Talking Through the Chest: Divination and Ventriloquism among African Slave Women in Seventeenth-Century Mexico*

Villa-Flores, Javier

doi:10.1080/10609160500315276

Cited by 30 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Research on Black ritual practice, including magical, medicinal, and religious practices, has revealed the plurality of traditions practitioners engaged with, which included not only Bantu, Aja-Fon, or Yoruba elements but also Indigenous, Catholic, and Islamic practices (Bristol 2007;Villa-Flores 2005;Sweet 2011;Spaulding 2019). 19 Greater awareness of this interplay has informed recent scholarship on corporate religious groups like confraternities which increasingly addresses visual and performative aspects (Fromont 2014;.…”

Section: Religion and Materials Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: visualizing Blackness in colonial Latin America

Santner¹,

Melling

2021

Colonial Latin American Review

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As she lay dying in Lima's convent of La Trinidad in 1696, Tomasa Fernández Montejo, a black-veiled nun, made arrangements for the fates of the two enslaved women in her possession. 1 María Gregoria, a mulata aged four years, was granted liberty; Ysabel María, de casta conga, on the other hand, would be given to the two-year-old child Fernández Montejo was raising in her cell, for the remainder of the child's life. But before Ysabel could be 'free of all subjection and bondage,' she would have one final mistress: an image of the Virgin of Carmen housed in the convent's choir. Ysabel would be required to leave the convent for the streets of Lima to earn jornal until she amassed 300 pesos. These earnings were to be rendered to the nun in charge of the image, and used for the celebration of feast days. Most stunningly, any children that Ysabel might have during her years of servitude would be enslaved to the image as well.More than a century later, in March of 1812, José Antonio Aponte y Ulabarra, a free Black man working as a cabinet-maker and sculptor in Havana, was brought to trial to answer charges that he had incited a series of slave rebellions that had erupted at nearby sugar plantations. Central to the accusation levied against Aponte was a remarkable 'Book of Paintings' that he had created, a hybrid of painting and collage depicting imagined and historical landscapes populated with figures of mythology and biblical history, classical gods, and most significantly, swashbuckling figures of Black history along with Black saints, cardinals, priests, pilgrims, nuns, and battling Black armies. Aponte also included depictions of himself and his forebears and used the book as a didactic tool to instruct members of his community about a telling of history that centered and celebrated Africans and their descendants as protagonists. Though Aponte's 'Book of Paintings' has been lost, the trial record of his three-day interrogation has left us Aponte's ekphrasis of the images he created. After his testimony, Aponte was condemned to death and his body was made a grisly public display.The fates of Ysabel María and José Antonio Aponte demonstrate the often-fraught relationship between Afrodescendants and visually potent objects which could variously and simultaneously be tools of oppression and vehicles for the articulation of subjectivity. Ysabel María's story illustrates the brutal fact that religious statues were conferred with greater agency than human beings. As scholars we long to know how Ysabel María regarded the Virgin to whom she was in bondage, a position that may have come with a certain amount of prestige and latitude. Aponte's 'Book of Paintings' not only visualized Black sovereignty and presented it as a historical fact to Black habaneros, it also

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Section: Religion and Materials Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: visualizing Blackness in colonial Latin America

Santner¹,

Melling

2021

Colonial Latin American Review

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“…84 For example, mediumistic practices of Luunda and Yaka divination conjured ngoomb (ancestral spirit) to provide consultations and solutions to balance fortunes. 85 Knowledge transfer of divinatory rites often occurred through ancestral, matrilineal inheritance and the bangudi banganga (pl.) who presided over initiation.…”

Section: Galleon Anxiety 403mentioning

confidence: 99%

Galleon Anxiety: How Afro-Mexican Women Shaped Colonial Spirituality in Acapulco

Luis¹

2021

The Americas

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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.

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The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West

2015

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This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.

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Talking Through the Chest: Divination and Ventriloquism among African Slave Women in Seventeenth-Century Mexico*

Cited by 30 publications

References 28 publications

Introduction: visualizing Blackness in colonial Latin America

Introduction: visualizing Blackness in colonial Latin America

Galleon Anxiety: How Afro-Mexican Women Shaped Colonial Spirituality in Acapulco

The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West

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