Exiles in This World: Studies in the Catholicism of Blacks in Cartagena and Lima in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

What follows is an exploration of problems of how and with what effects religious conversions happened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Catholicism was expanding conspicuously, especially in the Americas, and the Church was experiencing changes we usually designate as the Catholic Reformation. Black subjects in Spanish America demand attention, because most existing studies represent their religion as syncretic, hybrid, performative or adopted rather for social or political than strictly religious reasons, and therefore – by the godly standards of the time or those of some historians – as idiosyncratic, heterodox, or in some sense imperfectly sincere. I attempt a re-evaluation. In order to investigate, without prejudice, Blacks' responses to and practice of Catholicism, I try to identify reliable testimony, in their own words, from among records of Black catechumens in Cartagena and, in Lima, of Black confraternity-members and married Black petitioners to the archiepiscopal court. If evaluated in the contexts of global Catholicism and of African religious backgrounds, and with due respect to what professedly Catholic Blacks said, the evidence shows, I propose, that some Blacks were well situated to embrace Catholicism, and that in the cases I examine they typically understood the faith as well as – or practiced it no more idiosyncratically than – many other lay practitioners in Catholic Christendom. My purpose is not to deny that existing studies are useful or truthful, but to show that they do not tell the whole story of the range and richness of Black Catholic experience.<p></p>