Article
The Queen of los Congos: Slavery, Gender, and Confraternity Life in Late-colonial Lima, Peru
Journal of Family History 2015, Vol. 40(3) 305-322 ª 2015 The Author(s) Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0363199015590405 jfh.sagepub.com
Tamara J. Walker1
Abstract In 1812, in Lima, an enslaved woman named Marı´a Santos Puente was ousted from her post as queen of an African-descent confraternity and replaced by a free woman. Refusing to step down quietly, Santos Puente took her grievance to court. In examining the details of the case, this article draws attention to the ways in which confraternity membership provided access to community, kinship, and sources of mutual aid. It also shows how, in denying her the role of queen, the confraternity cut off one of the few avenues through which enslaved women in Lima could attain privileged and esteemed status. Keywords slavery, gender, confraternities, family, Peru, Latin America
When Marı´a Santos Puente joined Lima’s Cofradı´a de los Congos Mondongos sometime in the late 1770s, she set her sights on one day becoming its reina, or queen. Over the course of the next twenty-five plus years, she paid regular dues out of the meager wages she earned as a slave, actively participated in the confraternity’s many rites and rituals, and served as an ayudanta, or assistant, to long-reigning queen Victoria Paza. And, after receiving myriad assurances over the years that she was next in the line of succession, Marı´a took the final, customary step in her bid for the crown by paying for Paza’s funeral when she eventually passed away in 1812. After all this, Santos Puente eventually did get her wish, but it would prove to be a short-lived victory. For, despite decades of profoundly devotional acts and the assurances that partly inspired them, the enslaved woman was quickly and unceremoniously removed from her new post. In her place, a free woman named Manuela Quirigallo was named queen of los Congos.1 This information comes to us by way of a civil complaint that Marı´a Santos Puente filed in August 1812 against Manuela Quirigallo and her husband, a free man named Miguel Valdivieso. Together, the couple not only represented the claimant’s dashed hopes but, as Christine H¨unefeldt has argued in her brief discussion of the case, they also embodied the confraternity’s move to
1
Department of History, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Corresponding Author: Tamara Walker, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania, College Hall 216D, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. Email: wtamara@history.upenn.edu
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valorize legal status—and, more importantly, freedom—over all other criteria for leadership.2 Even though Victoria Paza had been enslaved when she was named queen of the confraternity, and remained in bondage until her dying day, it was clear that a significant number of her cofrades (fellow members) wanted to take the organization in a new direction. In fact, the all-male collective known as los veinte y quatros (who comprised the main voting bloc of the confraternity), to which Miguel Valdivieso belonged, had recently made the decision that the new queen of the confraternity should be a free woman.3 And that woman, as it turned out, was Valdivieso’s wife, Manuela Quirigallo. With this postmortem ruling, an enslaved woman found herself bereft of a carefully cultivated sense of self and pathway toward status. But Marı´a Santos Puente would not step down quietly. She took her grievance with her confraternity to Lima’s secular city council, where she demanded that the confraternity either allow her to resume her place as queen or refund the money she spent on her predecessor’s funeral.4 The case is also interesting for reasons that go beyond the issue of shifting organizational politics. It produced a remarkable record, filling both sides of more than fifty pages and featuring testimonies from nearly a dozen members of the Congos Mondongos confraternity. The witnesses were enslaved and free, male and female, and all had long-standing ties to the organization. Each possessed decades of institutional memory and drew upon their deep understandings of the confraternity’s practices in order to answer investigators’ questions about the logic and legitimacy of Marı´a’s claims. In the process, they provided details about how the confraternity traditionally handled successions, the ceremonial duties associated with the role of queen, as well as the behavioral expectations attached to the women who both aspired to and held the title (subjects about which I shall say more subsequently). Thus, in addition to providing a rich glimpse of a set of religious traditions from the perspective of the African-descent people who adhered to them, the case offers compelling insight into the role of women in the overall functioning and culture of the Congos Mondongos confraternity. The latter point is especially interesting in light of the fact that, while scholars have given careful attention to the question of how racial, ethnic, and legal status shaped the contours of confraternity membership in the region, the role of gender has received comparatively little inquiry.5 Consequently, our understanding of men and women’s varied experiences within—and expectations of—these organizations remains limited. But as Marı´a Santos Puente’s story makes clear, conflicts over status could have gender-specific implications. Indeed, in electing to valorize freedom over slavery when it came to determining who could be the queen, the Congos Mondongos confraternity closed off one of the few avenues through which enslaved women in Lima could attain privileged status. And in granting the title of queen to the wife of one of the veinte y quatros, the confraternity also hinged access to said status upon women’s relationships to privileged men. Using the 1812 case as a point of entry, this article analyzes the relationship between slavery, gender, and confraternity life in late-colonial Lima. To set the stage for my discussion, I begin with a brief sketch of the origins and founding purposes of the Congos Mondongos confraternity and the larger network of African-descent sodalities of which it formed part. From there, I return to the particulars of Marı´a Santos Puente’s case, to consider more closely what may have driven her to pursue the title of queen of her confraternity, as well as the myriad forces that conspired against her in such a pursuit. Finally, because this article draws insights from a document produced by court officials who generally paid attention to African-derived religious practices only when they were the subject of dispute, regulation, or disdain, I also reflect on both the challenges and possibilities of reconstructing this aspect of the cultural and religious history of the African diaspora.
Los Congos Mondongos and Confraternity Life in Early-colonial Lima For all the wealth of details it contains, the 1812 case is still far from a compendium of the Congos Mondongos confraternity’s origins, practices, and procedures. It tells us nothing, for example, about
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when the organization was founded, or for whom, because such questions did not interest the lawyers and judges involved in the case. As one judge put it, hearing and resolving the case was simply a matter of preserving ‘‘public order.’’6 From the court’s perspective, settling this dispute meant ensuring that the conflict did not spill beyond the boundaries of the confraternity and into city streets. In other words, even though the case made it to court for one set of reasons, it was heard and investigated for another. Other sources, however, offer some clues that help to situate the confraternity in a broader historical context and to flesh out at least a basic understanding of its origins and practices. To begin, confraternities in Lima traced their roots to the early-modern Iberian world, where they had been founded to provide members with sources of Catholic fellowship, charity, and burial assistance.7 In the regions of the peninsula where African slavery had taken hold, such as Lisbon and Seville, confraternities also served to facilitate Africans’ conversion to and observance of Catholicism.8 From there, the organizations made their way to Lima (as well as to other parts of Latin America) where, beginning in the sixteenth century, they grew in and around local churches, parishes, hospitals, and chapels, each under the protection of a specific patron saint or with a particular Marian devotion. And, like their predecessors in the Iberian world, confraternities in the region also played key roles in the conversion process, not only of African slaves but of Indians as well.9 Consequently, and as a result of larger patterns of legal and social segregation within colonial society, Spaniards, Indians, and Africans tended to belong to separate confraternities.10 In 1585, for example, Lima was home to twenty-three confraternities: six for Spaniards, seven for Indians, and ten for people of African descent.11 Among the latter group of confraternities, there tended to be further segregation according to ancestry. The name of the Congos Mondongos confraternity signals this trend. According to Frederick Bowser, notaries began using the label ‘‘Congo’’ beginning in 1560, to refer to Africans arriving in Lima from the West Central African kingdom of Kongo.12 And while the term ‘‘Mondongos’’ does not appear to have been in documented use beyond the 1812 case, it is possible that it was a variation of Ndongo, which was the name of the kingdom just south of (and a sixteenth-century tributary to) Kongo.13 We should not assume, however, that notarial classifications neatly mapped onto precise geographic locations in Africa, or that they referenced specific ethnolinguistic heritages, since they appeared in the archive following complex trade processes that made it difficult to trace individual arrivals’ exact points of origin.14 Terms like ‘‘Congo’’ and ‘‘Guinea’’ (the latter of which referenced arrivals from the region between the Senegal and Niger rivers in West Africa), in fact, were inscriptions rather than descriptions. But because they also formed part of an extensive set of labels that Spaniards used to constitute Africans, Indians, and their descendants as distinct and subordinate groups, the terms also carried profound meaning in Lima as well as in other parts of the Americas, where they served to signal both difference and belonging.15 Therefore, the name ‘‘Congos Mondongos’’ can be usefully understood as a collective banner under which West Central Africans came together for the purposes of observing Catholic rituals and traditions. Because its name also roughly matches information in a 1603 survey describing a confraternity that was sponsored by a Dominican monastery on behalf of negros congos in Lima, the Congos Mondongos’ origins (or at least those of an organization very much like it) appear to trace back to the first colonial generation.16 Further, it is likely that most of the confraternity’s early members were enslaved, given Lima’s demographics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to one estimate, in 1600, Lima was home to 14,262 souls, of whom 7,193 were Spanish, 6,621 were of African descent (with approximately 75 percent of them enslaved), and 438 were Indians.17 Their members’ backgrounds and legal status meant that confraternities provided important sources of social support. For men and women who were geographically separated from their loved ones—whether because they were forced to leave them behind across the Atlantic or because they were sold to different owners once they arrived in the Americas—and whose
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status as slaves could impede traditional family formation, confraternity life was fundamental to the building and nurturing of new kinds of kinship networks and communities.18 It is to this aspect of confraternity life, as well as how it would have shaped Marı´a Santos Puente’s experiences, that this discussion will now turn.
The Queen of los Congos By the late-eighteenth century, when Marı´a Santos Puente joined the Congos Mondongos, there were nearly ninety confraternities in Lima, with at least nineteen catering to Indians, twenty-nine to Spaniards, and forty confraternities for enslaved and free limen˜os of African descent.19 During roughly the same period, Lima’s population totaled 52,627: that number was estimated to include 19,986 Spaniards (including both Spanish-born peninsulares and native-born criollos, or creoles); 13,479 slaves; 10,023 free people of African descent; 4,807 mestizos; and 4,332 Indians.20 Put another way, the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a rise in both confraternity membership and freedom among Lima’s African-descent population. The latter shift owed to rising rates of manumission, self-purchase, and free birth, along with declining rates of enslavement during the same period. It also bears mentioning that another way in which confraternities—which generally required dues and stressed the importance of alms giving—came to the aid of their enslaved members was by advancing funds for manumission.21 Given that the hiring-out system entitled owners to claim the majority of their slaves’ wages, the prospect of setting aside enough money for selfpurchase was tremendously difficult for even the most devoted and provident individuals. It was not impossible, of course, as evinced by the growing population of free people of African descent during the period. But it is worth asking—and further researching—just how many of these transitions from slavery to freedom owed to the monetary support of confraternities. To be sure, for a confraternity to facilitate and even expedite the process of attaining freedom would have made a significant difference not only to the beneficiary but also to the confraternity itself, since more free members could mean more reliable and perhaps more substantial dues payments. With that, the organization could continue the cycle of providing monetary support to its members. With the above in mind, Marı´a Santos Puente would have had prudent reasons to pursue confraternity membership. For, in addition to advancing funds for manumission and providing other sources of financial support, African-descent confraternities in the region helped slaves navigate disputes with their owners.22 Marı´a Santos Puente would also have been guided by other reasons for joining and remaining a devoted member of her confraternity. Again, while we know little about the Congos Mondongos and their specific ritual practices, records pertaining to the confraternity of Nuestra Senora del Rosario de los pardos, another Lima sodality for African-descent men and women, provide some insight into the range of festivities in which these types of organizations engaged. During the period between 1770 and 1771, for example, in addition to organizing a Corpus Christi celebration, the confraternity hosted various additional cenas, or feasts, regular masses, and put on a festival in honor of their own saint’s day.23 Together, these events not only provided their members with a busy calendar but connected them to the city’s larger world of ritual practice as well. Enslaved and free people of African descent assumed myriad responsibilities within these organizations. To begin, both men and women constituted the rank-and-file membership; as such, they played active roles in organizing and carrying out the duties associated with funerals and various religious gatherings. Beyond these general duties were also more specialized and gender-specific roles. Men could move up the ranks to assume positions as mayordomos, treasurers, and members of los veinte y quatros, while their female counterparts could serve as queens or their assistants and capitanas (who were akin to deputies). As this breakdown suggests, men had a variety of high-level roles to which they could aspire, whereas female members could only hope to be or serve queens.
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The roles available to men, moreover, were positions of obvious leadership and influence, while queens and their assistants were traditionally ceremonial roles. In many ways, these gender disparities mirrored the patriarchal ideals of the broader culture in which they lived. In Lima as well as in other parts of Latin America, the idea that men had a duty to head and educate their households, and that women had a responsibility to obey the authority of their husbands and fathers, was a core (if at times shaky) principle of colonial society.24 Of course, slaves fared differently within this culture, subordinated as they were under the authority of their masters and mistresses. According to her testimony in the 1812 case, Marı´a Santos Puente had never been married and had never borne children. Her obligations to her owner, coupled with her enduring and exhaustive commitment to her confraternity, seem to have taken what little free time she had beyond her duties as a slave, such that she was likely unable to devote herself to traditional family formation.25 That said, perhaps Santos Puente was also unmarried and childless by choice. She would not have been alone in this regard. For example, in her examination of an annulment petition from nineteenth-century Brazil, Sandra Lauderdale Graham shows how an enslaved woman named Caetana defied her family, community, and even her owner in her quest to dissolve an arranged marriage. Emboldened by her ‘‘great repugnance for the state of matrimony,’’ as well as for the enslaved man to whom she had been bound, Caetana refused to consummate the union and eventually convinced her owner (who had arranged the marriage in the first place) to file an annulment petition on her behalf. The court ultimately declared the marriage legally contracted and therefore indissoluble, a decision that stood even after a lengthy appeal.26 But Caetana’s case nonetheless stands out as an example of how enslaved women could push back against the institution of marriage and helps raise the possibility that Santos Puente even counted among them. In any case, regardless of the explanation behind Santos Puente’s unmarried and childless state, for all intents and purposes, her confraternity was her family.27 Thus, at the same time that confraternities mirrored some of the dominant culture’s patriarchal ideals, they also challenged them as well. For enslaved men, confraternity leadership provided a means by which they could lay claim to their own kind of patriarchal authority. And while female members were excluded from confraternity leadership, the role of queen nonetheless provided them with a way of laying claim to a certain kind of authority as well as their own femininity. The latter was particularly meaningful in a slaveholding society that treated African-descent women’s bodies as sources of physical, sexual, and reproductive labor.28 Not only did these women frequently work under the same grueling labor conditions as their male counterparts (facing the same brutal treatment in the process), they also carried particular burdens that both exploited and undermined their femininity. For, even when they were tasked with genderspecific duties, such as wet-nursing, providing personal service, and escorting their mistresses through city streets, their bodies served to underscore and protect Spanish women’s femininity. When they escorted their mistresses in public, for example, their very presence helped to deflect untoward assumptions about the mistresses’ activities, since the women were not traveling around the city alone or in the company of unrelated men.29 In the process, African-descent women’s bodies provided yet another type of labor, though perhaps more symbolic, in service to Spanish womanhood. Given this context, the role of confraternity queen can be seen as representing both a limit and a peak—a limit in the sense that it was a constrained opportunity (not only within the organization itself but within the broader culture as well), and a peak in the sense that it conferred tremendous privilege and esteem. Historian Roberto Rivas Aliaga provides a glimpse of the kinds of duties associated with being queen in his analysis of an eight-day celebration in honor of the Corpus Christi in the late eighteenth century. The celebration occupied a central role in public life: because it commemorated the occasion of the Eucharist as the body of Christ, it was therefore a deeply important occasion that signaled the triumph of Catholicism in Spanish America.30 It was also one of the occasions during which both
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the queens and kings (or possibly mayordomos) of African-descent confraternities took on highprofile roles, leading processions while outfitted in finery and carrying the flags of their respective organizations. Rivas Aliaga argues that while contemporary observers presumed these displays to be poor imitations of elite Spaniards’ practices, the celebrants were in fact honoring the royals of their African homelands.31 Although the author does not cite evidence to bolster his claim about the African origins of these practices, it was certainly true that church officials, elite commentators, colonial officials, and other Spaniards in Lima treated African-descent (as well as Indian) confraternities with suspicion and derision. For example, in 1785, Lima’s cabildo passed legislation that banned members of confraternities that served ‘‘indios, negros, and zambos’’ from wearing certain masks and costumes during citywide religious festivities. According to Alberto Chosop, the city’s procurador general de los naturales (a legal representative for indigenous persons), several members of these confraternities had used the festival of Corpus Christi as an opportunity to steal from innocent revelers (many of whom were indios, negros, and zambos themselves), all the while ‘‘disguised as demons.’’ Here Chosop was referring to the dance procession known as la danza del son de los diablos, which generally led the Corpus Christi procession as it snaked through city streets.32 Chosop did not elaborate on his allegations, but enlisted the help of the mayordomos of these organizations in prohibiting their members from wearing devil costumes on religious holidays. And, should those efforts fall short, the order also promised that all violators would be ‘‘severely punished,’’ facing a penalty of one hundred lashes.33 Yet despite the severity of its proposed consequences, the order failed to produce its desired outcome. Four years later, on April 18, 1789, the city’s cabildo (municipal council) issued a similar decree, this time prohibiting dancing and diablillos, or revelers dressed as devils, during processions in honor of the Cuasimodo. The cabildo acknowledged ‘‘repeated decrees’’ that had been introduced to ‘‘contain individuals of the baja plebe’’ from taking advantage of the anonymity of the occasion not only to knock over food stands but also to attack and steal from Indians.34 Still, the tension between law and social behavior persisted, as evinced by a description that appeared in the 1791 issue of Lima’s twice-weekly newspaper, the Mercurio Peruano, which noted the following practices during the feast of the Corpus Christi: Some [negros bozales, or African-born blacks] disguise themselves as devils or with feathers; others imitate bears while wearing their skins; while still others dress as monsters, wearing horns, lions’ heads, and serpent tails. They all arm themselves with bows and arrows, garrotes, and shields; and paint their faces blue according to their country of origin, as if that somehow increased the effectiveness of their attacks on their enemies.35
The article even went as far as to argue that such displays distracted from the seriousness of the Corpus Christi, a supposedly solemn commemoration: This type of decoration, which would be acceptable for a carnival, seems indecent at an ecclesiastic function, especially one in which the slightest impertinence mars the dignity of the Sacred act, and dissipates the devotion of the attendees . . . Our children might see these and other similar abuses, the extirpation of which we demand henceforth.36
From the article’s perspective, not only were the revelers’ costumes inappropriate for the occasion, but they also suggested a failure to understand the very meaning of the Corpus Christi itself. And, in a turn that was typical of this paper, it expressed a paternalistic concern over the potential for such practices to set a bad example for the rest of colonial society.
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Life, Death, and the Right to Have Rites The aforementioned laws and criticisms are interesting in that they gave voice to a very old set of complaints. As Karen Graubart has shown, Church officials in Lima were complaining about African-descent and Indian confraternities since their founding in the sixteenth century, complaining that their members used confraternities as a ‘‘guise’’ for drunken revelry.37 So the 1785 and 1789 attempts to ban members of the city’s confraternities from celebrating religious occasions in accordance with their own customary practices were part of a long line of assaults on Africans, Indians, and their descendants’ ritual practices in the region. Indeed, at the same time that officials and observers were targeting Corpus Christi celebrations, they were also taking aim at other confraternity practices as well. Recall that funereal assistance was a major source of aid that confraternities provided to their members. This owed to the widespread concern with the idea of una buena muerte, or a ‘‘good death,’’ which so preoccupied enslaved and free people of all colors and classes (not only in Lima but elsewhere in Latin America as well) that it was a key driver of confraternity membership.38 This fact was on clear display in colonial wills, wherein African-descent testators like Manuel Lequenı´ca spoke of having ‘‘two cofradı´a [membership] letters, which are active,’’ so that ‘‘upon my death they will pay for my funeral and burial and ensure the protection of my soul.’’39 Some testators even proved so concerned with performing all the necessary earthly obligations to ensure this possibility that they held several confraternity memberships.40 Given that each confraternity imposed its own sets of fees (not only to join but also to participate in its many activities), the holding of multiple memberships represented profoundly devotional and expensive acts. But because those confraternities could finance funeral masses and burials, holding multiple memberships often proved to be a sound investment.41 As Joa˜o Jos´e Reis has observed in the case of nineteenth-century Brazil, ‘‘a solitary death stripped of ceremony could never be a good death.’’42 Preparation for death was consequently a matter of both spiritual and earthly importance, as funerals not only needed to be marked by proper sermons to ensure one’s eternal salvation, they also needed to make a statement about the decedent’s life. And African-descent limen˜os, along with their Spanish and Indian counterparts, knew how to stage a grand exit. This largely owed to the fact that royal exequias, or funerary rites in honor of deceased monarchs, had long stood out as the most sumptuous of the city’s ceremonies: among other protocols, they generally involved the participation of hundreds of mourners wearing long and rich black funeral cloaks, processions led by high-ranking officials and elegantly liveried slaves, the delivery of extensive sermons in honor of the deceased, and the burning of thousands of candles on catafalques and at masses held in cathedrals around the city.43 While it was financially and practically impossible for individual persons to carry out such spectacles on the same scale as those organized in honor of Spanish monarchs, limen˜os generally did their best to ensure that their own final passages were marked in ways that said something about their earthly status. Most prominent among them were the funerals of elite Spaniards who organized ceremonies calling for the use of numerous wax candles, the construction of large and ornate tumulos (burial mounds), the hiring of lloronas (professional wailers), as well as the wearing of expensive lutos (mourning dresses) among survivors of deceased, including family members and slaves. This created a particularly nettlesome problem for colonial officials, who argued that such practices were not only excessive in their own right but set a bad example for the rest of colonial society. On August 31, 1786, for example, Peru’s Viceroy Teodoro de Croix issued a decree that sought ‘‘to correct the detestable luxury that has been so flagrantly introduced into this populous Capital.’’ De Croix was referring to the cost and spectacle of funerals, burials, and exequies that, in his words, were contributing to ‘‘the detriment of the public and ruin of families’’ throughout the viceregal capital of Lima.44 His multipage proclamation devoted ample space to reiterating the efforts of his predecessors. This included Viceroy Jos´e Manso de Velasco’s 1740 imposition of restrictions on the
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color and fabric of mourning cloaks and coffin adornments, along with other funerary garb and practices. The viceroy also prohibited elite families from outfitting their slaves in mourning dress—acts he described as ‘‘exorbitant and superfluous expenses’’ that inspired emulation among the lower classes.45 More than thirty years later, in 1771, Viceroy Manuel de Amat y Junient issued similar legislation. By this point, however, the problem went beyond the customs and costumes not only of elite families and their slaves: Amat’s order also sought to address the practices of ‘‘mulatas, negras, and other gente de color [who] put on lutos of particularly immoderate decoration.’’46 Amat’s vague language notwithstanding (what, exactly, was so immoderate about their decoration?), his message was clear: elite whites were not the only people responsible for disorder. So too were people—and, especially, women—of African descent.47 Like those that had preceded it, Viceroy De Croix’s 1786 decree conveyed a similar degree of frustration over the seemingly intractable gap between law and social behavior. And while his order laid out measures that were intended for broad sectors of colonial society to observe, it was clear, once again, that certain groups’ practices were more troubling than others. In particular, men and women of African descent stood out as primary targets. For example, the order ‘‘absolutely prohibited the reprobate use of peculiar foods, or banquets, that on the occasion of funerals is customary among las gentes de color.’’ As the viceroy saw it, these practices engendered only moral disgust and social disorder.48 In an attempt to ensure the effectiveness of this particular prohibition, De Croix stipulated that first-time offenders would face a ‘‘penalty of one month in jail, or of service in public works projects on behalf of this Capital, if they have an aptitude for it; likewise in the second [instance], and upon the third transgression, they will be scarred with the greatest severity, which should cut off at the root similar abominations.’’49 In short, in everything from Corpus Christi celebrations to funerals, African-descent limen˜os were targets of restrictive legislation and negative attention. Yet, as the frequent passage of these kinds of laws made clear, they nonetheless persisted in their practices, even when threatened with physical punishment. In part, this owed to the fact that confraternities, even ones for people of African descent, were supposed to promote ritual practice. Since the sixteenth century, their founding purpose was to facilitate Catholic conversion and observance through participation in liturgical events. So from the cofrades’ perspective, they had a duty and a right to engage in their rites, even if they did look, taste, and feel different than those of Spaniards. Of course, beyond providing mediums through which members could express Catholic devotion, confraternity activities also made room for the cultivation of collective and individual identities. This was particularly meaningful for enslaved men and women, and perhaps even allowed them to make room in their lives for the experience of pleasure, no matter how fleeting or infrequent those experiences may have been. By dancing and parading in festivals and outfitting themselves in unique costumes, enslaved men and women could make and display their bodies as more than mere sites of slaveholders’ domination. Seen in this light, the acts shared similar meanings with broader diasporic practices. For example, as Stephanie M. H. Camp has shown in her analysis of plantation slavery in the US South, ‘‘despite planters’ tremendous effort, enslaved women and men routinely ‘slip[ped] away’ to attend illicit parties where such sensual pleasures as eating, dancing, drinking, and dressing were among the main amusements.’’ In so doing, those men and women claimed their bodies as sites ‘‘not only of suffering but also (and therefore) of enjoyment and resistance.’’50 In addition to helping explain more generally why African-descent men and women would hold so strongly to their ritual practices, these optics provide a way of understanding Marı´a Santos Puente’s particular commitment to the Congos Mondongos confraternity. Having joined during a period of persistent regulation, she would have been well aware of the challenges associated with being part of the organization. And yet she was still willing to stay the course. Moreover, throughout her testimony in the 1812 case, Santos Puente repeatedly described her role as assistant to the queen as un empleo, or a job, suggesting that she viewed her involvement as a true calling.51 She clearly
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saw her twenty-five years in the confraternity as, among other things, an extended apprenticeship, during which time she learned the various roles and responsibilities of the organization’s queen. But in her time under queen Victoria Paza’s tutelage, Santos Puente also saw a woman who, even though she was enslaved, reaped significant rewards. In addition to enjoying the services of a kind of ladyin-waiting, at the end of her life Paza received an elaborate funeral—something that she might not have been able to secure had she not been such an important figure in her organization. In addition to the brief snapshot of Paza’s time as queen, we can look to another source from the era to get a picture of what might have been in store for Santos Puente had she been able to continue occupying the role of queen after succeeding Paza. Upon his 1810 visit to Lima, for instance, British traveler William Bennett Stevenson wrote of his stay at the home of a local slaveholding family. While there, he met an enslaved woman named ‘‘Mama Rosa,’’ who had lived with the family for more than fifty years. According to Stevenson, Mama Rosa was ‘‘the acknowledged Queen of the Mandingos.’’ His fascination with the woman was clear, for he devoted significant space in his narrative to a discussion of her and her consorts’ practices. ‘‘On particular days,’’ Stevenson began: [Mama Rosa] was conducted from the house of her master, by a number of black people, to the cofradı´a, dressed as gaudily as possible; for this purpose her young mistresses would lend her jewels to a considerable amount, besides which the poor old woman was bedizened with a profusion of artificial flowers, feathers, and other ornaments.52
The woman in Stevenson’s account played an obviously important and prestigious role in the life of her religious confraternity. Although Stevenson refers to her as queen of her confraternity, the name Mama might have suggested a slightly different role. As Nicole Von Germeten has noted in her work on African-descent confraternities in colonial Mexico, women with the title ‘‘Mama’’ often bore multiple responsibilities. In addition to serving as surrogate mothers within their organizations, nurturing those separated from biological family members and strengthening the bonds holding the confraternity together. They also were often skilled at nursing and provided care for the sick members of their confraternities.53 There is not enough evidence to confirm that the same logic applied in Lima, but the example is suggestive nonetheless. For all his fascination with Mama Rosa and her consorts’ practices, Stevenson was also somewhat disparaging of them. This tone of intrigued derision is prevalent throughout Stevenson’s account (as we shall see subsequently), but the previous passage also makes clear that Mama Rosa’s owners were apparently not only encouraging of but also somewhat complicit in her practices. They even went so far as to supply her with jewelry and several other eye-catching elements of her costume. In addition to her mistresses’ jewelry, Mama Rosa had apparently received a ‘‘silver scepter’’ from her master. In so doing, Mama Rosa’s owners complicate the image of a world in which Africandescent confraternities faced a litany of external attacks. In many ways, these gifts are not terribly surprising. Slaves were frequently listed in their owners’ wills as beneficiaries of freedom and attendant gifts of cash or material possessions. Such bequests signaled the complex intimacies of the master–slave dynamic, and Stevenson’s account adds additional texture since Mama Rosa did not have to wait for her owners’ deaths to benefit from their largesse. While evidence of material distributions between living masters and their slaves is harder to trace, Stevenson’s account shows that owners were willing to supply material goods for their slaves’ enjoyment. Perhaps Mama Rosa’s owners also viewed supplying her with goods as an act of piety, to ensure their slave’s embrace of Catholicism. In addition to detailing Mama Rosa’s costume and accessories, Stevenson noted that Mama Rosa frequently received visitors from her confraternity while seated on the porch of her owners’ home. There, he wrote, she would ‘‘see her subjects come and kneel before her, ask her blessing, and kiss her hand.’’ And on at least one occasion, Stevenson followed Mama Rosa’s procession to the
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confraternity. Upon the group’s arrival, the woman was seated on a throne, and Stevenson was surprised to see her ‘‘go through the ceremony of royalty without a blush.’’ He went on to describe the ceremony that played out before the throne: On her arrival, and at her departure, the poor creatures would sing to their music, which consisted of a large drum, formed of a piece of hollow wood, one end being covered with the skin of a kid, put on while fresh, and braced by placing it near some lighted charcoal; and a string of catgut, fasted to a bow, which was struck with a small cane; to those they added a rattle, made of the jawbone of an ass or a mule, having the teeth loose, so that by striking it with one hand they would rattle in their sockets.54
In addition to signaling the profound degree of ingenuity that helped to guide the groups’ practices (for, in addition to piecing together ceremonial garb from diverse sources, the confraternity fashioned instruments from animal hides and skeletal remains), Stevenson’s account reveals the authority wielded by women in Mama Rosa’s position. While it did not negate her status as a slave, it nonetheless held a profound meaning that even her owners could not fail to recognize and participate in constructing and affirming. Stevenson’s account helps us to better understand why the role and title of queen held tremendous importance to Marı´a Santos Puente. As an enslaved woman, especially, the appeal of being the center of nurturing and enthralled attention would have been tremendous. Holding a prestigious position within the confraternity would have allowed her to recover aspects of her femininity and feminine authority traditionally denied to enslaved women. In addition to affirming their sense of belonging, this kind of special treatment would have provided a counterweight to the myriad assaults on their femininity they endured on a daily basis, while also offering a beacon of hope and possibility to other enslaved women. Perhaps the idea of being named an official mother figure to her cofrades also appealed to Santos Puente. Again, she did not have children of her own, but we should not necessarily take this to mean that she had no children in her life. Having been part of the Congos Mondongos for more than two decades, Santos Puente very likely watched many of her cofrades’ children grow up and have children of their own. She may even have been a godmother to one or more of them, or provided an extra set of hands when her cofrades needed child minders, either in order to fulfill their obligations as slaves, or when they needed to provide service to the confraternity itself. For these and myriad other reasons, she may have felt a strong sense of maternal connection and devotion, as well as a desire to protect and nurture the members of her confraternity.
The Custom of the Confraternity Unsurprisingly, after having spent a quarter-century in service to the queen and ultimately paying for her funeral—expenditures of time and money that might otherwise have been directed toward purchasing her own freedom—Marı´a Santos Puente expected to collect a return on her investment. To bolster her court case, Santos Puente marshaled a roster of witnesses who affirmed her right to occupy the role as queen of the Congos Mondongos confraternity. One witness, forty-five-yearold Joaquin Bolan˜os, identified in the case as a negro bozal ladino and a slave, had been a longtime member of the confraternity.55 In his testimony, he affirmed that Santos Puente had served as a capitana and ayudanta to the queen for a period of twenty-five years and that it was ‘‘a general custom’’ for the queen’s assistant to succeed her on the throne. Bolan˜os further stated that the queen could be enslaved or free, as long as she had served the prior queen and was not ‘‘de malas costumbres’’ (or inclined toward vices).56 The rules as he understood them said nothing about legal status. They had only required longevity of service to the organization and an unimpeachable moral character— expectations that Santos Puente apparently satisfied in both cases.
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The invocation of ‘‘custom’’ formed part of a clever legal strategy, and one that figured prominently in enough colonial-era lawsuits as to suggest that it constituted the official basis on which Santos Puente’s rested her claim to the throne. While her twenty-five years of hard work and dedication were certainly compelling, they did not pack the same kind of legal punch as the notion of ‘‘custom.’’57 As Santos Puente noted in her own testimony seeking to recover her place as queen of the confraternity of the Congos Mondongos, it was ‘‘customary’’ for the confraternity’s queens to be slaves.58 It is possible that lawyers in the case even asked questions of witnesses that either specifically invoked the term (or variations thereof) or that sought to elicit responses that would do the same. Indeed, the term appears in the case with remarkable frequency. For example, another witness called to testify was a free man de casta Benguela named Pedro Jose Bolan˜os (perhaps a brother of the aforementioned Joaquin). At the time of his testimony, Pedro Jose Bolan˜os was fifty years old and had been a member of the Congos Mondongos confraternity for half his life. He affirmed that not only had the confraternity’s queens always been enslaved, but that the enslaved queen Victoria Paza had also on ‘‘repeated occasions’’ stated that Santos Puente should succeed her. Bolan˜os was also present at Victoria Paza’s funeral, which he confirmed had been paid for by Santos Puente, as custom dictated.59 As he put it, Santos Puente deserved the title ‘‘not only because it was custom but ´ of said because it was her [Paza’s] wish.’’60 Moreover, ‘‘the enslaved and free negros of the Nacion confraternity have wanted and continue to want’’ Santos Puente to be queen, ‘‘because of her good services and arreglada conducta (appropriate conduct).’’61 Put another way, it was not only Paza’s wish that Santos Puente be queen but that of her enslaved and free cofrades as well. At the same time that the witnesses’ testimonies hinged on the notion of custom, they also drew attention to the behavioral expectations assigned to the confraternity’s queen. In referring to the need for the queen to be free of malas costumbres and to display arreglada conducta, the witnesses were all signaling the extent to which the queen was more than just a ceremonial figure but also a model representative of the organization. Although vague, the qualifiers conveyed the importance of exemplary moral rectitude. And perhaps the qualifiers were even intentionally vague, such that they enabled an unmarried enslaved woman to consider herself—and be considered by her cofrades—to be worthy of esteem. This was particularly remarkable considering that in Lima, as well as in other slaveholding societies throughout Latin America, elite whites had rigid expectations of women and only accorded status and honor to married or widowed women of ‘‘pure blood’’ and Old Christian ancestry.62 By definition, this excluded the vast majority of enslaved and free women of African descent, but it did not mean that such women thought of themselves as bereft of status and undeserving of respect. In fact, African-descent men and women, in Lima and elsewhere, cultivated and pointed to their own ideas about status. At times, those ideas corresponded to the dominant norms, such that marriage formed a cornerstone of many African-descent women’s conceptions of self.63 But their ideas about status also hinged on their roles as patrons, their honesty, the esteem of their peers, even on slave ownership, as well as a combination of factors that they could control, rather than those they could not.64 For the Congos Mondongos confraternity to require their queen to be free of vices and in command of appropriate manners was both to embrace larger social norms and to modify them as well. The witnesses’ testimonies also suggest that there may have been more supporters of Santos Puente than the original decision in favor of Manuela Quirigallo seemed to indicate. In addition to the twenty-four members of the veinte y quatros, there were four additional (anonymous) votes counted. With a total of twenty-eight votes cast, twenty-one were in favor of Quirigallo becoming queen and seven in favor of Santos Puente.65 It is not clear whether Joaquin Bolan˜os and Pedro Jose Bolan˜os were part of the voting panel and able to translate their beliefs into votes on Santos Puente’s behalf. Nor do we know what the deliberations and conversations (or even arguments) leading up to the vote may have entailed. But the men’s presence in the record shows that Santos Puente was not alone in believing that the title of queen was hers. To be sure, despite their invocation of the language
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of ‘‘custom,’’ and their high regard for Santos Puentes’ personal attributes, the witnesses in the case also expressed a clear desire to honor Victoria Paza’s wishes. The latter point is especially compelling for what it says about the sense of obligation that several members of the confraternity felt toward their deceased queen. Given the length of her tenure, Victoria Paza had been an enduring presence in the lives of her cofrades, such that they may have viewed it as both an honor and duty to do as she said. Perhaps Santos Puente’s supporters also had good reason to specifically oppose Quirigallo’s ascension. The testimony of a witness named Marı´a Josefa Andrade provides a tantalizing hint of that very possibility. Like the aforementioned witnesses, Andrade (who did not indicate whether she was enslaved or free) had been part of the confraternity for more than twenty-five years, during which time she had ascended to the role of reina mayor.66 She was not asked and did not specify in her testimony what that role entailed, or how it compared to the role that Santos Puente had briefly occupied. Perhaps, though, it was a tier above the role of queen and an honor bestowed upon elders with deep ties to the confraternity as well as stellar reputations. In any case, the witness’ status lent additional weight to her assertion that Santos Puente was ‘‘well liked,’’ within the confraternity. As Andrade put it, the confraternity ‘‘has applauded and continues to applaud [Santos Puente] for her good customs and honrado manejo, both of which,’’ she added, ‘‘Manuela Quirigallo lacks.’’67 Because the investigators did not probe the latter assertion, we do not know what Andrade was referring to in claiming that Quirigallo did not have good customs and honorable conduct. It is possible that Andrade had a particular example or set of examples in mind when she made such a statement. But even without elaboration, it makes sense that some cofrades would take exception to Quirigallo’s election. After all, Santos Puente had put in a quarter-century of time, money, and energy in order to become queen. There is no evidence that Quirigallo had done anything in service to the Congos-Mondongos that could have matched Santos Puente’s sacrifices. Why, then, were the majority of the voting members of the confraternity so insistent upon doing away with custom, dishonoring their deceased queen’s last wishes, and rejecting the will of so many of their fellow cofrades? By the time Santos Puente filed her complaint against Quirigallo and her husband, Miguel Valdivieso, the husband had died and the wife’s testimony went unrecorded. So there are no clear answers. Perhaps it was a combination of her status as a free woman and wife of one of the organization’s veinte y quatros that steered the vote in Quirigallo’s favor. Together, these qualities might have lent a more normatively respectable sheen to the Congos Mondongos and made the queen especially attuned and inclined to defer to what the male leadership wanted for the organization (thereby reinforcing its patriarchal structure). Ultimately, what is certain is that the vote was in Quirigallo’s favor, which ultimately proved sufficient enough reason from the court’s perspective to uphold the decision. In citing the 21-7 vote in favor of Manuela Quirigallo as justification for the decision, the judges in the case effectively dismissed the testimonies of the cofrades who spoke on Santos Puente’s behalf as irrelevant (and rendered moot the fact that neither Manuela Quirigallo nor the late Miguel Valdivieso recorded their own testimonies).68 But they also ordered the Congos Mondongos to pay Marı´a Santos Puente 115 pesos, to compensate her for the money she spent paying membership dues over the years and hosting Victoria Paza’s funeral. This was at least a partial acknowledgment of the validity of Santos Puente’s claims. In this way, the decision represented a concession of sorts to the claimant, who indicated when she filed her claim that she either wanted to resume her place as queen or get back the money she had spent in pursuit of the title. Because the compensation order ultimately comprised the last pages of the case file, there is no indication that the confraternity ever returned Santos Puente’s money. Even if they had, such an act would not necessarily have made the woman whole again, either financially or emotionally. The confraternity had played a profoundly meaningful role in her life for nearly three decades, and she had worked hard to become queen. Nor do we know whether Marı´a Santos Puente remained a member of the Congos Mondongos confraternity. Walking away from an organization into which she had invested so much of her time
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and so many of her resources would have been tremendously difficult, if not outright impossible. Here was a woman who, until filing her 1812 lawsuit, had cast her lot with the confraternity and seemed to engage the outside world only when necessary. Who was she, then, without the Congos Mondongos? At the same time, who could she be among them? It is difficult to imagine Marı´a Santos Puente continuing to pay dues to an organization that had stripped her of a title without feeling some degree of resentment, ambivalence, or even anger. Seen from Santos Puente’s perspective, Manuela Quirigallo had been able to claim a title that Marı´a Santos Puente had spent decades working for, simply because she was a free woman married to a powerful free man. The idea of calling that woman her queen would have undoubtedly stung. And, more importantly, it would have undermined the sense of order and custom that she had spent nearly three decades working to understand and represent.
Conclusions In using the 1812 dispute over the queen of the Congos Mondongos as point of entry, I have examined the importance of confraternity membership for enslaved and free people of African descent in colonial Lima. To fill the myriad silences in the central document, I consulted other sources. They included secondary literature, pieces of colonial legislation, newspaper editorials, visitor accounts, and other documents produced by elite, lettered whites who wrote with varying degrees of frustration, intrigue, and derision about how members of African-descent confraternities observed holidays and festivals. While several of these sources of contain obvious limitations, they also helped to place the Congos Mondongos confraternity in its wider historical context. What emerges from this discussion is the extent to which confraternity membership functioned as a kind of insurance policy that, for the price of entry, offered access to a network of financial support and personal advocacy. At the same time, however, confraternity membership also exposed enslaved and free people of African descent to prohibitive legislation, derision, and condemnation from colonial officials and elite Spaniards. In fact, these sources constitute the predominant source of information on African-descent confraternity membership in Peru. The sources are also by definition fragmentary and incomplete, for they reflect the writers’ prevailing interest in curtailing social disorder or criticizing customs that departed from the dominant norms. But it is nonetheless possible to piece together these fragments into a story that allows us to understand how, even in the face of unrelenting scrutiny and derision, enslaved and free people of African descent found charity, community, mutual aid, and spiritual nourishment in confraternity life, as well as ways of aspiring to positions of status, privilege, and authority within their own communities. Nevertheless, Marı´a Santos Puente’s experience shows that there were no guarantees, even after a lifetime of devotion and sacrifice. And in taking her dream of being queen of the Congos Mondongos confraternity away from her, the voting members of the organization set in motion an ironic chain of events. Not only did it propel Santos Puente to seek justice and recompense via the very legal system that had repeatedly sought in various ways to limit their confraternity’s practices and those of similar organizations, but it caused damage to and threatened to undo a powerful bond. For, beyond losing the title of queen, Santos Puente was in danger of losing her family—the very type of family, after all, that the organization and others like it had made it possible to create. Acknowledgments I wish to thank the following people for their careful, insightful, and animating feedback on various drafts of this article: Kathryn Burns, Anthea Butler, Michelle Chase, Marcela Echeverri, Anne Eller, Marie Escalante, Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Yuko Miki, Robert St. George, Zeb Tortorici, as well as the members of the Faculty Global Gender Works-in-Progress Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania. I am also deeply grateful to
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Roderick Phillips and the three anonymous readers for the Journal of Family History, for their comments, critiques, and suggestions for revision.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes 1. Archivo General de la Naci´on (Lima; hereafter, AGN) Cabildo (CA), Justicia Ordinaria (JO), Legajo (L) 1, Caja (C) 166, Documento (D) 3149, 1812, ‘‘Autos seguidos por Marı´a Santos Puente contra Miguel Valdivieso y Manuela Quirigallo.’’ 2. Christine H¨unefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima’s Slaves, 1821–1854 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 102–4. 3. AGN CA JO 1, C 166, D 3149, 1812, f. 50. 4. AGN CA JO 1, C 166, D 3149, 1812. 5. See, for example, Ciro Corilla Melchor, ‘‘Cofradı´as en la ciudad de Lima, siglos XVI y XVII: Racismo y ´ racial en la historia del Peru, ´ ed. Elisa Dasso et al. conflictos e´ tnicos,’’ in Etnicidad y discriminacion (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Cat´olica del Per´u, 2002), 11–34; Roberto Rivas Aliaga, ‘‘Danzantes negros ´ racial en la en el Corpus Christi de Lima, 1756: ‘Vos estis Corpus Christi,’’’ in Etnicidad y discriminacion ´ ed. Elisa Dasso et al. (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Cat´olica del Per´u, 2002), 35–63; Jos´e historia del Peru, Ramon Jouve Martı´n, ‘‘Public Ceremonies and Mulatto Identity in Viceregal Lima: A Colonial Reenactment of the Fall of Troy (1631),’’ Colonial Latin American Review 16, no. 2 (2007): 179–201; Karen Graubart, ‘‘‘So color de una cofradı´a’: Catholic Confraternities and the Development of Afro-Peruvian Ethnicities in Early Colonial Peru,’’ Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 1 (2012): 43–64. 6. AGN, CA, JO, L 1, C 166, D 3149, 1812, f. 21. 7. See, for example, Christopher Black and Pamela Grovestock, Early Modern Cofradias in Europe and the Americas (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). For a discussion of the importance of confraternities to burial practices, see Carlos M. N. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenthcentury Spain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 8. Graubart, ‘‘So color de una cofradı´a,’’ 46. 9. For a classic study of the origins and practices of Indian confraternities in Lima, see Paul Charney, ‘‘A Sense of Belonging: Colonial Indian Cofradı´as and Ethnicity in the Valley of Lima, Peru,’’ Americas 54, no. 3 (January 1998): 379–407. 10. Because the Spanish Crown perceived Africans to be physical, economic, and behavioral threats to indigenous communities, it tried to physically separate the two groups as often as possible. See, for example, Rachel O’Toole, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 17–34; Berta Ares Quejia, ‘‘Mestizos, mulatos y zambaigos (Virre´ nato del Per´u, siglo XVI),’’ in Negros, Mulatos, Zambaigos: Derroteros africanos en los mundos ibericos, ed. Berta Ares Quejia and Alessandro Stella (Sevilla, Spain: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 2000), 75–88. 11. Charney, ‘‘A Sense of Belonging,’’ 384. 12. Frederick Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 38–40. 13. For a discussion of the territorial boundaries, political structure, and cultural features of the kingdom of Ndongo, as well as its evolving relationship to the kingdom of Kongo, see Linda M. Heywood and John
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15.
16.
17. 18.
19. 20. 21.
22. 23. 24.
25.
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K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 49–108. See, for example, Phillip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 29–45; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 57–84. For a particularly insightful discussion of the myriad processes by which Spaniards marked Africans as inferior subjects, see Sherwin Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 46–83; and for a discussion of the vocabulary Spaniards produced to constitute indigenous alterity and inferiority, see Nancy E. van Deusen, ‘‘Seeing Indios in Sixteenth-century Castile,’’ The William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 2 (April 2012): 205–34. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 248. Because the document did not explicitly name the confraternity, it is difficult to say with certainty whether it was in fact the same Congos Mondongos that was at the center of the 1812 court case. It is also important to note that different confraternities in Lima often went by the same name. For example, Nuestra Sen˜ora del Rosario was a popular confraternity name, referring to organizations for people of Indians as well as for people of African descent. According to Charney, ‘‘A Sense of Belonging,’’ 387, a Rosario confraternity was founded for Indians in 1600; and as Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 249, shows, there were two Rosarios (one for negros, the other for mulatos) listed in a 1619 survey of confraternities in the region. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 339–40. For more on the sociocultural significance of Lima’s early-colonial cofradı´as, see Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 222–63; Emilio Harth-Terr´e, Presencia del negro en el virreinato del Peru´ (Lima, Peru: Editorial Universitaria, 1971), 13–37; Luis G´omez Acun˜a, ‘‘Las cofradı´as de negros en Lima (siglos ´ ´ siglos XVII),’’ Paginas 129 (October 1994): 28–39; Jean-Pierre Tardieu, Los negros y la Iglesia en el Peru: XVI–XVII (Quito, Ecuador: Centro Cultural Afroecuatoriano, 1997), 509–63; Diego L´evano Medina, ‘‘Organizaci´on y funcionalidad de las cofradı´as urbanas: Lima, siglo XVII,’’ Revista del Archivo General ´ 24 (May 2002):77–188. de la Nacion Archivo Arzobispal de Lima (hereafter, AAL), Cofradı´as, L 32A, E 46, 1689. Alberto Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe: Lima, 1760–1830 (Lima, Peru: Mosca Azul Editores, 1984), 83. For a discussion of the prevalence and sociocultural significance of Lima’s many cofradı´as, see Bowser, ´ ‘‘Physical and Spiritual Concerns,’’ 222–63; Harth-Terr´e, Presencia del negro en el virreinato del Peru, 13–37; Acun˜a, ‘‘Las cofradı´as de negros en Lima (siglos XVII),’’ 28–39; H¨unefeldt, Paying the Price of ´ 509–63; Medina, ‘‘Organizaci´on y funcioFreedom, 98–106; Tardieu, Los negros y la Iglesia en el Peru, nalidad de las cofradı´as urbanas,’’ 2002. See, for instance, H¨unefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom, 98–106. AGN, Cofradı´as, L 3, C 37, 1783. See, for example, Susan Migden Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5–15; Steve J. Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late-colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Recently, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750–1856 (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 2012), has drawn attention to the role of Spanish moralists’ writings in adding to the prescriptive dictates guiding Spanish women’s lives. For a discussion of how Brazilians understood and challenged these expectations, see Sandra Lauderdale Graham, ‘‘Making the Private Public: A Brazilian Perspective,’’ Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 1 (2003): 28–42. For a discussion of the material and social advantages slaves gained from marriage, see Nancy Van Deusen, Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial Lima (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). For comparison, see Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 79-125; Sherwin Bryant, ‘‘Enslaved
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26. 27.
28.
29. 30.
31. 32. 33.
34. 35. 36. 37. 38.
39. 40.
41.
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Rebels, Fugitives, and Litigants: The Resistance Continuum in Colonial Quito,’’ Colonial Latin American Review 13, no. 1 (June 2004): 7–46. Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No: Women’s Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–73. For a discussion of additional ways in which slaves in Lima engaged in nontraditional means of forming and maintaining families, see, for example, Tamara J. Walker, ‘‘‘He Outfitted His Family in Notable Decency’: Slavery, Honor, and Dress in Eighteenth-century Lima, Peru,’’ Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-slave Studies 30, no. 3 (September 2009): 383–402; Michelle A. McKinley, ‘‘Illicit Intimacies: Virtuous Concubinage in Colonial Lima,’’ Journal of Family History 39 (July 2014): 204–21. See, for example, H¨unefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom, 1995; Maribel Arrelucea Barrantes, Replan´ ´ teando La Esclavitud: estudios de etnicidad y genero en Lima Borbonica (Lima, Peru: CEDET Centro de Desarollo E´tnico, 2009). ´ historica ´ ´ See, for example, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relacion del viaje a` la America Meridional (Madrid, Spain: Antonio Marı´n, 1748), 72. For a discussion of the broader religious and political importance of the Corpus Christi celebration, see Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Aliaga, ‘‘Danzantes negros en el Corpus Christi de Lima, 1756,’’ 55–56. Ibid., 35–63. AGN, CA, Gobierno de la Ciudad, C 31, D 3, 1785. ‘‘Alberto Chosop, procurador general de los naturales, solicita se notifique a los mayordomos de cofradı´as para que no permitan que sus fieles roben ocult´andose bajo las m´ascaras y disfraces que usan en las festividades de Cuasimodo y Corpus Christi.’’ Archivo Municipal del Lima (herafter, AML)–Cabildo (CL)–Cedulas (CE)–XXIV, ‘‘Decreto Prohibiendo Danzas Y Diablillos En Las Procesiones De Cuasimodo’’ (1789), fja 125. Mercurio Peruano, ‘‘Idea de las congregaciones publicas de los negros bozales,’’ June 16, 1791, 112–19. Ibid. Graubart, ‘‘So color de una cofradı´a,’’ 48. For a discussion of what one scholar has termed ‘‘the economy of eternal salvation,’’ see Asunci´on Lavrin, ‘‘Cofradı´as Novohispanas: economı´as material y spiritual,’’ in Cofradı´as, capellanias y obras pı´as en la ´ America colonial, ed. Pilar Martı´nez Lopez-Cano, Gisela von Wobeser, and Juan Guillermo Mun˜oz (Mexico City: Universidad Aut´onoma Nacional, 1998), 49–64. ´ ltima voluntad de AGN, Protocolos Notariales (PN), Notario Silvestre Bravo, Protocolo 148, 1781, ‘‘U Manuel Lequenı´ca de casta pardo.’’ See, for example, AGN, PN, Notario Silvestre Bravo, Protocolo 148, November 18, 1781, ‘‘Testamento de Buena Ventura Pastrana, parda libre;’’ AGN, PN, Notario Teodoro Ayllon Salazar, Protocolo 96, July 4, 1790, ‘‘Testamento de Evarista Alzamora parda libre natural;’’ AGN, PN, Notario Teodoro Ayllon Salazar, Protocolo 96, March 24, 1792, ‘‘Testamento de Agustina Balcazar parda libre;’’ and AGN, PN, Notario Silvestre Bravo, Protocolo 148, October 20, 1770, ‘‘Testamento de Marcela Farf´an morena criolla.’’ The holding of multiple memberships was not limited to Lima’s African-descent population. It was also common among Spaniards and Indians in the region, as well as among cofrades throughout Latin America. In Brazil, for example, men and women who held multiple confraternity memberships were treated to lavish funerals upon their deaths, such as in the case of a freed slave named Francisco Gomes. When he died in 1741, ‘‘Gomes commanded a magnificent funeral, his body dressed in the garments of Saint Francis and carried through the streets of Rio by the brothers of all three [of his] confraternities.’’ See James H. Sweet, Domingos A´lvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 89. Interestingly, while membership in multiple confraternities could and did serve individual interests, it also had the potential to create problems. Paul Charney describes one case from the seventeenth century in which two confraternities were engaged in a dispute over whether
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42. 43.
44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.
53. 54. 55.
56. 57.
58. 59. 60. 61. 62.
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an indigenous testator intended one or both of the confraternities to which he had belonged to receive rent on a rental property following his death. See Charney, ‘‘A Sense of Belonging,’’ 401–3. Joa˜o Jos´e Reis, Death Is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-century Brazil (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 127. Particularly detailed accounts of royal exequias (in honor of Philip IV in 1666) can be found in Josephe ´ ´ de Mugaburu, Diario de Lima (1640–1694) cronica de la epoca colonial, por Josephe de Mugaburu y ´ Francisco de Mugaburu (hijo). Publı´canlo por primera vez, tomandolo del manuscrito original. Horacio H. Urteaga y Carlos A. Romero (Lima: 1918); Alejandra B. Osorio, Inventing Lima: Baroque Modernity in Peru’s South Sea Metropolis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 89–93. AML, CL, CE, XXIV, ‘‘Bando sobre lutos’’ (1786). AML, CL, CE, XXII, ‘‘Bando sobre la forma de los lutos y funerales,’’ 1740, foja 342. AML, CL, CE, XXII, ‘‘Bando del Gobierno sobre la moderacion de lutos y funciones,’’ 1771. Ibid., foja 421. AML, CL, CE, XXIV, ‘‘Bando sobre lutos,’’ 1786, foja 486. Ibid., f. 486. Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 62. AGN CA JO 1, C 166, D 3149, 1812, f. 12. W.B. Stevenson, Historical and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years’ Residence in South America: Containing Travels in Arauco, Chile, Peru, and Colombia, with an Account of The Revolution, its Rise, Progress, and Results, vol. 1 (London, UK: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1819), 304. Nicole Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 54. Stevenson, ‘‘Historical and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years’ Residence in South America,’’ 304–6. The term bozal generally refers to a newly arrived, non-Spanish speaking and usually unbaptized native of Africa, unless otherwise noted as ladino (Spanish speaking). For a discussion of the literal and practical definitions of bozal and ladino, see James Lockhart, Spanish Peru: 1532–1560 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 198–99, who writes that the former ‘‘basically meant just an inexperienced new arrival from Africa,’’ while the latter ‘‘merely meant fluent in Spanish, but [the two terms] were used as opposite poles, ‘bozal’ to mean a new slave who therefore knew no Spanish, and ‘ladino’ to mean a Spanish-speaking slave who was therefore experienced. These meanings, already fairly clear from the ordinary use of the words in documents of sale, can be deduced with certainty from their occasional use together, as when one black was called ‘half way between ladino and bozal.’’’ That the 1812 case identifies the witness [Bolan˜os] as a ‘‘negro bozal ladino’’ is an especially curious conflation, given Lockhart’s definitions and that Bolan˜os had been a member of the confraternity for a quarter century. How was it possible for a man who had lived in Lima for at least two decades, and belonged to a Catholic-based religious brotherhood, to be described as newly arrived, non-Spanish speaking, and unbaptized? The notary might have intentionally chosen to use ‘‘bozal’’ to signal Bolan˜os’s African birth, and ‘‘ladino’’ to signal his ability to speak Spanish (and his having been baptized). AGN CA JO 1, C 166, D 3149, 1812, f. 9. For a discussion of how Indians in Peru used the language of ‘‘custom’’ in court cases, see Karen Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Creation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550–1700 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 158–85. AGN CA JO 1, C 166, D 3149, 1812, f. 8. Ibid., f. 9. Ibid., f. 10. Ibid., f. 11. For a discussion of the relationship between blood purity and status in Spanish America, see Silvia Marina Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985); Marı´a
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63.
64.
65. 66. 67. 68.
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Elena Martinez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Socolow, ‘‘Iberian Women in Old World and New,’’ 5–15; Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). On the importance of marriage to African-descent women’s conceptions of self, see Verena Martı´nez Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-century Cuba (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Bryant, ‘‘Enslaved Rebels, Fugitives, and Litigants,’’ 7–46; Ram´on Guti´errez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away. Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Michelle A. McKinley, ‘‘‘Such Unsightly Unions Could Never Result in Holy Matrimony’: Mixed-status Marriages in Seventeenth-century Colonial Lima,’’ Yale Journal of Law & The Humanities 22, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 217–55; Ann Twinam, ‘‘Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America,’’ in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asunci´on Lavrı´n (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 118–55. For example, Sandra Lauderdale Graham, ‘‘Honor among Slaves,’’ in The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America, ed. Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 201–28, shows how an enslaved woman placed a premium on her ability to repay debts. Similarly, R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Pleibian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), shows that many castas derived their beliefs in their reputations from their peers and took great care to offer mutual assistance and friendship to ensure their so-called reputational standing. On slaves as patrons, see Kim Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-abolition Sa˜o Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 20–24. And for a discussion of African-descent female slaveholders in Lima, see Karen Graubart, ‘‘Lazos que unen: Duen˜as negras de esclavos negros en Lima, ´ siglos XVI–XVII,’’ Nueva coronica 2 (Julio 2013): 625–40. AGN CA JO 1, C 166, D 3149, 1812, f. 23. Ibid., f. 11. Ibid., f. 12. Ibid., f. 23.
Author Biography Tamara J. Walker is an assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on slavery, gender, and material culture in colonial Latin America. She is the author of ‘‘‘He outfitted his Family in Notable Decency’: Slavery, Honour, and Dress in Eighteenth-Century Lima, Peru,’’ in Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies; ‘‘‘Blanconas Sucias and Putas Putonas’: Women, Social Conflict and the Power of Words in Late Colonial Lima, Peru,’’ in Gender & History; and the book, Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima, Peru, which is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Email: wtamara@sas.upenn.edu.
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