Americas, 150-152
38. For a late-eighteenth-century description of the Portuguese slave trade, including branding practices, see Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (Princeton, N.J., 1983), 15-23
39. For how free and enslaved persons of African ancestry in colonial Brazil used their status as subjects of the Portuguese crown to make appeals for justice, see A. J. R. Russell-Wood, "'Acts of Grace': Portuguese Monarchs and Their Subjects of African Descent in Eighteenth-Century Brazil," Journal of Latin American Studies, XXXII (2000), 307-332
40. On the participation of free persons of African ancestry in New Spain's militia units, see Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, Calif., 2001)
41. Kathryn Joy McKnight, "Blasphemy as Resistance: An African Slave Woman before the Mexican Inquisition," in Mary E. Giles, ed., Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World (Baltimore, 1999), 229-253
42. and Colin A. Palmer, "Religion and Magic in Mexican Slave Society, 1570-1650," in Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, N.J., 1975), 311-328
43. Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven, Conn., 2003), 140-163 (esp. 152-162)
44. For a discussion of the link between "tainted" blood, dishonor, and "civil death" in the early modern Hispanic world, see Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford, Calif., 1999), 41-50 (esp. 44)
45. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 13. The extent to which Spanish colonialism was able to accomplish this - the erasure of African lineage and memory - is, of course, debatable, varied by region, and depended on a number of factors. Furthermore, as the recent surge in studies on African Mexicans (not to mention Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán's pioneering work on the same subject, La población negra de México: studio etnohistórico [Mexico City, 1946]) has confirmed, no past is ever entirely dead. For a work that examines twentieth-century Mexico's efforts to deny the African origins of part of its population, see Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, "The Erasure of the Afro Element of Mestizaje in Modern Mexico: The Coding of Visibly Black Mestizos according to a White Aesthetic in and through the Discourse on Nation during the Cultural Phase of the Mexican Revolution, 1920-1968" (Ph.D. diss., The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 2001)
46. For a recent treatment of the issue, see Pedro Carrasco, "Indian-Spanish Marriages in the First Century of the Colony," in Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, eds., Indian Women of Early Mexico (Norman, Okla., 1997), 87-104
47. Enrique Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to Independence, trans. Albert G. Bork (Austin, Tex., 1994)
48. James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif., 1992), 326-373
49. Lockhart, Nahuas and Spaniards: Postconquest Central Mexican History and Philology (Los Angeles, 1991)
50. Susan D. Gillespie, The Aztec Kings: The Construction of Rulership in Mexican History (Tucson, Ariz., 1989)
51. Some blacks and mulattoes were employed in mining and agricultural enterprises (especially sugar), and many others provided skilled and unskilled labor in various cities. In Mexico City and Lima, which had the largest concentrations of blacks in the western hemisphere through most of the seventeenth century, they participated in a number of guilds and in industries such as shoemaking, ironware, and construction. See Frederick P. Bowser, "Africans in Spanish American Colonial Society," in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge, 1984-). II. 366-367
52. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524-1650 (Stanford, Calif., 1974)
53. and James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532-1560: A Colonial Society (Madison, Wis., 1974), 171-198
54. A number of laws at the turn of the century tried to curb the trend. In 1601, for example, Viceroy don Gaspar de Zuñiga y Azevedo limited the number of blacks and mulattoes that could accompany any Spaniard to three. AGI, México 270: decree regarding accompaniments of blacks and mulattoes, 1601. Of course, the economic function of slaves, including urban ones, should not be underestimated. Some Spaniards in colonial cities, for instance, profited from renting their slaves to other Spaniards. For the case of Jalapa, see Patrick J. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development, 2d ed. (Austin, Tex., 2001), 64-67
55. See Nancy M. Farriss, Mayas Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 97, 122
56. On the psychological effects of slavery on white masters, see, for instance, Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990), 15-75 (esp. 66-67)
57. and Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (New York, 1997), 12-13
58. Racial fantasies also appeared, and became even more prominent, in some post-slavery societies, such as in the Jim Crow South, where thousands of people (most of them black men accused of raping or intending to assault white women) were lynched between 1880 and 1930. See W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1993)
59. and Jeffrey Melnick, Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South (Jackson, Miss., 2000)
60. Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York, 1970), 49. For Kovel, the fear of castration derives from the "anal-oedipal phase" of childhood develop-ment, duting which the (male) child learns that the mother is forbidden and belongs to the father, who represents authority
61. Castration was at times used by colonial authorities to punish runaway slaves. It was common enough that in 1540 Charles V ordered a stop to it, but in 1579 New Spain's viceroy issued a decree that sanctioned it and other forms of bodily mutilation. See Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 123-125
62. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, 90-92
63. The topic has received less scholarly attention from scholars of colonial Mexico than the eroticization of women of African descent. See, for example, Estela Roselló Soberón, "Entre la luz y la sombra: la sensualidad de las mujeres de origen africano en la Nueva España," Cuaderno Mexicanos, XCV (2002), 171-186
64. AGI, México 27, no. 63: letters of Viceroy don Luis de Velasco, the younger, Feb. 13, 1609
65. Spanish American Audiencias did not simply have judicial functions; they had administrative and executive powers as well. The Mexico City one normally consisted of a president ex-officio (the viceroy), eight to ten magistrates (oidores), four criminal judges (alcaldes del crimen), one or two prosecutors (fiscal de lo civil and fiscal de lo criminal), one high sheriff (alguacil mayor), one lieutenant chancellor (teniente de gran chanciller), and other lesser officials. On Spanish colonial legal institutions and culture, see Charles R. Cutter, The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain, 1700-1810 (Albuquerque, N.M., 1995)
66. Martín, too, was basically a creole, for he had arrived in New Spain as a child and had for the most part been raised there. Nonetheless, it is significant that the participants chose as king the one person among them who had been born in Africa, perhaps because he retained some knowledge of African social and religious traditions, which, as various scholars have noted, tended to be a source of great respect in slave communities. See Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (Cambridge, 1986), 167
67. Creole Portuguese, for example, was the first lingua franca in coastal Africa, and some slaves took it to the New World; see John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1998), 214-216
68. For more on Atlantic creoles during the height of Portuguese involvement in the slave trade, see Ira Berlin, "From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America," WMQ, 3d Ser., LIII (1996), 254-264
69. See, for example, Klein, African Slavery in Latin America, 14
70. and Thornton, Africa and Africans, 206-234
71. On Atlantic slavery and the concept of disembedding, see Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 5
72. Leonard, Baroque Times, 19-20. Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah estimated that the native population declined from about 27,650,000 in 1519 to approximately 1,075,000 in 1605 (the figures are cited in Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 2). A report sent by Pedro de Vega to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in 1595 estimated the total nonnative population of Mexico City to be 60,000, including 40,000 Spaniards, 10,000 slaves, and 1,500 free blacks and mulattoes. For Puebla, Vega estimated the total nonindigenous population to be 20,100, including 14,400 Spaniards, 2,500 black and mulatto slaves, and 3,000 workers in the obrajes, or textile mills, among which were Spaniards and "many mestizos, mulattoes, and free blacks." The report was based on a census taken in New Spain in 1592. Vega probably overestimated the Spanish population, which he determined by multiplying the number of Spanish heads of household (5,000 in Mexico City, 1,800 in Puebla) by 8, supposedly the average number of people in Spanish homes. See AHN, Inquisición de México, Libro 1049, fols. 54r-57v: report from Pedro de Vega regarding the population of Mexico City, Puebla, and other cities, 1595
73. For more on this maroon community, see Davidson, "Protest and Palenques," in Pescatello, ed., The African in Latin America, 212-213
74. J. I. Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610-1670 (London, 1975), 70-71
75. See "The Foundation of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Morenos de Amapa, Mexico," in Mills and Taylor, eds., Colonial Spanish America, 274-281
76. Just as they did in the metropole, Spaniards in New Spain used plays to convey religious messages. The genre became popular among different colonial populations. For a work that examines a Spanish Holy Week play that was performed in Nahuatl, see Louise M. Burkhart, Holy Wednesday: A Nahua Drama from Early Colonial Mexico (Philadelphia, 1996)
77. Also see Inga Clendinnen, "Ways to the Sacred: Reconstructing 'Religion' in Sixteenth Century Mexico," History and Anthropology, V (1990), 105-141
78. See Luis Querol y Roso, "Negros y mulatos de Nueva España," Anales de la Universidad de Valencia, XII, no. 9 (1931-1932), 141
79. Querol y Roso, "Negros y mulatos," Anales, XII, no. 9 (1931-1932), 148
80. Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven, Conn., 1994)
81. Serge Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Eileen Corrigan (Cambridge, 1993), 146-183
82. Nora Reyes Costilla and Martĩn Gonzãlez de la Vara, "El demonio entre los marginales: la poblaciõn negra y el pacto con el demonio en el norte de Nueva España, siglos XVII y XVIII," Colonial Latin American Historical Review, X (2001), 199-221
83. and Ruth Behar, "Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late-Colonial Mexico," American Ethnologist, XIV (1987), 34-54
84. Ann Laura Stoler, "'In Cold Blood': Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives," in Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories, special issue of Representations, XXXVII (1992), 154. I thank Nancy Lutkehaus for drawing my attention to this article. A rigid distinction between fact and fiction does not exist. As scholars such as Natalie Zemon Davis have noted, history is a form of fiction, not in the sense that it tells lies, but because it relies on narratives, which almost by definition have plots in ways that life does not (Davis, Fiction in the Archives, 2-3)
85. Also see Hayden White, "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the 'Final Solution'" (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 37-53
86. See, for instance, Gary B. Nash, "The Hidden History of Mestizo America," in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York, 1999), 17-18
87. Blacks' "otherness," however, did not prevent Spanish males from continuing to have illicit relations with women of African ancestry. In the last third of the seventeenth century, the Mexican church intensified its battle against concubinage and forced some Spaniards, under threat of excommunication, to legalize their unions with black and mulatto women, including slaves. See Beltrán, La población negra de México, 247-248
88. The historiography of the U.S. South is a different case. See Martha E. Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, Conn., 1997)
89. Richard E. Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisition of the Sixteenth Century (Albuquerque, N.M., 1960)
90. Solange Alberro, Inquisición y Sociedad en México, 1571-1700 (Mexico City, 1988), esp. 149-151
91. and Jean Pierre Dedieu, "'Christianization' in New Castile: Catechism, Communion, Mass, and Confirmation in the Toledo Archbishopric, 1450-1650," in Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, eds., Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain (Minneapolis, Minn., 1992), 1-24
92. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York, 1967), 63-82
93. For an interesting discussion of how certain native groups have identified blackness, not with slavery, but with liberation, see Norman Whitten and Rachel Corr, "Contesting the Images of Oppression: Indigenous Views of Blackness in the Americas," NACLA: Report on the Americas, XXXIV, no. 6 (2001), 24-28
94. Chimalpahin, Codex, trans. Lockhart, Schroeder, and Namala