Reviewed by Sylvia R. Frey | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2

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Reviewed by Sylvia R. Frey | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640. By Herman L. Bennett. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 275. $ 39.95.) Reviewed by Sylvia R. Frey , Tulane University
In 1946, the Austrian-born scholar Frank Tannenbaum published a small book that gained instant recognition for its controversial comparison of the Latin American and British American slave systems. In it, Tannenbaum argued that Latin American slaves were the beneficiaries of an ancient legal system rooted in the Christian conception that man is free and equal, especially in the sight of God. Because Las Siete Partidas, the Spanish legal code, was framed within this Christian doctrine, enslaved people were recognized as moral human beings and were accorded a degree of protection and certain rights. Throughout Latin America, the Catholic Church enforced legal provisions making manumission possible, insisted that masters baptize their slaves and allow them to marry, and protected families against separation. In the more "hostile" environment of British and American slave systems, opposition to manumission and denial of opportunities for baptism and marriage were the characteristic features.¹	1
More than half a century after its publication, Tannenbaum's thesis still has its detractors—who criticize it on the grounds that his conclusions were based on the rhetoric of the law rather than its administration—and its supporters. Herman L. Bennett eschews the idea of a complete reexamination of the historiographical tradition associated with Tannenbaum, although he adopts Tannebaum's starting thesis that Christianity played a determining role in the lives of African Americans in the Mexico City area. Africans in Colonial Mexico is a study of the process of Afro-Mexican creolization. Bennett's introduction offers a fascinating glimpse of the distinctive demography of the Kingdom of New Spain, or colonial Mexico. From 1519, when Hernán Cortés brought the first African-descended servants and slaves into Mexico, to 1640, when the Portuguese slave trade to Mexico ended, people of African descent were a commanding presence. By the mid-seventeenth century, New Spain contained the second largest population of enslaved Africans and the largest number of free blacks in the Americas. A 1646 census reported 35,089 Africans and 116,529 persons of African descent. Although the enslaved population of New Spain declined following the end of the slave trade, the free black population grew steadily; by 1810, it represented 10 percent of the total population. Most slaves were concentrated in urban areas, a second distinguishing feature of slavery in New Spain.	2
As Bennett notes, to those unaccustomed to thinking of Mexico as a prominent site of African presence, these statistics may come as a revelation. Those accustomed to thinking of Barbados as the first slave society in the New World will find Bennett's designation of New Spain, and particularly Mexico City, as the first slave society equally surprising. Given its demographic and economic profile, New Spain does not fit the conventional definition of a slave society wherein the enslaved population represents roughly 20 percent of the total and where slavery is central to the functioning of the economy. Bennett, however, aims to revise that definition, arguing that "urban slavery cannot be restricted to chattel slavery with its emphasis on labor" (p. 30). Although African labor was essential for the working of New Spain's silver-based economy, persons of African descent were also greatly valued "for the cultural capital they conferred" (p. 30). According to Bennett, the "symbolic importance of slaves in an honorific culture" (p. 19) has been largely ignored by historians of colonial Latin America. Bennett calls for historians to move beyond the narrow view of slaves as laborers in favor of ascribing "greater weight to a culturally determined need that led to the pervasive ownership of slaves," a perspective that "underscores slavery's centrality in Spanish America's urban cultural arena" (p.30).	. . .

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