In Sovereign Joy, Miguel Valerio takes the reader on a tour of Black festive culture in early colonial Mexico City. In 1539, more than 50 Afro-Mexican men, women, and children, richly dressed in gold, silver, precious stones, and pearls, were part of a procession commemorating the Truce of Nice. On horseback and accompanied by their king and queen, according to Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s account, they staged a mock battle against Indigenous people and simulated a hunt in a forest built for the event. In 1610, two extravagantly decorated floats were part of Black performances celebrating Ignacio de Loyola’s beatification. One float transported the Eucharist and was decorated with a beautiful high castle from where 12 dancers, dressed to represent savages, emerged to the delight of the crowd. Another float was shaped like an elephant, on top of which was a Black king with a crown and scepter, and in its hollow belly were rockets, mortars, and bombs that shot out with great speed, causing much admiration. In 1640, 11 Black women performed a choreographed dance in which they reenacted the Queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon in a private event honoring the newly appointed viceroy. The performance was memorialized in a detailed account published in 1640 by Nicolás de Torres, a text that was possibly commissioned by the women themselves.

All three events celebrated men and feats that were inseparable from European imperial pursuits. Their material displays and cultural language invoked European festive baroque traditions and expectations of Black exoticism. Valerio sets out to demonstrate, however, that these performances and performers were not mimicking those traditions or submitting to those expectations. They were articulating a Black identity and sovereignty that was grounded in their claimed place in Mexico’s urban society and embodied by their Black kings and queens. In the four chapters that form the book, Valerio recovers Afro-Mexicans’ negotiation of identity and sovereignty during and in the cultural spaces created by public festivals. His analysis makes two major assertions. First, early colonial Mexico City offers some of the earliest examples of an African Diasporic cultural adaptation that produced Black confraternities and the culture of festive kings and queens in the Americas. Second, the absence of Black confraternities and kings and queens from descriptions of public festivals after 1640—in contrast to colonial accounts from other parts of Latin America—is not evidence of their disappearance. Rather, it is indicative of Afro-Mexican festive culture becoming broader Mexican culture. On the basis of both assertions, Valerio calls for the re-periodization of the process of creolization that created the Black Atlantic.

Sovereign Joy aligns with works that emphasize Mexico’s relevance to the history of Atlantic slavery and Black freedom and the centrality of the African Diaspora to the trajectory of the Western hemisphere such as those by Herman Bennet, Matthew Restall, David Wheat, Pablo Sierra Silva, and Daniella Terrazas Williams. It does not, however, propose to provide the thick historical description those works offer. The book’s main contribution is to a field of colonial literary studies that, Valerio stresses, has yet to recognize African descendants’ contributions to colonial and creole culture. Historians reading this book will be left with many questions regarding the environment and processes that shaped this festive culture. But they will also be left with a vivid picture of rich and vibrant Afro-Mexican celebrations that inspired general awe and joy in colonial Latin American society, and that might inspire them, in turn, to research the answers to their questions.