No abstract

During the seventeenth century, transatlantic and transpacific diasporas created one of the world’s most globalized early modern societies in New Spain. As the slave trades to the colonial centers of central Mexico reached frenetic levels after the turn of the seventeenth century, processes of encounter, exchange, and transmission began to characterize these diverse communities. For “chinos” arriving in Acapulco, careful observation and experience coalesced into mobile bodies of knowledge ranging from the social practice of blasphemy to spiritual ritual. These varied modes of cultural production facilitated negotiation of enslaver/enslaved relations and represented a kaleidoscope of responses to power relations in colonial society. Through these forms of contestation, knowledge production in enslaved communities became central to the rhythms of daily life in New Spain.

No abstract

Acapulco became a global town during the early seventeenth century, characterized not only by transpacific trade, but also by an increasingly large Afro-Mexican population residing and laboring at the port. A cohort of Afro-Mexican women gained prominence and visibility by delivering accurate predictions on the arrival of galleons to Acapulco. They adapted mixed African and Indigenous divination practices to calm port residents worried about galleon losses on the world's largest ocean. Scholarship on the Spanish Pacific has yet to investigate how the globalization of New Spain through galleon travel affected African and Afro-descendant communities. This article contends that the dangers of Pacific travel, and anxieties about them, frequently exceeded the therapeutic capacities of Catholic dogma. Black women, drawing on the profound West and West Central African estimation of female diviners, practiced clairvoyance to report on the location of galleons and whether they would arrive safely. The confluence of an increasing population of Afro-Mexicans with the economic dynamism of transpacific trade transformed spiritual life at the eastern node of Spain's Pacific empire. Black women positioned themselves at the center of these massive structural transformations and ultimately created new cultures as spiritual authorities in Acapulco.