María Elena Martínez

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María Elena Martínez | The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.3 | The History Cooperative

The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico

ON the morning of May 2, 1612, a Wednesday, thirty-five blacks and mulattoes (twenty-eight men and seven women) were escorted by New Spain's authorities through the streets of Mexico City. They were being paraded on horseback, shamed before the residents of the viceregal capital, before all were summarily hanged in front of a large crowd in the central plaza facing the church and palace. The bodies of some of the victims remained suspended in the air through the next day, which happened to be the celebration of the Holy Cross, the fiesta de Santa Cruz. The horrible spectacle did not end with the hangings. After consulting with a group of doctors about the fate of the bodies, Mexico City's royal tribunal, the Audiencia, ordered twenty-nine to be decapitated and the heads left to rot on top of the nine gallows (eight of which had been made for the occasion). The other six were quartered, and the parts were placed on pikes on the city's main streets and roads. Serving as potent symbols of royal power and of the marginal place occupied by people of African ancestry within the Spanish colonial order, the body parts were left on display until their stench became both unbearable and insalubrious for the residents of the capital.	1
The thirty-five hangings were the tragic culmination of an investigation ordered by the royal Audiencia of rumors concerning an alleged conspiracy by blacks in central Mexico to rebel against their masters (slaveowners and employers) and to overthrow the government. After conducting a series of interrogations, colonial officials concluded that a rebellion was indeed being planned for Maundy Thursday. Not all scholars of colonial Mexico have been convinced that the allegations were sound.¹ However, whether or not the blacks and mulattoes whose bodies were savagely mutilated in 1612 had a plan to rebel, understanding the circumstances in which the hangings took place illuminates the nature of Mexico's racialized colonial order at the beginning of the seventeenth century. That historical moment was marked not only by the introduction of a growing number of African slaves into central New Spain, which was generating all sorts of social tensions, including a heightened preoccupation with policing sexuality, but also by the deployment of the Spanish concept of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) against colonial populations and an increasing association of blacks with disloyalty to the crown and the Catholic faith. All of these developments—the recasting of metropolitan notions of purity, the concern with controlling colonial sexual relations, and the connection of persons of African ancestry with political and religious infidelity—provided the crucial subtext of the 1612 black conspiracy in Mexico City.	2
An analysis of this alleged conspiracy reveals the strong connection between race, gender, and religion in early colonial Mexico as well as between discourses about Jews (and, to a lesser extent, Muslims) in the Iberian Peninsula and those that surfaced in New Spain about colonial populations, especially blacks. These discourses, which had been molded by Old World religious life and by the increasing obsession with safeguarding the boundaries of the Christian community in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain, marked persons of Jewish and African ancestry in similar, though by no means identical, ways. A close examination of the supposed black plot in Mexico City in 1612 also makes manifest the limitations that the colonial archive places on determining whether a conspiracy existed or not. The nature and relatively small number of primary sources available for studying the thirty-five convictions and hangings—namely, an account by the indigenous historian Chimalpahin, a report sent from New Spain to the Council of the Indies, and colonial correspondence—make it difficult to reconstruct, even partially, the events that preceded them. Furthermore, those contemporary sources leave no doubt that power shaped the construction of historical narratives of the plot, which only complicates the task of determining what exactly occurred.² Arriving at definitive conclusions about what transpired, however, is ultimately less important than comprehending the historical and cultural context that made certain crimes in early-seventeenth-century Mexico possible—at least in the eyes and imaginations of those who described them.	. . .

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