Africans to Spanish America expands the Diaspora framework that has shaped much of the recent scholarship on Africans in the Americas to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African Diaspora in the Spanish empires. While a majority of the research on the colonial Diaspora focuses on the Caribbean and Brazil, analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. Editors Sherwin K. Bryant, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, and Ben Vinson III arrange the volume around three themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion. Across these broad themes, contributors offer probing and detailed studies of the place and roles of people of African descent in the complex realities of colonial Spanish America.

Contributors are Joan C. Bristol, Nancy E. van Deusen, Leo J. Garofalo, Herbert S. Klein, Charles Beatty-Medina, Karen Y. Morrison, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Frank "Trey" Proctor III, and Michele Reid-Vazquez.

|Introduction 1
Sherwin K. Bryant, Ben Vinson III, and Rachel Sarah O'Toole

Part 1. Complicating Identity in the African Diaspora to Spanish America
1. The Shape of a Diaspora: The Movement of Afro-Iberians to Colonial Spanish America 27
Leo J. Garofalo
2. African Diasporic Ethnicity in Mexico City to 1650 50
Frank "Trey" Proctor III
3. To Be Free and Lucumi: Ana de la Calle and Making African Diaspora Identities in Colonial Peru 73
Rachel Sarah O'Toole

Part 2. Royal Subjects, Loyal Christians, and Saints in the Alley
4. Between the Cross and the Sword: Religious Conquest and Maroon Legitimacy in Colonial Esmeraldas 95
Charles Beatty-Medina
5. Afro-Mexican Saintly Devotion in a Mexico City Alley 114
Joan C. Bristol
6. "The Lord walks among the pots and pans": Religious Servants of Colonial Lima 136
Nancy E. van Deusen

Part 3. Comparisons and Whitening Revisited: Race and Gender in Colonial Cuba
7. Whitening Revisited: Nineteenth-Century Cuban Counterpoints 163
Karen Y. Morrison
8. Tensions of Race, Gender, and Midwifery in Colonial Cuba 186
Michele Reid-Vazquez
9. The African American Experience in Comparative Perspective: The Current Question of the Debate 206
Herbert S. Klein

Glossary 223
Bibliography 229
List of Contributors 263
Acknowledgments 268
Index 269| "A pioneering effort to write the history of Africans in colonial Spanish America using the African diaspora paradigm. The authors fully demonstrate the considerable potential of this approach."—Kris Lane, author of The Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires
"A page-turning secret society history based on solid research and accuracy."—Southern Historian

"Africans to Spanish America is both useful and provocative, with chapters drawing on a range of methodological approaches to explore the complexities and nuances of racial identity in diverse Spanish American societies."— Journal of Latin American Studies
|Sherwin K. Bryant is an assistant professor of African American studies and history at Northwestern University. Rachel Sarah O'Toole is an associate professor of history...