“Blackness,”“Femaleness” and Self‐Representation: Constructing Persons in a Colonial Mexican Court

Abstract

This paper examines a case heard by the colonial Mexican Inquisition in 1655. It addresses individual negotiations of race and gender in a society that hierarchized notions of personhood through a system of rankings based on Early Modern ideas about natural difference. In the New World context, those rankings subordinated women, blacks, Indians and mixed-races to the authority of Spanish men.