Sentiment and the Law: Inventing the Category of the Wretched Slave in the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo, 1783–1812

Hontanilla, Ana M.

doi:10.1353/ecs.2015.0008

Cited by 39 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 10 publications

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“…One of the testimonies is at the AGI, and another one at the Biblioteca de Palacio de Madrid. For an analysis of the ambiguity in the Black Code of 1784, see (Hontanilla 2015). See Chapter II on Education and Good Customs, (Pérez Memén 2010).…”

Section: The Miracle Of the Enslaved Mute: Black Piety And Community ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Black Piety and Community Membership in the Virgin of Altagracia Medallions

Baez¹

2021

Arts

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In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Santo Domingo archbishop Isidoro Rodríguez Lorenzo (s. 1767–1788) issued a decree officializing the day of the cult for the Virgin of Altagracia as January 21 and made it a feast of three crosses for the villa of Salvaleón de Higüey and its jurisdiction, meaning all races (free and enslaved) were allowed to join the celebrations in church. Unrelated to the issuance of this decree and approximately during this time (c. 1760–1778), a series of painted panels depicting miracles performed by the Virgin of Altagracia was produced for her sanctuary of San Dionisio in Higüey, in all likelihood commissioned by a close succession of parish priests to the maestro painter Diego José Hilaris Holt. Painted in the coarse style of popular votive panels, they gave the cult a unifying core foundation of miracles. This essay discusses the significance of the black bodies pictured in four of the panels within the project’s implicit effort to institutionalize the regional cult and vis-à-vis the archbishop’s encouragement of non-segregated celebrations for her feast day. As January 21 was associated with a renowned Spanish creole battle against the French, this essay locates these black bodies within the cult’s newfound patriotic charisma. I examine the process by which people of color were incorporated into this community of faith as part of a two-step ritual that involved seeing images while performing difference. Through contrapuntal analysis of the archbishop’s decree, I argue the images helped model black piety and community membership within a hierarchical socioracial order.

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Section: The Miracle Of the Enslaved Mute: Black Piety And Community ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Black Piety and Community Membership in the Virgin of Altagracia Medallions

Baez¹

2021

Arts

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As If She Were Free

2020

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On July 15, 1594, officials in Puebla de los Ángeles arrested fifty-eightyear-old Margarita de Sossa (b. 1536) on charges of witchcraft (brujería) and hauled her from the city where she then resided, Puebla in New Spain, to the secret jails of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the viceregal capital, México (present day Mexico City). As was typical in inquisitorial trials, Sossa did not know why she had been arrested. 1 However, she soon informed the prosecutors in her trial that she was innocent; her spiteful enemies in Puebla must have furnished any accusations levied against her. Sossa had harbored such enemies, she explained, because some years earlier she had testified against Bargas Machuca, a resident of Puebla, regarding his crime of incest against a young Indigenous Chichimeca girl to whom both Sossa and Machuca served as godparents. When inquisitors in Mexico City eventually heeded Sossa's calls to investigate the previous court case in Puebla where witnesses had supposedly provided false testimonies against her, inquisitors discovered a lengthy divorce

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