Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status Through Religious Practices

Employing a transregional and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores indigenous and black confraternities -or lay Catholic brotherhoods- founded in colonial Spanish America and Brazil between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. It presents a varied group of cases of religious confraternities founded by subaltern subjects, both in rural and urban spaces of colonial Latin America, to understand the dynamics and relations between the peripheral and central areas of colonial society, underlying the ways in which colonialized subjects navigated the colonial domain with forms of social organization and cultural and religious practices. The book analyzes indigenous and black confraternal cultural practices as forms of negotiation and resistance shaped by local devotional identities that also transgressed imperial religious and racial hierarchies. The analysis of these practices explores the intersections between ethnic identity and ritual devotion, as well as how the establishment of black and indigenous religious confraternities carried the potential to subvert colonial discourse.

Javiera Jaque Hidalgo is an assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures in Virginia Tech. Her topic of research is the literature and culture of Colonial Latin America with a focus on Jesuit missions in Chile. More recently her research focus is on indigenous migration to urban spaces. She has published her research in A Contracorriente, Una revista de estudios latinoamericanos, Rocky Mountain Review, Revista Chilena de Literatura, and Revista Provinciana. Revista de literatura y pensamiento. She is currently working in her first monograph entitled Misiones Jesuitas en la Frontera de Arauco: Resistencia Mapuche, Negociación y Movilidad Cultural en la Periferia Colonial (1593-1641) , in which she analyzes the frontier dynamics among Mapuche people and Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century.

Miguel A. Valerio is assistant professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the African diaspora in the literatures and cultures of the early modern Iberian world, particularly Afro-confraternities' festive practices. His work has appeared in Afro-Hispanic Review, Confraternitas, Slavery and Abolotion, Colonial Latin American Review and the Journal of Festive Studies. His book, Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640, which studies Afro-Mexican confraternities' festive practices, will be published with Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Nicole von Germeten, a professor of Latin American History at Oregon State University, has worked as the Director of the School of History, Philosophy, and Religious studies since 2017. She received her PhD from the University of California Berkeley in 2003 with research funded by the Fulbright Garcia Robles Scholarship and the Muriel McKevitt Sonne Endowment. She was a Fellow at the Princeton Center for the Study of Religion in 2004 and was affiliated with the Stanford University Center for Latin American Studies in 2008 and 2009. She has contributed essays, reviews, and articles in close to sixty edited volumes and academic journals. She has published three single-authored books and one edited book-length translation since 2006, most recently Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico (California, 2018). Her fifth book, coming out in 2022 with the University of Nebraska Press, The Enlightened Patrolman: The Early History of Law Enforcement in Mexico City, examines how the Spanish viceroys attempted to modernize policing to suppress popular revolt and to curb what they viewed as an out-of-control drinking culture. This book focuses on the perspective of the men walking the beat. Her previous publications range in topics from sexuality, religion, legal history, and gender in Spain and the Iberian empires, to Afro-descended populations in Spanish America, Catholic brotherhoods and Jesuit proselytiza_x0002_tion. Her scholarship has also explored transactional sex, honor, violence, witchcraft, sodomy, and suicide. She is currently writing a manuscript entitled Death in Old Mexico: the 1789 Dongo Murders and a translation from Spanish to English of an 1869 novel which focuses on the same case.

Jaime Valenzuela Márquez is professor of history at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He has been a fellow at the Centro Diego Barros Arana of the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile (1991-1993) and the John Carter Brown Library. He has been a visiting professor at many French and Latin Con tribu tors 403American universities. Some of his books include: Las liturgias del poder. Celebraciones públicas y estrategias persuasivas en Chile colonial (1609-1709); Fiesta, rito y política. Del Chile borbónico al republicano; América en diásporas. Esclavitudes y migraciones forzadas en Chile y otras regiones americanas (siglos XVI-XIX).

Ximena Gómez is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She specializes in the art of colonial Latin America and that of the early modern transatlantic world more broadly. Her work has been published in Colonial Latin American Review and the edited volume, A Companion to Early Modern Lima. She is currently at work on her first book, which investigates the visual culture of Indigenous and Black lay confraternities in Lima during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.