Africans to Spanish America—Expanding the Diaspora

"Exploring the connections between colonial Latin American historiography and the scholarship on the African Diaspora in the Spanish empires, Africans to Spanish America points to the continuities as well as disjunctures between the two fields of study. While a majority of the research on the colonial diaspora focuses on the Caribbean and Brazil, analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes open up new questions of community formation that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. Therefore, it is critically important to expand the lens of the Diaspora framework that has come to shape so much of the recent scholarship on Africans in the Americas. Comprised of nine original essays, this volume is organized into three sections. Starting with voluntary and forced migrations across the Atlantic, Part I explores four distinct cases of identity construction that intersect with ongoing debates in African Diaspora scholarship regarding the models of continuity and creolization in the Americas. Part II interrogates how enslaved and free people employed their rights as Catholics to present themselves as civilized subjects, loyal Christians, and resisters to slavery. Part III asks how free people of color claimed categories of inclusion based on a identities of professional medical practitioners of "white" in transformative moments of the late colonial period"--