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  Subject: H-Net Review Publication:  'Rethinking Black and Christian
Lives in New Spain'
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Herman L. Bennett.  Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico.
Bloomington  Indiana University Press, 2009.  xvi + 227 pp.  $39.95
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35338-2.

Reviewed by Matthew F. Rarey (Art History, University of
Wisconsin-Madison) and Alyson Williams (Art History, University of
Wisconsin)
Published on H-AfrArts (November, 2009)
Commissioned by Jean M. Borgatti

Rethinking Black and Christian Lives in New Spain

"What happens to our understanding of black identity," Herman L.
Bennett asks, "when its foundational trope, the slave, is no longer
conceived of as a stable subject?" (p. xiii). It is interesting,
given the current and frequent emphasis on undermining the historical
and cultural obsession with the act of manumission, that this
question has so rarely been posed. This is the question that Bennett
attempts to answer through an analysis of ecclesiastical church
documents in New Spain between the sixteenth and eighteenth
centuries. His response describes the vibrant social and private
lives of both enslaved and free persons as it seeks to eliminate the
distinction between "slave" and "free."

Bennett positions his study as the response of an intellectually
frustrated scholar to what have been the central academic tropes of
the Afro-Latin experience: the dependence on slavery as a major
social category, the constant desire of blacks to attain upward
social mobility, the lack of emphasis placed on Catholicism as an
important social force among blacks, the need to characterize all
black cultural practices as forms of resistance, and the constant
reiteration of the lives of enslaved persons as socially dead,
following Orlando Patterson's _Slavery and Social Death__: A
Comparative Study _(1982)_._ Bennett succeeds in opening new spaces
for further investigation and fruitful research through raising new
and compelling questions regarding the construction and present
understanding of the Afro-Mexican experience, challenging
preconceived notions of what it meant to be black in New Spain.

Through his central argument and extensive use of primary sources,
Bennett undermines long-standing scholarly conceptions of black
lives, or lack thereof, as tied to slave plantation economies.
Bennett instead relocates this history to metropolitan centers with
rich social networks, a move that allows him to demonstrate that the
lives and loves of black Mexicans are not constructed around
resistance, but rather are rich and multifaceted independent human
experiences. As he departs from the previously mentioned academic
tropes, Bennett describes a world of mulattos, Africans, slaves, and
Creoles (all interwoven and fluid social categories) in New Spain
whose identities as slave or free are far less important than their
lives as Christian subjects. It is only through articulations of
Christian identity, Bennett argues, that Africans and their
descendants create independent identities in New Spain. The
dynamic/active social lives located inside of those Christian
identities rely not on upward social mobility but on forming and
maintaining elaborate family ties and maintaining individual personal
identities. But as Bennett locates these personal identities inside
his conception of "colonial blackness," he cautions the reader
against presupposing that blackness exists as a homogenizing social
category. Instead, being black in New Spain meant bringing "a
perspective, a way of seeing, if you will, to the historical
experience," which allowed blacks to define their own social lives as
they interacted with other social groups (p. 214).

Despite Bennett's enormous theoretical scope, his source material has
a difficult time carrying his argument. Bennett's study is entirely
dependent on a detailed analysis of Catholic reformation marriage,
concubinage, and cohabitation records between the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries, primarily in Mexico City, but also in
Michoacán. If Bennett's only claims were that the Catholic Church
sought to regulate Africans and their descendants as part of a
Christian population and that blacks in Mexico were not socially
dead, his sources would be very convincing. However, since Bennett is
arguing for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of collective black
identity, this source appears flat and one-dimensional. In his
careful study of the ecclesiastical records, stories abound of
Africans and Creoles whose kinship networks extend across the
colonial Spanish caste system and across the geographic space of New
Spain, and that were maintained in many cases as long as the
individual was alive. In the face of these stories, Bennett can
quickly and confidently undermine any claim that blacks in Mexico
suffered a socially dead existence. Similarly, Bennett has no trouble
convincing the reader that the Catholic Church, in its disciplining
and regulation of black lives, gave little consideration to social
category or ethnic identity when granting marriage dispensations or
punishing misbehaving Christians. In these stories, free blacks, who
have frequently been seen in other histories as posing problems to
the hegemonic social order, never seem to pose problems to the
Catholic inquisitors_ _as social beings; it is only when they lose
their commitment to Christian virtue that the church deems it
necessary to regulate them.

Yet it is this focus on the ecclesiastical response to black lives
that alerts the reader to a potential snag in Bennett's chain of
argument, one that he seems unwilling to acknowledge in the text: the
myopic and highly problematic nature of his sources. Ecclesiastical
records may convincingly show when the church found it necessary to
interfere in black lives, but they cannot demonstrate that it was
solely the church through which black social lives were formed. They
may show what punishments and regulations the church chose to impose
on black lives, but they cannot say exactly what effect this
discipline had on daily existence. Finally, and most important, they
present a highly problematic construction of personal identity, one
that Bennett seems to take at face value, but one that must have been
filtered through black social lenses to manufacture useful identities
for the inquisitors. While Bennett finds repeated invocations of
blacks knowing each other since birth to be convincing proof that
blacks maintained lifelong social relationships, we are given no hint
of precisely how those social ties were forged, maintained, or even
if they were true as presented to the panel. In other words, why did
people choose to present themselves the way they did in front of the
Inquisition council? Can we trust that people were always honest
about how long or how well they had known one another? And, finally,
how were these relationships maintained in the face of great
distances and unreliable communication?

_Colonial Blackness _by no means lives up to its own subtitle: "A
History of Afro-Mexico." It is rather a thoroughly researched, but at
times argumentatively overstated, argument about the black experience
in New Spain. Clearly, Bennett intends _Colonial Blackness _to be an
extension of his previous study, _Africans in Colonial Mexico__:
Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640
_(2003)_._ _Colonial Blackness _uses similar source material and
presents a similar argument, but addresses some of the criticisms
leveled at the first book, primarily through an expansion of its
scope both geographically (outside of Mexico City) and temporally
(beyond 1640). _Colonial Blackness _is the better developed of the
two works, and anyone wishing to engage with Bennett's argument
should begin with _Colonial Blackness. _The thesis of this book, to
reorient our perspective in order to understand Afro-Mexicans, is
fascinating and long overdue. In presenting questions that challenge
the very foundation of traditional historical analysis of
Afro-Mexicans, Bennett lays a strong foundation for future research
that can only add to the richness and complexity of understanding
that he introduces. The real strength of _Colonial Blackness _lies in
its reframing of the discussion away from slavery and recognizing the
diverse social and private lives that constructed an understanding of
black identity. Unfortunately, its unquestioning reliance on its
source material prevents _Colonial Blackness _from fully uniting its
ambitious and welcome theoretical framework with appropriate
evidence.

Citation: Matthew F. Rarey and Alyson Williams. Review of Bennett,
Herman L., _Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico_. H-AfrArts,
H-Net Reviews. November, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25561

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.


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