Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531–1706

Abstract

Africans and their descendants in colonial Mexico are one of the most thoroughly documented diasporic populations in the early Americas, with archival evidence attesting to everything from long-term demographic trends to the daily experiences of individual Afro-Mexicans. As a delicately balanced work of social and cultural history, Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva's Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico puts this evidence to excellent use, modeling aspects of both large-scale analysis and detailed microhistorical storytelling. Focusing on colonial Mexico's second city of Puebla de los Ángeles, Sierra Silva draws on an impressive array of municipal, notarial, and judicial records to reconstruct a complex landscape of urban slavery, showing how the enslaved navigated Puebla's particular urban spaces and labor regimes to sustain families, build social networks, and improve their legal and financial circumstances.Though not strictly chronological, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico begins with Puebla's founding in 1531, in a previously uninhabited plain not quite halfway between Mexico City and the Gulf Coast. Sierra Silva describes the city's founders as antiencomienda idealists who sought to create a Spanish settlement that did not rely on native exploitation. The “Puebla experiment” soon failed, and by the mid-sixteenth century the city had become a hub of the indigenous and early African slave trades, details of which readers will find of interest (p. 24).The majority of the book takes place in the seventeenth century, when Puebla's embrace of African and, to a lesser extent, Asian slavery was complete. Emphasizing the importance of space and mobility, Sierra Silva describes how slavery functioned in five urban contexts: textile mills (obrajes), convents, the slave market, social networks, and local marketplaces. In each, Sierra Silva describes the development of spaces and spatial relationships while also examining individual cases to reveal how Africans, Asians, and indigenous people navigated them. For example, chapter 2 follows Puebla's textile industry, in which African and Asian captives lived and worked in close quarters with indigenous laborers. Sierra Silva examines both the interethnic intimacy of the obraje and means by which obrajeros controlled intimacy for their own ends. In chapter 3, Sierra Silva turns to Puebla's convents, where, like the obraje, confinement prevailed but where the cultural expectations of the church allowed enslaved individuals slightly more mobility.Chapter 4 departs from this rubric somewhat as Sierra Silva's description of Puebla's slave market gives way to his study of its entanglement in larger slave-trading circuits. Drawing on an original database of nearly 10,000 notarial transactions, Sierra Silva demonstrates that the inland city functioned as a major slave-trading node even if no ships ever docked there. Not only does Sierra Silva offer a thorough demographic profile of captives bought and sold in Puebla, but he also describes in remarkable detail the business of slave trading on the local level. Sierra Silva's research not only necessitates revision to long-standing scholarship on the slave trade to Mexico but also calls on historians of the slave trade elsewhere to seriously consider local archives alongside those of larger colonial repositories.The final two chapters return us to Puebla's urban landscapes, this time to the less confining spaces of elite residences and secondhand marketplaces. In chapter 5, Sierra Silva demonstrates how the enslaved used family networks and religious affiliations to strategically expand their spatial mobility, while chapter 6 describes the economic opportunities afforded by small-scale marketing practices. In both chapters, Sierra Silva contributes to a wealth of scholarship on black community formation in colonial Mexico. Importantly, he does this while pressing beyond the typical institutions whose perspectives have guided that scholarship—the militia, the church, and the tribute system—instead using Puebla's notarial archive to reconstruct the lives and networks of Afro-Poblanos who are not otherwise represented in militias and confraternities.Throughout the book, Sierra Silva is cautious on the question of Puebla's typicality, at times emphasizing the distinctiveness of urban slavery in central Mexico but also suggesting a number of potential links between Puebla and other places in the Atlantic world. This caution is perhaps wise, especially as one of Sierra Silva's primary contributions is his steady focus on the particularity of individual experiences. Nevertheless, in a field that is increasingly interested in understanding the differences and commonalities of diasporic communities across time and space, a more decisive assertion of where Puebla fits (or does not) in larger narratives of Afro-Atlantic diaspora would be welcome.Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico's core is the individual stories of Afro-Poblano lives that it relates in exquisite detail. Sierra Silva takes on archival collections that, while large, tend to reproduce the priorities and perspectives of slaveholders, administrators, and those who sought their attention and favor. Building on the work of Marisa Fuentes, Sierra Silva confronts the colonial archive, using its “fragments” to render lives that are often obscured not only by scarcity but also by the residue of colonial power. Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico thereby moves the history of Afro-Mexico in new directions and should be read widely by historians in that field as well as those of colonial Latin America and the Atlantic world more generally.