Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices(5 Connected Histories in the Early Modern World)

Employing a transregional and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores indigenous and black confraternities –or lay Catholic brotherhoods– founded in colonial Spanish America and Brazil between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. It presents a varied group of cases of religious confraternities founded by subaltern subjects, both in rural and urban spaces of colonial Latin America, to understand the dynamics and relations between the peripheral and central areas of colonial society, underlying the ways in which colonialized subjects navigated the colonial domain with forms of social organization and cultural and religious practices. The book analyzes indigenous and black confraternal cultural practices as forms of negotiation and resistance shaped by local devotional identities that also transgressed imperial religious and racial hierarchies. The analysis of these practices explores the intersections between ethnic identity and ritual devotion, as well as how the establishment of black and indigenous religious confraternities carried the potential to subvert colonial discourse.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Negotiating Status through Confraternal Practices (Javiera Jaque Hidalgo and Miguel A. Valeri) Part I Indigenous and Black Confraternities in New Spain 1 Religious Autonomy and Local Religion among Indigenous Confraternities in Colonial Mexico, Sixteenth Seventeenth Centuries (Laura Dierksmeier) 2 Confraternities of People of African Descent in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City (Cristina Verónica Masferrer León) 3 "Of All Type of Calidad or Color": Black Confraternities in a Multiethnic Mexican Parish, 1640-1750 (Krystle Farman Sweda) Part II Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Peru 4 Confraternal "Collections": Black and Indigenous Cofradías and the Curation of Religious Life in Colonial Lima (Ximena Gómez) 5 "Of Greater Dignity than the Negros": Language and In-Group Distinctions within Early Afro-Peruvian Cofradías (Karen B. Graubart) 6 African-Descent Women and the Limits of Confraternal Devotion in Colonial Lima, Peru (Tamara J. Walker) 7 Glaciers, the Colonial Archive and the Brotherhood of the Lord of Quyllur Rit’i (Angelica Serna Jeri) Part III Indigenous Confraternities in the Southern Cone 8 Immigrants’ Devotions: The Incorporation of Andean Amerindians in Santiago de Chile’s Confraternities in the Seventeenth Century (Jaime Valenzuela Márquez) 9 The Marian Cult as a Resistance Strategy: The Territorialized Construction of Devotions in the Province of Potosí, Charcas, in the Eighteenth Century (Candela De Luca) 10 Between Excess and Pleasure: The Religious Festivals of the Indigenous People of Jujuy, Seventeenth-Nineteenth Centuries (Enrique Normando Cruz and Grit Kirstin Koeltzsch) Part IV Black Brotherhoods in Brazil 11 Black Brotherhoods in Colonial Brazil: Devotion and Solidarity (Célia Maia Borges) 12 Cultural Resistance and Afro-Catholicism in Colonial Brazil (Marina de Mello e Souza) 13 "Much to See and Admire": Festivals, Parades, and Royal Pageantry among Afro-Bahian Brotherhoods in the Eighteenth Century (Lucilene Reginaldo) Afterword: Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America (Nicole von Germeten) Bibliography Contributors Acknowledgements Index

About the Author :
Javiera Jaque Hidalgo is an assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures in Virginia Tech. Her topic of research is the literature and culture of Colonial Latin America with a focus on Jesuit missions in Chile. More recently her research focus is on indigenous migration to urban spaces. She has published her research in A Contracorriente, Una revista de estudios latinoamericanos, Rocky Mountain Review, Revista Chilena de Literatura, and Revista Provinciana. Revista de literatura y pensamiento. She is currently working in her first monograph entitled Misiones Jesuitas en la Frontera de Arauco: Resistencia Mapuche, Negociación y Movilidad Cultural en la Periferia Colonial (1593-1641) , in which she analyzes the frontier dynamics among Mapuche people and Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century. Miguel A. Valerio is assistant professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the African diaspora in the literatures and cultures of the early modern Iberian world, particularly Afro-confraternities’ festive practices. His work has appeared in Afro-Hispanic Review, Confraternitas, Slavery and Abolotion, Colonial Latin American Review and the Journal of Festive Studies. His book, Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640, which studies Afro-Mexican confraternities’ festive practices, will be published with Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Review :
"This stimulating edited volume takes a timely and novel approach to the study of confraternities by analyzing sodalities composed of predominantly Indigenous, Africanorigin, and African-descended populations in the same publication" -- Longue Duree, Hispanic American Historical Review, 103:2