Black Festive Practices in the Early Modern Iberian World: Sources and Challenges

AbstractIn the early-modern Iberian world, people of African descent engaged in festive practices both in isolation and as part of wider religious and civic communities. Based on contemporary chronicles, festival accounts and visual sources, our knowledge of these practices remains partial, both because contemporary writers and artists were largely non-Black and because these authors and artists inscribed these traditions within the Eurocentric exotic genre. In this article, I turn to festival accounts, government reports and visual sources, discuss the challenges and opportunities they present and develop diasporic, transgeographic and transtemporal methodologies allowing us to identify continuities across the Afro-Iberian diaspora. Notes1 Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (manuscrito ‘Guatemala’) (1632), ed. José Antonio Barbón Rodríguez (México D.F.: Colegio de México/UNAM, 2005), Chapter 201, 755. The original manuscript had ‘más de çiento y çinquenta’ (Historia verdadera, ed. Barbón Rodríguez, 755, note 5; emphasis added). Díaz del Castillo, writing some fifty years after the events he describes, later crosses out ‘çiento y’. On the Indigenous elements of these festivities, see Patricia Lopes Don, ‘Carnivals, Triumphs, and Rain Gods in the New World: A Civic Festival in the City of México-Tenochtitlán in 1539’, Colonial Latin American Review, 6:1 (1997), 17–40.2 This armistice ended the second of the three Italian Wars (1521–1526, 1536–1538 and 1542–1546) sparked by Charles V’s election as Holy Roman Emperor. This ceasefire was significant for New Spain (as colonial Mexico was then known) because the Emperor’s war with France had caused instability in the viceroyalty. See David Porter, Renaissance France at War: Armies, Culture and Society, c.1480–1560 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 30–37.3 The most famous example is Estebanico in Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (1542).4 Andrés Pérez de Rivas, Corronica y historia religiosa de la provincia de la Compañia de Jesús de Mexico en Nueva España, 2 vols (Ciudad de México: Sagrado Corazón, 1896), I, 250–51.5 Peter Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1998), 40.6 On autoethnography in this performative tradition, see Miguel A. Valerio, Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539–1540 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2022), Chapter 3.7 On early modern Black Christian identity, see, for example, Chloe Ireton, ‘ “They Are Blacks of the Caste of Black Christians”: Old Christian Black Blood in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth-Century Iberian Atlantic’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 97:4 (2017), 579–612. On Afropolitanism, see Achille Mbembe, ‘Afropolitanism’, Nka, 46 (2020), 56–61.8 ‘Requerimento dos Pretos devotos da S[enhora] do Rosario da Bahia’, Bahia, 1786, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Bahia, cx. 71, doc. 12235 (cota antiga), s.f.; English translation available, in Patricia A. Mulvey, ‘Slave Confraternities in Brazil: Their Role in Colonial Society’, The Americas, 39:1 (1982), 39–68 (p. 47).9 Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession, (1991), 33–40 (p. 35); see also her Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London/New York: Routledge, 1992), 7.10 I chose to return to the term ‘creolization’ because I wanted to rescue the word ‘creole’ from the Whiteness with which Latin American Studies has imbued it and the process it describes. As El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega wrote, the term criollo (from the Portuguese crioulo [boy house slave], and this in turn from criar [to raise]) was first used for Afrodescendants born in the Americas. See Garcilaso de la Vega, Primera parte de los comentarios reales (Lisboa: Pedro Crasbeeck, 1609), fol. 255. I found the best definition in Stuart Hall, who describes creolization as a process that ‘occurs in such a way as to produce, as it were, a “third space”—a “native” or Indigenous vernacular space, marked by the fusion of cultural elements drawn from all originating cultures, but resulting in a configuration on which these elements, though never equal, can no longer be disaggregated or restored to their originary forms, since they no longer exist in a “pure” state but have been permanently “translated” ’ (Stuart Hall, ‘Creolité and the Process of Creolization’, in Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations, ed. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez & Shirley A. Tate [Liverpool: Liverpool U. P., 2015], 12–25 [p. 15]). I identified the festival space as that third space where the translation gets accelerated. In short, I wanted to bring to the fore the role people of African descent (negros criollos) played in Latin America’s cultural formation.11 See Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México, 1519–1810: estudio etnohistórico (México D.F.: FCE, 1989 [1st ed. 1946]); Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 2003); Herman L. Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 2009); Ben Vinson III, Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2018); Theodore W. Cohen, Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation After the Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2020); Rafael Castañeda García, ‘Devociones y construcción de identidades entre los negros y mulatos de la Nueva España (s. XVIII)’, in Imagen y poder. VI Encuentro Internacional sobre Barroco, ed. Norma Campos Vera (La Paz: Fundación Visión Cultural, 2012), 241–47; Rafael Castañeda García, ‘La devoción a santa Ifigenia entre negros y mulatos de Nueva España, siglos XVII y XVIII’, in Esclavitud, mestizaje y abolicionismo en los mundos hispánicos, ed. Aurelia Martín Casares (Granada: Univ. de Granada, 2015), 151–72; Rafael Castañeda García, ‘Santos negros, devotos de color: las cofradías de San Benito de Palermo en Nueva España: identidades étnicas y religiosas, siglos XVII–XVIII’, in Devoción, paisanaje e identidad: las cofradías y congregaciones de naturales en España y en América (siglos XVI–XIX), ed. Óscar Álvarez Gila, Alberto Angulo Morales & Jon Ander Ramos Martínez (Bilbao: Univ. del País Vasco, 2014), 145–64; Rafael Castañeda García, ‘Modelos de santidad: devocionarios y hagiografías a San Benito de Palermo en Nueva España’, Studia Historica: Historia Moderna, 38:1 (2016), 39–64, (accessed 17 July 2023); Danielle Terrazas Williams, The Capital of Free Women: Race Legitimacy and Liberty in Colonial Mexico (New Haven: Yale U. P., 2022); María Elisa Velázquez Gutiérrez, Mujeres de origen africano en la capital novohispana, siglos XVII y XVIII (México D.F.: INAH/UNAM, 2006); Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa, ‘Distributed Intensities: Whiteness, Mestizaje and the Logics of Mexican Racism’, Ethnicities, 10:3 (2010), 387–401; Paulette A. Ramsay, Afro-Mexican Constructions of Diaspora, Gender, Identity and Nation (Kingston, Jamaica: Univ. of the West Indies Press, 2016); Nicolás Ngou-Mve, El África Bantú en la colonización de México (1595–1640) (Madrid: CSIC, 1994); and Nicolás Ngou-Mve, Lucha y victorias de los esclavos Bantú en México (siglos XVI–XVII): la socialización de los esclavos africanos en Nueva España (Madrid: AECID, 2019).12 See, for example, Velázquez Gutiérrez, Mujeres de origen africano en la capital novohispana; and Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2006), especially Chapter 1.13 See, for example, Tamara J. Walker, ‘The Queen of los Congos: Slavery, Gender, and Confraternity Life in Late-colonial Lima, Peru’, Journal of Family History, 40:3 (2015), 305–22.14 See Lopes Don, ‘Carnivals, Triumphs, and Rain Gods in the New World’, 17–18; Max Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2000), 123–31 (p. 130); and Jerry M. Williams, El teatro del México colonial: época misionera (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 64–66 (p. 65).15 The mock battles shared a common theme of the triumph of Christendom over its infidel enemies. The re-enactment of the Siege of Rhodes, either of 1480 or 1522, both of which took place against the Ottoman Empire, was itself a restaging of Cortés’ offensive against Tenochtitlan in 1521. Cortés, who had fallen out of royal favour and had been dismissed from his post of governor of New Spain, was elected to perform the prominent role of Captain General, symbolically returning to his former post. On both occasions (1480 and 1522) the Europeans lost to the Ottomans. The re-enactment in Mexico City then was a reinvention of that lost victory in light of what had happened in Tenochtitlan in 1521. The moros y cristianos choreography was also significant, dramatizing the Reconquista (780–1492). These various mock and restaged battles were intended to signify conquest, the triumph of Christianity and the military superiority of the Spanish Empire. See Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians; and Helen J. Nicholson, The Knights Hospitaller (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001).16 Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians, 130.17 Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians, 130.18 Antonio de Mendoza, ‘Informe del virrey Antonio de Mendoza’, Mexico City, 10 December 1537, Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Patronato 184, R. 27, s.f.19 See Miguel A. Valerio, ‘A Mexican Sangamento? The First Afro-Christian Performance in the Americas’, in Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Atlantic Tradition, ed. Cécile Fromont (University Park: Pennsylvania State U. P., 2019), 59–72.20 See my analysis of this phenomenon, in Sovereign Joy, 80–125. Additional accusations are found in ‘Carta del virrey Martín Enríquez’, Mexico City, 28 April 1572, AGI, México 19, N. 82; ‘Carta del virrey Martín Enríquez’, Mexico City, 18 October 1579, AGI, México 20, N. 29; ‘Carta de López de Azoca, alcalde del crimen de la Audiencia de México’, Mexico City, 8 February 1609, AGI, México 73, R. 1 & N. 4; ‘Carta del virrey Luis de Velasco, el joven’, Mexico City, 13 February 1609, AGI, México R.17 & N. 63; ‘Relacion del alçamiento que negros y mulatos libres y cautivos de la Ciudad de Mexico de la Nueva España pretendieron hazer contras los españoles por Quaresma del año de 1612, y del castigo que se hizo de los caveças y culpados’, Mexico City, 1612, in Papeles varios de Perú y México, BNE, MSS/2010, fols 158–64. See also 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 (2004), 479–520; and Daniel Nemser, ‘Triangulating Blackness: Mexico City, 1612’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 33:3 (2017), 344–66.21 Mendoza, ‘Informe del virrey Antonio de Mendoza’, s.f.22 In his letter, Mendoza asked Charles V to halt the importation of enslaved Africans to New Spain, but the abolition of Indigenous slavery in 1542 would increase the demand for enslaved African labour.23 On the sovereign power to kill, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans Robert Hurley, 3 vols (New York: Pantheon, 1978–1986 [1st French ed. 1976–1984]), I (1978), The Will to Knowledge, 133–60.24 See ‘Relacion del alçamiento que negros y mulatos libres y cautivos’.25 ‘Carta de López de Azoca, alcalde del crimen de la Audiencia de México’; and ‘Carta del virrey Luis de Velasco, el joven’; Juan de Torquemada, Monarchia indiana con el origen y guerras de los indios occidentales, de sus poblaçiones, descubrimiento, conquista, conuersión, y otras cosas marauillosas de la mesma tierra, 3 vols (Madrid: Nicolás Rodríguez Franco, 1723 [1st ed. 1615]), I, 759.26 The author’s name has been lost because only a manuscript copy of the report survives. Whoever copied the report failed to copy the author’s name. These reports always bore the author’s signature.27 Pérez de Rivas, Corronica y historia religiosa, 250–51.28 See, for example, Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2011); and Bolívar Echeverría, Modernidad y blanquitud (México D.F.: Ediciones Era, 2010).29 See, for example, Judith Bettelheim, ‘Carnaval of Los Congos of Portobelo, Panama: Feathered Men and Queens’, in African Diasporas in the New and Old Worlds: Consciousness and Imagination, ed. Geneviève Fabre & Klaus Benesch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 287–309; Renée Alexander Craft, When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama (Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 2015); Marina de Mello e Souza, Reis negros no Brasil escravista: história da festa de coroação de rei congo (Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2002); Elizabeth W. Kiddy, Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil (University Park: Pennsylvania State U. P., 2005); Cécile Fromont, ‘Dancing for the King of Congo from Early Modern Central Africa to Slavery-Era Brazil’, Colonial Latin American Review, 22:2 (2013), 184–208; Patricia Fogelman & Marta Goldberg, ‘ “El rey de los congos”: The Clandestine Coronation of Pedro Duarte in Buenos Aires, 1787’, in Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812, ed. Kathryn Joy McKnight & Leo J. Garofalo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), 155–73; Alex Borucki, From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Río de la Plata (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2015), 99–105; Patricia Lund Drolet, El ritual congo del noroeste de Panamá: una estructura afro-americana expresiva de adaptación cultural (Panama: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1987); Jeroen Dewulf, From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square: Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians (Lafayette: Univ. of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2017); Philip A. Howard, Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. P., 1998); William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 117–28; and Walker, ‘The Queen of Los Congos’.30 A Black king appeared in Macau’s 1542 commemoration of John IV of Portugal’s proclamation: João Marques Moreira, Relação da Magestosa, Misteriosa, e Notavel Acclamaçam, que se fez a Magestade d’El Rey Dom IOAM O IV. nosso Senhor na Cidade de nome de Deos do grande Imperio da China, & festas que se fizerão pellos Senhores do Governo publico, & outras pessoas particulares (Lisboa: Domingos Lopes Rosa, 1644), 32.31 See Kiddy, Blacks of the Rosary; and Mello e Souza, Reis negros no Brasil escravista.32 The other examples I study in Sovereign Joy are: Pérez de Rivas, ‘Relación de las fiestas insignes que en la Ciudad de México se hicieron en la dedicación de la iglesia de la Casa Profesa y beatificación de Nuestro Santo Padre Ignacio’, in Corronica y historia religiosa, 242–61; and Nicolás de Torres, Festín hecho por las morenas criollas de la muy noble, y muy leal Ciudad de México al recibimiento, y entrada del Excellentísimo Señor Marqués de Villena, Duque de Escalana, Virrey de esta Nueva España (Ciudad de México: Francisco Robledo, 1640). These examples show how Black festive kings and queens were incorporated into Baroque festive culture in Mexico City. See Miguel A. Valerio, ‘The Queen [of] Sheba’s Manifold Body: Creole Black Women Performing Sexuality, Cultural Identity, and Power in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City’, Afro-Hispanic Review, 35:2 (2016), 79–98; and Miguel A. Valerio, ‘Cultura afrobarroca mexicana: soberanía negra en las calles de la Ciudad de México, 1610’, Latin American Research Review, 58:4 (2023), 281–98, (accessed 17 July 2023).33 On the Spanish colonial surveillance system, see Daniel Nemser, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2017).34 See Lisa Voigt, ‘Representing an African King in Brazil’, in Afro-Catholic Festivals, ed. Fromont, 75–91; and Silvia Hunold Lara, ‘Uma embaixada africana na América portuguesa’, in Festa, cultura e sociabilidade na América portuguesa, ed. István Jancsó & Iris Kantor, 2 vols (São Paulo: Hucitec, 2002), I, 151–65.35 Francisco Calmon, Relação das fautíssimas festas que celebrou a Câmara da Vila de Nossa Senhora da Purificição, e Santo Amaro da Comarca da Bahia pelos augistíssimos desposórios da Sereníssima Senhora Dona Maria, Princesa do Brasil, com o Sereníssimo Senhor Dom Pedro, Infante de Portugal (Lisboa: Miguel Manescal da Costa, 1762), fols 11–12.36 In his 1537 report, Mendoza stated that there were only 620 horses in the whole viceroyalty, of which only 450 were healthy: ‘hallaronse hasta seycientos y veynte de cavallo […] y […] serían los quatroçientos y çinquenta dellos bien en horden’.37 Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians, 130.38 See Isidro Moreno, ‘Plurietnicidad, fiestas y poder: cofradías y fiestas andaluzas de negros como modelo para la América colonial’, in El mundo festivo en España y América, ed. Antonio Garrido Aranda (Córdoba: Univ. de Córdoba, 2005), 169–88; and Marina de Mello e Souza, Reis negros no Brasil escravista, 23–42.39 See Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (Chapel Hill: Univ. of Carolina Press, 2014), 21–64; Fromont, ‘Dancing for the King of Congo’; Mello e Souza, Reis negros no Brasil escravista, 85–95; Jeroen Dewulf, The Pinkster King and the King of Kingo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi), 114–15; Dewulf, From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square, 21–24; and Silvia Hunold Lara, Fragmentos setecentistas: escravidão, cultura e poder na América portuguesa (São Paulo: Companhias das Letras, 2007), 176–79.40 Calmon, Relação das fautíssimas festas, fol. 6.41 Calmon, Relação das fautíssimas festas, fol. 11.42 Calmon, Relação das fautíssimas festas, fol. 12. This component of the performance became known as quicumbis in Brazil. See Peter Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance: African Musical Heritage in Brazil (Middletown: Wesleyan U. P., 2000), 72–73; and Lisa Voigt, Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2016), 130.43 Fromont, The Art of Conversion, 23. See also her ‘Dancing for the King of Congo’.44 See Fromont, The Art of Conversion, 23–53.45 Fromont, The Art of Conversion, 24.46 Fromont, The Art of Conversion, 4.47 Fromont, The Art of Conversion, 27.48 Fromont, The Art of Conversion, 27. Not only was sangamento a Kongolese tradition brought to the Americas by slaves, but also performed on American soil by Kongolese envoys, as in Recife, Brazil, in 1642, while under Dutch rule (1630–1654). See Fromont, The Art of Conversion, 114–21.49 Fromont, The Art of Conversion, 23.50 Fromont, ‘Dancing for the King of Congo’, 185.51 Moreno, ‘Plurietnicidad, fiestas y poder’.52 On Garrido see, Ricardo E. Alegría, Juan Garrido, el Conquistador Negro en las Antillas, Florida, México y California, c.1503–1540 (San Juan: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y El Caribe, 1990). On other ‘Black conquistadors’, see Matthew Restall, ‘Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America’, in The African Experience in Early Spanish America, ed. Matthew Restall & Jane Landers, The Americas, 57:2 (2000), 171–205.53 Jeroen Dewulf, Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians (South Bend: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 30.54 See, for example, Fromont, ‘Dancing for the King of Congo’; Mello e Souza, Reis negros no Brasil escravista, 85–95; and Hunold Lara, Fragmentos setecentistas, 176–79.55 Willy Bal, ‘Introduction’, in Filippo Pigafetta, Le Royaume de Congo & les contrées environnantes (1591), ed. Willy Bal (Paris: Chandeigne, 2002), 9–16.56 ‘Since that kingdom received the Christian faith, its courtiers began to dress in the manner of the Portuguese, with red silk capes, hats, velvet and leather shoes and boots, with his sword on his side, each according to his means. The women too, but not capes, but rather a veil on their heads, and on top of it a velvet hat adorned with jewels, and gold chains on their necks. The poor, who cannot afford these things, keep their old customs. Since the King converted to the Christian faith, he arranged his court in the fashion of the King of Portugal. First, when he eats in public, a platform, with three steps, covered an Oriental rug, is erected. On this platform, a table with a chair is placed. This chair has a velvet seat and gold arms. The king always eats alone. He eats and drinks from gold and silver vessels and cups. He is guarded by members of the Anzichi nation and of other neighboring nations. When he wishes to go out, drums are beat. These drums can be heard for five or six miles. When they are heard it is understood that the King wishes to go out’ (Filippo Pigafetta & Duarte Lopes, Relatione del reame di Congo et delle circonvicine contrade [Roma: Bartolomeo Grassi, 1591], fols 67–68; my translation).57 ‘The king has a court which, although it does not equal those of the princes of Europe, still has pomp and nobility proportionate to the other conditions of the kingdom. When he goes out in public, guards, armed with bows, lances, and muskets make up his escort. Behind them go the musicians playing their barbarous instruments and fifes, which they have learned to play from the Portuguese, disturbing, with their dissonant noise, the king’s valor and magnificence, as well as his ancestors. In this kind of composition, they are aided by some heralds who make themselves heard from afar with metal clubs and small bells. Then follows the lower court … the pages, the officials, and a great number of knights of the Cross, a very noble order instituted by the first Christian kings of the Congo and still held in high esteem. The king comes in last, attended by two young squires of noble blood. One carries a shield covered in tiger hide and a bejeweled cutlass. The other carries a staff covered with red velvet, adorned with gold and solid silver. Two pages accompany the king swinging horse’s tails to keep away flies. This task is the most esteemed of all. Then one of the king’s favorites carries a parasol, which is always open on the king’ (Giannantonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, Istorica descrizione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola, situati nell’Etiopia inferiore occidentale e delle missioni apostoliche esercitatevi da religiosi capuccini [Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1687], fol. 257; my translation).58 Mello e Souza, Reis negros no Brasil escravista, 85–95; Hunold Lara, Fragmentos setecentistas, 176–79. On communal and discursive sovereignty, see Valerio, Sovereign Joy, 11–12.59 Fromont, ‘Dancing for the King of Congo’.60 Andrés Pérez de Rivas, Corónica y historia religiosa de la provincia de la Compañía de Jesús en Nueva España (c.1600–1650), 2 vols in 1 (Ciudad de México: Sagrado Corazón, 1896), 250–51.61 Alonso Carrió de la Vandera, El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (1773), ed., intro., cronología & bibliografía de Antonio Lorente Medina (Caracas: Ayacucho, 1985), 175.62 Anon., Folheto de ambas Lisboas, 7 (Lisboa: Oficina de Música, 1730), fol. 3.63 See Alejandro Miranda Nieto, Musical Mobilities Son Jarocho and the Circulation of Tradition Across Mexico and the United States (New York/London: Routledge, 2017); and Janet L. Sturman, The Course of Mexican Music (New York/London: Routledge, 2016).64 Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2017), 6.65 Geoffrey Baker, ‘The Resounding City’, in Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America, ed. Geoffrey Baker & Tess Knighton (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2011), 1–20 (p. 1).66 Baker, ‘The Resounding City’, 12–13.67 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia U. P., 1996).68 John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1992); John K. Thornton & Linda M. Heywood, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2007). See also Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2002).* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.