Sherwin K. Bryant

Rachel Sarah O'Toole

Ben Vinson

Africans to Spanish America expands the diaspora framework to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African diaspora in the Spanish empires. Analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. The volume is arranged around three sub-themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion. Contributors are Joan Cameron Bristol, Nancy E. van Deusen, Leo Garafalo, Herbert S. Klein, Charles Beatty Medina, Karen Y. Morrison, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Frank "Trey" Proctor, and Michele B. Reid.

Expanding the Diaspora

Africans to Spanish America

Ben Vinson (III.)

"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"--

Sherwin K. Bryant

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