Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico offers an in-depth assessment of Afro-descendant sonorities in New Spain. The book uses different archival sources to make in-roads in sound and music studies and in critical analyses of race in the New World. Following the analytical framework of her first book (Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 2019), Sarah Finley brings comparative literature and literary criticism into a conversation with musicology. The result is a novel approach to the study of sound and aurality in relation to race in New Spain. By all accounts, the book—in terms of its elucidations and the questions it leaves to the reader—is a groundbreaking study in New Spanish studies across disciplines.

In three sections, Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico maps the plurality of ways in which Afro-descendants sought audibility and presence in a racialized society. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce a historical context of musical activity and the parameters that organized the movement of people in New Spain during the colonial period, from ca. 1521 through the eighteenth century, although 1810 marked the beginning of the end of the colonial period with the war of independence. These chapters show how Spanish spaces, such as the church, enabled Black individuals to articulate desires for representation beyond the script of the casta system. In contrast, Chapters 3 through 5 outline how political ceremonies, popular religious settings, and villancicos (as social texts) force us to rethink what this canvas represented socially. The final chapter brings the previous two sections together in the villancicos de negros (Black villancicos) of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, where the poet postulates alternate readings of blackness beyond prescribed stereotypes through her voice.

In Chapter 1, Finley approaches the lives of Black castrati slaves, bought by Spanish churches because of their highly trained voices. Finley challenges interests in “Black voices” by previous scholarship (i.e., the search for non-European sounds, which has furthered stereotypes of Afro-descendants in historical studies) and urges the reader to consider Black voices intersectionally, as individuals moved in and out of Spanish spaces to negotiate their social positions. In Chapter 2, Finley delves more into ecclesiastical music as an aural site for the re-inscription of the Black body. The fact that Spanish composers wrote specifically for the voice of Afro-descendant musicians suggests that they could negotiate their status. How could such voicing alter imaginings of blackness in relation to official representations of the body in New Spain? Thus, Chapters 1 and 2 broach the notion of Black “voice” as an uncharted territory in relation to the Black body as a literary trope, codified in by the textuality of casta paintings. By alluding to “musical and lyrical rememberings,” Finley sees texts as intersections of social and cultural spaces where the body moved, a sociocultural archive of political action and the expression of desire.

Such expression was not aloof to colonial power, and Chapters 3 through 5 describe the ontological framework that informed social texts important to Afro-descendant activity. In these texts, “harmony” referred to the bringing of different social elements into concord through institutional norms, civic codes, and the law, which prescribed conduct and disciplined behavior. While official ceremonies—to receive new archbishops and viceroys—and religious festivities were two of the most important arenas for public ritual, villancicos (works of Spanish lyrical poetry, sometimes set to music) encompassed Spanish representations of civil society.

According to Finley, such harmonization enabled Afro-descendants to preserve referents of cultural memory through symbolic negotiation. Her take on political ceremonies is certainly compelling, analyzing a surviving text that documents a performance by free Afro-descendant women, in which they wove African religious symbolism in the performance of Spanish poetry. However, the corporate character of social visibility during religious festivities covered in Chapter 4, where groups such as guild, confraternities, the clergy, and the royal government comprised the spectrum of membership through which individuals vied for social representation, makes one wonder if cultural memory reflected a collective interest.

Event descriptions, payment records, and musical scores allow Finley to sketch a broad aural narrative of Afro-descendant presence. However, the performance of congos, matambas, lobolos, and bendos during processions (e.g., Corpus Christi), specifically, cannot be tied neatly with the efforts of Black confraternities. The fact that the membership of these groups included Afro-descendants and mestizo individuals (people with one parent being indigenous and the other Spaniard) sheds doubts as to how these performances displayed a group interest to harness cultural memory. Finley’s point, however, is not so much about documenting corporate cultural capital as it is about broadening our understanding of Afro-descendants’ scope of social performance and how such performance left historical cultural remnants.

In addition to these performative renditions, Finley’s analysis of inquisition depositions related to fortune tellers further shows African culture tightly woven in the Spanish imagination. Here, “speaking from the chest,” which alludes to the voice of fortune tellers sought by Spaniards to perform divination, emphasizes the importance of aurality as an act of disembodiment through which Afro-descendants sought to dissociate themselves from their prescribed identity in the casta system. The politics of this disembodiment and the possibilities it opens through a responsive listener are the focus of the last chapter, which center on Sor Juana’s Black villancicos. These lyrical renderings, usually involving stereotypical representations of Afro-descendant bodies and voices, are not necessarily a top-down voicing of blackness according to a Spanish nun. As someone living in seclusion, Sor Juana’s ear was tuned to the social pulse of the street’s aurality and to other voicings discussed above, to which she lent her poetic voice; only an acute listener, Finley argues, will hear a Black voice beyond the confines of inherited stereotypes.

A deep and nuanced archival assessment such as Finley’s shows that Black “voice” comprised a robust and diverse field of social action, which makes the Black body hard to signify historically. This Black polyphony, which politicized aural renderings of the body, invites scholars to reframe imaginaries of the colonial world in ways that could reinvigorate the study and teaching of race in the Americas during the early modern period. All in all, Finley’s book is a commendable example of an interdisciplinary approach to a critical reading of race and of how these readings are contingent on the ontological performance of social agents as they negotiated colonial power. Undergraduate and graduate students, music performance scholars, and—from the vantage point of interdisciplinarity—musicologists and ethnomusicologists will surely benefit from Finley’s contribution.