Afromexico: the untold history of slavery in colonial Puebla 🎤with Dr. Pablo Sierra.

Presented by: Rocio Carvajal Food anthropologist, culture & gastronomy educator. 

Episode 82

Dr Pablo Sierra’s research contests that blackness is a decidedly foreign concept in the cultural history of the City of Puebla, an idealised urban centre whose narratives about Spanish baroque splendour have silenced the stories and presence of other ethnic groups, namely thousands of enslaved and free afro descendants.

In this episode, we discuss the rise of Afromexican studies, Puebla’s role in the slave trade, the racialised configuration of the novohispanic society, and the challenges of critical historical research.

We also talk about the case of an elite Afro-Indigenous couple in colonial Puebla, called Felipe Monsón y Mojica and Juana María de la Cruz that lived in the 17th century and rose to power and wealth as chilli tycoons. Their history reveals incredible details about social mobility, self-empowerment, interracial relations and even Puebla’s intertwined history with piracy in the Caribbean.

Contact Pablo:

• Website: https://tinyurl.com/yyqbwzx6 

• Academia.edu: https://rochester.academia.edu/PabloSierra   

• ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pablo-Sierra-Silva

• Email: pablo.sierra@rochester.edu   

Recommended resources:

From Dr. Sierra:

·       Pablo Miguel Sierra S.  (2020) “Negros, aquí? Blacks, here?”: Blackness in the Mexican Archive. In: InVisible Culture,  Issue 31: Black Studies Now and the Counter-Currents of Hazel Carby.   https://www.invisibleculturejournal.com/pub/negros-aqui-blacks-here/download/pdf (free access) 

·       Sierra Silva, Pablo Miguel. “Afro-Mexican Women in Saint-Domingue: Piracy, Captivity, and Community in the 1680s and 1690s.” Hispanic American Historical Review Vol. 100, No. 1 (February 2020): 3-34. https://tinyurl.com/26uebjac (paid)

 ·       Pablo Miguel Sierra S. (2018) “El tráfico de esclavos a la ciudad de Puebla. Siglo XVIII.” En: El Pregonero de la ciudad. Nueva época No. 18 Julio-septiembre. pp. 11-15. https://tinyurl.com/2ggqxyul (membership Access)

 ·       Pablo Miguel Sierra S. (2015). “From Chains to Chiles: An Elite Afro-Indigenous Couple in Colonial Mexico, 1641–1688” in: Ethnohistory 62:2 (April) pp. 196-219. https://tinyurl.com/2nobtqtw (paid access)

 ·       Pablo Miguel Sierra S. (2019). Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531–1706 (Cambridge Latin American Studies, Series Number 109) (Amazon) https://amzn.to/3dGO6Ld

 ·        Treasures of the UCLA Library: Colonial Mexican Manuscripts. https://youtu.be/_fOPtHqo2g8 (youtube video)

 

Podcast episodes:

·        Afro-Andalusi culinary legacy in Mexico. ep. 77  https://tinyurl.com/2lg4k7y9  

·        Kingdom, Empire and Plus Ultra: conversations on the history of Portugal and Spain, 1415-1898: Mestizaje and the Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico with Dr. Ben Vinson. https://tinyurl.com/2kk8meec

·       Dan Snow’s History Hit podcast episode: “The Conquistadores” with Mexican historian and author Dr. Fernando Cervantes from the University of Bristol.  https://tinyurl.com/yxero78m 

 

Books:

·   Mintz, Sidney W. and Price, Richard. (1992). The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Beacon Press. https://amzn.to/3K5vqAa

·   Proctor III, Frank. (2010) “Rebelión esclava y libertad en el México colonial.” En: de la Serna, J. M. (Ed.), De la libertad y la abolición: Africanos y afrodescendientes en Iberoamérica. Centro de estudios mexicanos y centroamericanos. (free access)  http://books.openedition.org/cemca/1626 

·   Rinaudo, Christian. (2012). Afromestizaje y fronteras étnicas: una mirada desde el puerto de Veracruz. Universidad Veracruzana, Institut de recherche pour le développement.  https://tinyurl.com/y3lk5n8m (free access)

·       UNESCO. (2018) Legacies of slavery: a resource book for managers of sites and itineraries of memory. https://tinyurl.com/yhyhdrwh. (free access)  

·       Goméz García, Lidia E. Los anales nahuas de la ciudad de Puebla de los Ángeles, siglos XVI y XVII: Escribiendo historia indígena como aliados del rey católico de España. Puebla: Ayuntamiento de Puebla, 2019. shorturl.at/dCIP6  (free Access)

·       Lockhart, James and Camilla Townsend. Here in this Year: Seventeenth-century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.  https://amzn.to/3sFcOzN (paid)

·       Camba Ludlow, Úrsula. Ecos de la Nueva España: Los siglos perdidos en la historia de México. Ciudad de México: Grijalbo, 2022. https://amzn.to/3zss3Qp (paid)