A Black Monarchy in Mexico?
The 1612 story that turned New Spain's colonial system upside down.
*Welcome to another edition of the #Nerdflow Newsletter!*
María Elena Martínez once wrote about a bizarre historical episode involving enslaved Blacks and Mulattoes who allegedly attempted to subvert the colonial order. New Spain’s authorities hanged thirty-five people in Mexico City on May 2, 1612, for conspiring to slaughter Spaniards and establish a monarquía africana.
The purported plan went as follows. After killing their Spanish masters, the conspirators were going to crown one of their own as king and a mulata morisca, or light-skinned mulatto woman, as their queen. Having previously assigned themselves nobility titles and royal administrative posts, the rebels would establish their own government and force the indigenous people to provide them with tribute. They would also kill all Spanish males except some members of the religious orders, whose main responsibility would be to train black children to become priests and government officials. To make it impossible for Spaniards to reproduce, however, the friars' sexual organs would be removed. Spanish women, for their part, would also be killed, but not those who were young and pretty; they would become the property of black males. Black women, on the other hand, would be relegated to convents, thus becoming the chaste and secluded "guardians of God." With regard to the offspring of the black men and Spanish women, all those who were born male would be murdered to prevent them from growing up and avenging their mothers' ancestors; those born female would be raised, but for the sole purpose of serving black men. The same fate was to fall on subsequent generations, a process that would eventually produce more "blacks."
What stands out is the nature of the plot. As Martínez explains, “the rebels did not seek fundamentally to alter society; they sought to rule it and to appropriate the sexual and racial prerogatives of their masters.” Instead of being at the bottom, Blacks would rule with White and Indigenous people beneath them.
Were the accusations true? It’s unclear. The evidence that Martínez carefully lays out suggests, to me, that Spaniards in Mexico City either fabricated or greatly exaggerated the details of the rebellious plot. For example, a government official named López de Azoca had previously investigated Black gatherings of song and dance that included carnivalesque rituals in which people performed mock coronations and gave themselves noble titles like “Don Juan of Austria.” Also, in 1611, rumors about a Black conspiracy began to circulate after a public demonstration:
…fifteen hundred persons of African descent marched through the center of Mexico City to protest the death of a female slave. Carrying her body as they took possession of the streets, they accused her owner, Luis Moreno de Monroy, one of New Spain's most affluent residents, of routinely beating her and being ultimately responsible for her death. In what seems to have been a demonstration of collective outrage against the symbols of secular and religious power, the protesters stopped in front of the palace and the headquarters of the Inquisition (the institution that frequently punished blacks and mulattoes tried for blasphemy) and ended their march at the house of Moreno de Monroy, where they threatened him and the other occupants with rocks and insults.
Whether or not the accusations about the 1612 conspiracy were based in fact or imagined fears, Martínez argues that they reveal significant truths about colonial society and the Spaniards who made such accusations. This conspiracy disturbed the colonial imagination because it held an inverted mirror to its own assumptions about hierarchy, sexual control, religious orthodoxy, and purity of blood.
María Elena Martínez’s entire article, “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico,” is well worth the read.
What I’m Writing
I’m taking a break from writing my column at The Revealer in order to focus on my Las Casas book. Besides this newsletter, I don’t expect to be publishing much else in the near future.
Writing Life Tip
Would it help you to compare your writing to music or photography?
I often like to think of my writing as a song that I’m trying to play. The paragraphs and sentences are “right” if they hit certain notes, move in particular rhythms, and create a mood. In Why I Write, Joan Didion says:
Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene.* It tells you. You don’t tell it.
What I’m Reading
The Last Humanist: How Paul Gilroy Became the Most Vital Guide to Our Age of Crisis by Yohann Koshy
What Do We Want History to Do to Us? by Zadie Smith
Can the Left Regulate Sex? by Ross Douthat
Robin DiAngelo and the Problem With Anti-Racist Self-Help by Danzy Senna
Nobody Wants To Be a Serf Anymore by Andrew Singleton
The Many Myths of the Term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ by Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade
Song I Love
Héctor Lavoe, Willie Colón - Aguanile