Conference Presentations by Miguel Valerio
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History
Black confraternities or lay Catholic brotherhoods were colonial Afro-Latin Americans' main site ... more Black confraternities or lay Catholic brotherhoods were colonial Afro-Latin Americans' main site of social action and expression, striking a balance between rebellion and flight and assimilation. Modeled on the Roman collegia, burial of deceased members was a central preoccupation. Black brothers and sisters cared for infirm cofrades (confraternity members) in their own hospitals and other hospitals of colonial Latin America. They commissioned, fashioned, and maintained ornate altars and shrines for their saints, thereby engaging in artistic patronage and art collecting. They staged lavish festivities for their patron's feast and
Journal of Festive Studies , 2022
On September 13, 1745, the pardo (mixed-race Afro-Brazilian) brotherhood (lay Catholic associatio... more On September 13, 1745, the pardo (mixed-race Afro-Brazilian) brotherhood (lay Catholic association) of Nossa Senhora do Livramento (Our Lady of Emancipation) of Recife, Pernambuco, in collaboration with the pardo brotherhood of Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe) in neighboring Olinda, enthralled Pernambuco's largest city with a great festival in honor of Blessed Gonçalo Garcia (1556-97). Like many colonial festivals, the festivities included fireworks, artillery salvos, five triumphal carts, seventeen allegorical floats, five different dance performances, and jousting. Yet never before had such an extravagant display of material wealth been made by an Afro-Brazilian brotherhood. The pardo irmãos (brotherhood members) had two important issues they wanted to settle once and for all with this festival. One was the question of Blessed Gonçalo's pardoness, since the would-be-saint was the son of a Portuguese man and an East Indian woman, and pardoness in Brazil had been defined as the result of whiteblack miscegenation. The other issue was the popular notion that mixed-race Afro-Brazilians constituted colonial Brazil's most deviant and unruly socioracial group. In this article, I analyze how mixed-race Afro-Brazilians used the material culture of early modern festivals to publicly articulate claims about their sacro-social prestige and socio-symbolic status. I contend that material culture played a central role in the pardo irmãos' articulation of their devotion to Blessed Gonçalo and claims of sacro-social and socio-symbolic belonging, and that they used this material culture to challenge colonial notions about their ethnic group.
The Americas, 2021
In 1568, a group of Mexican mulatos unsuccessfully petitioned the Spanish crown for a license to ... more In 1568, a group of Mexican mulatos unsuccessfully petitioned the Spanish crown for a license to build a hospital. The mulatos' petition, however, is an important document that speaks to the legal avenues Afro-Mexicans explored in the mid sixteenth century in their attempts to improve their social position. Through an analysis of how the petition process played out, this article demonstrates how that process epitomized the growing limits placed on Afro-Mexican autonomy by colonial administrators. I contend that this case attests to the difficulties Afro-Mexicans continually encountered in their efforts to establish safety nets through such institutions as hospitals and cofradías, following the example of other colonial subjects. Over time, however, the mulatos' attempts to institutionalize their privileges as permanent fixtures of colonial society, for example, in petitioning to establish a hospital, intensified the opposition of local royal authorities. I also argue that the petition reveals a Mexican mulato community taking form as a common goal brought the mulatos together, setting in motion a process of community-building through petitioning. Finally, the petition process allows us to see how mulato-ness was understood at the time, broadening our understanding of the category at the time as well as its transformations. The article thus contributes to the study of Afro-Mexicans' use of the Spanish legal system in the mid sixteenth century, as well as their engagement with the Spanish petition system, two topics that have received little scholarly attention.
Afro-Hispanic Review, 2016
Papers by Miguel Valerio
Colonial Latin American Review, 2021
Writing about Afro-Brazilians in the 1760s, the Franciscan friar Antonio Santa Maria Jaboatão not... more Writing about Afro-Brazilians in the 1760s, the Franciscan friar Antonio Santa Maria Jaboatão noted that there was ‘no city, town, parish or hamlet’ in all of Brazil ‘where this People does not have their own Church’, ‘with its own confraternity or brotherhood’. Still standing in Brazil’s oldest cities, these churches show how Afro-Brazilians availed themselves of the most public art form in early modernity, religious architecture and art, to express their faith, ethnoracial and corporate identity, display their wealth, social agency, and cultural literacy, and, more importantly, to assert their humanity in the world’s largest slavocracy. They also demonstrate how Afro-Brazilian irmandades (or brotherhoods) employed and transformed European artistic trends and Catholic iconography, giving their religious monuments an Afro-centric iconography. This article studies two of these churches, one in Salvador, Bahia, and the other in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais. The article also introduces the long-overlooked subject of black patronage in colonial Latin American architecture and art.
PALARA, 2020
This article discusses several early modern Spanish and Portuguese texts that describe Afro-Iberi... more This article discusses several early modern Spanish and Portuguese texts that describe Afro-Iberians' festive and confraternal practices in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. While scholars have contended that the early modern Iberian states and church used conversion and confraternities, or lay Catholic brotherhoods, to integrate Afrodescendants to Iberian society, by linking Afro-Iberians' festive practices to their confraternities, the article contends that these texts underscore how Afrodescendants adapted their African cosmologies and festive customs in the diaspora, rather than totally assimilate to Iberian culture. The article also triangulates Afrodescendants' festive practices in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, suggesting that Afrodescendants thought of the diaspora as an imagined community. Black Woman: If you want me to have a fiesta, I'll sing a song from our land. Preta: Queri tu que faça uns festa, eu canta argum moda de nossa terra. 1
Slavery and Abolition, 2021
This essay discusses Mexican colonial officials’ efforts to suppress Afro-Mexican confraternities... more This essay discusses Mexican colonial officials’ efforts to suppress Afro-Mexican confraternities, or lay Catholic brotherhoods, between 1568 and 1612, a period of black confraternal activity in Mexico that has not received scholarly attention. Colonial officials – from the viceroy to royal magistrates to Church and city officials – suspected that Afro-Mexicans used brotherhoods to disguise unorthodox and criminal activities, including planning slave revolts. Sources analyzed here are the earliest records of Afro-Mexican confraternities and allow us to study them in the sixteenth century. Thus, this essay reperiodizes the conversation about Afro-Mexican confraternities and colonial officials’ suspicions of Afrodescendants’ motives. The article contends, as scholars of black confraternities have sustained, that rather than the dangerous, immoral, and unorthodox places that colonial officials imagined, Afro-Mexican confraternities were instead spaces where creole black Mexicans sought to ameliorate their coloniality by forming community, pooling their resources together to care for each other in time of need, and expressing their Afro-Catholic identity through devotion and festive practices.
In February 1539, Mexico City was the stage of a lavish two-day festival meant to commemorate the... more In February 1539, Mexico City was the stage of a lavish two-day festival meant to commemorate the Truce of Nice, signed the year before between Emperor Charles V and King Francis I of France at Aigues-Mortes. In this article, I analyze Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s description of a performance by “more than fifty” blacks with “their king and queen”, all “wearing great riches of gold and precious stones and pearls and silver.” This article argues that the black participants of this festival most likely belonged to a Catholic confraternity, which not only would demonstrate that black confraternities were brought to the Americas very early, but also that, as in the Iberian Peninsula, they were used by members as vehicles of social mobility and agency from the start of imperial expansion. Juxtaposing this and other black performances with instances of perceived black resistance to Spanish domination, the article shows how confraternities could offer blacks a space where they could continue some of their ancestral festive practices without being perceived as a threat to colonial order.
Book Reviews by Miguel Valerio
Colonial Latin American Review, 2021
Interestingly, in this corpus there is strong evidence of a Zapotec 'three-tiered cosmos with nin... more Interestingly, in this corpus there is strong evidence of a Zapotec 'three-tiered cosmos with nine levels above and nine below earth' (181), as well as of their distinct correlations with the feasts in the 260-day ritual calendar. The conclusion of Tavárez, singular in the context of the volume, is that the vertical layers of this colonial Zapotec cosmos most likely have pre-Hispanic origins. The volume also includes the descriptions of two living Mesoamerican cosmos. In his chapter, Kerry Hull studies the universe according to the Ch'orti Maya of southern Guatemala, for whom the common Mesoamerican quincunx, with its four universal directions and a center, is composed of five seas of different colors, and where, not surprisingly, all celestial events are 'causative forces with ramifications for humans on earth' (238). The volume closes with a study of the Wixarika, the famous 'Huichol' people of northern Mexico. According to Johannes Neurath, the Wixarika cosmos is in constant creation; following Konrad Preuss he argues that 'ritual is not a repetition, but a unique event' in which the cosmos is created by its performers. Thus, the life of the cosmos depends on its ritual union with the Wixarika distinctive 'dividual personhood' (337). Reshaping the world is a rigorous intellectual adventure that presents us with nuanced and diverse ways of understanding Mesoamerican cosmologies. It should be mentioned, however, that the idea of a Mesoamerican cosmos shifting in colonial times from a predominantly horizontal representation towards a more vertical, Christian one, is one of the main insights of La cruz mesiánica by Enrique Marroquín, published as early as 1989. Regardless of this minor caveat, the volume gifts the English reader with some of the most exciting developments in the historical and ethnographic study of the still elusive Mesoamerican cosmologies.
Bulletin of the Comediantes, 2018
Books by Miguel Valerio
Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Atlantic Tradition, 2019
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Conference Presentations by Miguel Valerio
Papers by Miguel Valerio
Book Reviews by Miguel Valerio
Books by Miguel Valerio