For many enslaved Africans, the baptismal ceremony carried out on the shores of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century West Africa before they were loaded onto the terrible transatlantic slave ships was a fearsome ritual that signified the first step in a process which they believed would end in their consumption by Europeans, either as food or as an ingredient of gunpowder. Joan Cameron Bristol not only draws the reader's attention to the initial distance of newly enslaved Africans from Christianity, but also constructs a wide-ranging narrative that penetrates and illuminates a significant sector of Christian society in New Spain, and in fact shows that Colonial Afro-Mexicans were, as she writes, defined by ‘shared values, cultural practices and communities’ (p. 5). Afro-Mexicans, she argues, did not just crudely practice Christianity to placate their owners and did not merely imitate elite forms of worship, but instead ‘found solace in Christian practice and associations’ (p. 221). In this respect, Christians, Blasphemers and Witches offers a nuanced analysis of colonial religiosity as it played out across a broad section of Afro-Mexican society. From a nun whose piety caused her to be declared a popular saint, to neophyte bozales newly arrived from Africa being prosecuted for blasphemy by the Inquisition, Bristol demonstrates the multifaceted nature of Afro-Mexican participation in Christian ritual practice during the long seventeenth century.
The book's opening case study introduces the reader to the story of Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, a slave who had been given to the Carmelite convent of San José in Puebla. Such was her piety that she was given permission by the bishop to profess as a nun a year before her death, a privilege normally only granted to elite women whose families could provide significant dowries to the convent. After her death in 1679, the population of Puebla considered her a miracle-working saint. This case, as Bristol says, seems to ‘fly in the face of what we know about Afro-Mexican roles in New Spain’ (p. 24), but it ably demonstrates to the reader that social and religious boundaries in colonial Mexico were more fluid than one might otherwise expect. Esperanza was not merely a Christian; her life was held up as a paradigm of Christian virtue, an example for all the citizens of Puebla to follow. The hagiographical account of her life even rationalised her lowly status as a slave by invoking the holiness and suffering of Christ.
Before following Esperanza's story with other case studies drawn from the archives of the Mexican Inquisition, Bristol necessarily charts the development of race perception in the Hispanic and Iberian world and explains that early denigration of Africans was more to do with their lack of Christianity than any other defining characteristics. Over the course of the sixteenth century, theologies attacking the enslavement and systematic exploitation of Amerindian peoples also had an impact on thinking about the enslavement of Africans. While the Dominicans Fernão Oliveira and Domingo de Soto condemned the illegal capture of Africans, Iberian intellectuals and theologians stopped short of questioning the inherent logic of the slave trade, which was a mainstay of empire. Africans had no Las Casas to fight in the imperial court against their enslavement; even the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval, whose treatise De instauranda Aethiopum salute vigorously condemned abuses against African slaves, did not take the final step and condemn slavery outright. The Jesuit economy in certain provinces of the Americas was heavily tied to slave labour, but theirs was also a world in which the salvation of souls was more important than physical liberty. Slavery could be vigorously condemned if it imperilled the souls of those enslaved, but if it led to their proper Christianisation (such as in the case of Esperanza) the moral ambiguities of the practice became much more pronounced, thus enabling slavery to be defended as an imperial concern.
These ambiguities are made even clearer as Bristol highlights the distance between the absolute requirements of Christianity and the newly baptised African slaves' understanding of this new religion. Importantly, they did not see their ritual practices as being at odds with Christianity, and those who had little or no contact with Jesuit teachers learned about Christian practice by watching and imitating others in the public displays of Catholicism so common to the Iberian world. Not surprisingly, these ritual imitations often led to new interpretations considered heterodox by the inquisitorial authorities; together with the continued practice of African ritual healing – necessary given the dearth of trained physicians – this made Colonial Mexico a fertile ground for the blending of African, indigenous and Hispanic healing and religious traditions. The inquisitorial trials for sacrilegious participation in the sacraments, blasphemy and superstitious magic in all probability represent an insignificant proportion of heterodox Afro-Mexican socio-religious practices.
Bristol's careful selection of cases thus gives important insight into the types of ritual practice taking place. At the same time, her argument is subtle and not overstated. For example, when she discusses the use by Afro-Mexicans of scapulars, a devotional practice common to the Ibero-Catholic world and certainly one encouraged by the clergy, she draws a tentative parallel between this, magical pouches prepared by Nahua priests, the Muslim practice of wearing Koranic verses in Senegal and the amulets worn by the inhabitants of the East African coast (present-day Sierra Leone). Far from suggesting direct links between any of these practices, she merely establishes their coexistence in the mind of the reader while sensibly claiming that possible connections are difficult to dismiss, especially among the slave population of New Spain, where these traditions might have come together. Overall, Bristol's intelligent and nuanced analysis provides the reader with a valuable exposition of the dynamic development of the beliefs and religious practices of a significant sector of Colonial Mexico's population, and her book is a much-needed contribution to the scholarship of Slavery, the African Diaspora, and religious beliefs and practices in the early modern Hispanic world.
