Taxing Blackness: Free Afromexican Tribute in Bourbon New Spain

Abstract

In 2020 the Mexican government's decennial census will incorporate African descendants into the categories of race and ethnicity, which it has not done since the nineteenth century. In 2015, the Mexican government conducted an interim census where it allowed individuals to self-identify, and more than 1 million people identified as African-descendant. The current presence of African descendants in Mexico goes beyond census recognition, as those considered the tercera raíz (third root) have received significant attention by scholars, politicians, and the general public as a result of this population's continued self-identification as Afro-Mexican. While this is significant for current-day sociopolitical circumstances, such categorization and recognition of African descendants, through registers, censuses, and other documentation, existed throughout the colonial period. In Taxing Blackness: Free Afromexican Tribute in Bourbon New Spain, Norah Gharala moves beyond statistical evidence and critically analyzes the ways in which African descendants practiced agency through their identity in New Spain.The book focuses on Bourbon tribute reforms in New Spain and emphasizes the policies that colonial authorities implemented in the taxation of colonial subjects, with a specific focus on African descendants. Norah Gharala's examination of the expanding Real Hacienda (Royal Treasury) under the Bourbon dynasty reveals the complexity of taxing as a two-way power dynamic for the crown and its subjects. Paying particular attention to colonial subjects of African descent, the six chapters show how “tributary status became a ground of contestation where, ultimately, the significance of blackness itself was alternately attested and challenged in colonial courts and tribunals” (p. 3).One of the most critical aspects of Gharala's work is that it goes beyond the historiography's focus on race. Instead, the author builds from the growing number of manuscripts, articles, and dissertations that examine African descendants in Mexico in conjunction with the concept of calidad. Chapter 1 details the connection between tribute and calidad, demonstrating the variety of aspects that the latter encompassed (community, physical appearance, language, occupation, dress, residence, color, and religiosity). For the purposes of this study, Gharala makes clear that “calidad and tributary status were deeply interconnected through a process of bureaucratic knowledge making” (p. 44). Chapters 3 and 5 explore calidad through the use of complex methodological inquiry into a plethora of sources, including census records, court records, and tax and tribute records (on which Gharala heavily relies). Chapter 3 details how individuals relied on what the author labels “tributary genealogies,” in which they discussed and engaged the actions of their ancestors in reference to the contributions to the crown. Chapter 5 moves from individual families and highlights the role of community formation and identity in reference to calidad. Each of the aforementioned chapters provides specific examples; however, they also detail the strategic identities that African descendants constructed through the use of the notion of calidad.Such construction plays directly into the agency of those who did or did not pay taxes based on their calidad. Analyzing Afro-Mexican arguments for exemptions is one of the critical contributions of this study. In order to understand the process of exemptions, one must first engage the ways that the system assessed eligible tributaries. Chapter 4 engages the tribute system's expansion and the ways that colonial officials collected the taxes and information of their Afro-Mexican tributes. In chapter 6, Gharala details specific cases in which some argued that they were not African descendants despite evidence to the contrary. However, as the author makes clear, not all African descendants rejected their blackness in their claims for exemptions. Some African descendants argued for exemptions using genealogical references focusing on the contributions that their ancestors made to the Spanish crown.This work is a significant contribution to the historiography of Afro-Mexico in that it demonstrates another aspect of the Afro-Mexican partition and agency within the late colonial regime. Whereas previous studies employed censuses and court records, this study also utilizes tax records (in conjunction with other records) in engaging agency. The book also adds to the historiography on tribute, which tends to focus on indigenous populations, by including the Afro-Mexican populations, while also providing a space for analysis of Spanish tax structure and law in the colonial period.This text readily fits into history courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels and can be used in a variety of disciplines to engage the complexity of socially constructed identities and economic contributions, political participation, and agency across time and space. Not simply a contribution to contemporary academic and scholarly debate, it also adds to the current social, political, and economic discourse involving African descendants in Mexico.