University Press of Florida
Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans
Key Metrics
- Nicole Von Germeten
- University Press of Florida
- Hardcover
- 9780813029429
- 9.58 X 6.34 X 0.9 inches
- 1.25 pounds
- Religion > Ethnic & Tribal
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Celebrating the African contribution to Mexican culture, this book shows how religious brotherhoods in New Spain both preserved a distinctive African identity and helped facilitate Afro-Mexican integration into colonial society. Called confraternities, these groups provided social connections, charity, and status for Africans and their descendants for over two centuries.
Often organized by African women and dedicated to popular European and African saints, the confraternities enjoyed prestige in the Baroque religious milieu of 17th-century New Spain. One group, founded by Africans called Zapes, preserved their ethnic identity for decades even after they were enslaved and brought to the Americas. Despite ongoing legal divisions and racial hierarchies, by the end of the colonial era many descendants from African slaves had achieved a degree of status that enabled them to move up the social ladder in Hispanic society. Von Germeten reveals details of the organization and practices of more than 60 Afro-Mexican brotherhoods and examines changes in the social, family, and religious lives of their members. She presents the stories of individual Africans and their descendants--including many African women and the famous Baroque artist Juan Correa--almost entirely from evidence they themselves generated. Moving the historical focus away from negative stereotypes that have persisted for almost 500 years, this study is the first in English to deal with Afro-Mexican religious organizations.Author Bio
Nicole von Germeten, a professor of Latin American History at Oregon State University, has worked as the Director of the School of History, Philosophy, and Religious studies since 2017.
She received her PhD from the University of California Berkeley in 2003 with research funded by the Fulbright Garcia Robles Scholarship and the Muriel McKevitt Sonne Endowment. She was a Fellow at the Princeton Center for the Study of Religion in 2004 and was affiliated with the Stanford University Center for Latin American Studies in 2008 and 2009.
She has contributed essays, reviews, and articles to over thirty edited volumes and academic journals. She has published three single-authored books and one edited book-length translation since 2006, most recently Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico (California, 2018). Her fifth book, coming out in 2022 with the University of Nebraska Press, The Enlightened Patrolman: The Early History of Law Enforcement in Mexico City, examines how the Spanish viceroys attempted to modernize policing to suppress popular revolt and to curb what they viewed as an out-of-control drinking culture.
This book focuses on the perspective of the men walking the beat. Her previous publications range in topics from sexuality, religion, legal history, and gender in Spain and the Iberian empires, to Afro-descended populations in Spanish America, Catholic brotherhoods and Jesuit proselytization. Her scholarship has also explored transactional sex, honor, violence, witchcraft, sodomy, and suicide.
She is currently writing a manuscript on a mass murder incident from 1789 and a translation from Spanish to English of an 1869 novel which focuses on the same case. Her next project will delve into the human sacrifice/cannibalism series of crimes in late 1980s Mexico, especially their framing as a candomblé-influenced ritual.
Source: Oregon State University
Videos
No Videos
Community reviews
Write a ReviewNo Community reviews